Unit 2 part I first explorers from europe

The first Europeans to arrive in North America, at least the first for whom there is solid evidence, were Norse. They were a sea-going people from Scandinavia in Northern Europe. The Vikings were traveling west from Greenland, where Eric the Red had founded a settlement around the year 985. Around the year 1000 his son Leif Ericson, a sailor from Iceland, and a group of Vikings sailed to the eastern coast of North America and landed at a place they called Vinland because of grape vines growing there. They explored the eastern coast of what is now Canada and spent at least one winter there. Remains of a Viking settlement were found in the Canadian province of Newfoundland. The archeologists discovered the foundations of huts built in Viking style and also iron nails and the weight, or “whorl” from a spindle. These objects were important pieces of evidence that the Viking had indeed reached America. Until the arrival of Europeans none of the Amerindian tribes knew how to make iron. And the spindle whorl was exactly like those used in Iceland.

Soon other Vikings followed Leif Ericson to Vinland, but the settlements they made there did not last. The hostility of the local Amerindians and the dangers of the northern seas made them give up their attempts to colonize Vinland. The Vikings sailed away and their discovery was forgotten except by their storytellers.

Five hundred years later the need for increased trade and an error in navigation led to another European encounter with America. In 1492 an Italian adventurer named Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain to find a new way from Europe to Asia. He aim was to open up a shorter trade route between the two continents. In Asia, he intended to load his three small ships – the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria – with silks, spices and gold, and sail back to Europe a rich man. He first sailed south to the Canary Islands, then he turned west across the unknown waters of the mid-Atlantic ocean. It was October 12, ten weeks after leaving Spain, when he stepped ashore on the beach of a low sandy island. He named the island San Salvador –Holy Savor. Columbus believed that he had landed in the Indies, a group of islands close to the mainland of India. For this reason he called the friendly, brown-skinned people who greeted him Indians. But Columbus was not near India and it was not the edge of Asia that he had reached. In fact he landed in the Caribbean, the islands off the shores of a new continent.

But the continent received its name after Amerigo Vespucci, one of several navigators who followed Columbus west. And the reason for that is that to the end of his life Columbus believed his discoveries were part of Asia. The man who did most to correct this mistaken idea was Amerigo Vespucci. He was an Italian sailor from the city of Florence. During the late 1490s he wrote some letters in which he described two voyages of exploration that he had made along the coast of South America. He was sure that the lands beyond the Atlantic were a new continent. To honor him, they were named America.

The first explorations of the continental United States were launched from the Spanish possessions that Columbus helped to establish. The first of these took place in 1513 when a group of men under Juan Ponce de Leon landed on the Florida coast. Ponce de Leon was a Spanish conquistador who came to the New World with Columbus on his second voyage (1498). He became the governor of the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico. The natives of Puerto Rico told de Leon that to the north lay a land rich in gold. This northern land, they said, also had an even more precious treasure – a fountain whose waters gave everlasting youth to all those who drank from it. In the spring of 1513 de Leon set off in search of the magic fountain. He landed in present day Florida and sailed all round its coast searching for the miraculous waters. And though he never found the Fountain of Youth, he did claim Florida for Spain. In 1565 Spanish settlers founded St. Augustine there, the first permanent European settlement on the mainland of North America.

When Columbus returned to Spain he took back with him some jewelry that he had obtained in America. This jewelry was important because it was made of gold. In the next fifty years thousands of treasure-hungry Spanish adventurers crossed the Atlantic Ocean to search for more of the precious metal. It was lust for gold that in the 1520s led Hernan Cortez to conquer the Aztecs, a wealthy, city-building Amerindian people who lived in what is now Mexico. In the 1530s the same lust for gold caused Francisco Pizarro to attack the equally wealthy empire of the Incas of Peru. With the conquest of Mexico the Spanish solidified their position in the Western Hemisphere and a stream of treasure from a new empire in Central and South America began to flow across the Atlantic to Spain.

