The American Yawp — Chapter Three: Colliding Cultures
Abridged for Intermediate-High Learners

While Spain built its empire in Mexico and Peru, other European powers began to challenge it. The Portuguese settled Brazil, the French explored Canada and the Caribbean, the Dutch built colonies in North America and the Caribbean, and the English planted settlements along the Atlantic coast. By the end of the 1600s, seven European nations had permanent settlements in the Americas. All the while, most of the Americas remained under Indigenous control. Native peoples faced enormous changes from new diseases, migrations, and trade with Europeans.

The 1600s brought drastic change for Native Americans. Many moved away from large, centralized chiefdoms toward smaller communities. Then came disaster: European diseases such as smallpox killed between 30 and 90 percent of some Native populations, because Indigenous people had no immunity to these new illnesses.

England began to challenge Spain after defeating the Spanish Armada in 1588. The French built trading posts along the St. Lawrence River and founded Quebec in 1608. The Dutch claimed the Hudson River valley and built New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. But England's most important early efforts came in Virginia.

England's first attempt at a colony ended in mystery. In 1587, about 115 colonists settled on Roanoke Island, off present-day North Carolina. When their leader returned from England three years later, every colonist had vanished. Roanoke became known as the Lost Colony.

In 1607, the Virginia Company sent three ships, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery, to the Chesapeake Bay. The colonists built Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in what is now the United States. The site was a disaster: the water was salty and unhealthy, and the soil was poor.

The colonists were mostly gentlemen who expected to find gold. As John Smith complained, they "would rather starve than work." Smith took command and ordered, "He that will not work shall not eat." In the winter of 1609 to 1610, known as the "starving time," the colonists ate horses, dogs, rats, and even dug up graves to eat the dead. By the summer of 1610, only 60 of the original settlers were still alive.

The colony was saved by Native help and by tobacco. Powhatan, the leader of a powerful confederacy of Algonquian peoples, kept the English alive that first winter. His daughter Pocahontas later married the colonist John Rolfe to ease tensions for a time. Rolfe also began growing tobacco, which became Virginia's profitable cash crop and changed the colony's future.

Jamestown also began moving toward slavery. In 1619, a Dutch ship brought the first enslaved Africans to Virginia. That same year, the colony created the House of Burgesses, its first elected assembly. To attract workers, the Virginia Company offered the headright system: 50 acres of land to anyone who paid for a worker's passage to America.

Fighting between colonists and Native peoples continued. In 1622, the Powhatan attacked English settlements, killing hundreds of colonists. The English responded with brutal wars that destroyed Powhatan power by 1646.

To the north, a group of English Puritan settlers sought religious freedom. The Pilgrims founded Plymouth in 1620, helped by Squanto, a Native man who taught them to farm. In 1630, John Winthrop led a larger group to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he promised to build a "city upon a hill," a model Christian community. Unlike Jamestown, the New England colonies were built around families, churches, and towns.