Early European Settlements Profit was the primary goal of most early European settlements -- but those that failed to establish good relations with Native people were usually doomed. As traders and merchants grew rich from the furs, fish, and other goods that were shipped out of northeastern North America, some Europeans believed that it was time to establish permanent settlements there.  It was thought that such colonies would provide a more profitable base for trade with the Natives.  Additionally, promoters variously hoped that the new colonies would export crops and natural resources, raid passing Spanish ships, continue the search for gold, and find a shortcut to the Pacific.  In England, colonization was also seen as a solution to problems at home of unemployment, overpopulation, religious strife, and a growing shortage of land. Colonists from England, France, and the Netherlands came to the Eastern seaboard beginning in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.  Their settlements were usually isolated communities established in locations that investors hoped would prove profitable—or simply wherever the ships landed.  There was little forethought given to the Natives who were already there. The colonists often had no realistic plans for making their enterprises successful, or even for surviving the winter.  In some places Native people rescued these fledgling communities by providing information, food, and friendship.  In others, where previous contact with Europeans had taught them a lesson, the Native people were hostile.  The nature of these early relations often spelled success or failure for the ill-prepared newcomers. Roanoke, 1587 Hostilities between colonists and the Carolina Algonquians destroyed this early English settlement.  With visions of overseas expansion and profits, the Englishman Sir Walter Raleigh sent an exploratory party to the Atlantic coast in 1584.  The two ships landed at an island called Roanoke by the local Algonquian-speaking Natives, the Roanoakes, who were friendly to the Englishmen and exchanged goods with them.  Encouraged, Raleigh obtained a royal charter for colonization, and the following year he sponsored a settlement at Roanoke. The Roanokes gave the group permission to build on the island, but relations got off to a bad start when the English, in retaliation for the apparent theft of a silver cup, attacked and burned a Roanoke village and its cornfields.  Relations deteriorated further as the English group insisted that the Natives trade their own dwindling food reserves and as a European disease ravaged the Native population.  When the English became convinced that the Natives were planning a conspiracy, the colonists attacked first, killing Wingina, the Roanokes’ leader.  Ten days later the colonists fled back to England. One member of the 1585 and 1587 Roanoke expeditions was John White, a naturalist and superb illustrator whose drawings of the Carolina Algonquians provide a rare and accurate glimpse of Native life in the 16th century.  White returned to England for supplies shortly after landing at Roanoke in 1587; his daughter and her family vanished with the other colonists. Undeterred, in 1587 Raleigh sponsored another expedition of 118 men, women, and children, who planned to settle further north at Chesapeake Bay.  But the group ended up at Roanoke and, sometime within the next three years, disappeared.  Were they doomed by a famine brought on by severe drought, killed by the Roanokes or Croatoans in a struggle over food, or taken in by friendly Natives some distance away? To this day, the mystery remains unsolved. Jamestown, 1607 From nearly the moment of their arrival in 1607, the colonists who established Jamestown clashed with the Natives of eastern Virginia known as the Powhatans. In the spring of 1607, three ships sponsored by a London-based company arrived on the coast of present-day Virginia.  About a hundred men had been enlisted to establish a permanent, profitable settlement, a base from which the colonists were to search for gold and export lumber, tar, pitch, and iron.  The group chose to settle on a swampy island on the James River, in the territory of the Powhatans—an "empire" of numerous chiefdoms and thousands of Native people, headed by the powerful leader Powhatan. Inadequately supplied with food and beset by disease, the English settlement was troubled from the start.  The colonists repeatedly offended the Powhatans by neglecting to negotiate for land, failing to understand the complex alliances and rivalries among the chiefdoms, and trying to convert Native people to European ways of life.  Although Powhatan personally thought the English could be useful as allies, the Native people did not welcome the colonists in their midst, and a large force of men from several chiefdoms attacked two weeks after the colonists landed.  Relations may have been particularly strained as the result of a severe drought, which depleted food reserves for Natives and colonists alike.  Still, as the Englishmen began to starve, some Powhatans took pity and brought them food. The tactics of Captain John Smith, who insisted that the Natives trade with the colonists for corn and resorted to force with those who refused, guaranteed that relations between the newcomers and the Powhatans would remain strained.  In 1610, tit-for-tat killings escalated into war.  Both sides endured losses of life and property until 1614, when Powhatan allowed his daughter, Pocohontas, to marry a colonist, thus creating an alliance between the groups.  Even this peace did not last, and eight years later a Powhatan uprising killed 347 colonists in one day.  Intermittent hostilities continued to claim lives on both sides for another two decades until the Powhatans finally were forced to acknowledge that the colonists were too numerous to defeat. Captain John Smith believed that a show of force was the best way to deal with the Natives of the Powhatan confederacy.  Although the Jamestown colony survived -- in part because sympathetic Powhatans supplied the starving colonists with food -- it engaged in more than three decades of hostilities with its Native neighbors. New Amsterdam, ca. 1624 The Dutch settlers at New Amsterdam clashed with local Natives but were careful to maintain good relations with the Mohawks, who provided them with valuable furs. Under the authority of the Dutch West India Company, colonists from the Netherlands arrived in North America beginning around 1624.  One of the several places they settled was the island of Manhattan, where they built a fort, trading post, church, and several houses before deciding to make the occupation legal with the payment of trade goods to the local Native people. Population remained low, as the primary purpose of the  Dutch venture was trade, and initially the small settlement got on well with the local Wappingers and other Natives.  