D
iego Gutiérrez boldly claimed the Americas for
the Spanish Crown in his 1562 map, as we saw
in the last chapter. Yet Spain exercised little
territorial control over North America. Its fort at
St. Augustine in Florida was actually established in 1565 to
defend against French encroachments. Sensing a similar
opportunity for the English, Queen Elizabeth extended
permission to Humphrey Gilbert and Walter Raleigh to
establish colonies on the Atlantic coast in the 1580s. In
1583 Gilbert attempted a colony at Newfoundland; it
failed and he died on the return voyage to England.
The following year Raleigh explored a more hospitable
climate further south, naming it Virginia in honor of
Elizabeth,“the virgin queen.” With one hundred soldiers
he founded a settlement at Roanoke Island on North
Carolina’s outer banks, but the group soon abandoned
the area and sailed home with Sir Francis Drake. A second
settlement effort in 1587 brought men, women, and
children, but the colony disappeared when it was
stranded without supplies.
The failures of Gilbert and Raleigh conveyed the
dangers of colonization, yet English pursuits continued.
These early efforts also signaled a more general shift in
seventeenth-century North America. While in the 1500s
Europeans explored and then left, by the 1600s they
were beginning to stay, motivated by a combination
of commercial gain, religious mission, and emergent
nationalism. The maps in this chapter were made as
instruments of that first stage of colonization.
The earliest of these efforts were Spanish. After
founding St. Augustine, the Spanish built missions
and trading posts throughout the Southwest. Some
missionaries lived peacefully among the Indians;
more notorious was Juan de Oñate, who in 1598 led
an expedition of 500 soldiers and settlers to spread
Catholicism and Spanish authority. In what the Spanish
named “New” Mexico, Oñate’s men seized supplies from
the Pueblo Indians, destroyed the village, and killed more
than 800 Acoma Pueblo men, women, and children. Oñate
was recalled to Spain and punished, but before that he
helped to establish the first European settlement in the
American Southwest, at Santa Fe.Just as the Spanish were moving northward from
Mexico, the English made a third attempt to colonize
North America at a swampy spot on Chesapeake Bay that
they named for King James. Within a year of founding
Jamestown, Robarte Tindall sent back the first English
chart of the region (page 36). This remarkable document
captures Tindall’s first impressions as he explored the
rivers in search of a westward passage. A few years
later, John Smith drew a far more detailed map of the
Chesapeake, designed to promote a colony that was barely
surviving because of food shortages, a failure of discipline,
and deteriorating relations with the neighboring tribes
of the Powhatan Confederacy (page 40). Ever the
entrepreneur, Smith saw another opportunity to promote
English colonization further up the Atlantic coast. Before
the English had even explored (much less settled) the area,
Smith claimed this as a “New England” (page 42). Smith’s
map shrewdly branded the area as an extension of the
mother country, a familiar destination that beckoned
new settlers.
While the English sought to establish a foothold
in the Chesapeake and New England, the French set
their sights further north. In 1608 they sent Samuel de
Champlain to establish a trading outpost at Quebec on
the Saint Lawrence River. Champlain’s ongoing exploration
of the interior laid the foundation for subsequent French
claims to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River
Valley. And, while the French—like the Spanish—sought
to convert souls, they spent more time building the fur
trade and searching for a navigable passage across the
continent. Champlain’s map of “Le Canada” reflects this
drive to understand the North Atlantic coast, the Saint
Lawrence Seaway, and especially the Great Lakes further
west (page 46).
Soon after the French established Quebec, Henry
Hudson sailed up the river that now bears his name,
looking for a Northwest Passage. Though he found no
such passage, he used the voyage to claim enormous
territory for his Dutch patrons. This paved the way for the
settlement of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island in
The religious separatists sailing on the Mayflower
in 1620 had originally planned to settle these Dutch
Early Settlement and the Northwest Passage