claims along the Hudson River near Manhattan. But
when their voyage was blown off course to the north, they
established the Plymouth colony near Cape Cod in what
Smith had named New England just a few years earlier. A
“Great Migration” of religious exiles followed, extending
settlement ever further into the interior and onto native
lands. John Foster’s 1675 map of King Philip’s War records
the horrific violence of those early encounters between
English settlers and the Wampanoag Indians (page 54).
This rush of settlements along the Atlantic Oceanand its waterways led to a welter of imperial claims and
counterclaims by the end of the seventeenth century.
Jamestown, Santa Fe, and Quebec were all founded within
a few years of each other, a useful reminder that there was
nothing inevitable about the eventual English domination
of North America. The maps in this chapter restore that
contingency. The ongoing contest between the Dutch and
English for control of New York is underscored by Robert
Holmes’ map of Manhattan in 1664 (page 52). Vincenzo
Coronelli’s master map of North America in 1688 captures
both the state of geographical knowledge by the end of
the century and the continental ambitions of the French
(page 60).
This chapter also demonstrates the tenuous natureof early North American colonization, exemplified by the
case of Virginia. During the desperate “starving time,”
Jamestown colonists even resorted to cannibalism. The
colony stabilized only when its leaders introduced harsh
discipline and an emphasis on agriculture, especially
tobacco. Virginia’s prosperity was aided by the heavy
recruitment of new settlers, and the continued belief that
a Northwest Passage through the continent would position
the colony at the center of worldwide trade (page 44).
The demand for tobacco transformed Virginia from astruggling colony to a thriving enterprise, but at great cost.
Planters, devoting ever more land and labor to the crop,
came into direct conflict with the Powhatan Confederacy,
which in turn prompted the Virginia Company to expel
natives from the colony and to seize their lands. The
increased cultivation of tobacco soon came up against a
shortage of labor, which led to the introduction of slavery.
When tobacco planter John Rolfe exchanged food for
twenty Africans aboard a passing Dutch ship in 1619, he
established a pattern that would quickly grow. Dutch and
English traders soon thereafter brought Africans from the
Caribbean on a regular basis, launching a practice that
stimulated the early Atlantic slave trade.
In its earliest stages, slavery was a fluid practice, but
in the 1660s Virginia colonists began to pass laws that
defined this labor system in racial terms. These laws
virtually ensured that to be black was to be enslaved, and
that one born in bondage would remain so for life. The
map of West Africa on page 50 marks an early moment in
that evolution, when Dutch (and later English) merchants
began to send slaves to the Americas in order to meet a
growing demand for tobacco and sugar in Europe. Without
the displacement of Indians and the introduction of slaves,
Virginia could not have prospered.
Such accounts force us to reckon with our own national
myths. Schoolchildren learn that, while Captain John
Smith saved the Jamestown colony, he in turn was saved
by Pocahontas. The New England Puritans are enshrined
as religious refugees who gave thanks for their first fall
harvest in a harsh and unforgiving environment. William
Penn is exalted as a champion of religious freedom who
forged peaceful treaties with the Lenape Indians in what
would become Pennsylvania (pages 56 and 58). The maps
in this chapter help us both to understand the origin of
these myths and to reach beyond them to a more complex
and contingent account. They enable us to see through
the eyes of those early settlers, and to ask how they
understood the geography of North America. They reveal
the aspirations to settlement, the interests at stake, and
the dynamics at work in these early years of colonization.