As Dutch farms swallowed up greater chunks of forest, though, the Native  people became frustrated by the disappearance of hunting territory and took to killing European livestock. The heavy-handed Dutch response, including unreasonable demands for annual payments of corn, furs, and wampum, served to sour the relationship even further. In 1643 New Amsterdam unleashed a massacre on the River Indians in nearby Pavonia, burning the village and killing hundreds, including women and children. Hostilities with nearby Natives flickered on and off during the entire period of Dutch rule.  At the same time, the business-savvy colonists did their best to maintain an alliance with the powerful Mohawks and other Iroquois people of the Five Nations, who lived further inland and, in exchange for wampum and trade goods, provided the Dutch with vast quantities of furs.  When the British gained control of New Amsterdam in 1664, they assumed the Dutch role as the ally of the Mohawks. Plymouth, 1620 The first successful European settlement in New England benefited from peaceful relations with the neighboring Wampanoags.  The 102 passengers who sailed aboard the Mayflower in 1620 included the first colonists to come to North America primarily for religious reasons.  These Puritans, persecuted in England for their radical views, hoped to create a community where they could worship as they pleased. The newcomers were ill prepared for their new life. They were in financial debt to the sponsors of their voyage, and woefully low on provisions. They knew little about hunting or fishing.  They were fortunate to find an area near Cape Cod, which they named Plymouth, where there were fields for crops already prepared. Unbeknownst to them, this place was the former Native village of Patuxet, recently abandoned after the residents had been wiped out in a plague—a disease brought by European traders.  A stash of about ten bushels of Indian corn and beans, which the settlers stole from Native storage pits on Cape Cod, helped keep them from starvation.  Nonetheless, half the group died the first winter.  The survivors’ fortunes improved in the spring, when they were befriended by the nearby Pokanokets, including Squanto, a former resident of Patuxet.  Squanto’s early assistance in teaching colonists how to plant and where to fish in his ancestral territory was invaluable—and the Pokanokets, in turn, used their alliance with the settlement to increase their strength and expand their territory.  The experiences of the colonists at Plymouth served as a warning to other Puritans in England, who realized that future settlements would require better financial backing and preparation. Massachusetts Bay, 1630 With advice and supplies from their neighbors at Plymouth, this Puritan colony grew rapidly—encroaching more and more into the Massachusetts Indians’ land. The political climate in England made it increasingly difficult for Puritans there to practice their faith, and so a group of Puritan investors bought into a commercial venture and obtained a royal charter to establish a colony in America not far from Plymouth.  By the end of 1630, more than 1,000 colonists had settled in the region known as Massachusetts Bay, establishing Boston, the company and colony headquarters, as well as half a dozen towns in the surrounding countryside.  Within a decade the colonists’ numbers had increased tenfold, making Massachusetts Bay the hub of settlement and commerce in New England. Their numbers having been drastically reduced by epidemic diseases, the Native people residing around Massachusetts Bay could do little to prevent the new settlers from moving in.  Colonists justified their actions by arguing that because the Natives had not improved their land in the European manner, they did not truly own it.  Yet the settlers made great efforts to maintain as much distance from local Native people as possible.  In the wake of the Powhatan attack on Jamestown eight years earlier, the Puritans apparently believed that it was best to avoid too much intermingling with the “heathens.” The Puritans who colonized Massachusetts Bay hoped to establish “a City upon a Hill,” a model Christian settlement that others might emulate.  By buying out all the non-Puritan  investors in the original commercial venture and bringing the Company’s charter with them to Boston, the Puritans ensured that they would be largely free from interference. Sagadahoc, 1607 Alienating their Abenaki trading partners, these colonists endured for only one harsh winter. This settlement at the mouth of the Sagadahoc River, today called the Kennebec River, was financed by a group of English investors who hoped that the colonization of North America would be profitable.  Among the 120 colonists who arrived here in 1607 was Skidwarres, a Pemaquid Abenaki who had been previously kidnapped by an English trader.  Having spent two years in England, Skidwarres was pressed into service as the group’s interpreter and mediator. Shortly after arrival, Skidwarres returned to his community.  The English failed to establish good relationships with their Abenaki neighbors—in part because of the active efforts of Skidwarres and another Native who was kidnapped—and they offended those with whom they hoped to trade.  Only one of the group’s leaders was favored by the local Natives, and after his death relations deteriorated even further.  The colonists repeatedly used violence to turn away the Abenakis who approached the fort, and finally the Natives attacked a group of colonists, killing eleven.  The colony was abandoned shortly after, in 1608.  The Abenakis later said that their powwows had used supernatural powers to drive away the Englishmen, who had treated them badly. Quebec, 1608 The first French settlement in America, Quebec served as a center for two groups: fur traders and missionaries. The French first attempted to establish a settlement on the banks of the St. Lawrence River as early as 1541, when Jacques Cartier arrived with several hundred colonists, including a few dozen convicts.  Cartier had twice previously explored the area, spending a winter near Stadacona, an Iroquois village.  But Cartier’s attempted colony failed—in part because he had angered the Native people of Stadacona by kidnapping 10 children and adults, including Donnaconna, the village leader, and taking them back to France.  None ever saw their own territory again. It wasn’t until 1608 that Samuel de Champlain founded an enduring settlement at Quebec. The nearby village of Stadacona had by that time been abandoned,  but scurvy and the harsh weather took their toll on Champlain’s colonists. Only eight survived the first winter. More a trading post than a town, Quebec supported the extensive operations of French fur trappers and traders, who bartered with Natives far inland to obtain the pelts they sent back to France.  Like the strategically located Dutch settlement at New Amsterdam, which controlled the mouth of the Hudson River, Quebec enabled the French to control the St. Lawrence River, which led to the Great Lakes.  The settlement remained small for many years—by 1650, its population had reached 675.  Jesuit priests and missionaries steadily arrived in the land they called New France, however, propelled by the hope that they would convert the Natives to Christianity.