From Eve to Dawn, A History of Women in the World, Volume 2 by Marilyn French

Author:Marilyn French [French, Marilyn; Atwood, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781558616219
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY

CHAPTER 6

EUROPEAN APPROPRIATION OF NORTH AMERICA

Conquest

ABOUT 1000 CE the Viking Leif Ericsson landed on the North American coast. He left no settlement, and Europeans were unaware of the landmass until the Florentine Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot), like Columbus seeking a sea route to India, stumbled on it in 1497. The Spaniards Juan Ponce de León (1513) and Pánfilo de Narváez (1528) explored Florida, Hernando de Soto and Vásquez de Coronado the southwest (1539–42), and others the west coast, leaving outposts at St. Augustine and Santa Fe. Finding no natural resources in the continent, Spain set out to conquer the native societies and to force them to find and extract some. Since Spain had no plans to colonize this territory, it sent no women until Francisca Hinestrosa arrived in 1539. She was probably the first European woman in North America when she landed at Tampa Bay with her husband, a soldier with de Soto. She died in a battle with Native Americans in 1541 in the Mississippi Valley.

Seeking a nonexistent “northwest passage” to Asia, Giovanni da Verrazano explored the east coast from Florida to Nova Scotia in 1524, followed a decade later by Jacques Cartier, who sailed the St. Lawrence River and built a settlement at Quebec. French Basque fishermen based in Montreal traded with Abenaki beaver-trappers in Maine who wanted European cloth and metal tools. In 1609 Henry Hudson sailed the river named for him and, after 1624, the Dutch settled the Hudson Valley. By 1638 Swedes had settled along the Delaware River.

The English who would defeat the Dutch and gain territorial control and cultural hegemony over eastern North America were the last to explore and settle it. Wanting a New World base from which to attack Spain, Queen Elizabeth I sent Sir Walter Raleigh and his half-brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert to establish one: Gilbert died in the attempt, but Raleigh landed at Roanoke Island and, in 1587, sent ninety-one men, seventeen women, and nine male children to colonize Virginia (which was named for Elizabeth, the “Virgin Queen”).

The colonists tried to farm Indian land. Eleanor Dare was five months pregnant when she left England with her husband and father, John White.1 After enduring three months on stormy seas and one in tropical wilderness, Eleanor gave birth on August 18, 1587, to the first English child born in the New World, Virginia Dare. Nine days after his granddaughter’s birth, White returned to England to replenish supplies and get help. But war erupted between England and Spain and he could not leave England. After Spain’s Armada was destroyed in the summer of 1588 and the sea lanes were opened, White was further detained by Raleigh’s near bankruptcy. He finally went back to Roanoke in August 1590, but found not even a human bone.

England did not repeat its attempt until 1605, when some prosperous gentry and merchants, with visions of huge profits dancing before their eyes, set up a joint-stock company to colonize North America. King James I chartered the Virginia Company, which sent 144 men and boys to the New World.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.