Discovery and Settlement of the New World 9other tribes. They occupied the region south of the St. Lawrence River
and Lake Ontario. The Five Nations of the Iroquois included the Sen-
eca, Onondaga, Mohawk, Cayuga, and Oneida, and were later joined
by the Tuscarora, becoming the Six Nations.
Farther north, above the St. Lawrence, lived the Algonquin tribes,
principally the Hurons, who were leagued with the French. This alli-
ance was a natural one, since the French desired furs and the beaver
population in the Algonquin country was judged the best. The Iroquois
sought to defeat the Hurons to obtain the furs, which they wanted to
exchange for guns, resulting in intermittent Indian wars in which the
Iroquois came close to driving the French from North America.
The Dutch also tried their hand at enlarging their possessions and
obtaining wealth. In 1609 Henry Hudson sailed up the river that now
bears his name and established trading posts. The Dutch West India
Company controlled several such posts: the most important of these
were New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island, which later became New
York, and Fort Orange, which was renamed Albany after the English
occupied them following the Dutch War. Like the French, the Dutch
concentrated on obtaining furs, not on colonization, and they regularly
traded guns for furs with the Iroquois.
Then t her e were the English: those Anglo-Saxons perched on
islands in the North Sea and protected by water that they soon ruled.
With stout ships and even stouter hearts they searched the world to
create an empire. As early as 1497 , under King Henry VII, an Italian by
the name of John Cabot hunted for a westward passage to the Orient,
first along Newfoundland and a year later farther south along the
North American coastline, thereby giving England a claim to a large
segment of what later became the United States. But not until the reign
of Queen Elizabeth I, a Protestant, did the English take a serious in-
terest in the New World. For the most part they struck at Spanish power
by attacking its merchant and treasure ships plying the high seas. Buc-
caneers such as John Hawkins and Francis Drake brought home to
their queen a hoard of gold and silver. Elizabeth both disclaimed any
involvement in the raids and at the same time knighted Drake after he
circumnavigated the globe and scooped up a veritable fortune. Philip