In the years that followed other Spanish conquistadors undertook the search for gold in North America. Among the most significant Spanish explorations was that of Hernando de Soto. In 1539 his expedition left Cuba and landed in Florida. In search of riches he led his expedition westward and explored the southeastern United States discovering the Mississippi river.

Another Spaniard, Francisco Coronado, set out from Mexico in 1540 in search of the mythical “Seven Cities of Gold” that, Amerindian legends said, lay hidden somewhere in the desert. He never found them however Coronado and his men journeyed as far east as Kansas and became first Europeans to see the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. Besides, Coronado’s expedition left the peoples of the region a remarkable gift: enough horses escaped from his party to transform life on the Great Plains and within a few generations the Amerindians became masters of horsemanship.

The growing wealth of Spain made other European nations envious. They became eager to share the riches of the new world. And while the Spanish were pushing up from the south, the northern portion of the present-day United States was slowly being revealed by English and French explorers.

In 1524 the French king Francis I sent an Italian sailor name Giovanni Verrazano to find a land rich in gold and a new sea route to Asia. Verrazano sailed the full length of the east coast of America, but found neither. However he anchored his ship in what is now the harbor of New York.

Ten years later another French explorer, a fisherman named Jacques Cartier, discovered the St. Lawrence River. He returned to France and reported that the forests lining the river’s shores were full of fur-bearing animals and that its waters were full of fish. The next year he sailed further up the river, reaching the site of the present-day city of Montreal. Cartier failed to find the way to Asia but his expeditions along the St. Lawrence River laid the foundations for the French claims to North America.

In 1497, just five years after Columbus landed in the Caribbean, English king Henry VII hired an Italian seaman named John Cabot to explore the new lands and to look again for a passage to Asia. Cabot sailed to the north of the continent and eventually he reached the rocky coast of Newfoundland. At first Cabot thought that this was China. A year later he made a second westward crossing of the Atlantic. This time he sailed south along the coast of North America as far as Chesapeake Bay. Though Cabot found no gold and no passage to the East his voyages were very valuable for the English as later they provided the basis for their claims to North America.

Claiming that you owned land in North America was one thing, actually making it yours was something quite different. Europeans could only do this by establishing settlements for their own people. Almost a century later Sir Walter Raleigh, an English adventurer, sent his ships to find land in the New World were English people might settle. He named the land they visited Virginia, in honor of Elizabeth I, England’s unmarried queen. In July 1585, 108 English settlers landed on Roanoke Island, off the coast of the present-day state of North Carolina. They built houses and a fort, planted crops and searched – without success – for gold. When they ran out of food and made enemies with the local Amerindian inhabitants they gave up and sailed back to England. In 1587 Raleigh tried again. His ships landed 118 settlers on Roanoke Island, including fourteen family groups. But when theBritish ship returned to Roanoke in August 1590, the settlement was deserted. There was no sign of what had happened to its people except a word carved on a tree – “Croaton”, the home of a friendly Indian chief, fifty miles to the south. Some believe that the Roanoke settlers were carried off by Spanish soldiers from Florida. Others think that they may have decided to go to live with Indians on the mainland. But the Roanoke settlers were never seen or heard of again.

DISCUSSION

1. What do we learn about the first Europeans who arrived in North America? What were the pieces of evidence found by archeologists?

2. Why did Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain in 1492? What was his objective?

3. Why did Columbus name the native inhabitants of the island “Indians”?

4. What do we learn about Amerigo Vespucci? Why was the new continent named to honor this man?

5. What do we learn about the journeys made by Juan Ponce de Leon? What was he searching for in what is now Florida?

6. What was the first European permanent settlement in North America? Where and when was it established?

7. What made thousands of Spanish adventurers cross the Atlantic after Columbus returned from his voyage?

8. What do we learn about the expeditions sent by English and French kings?

9. Why did Sir Walter Raleigh, an English adventurer, name the land he visited Virginia?

10. What do we learn about the colony he established?