Just how small is England? Exclusive of Wales and Scotland, which were not part of the nation in the 1500s, England is only 50,363 square miles in area.

It was Russian sailors who finally found the Northeast Passage in 1648. Semen Ivanov Dezhnev sailed from the Kolyma River through the Bering Strait to the mouth of the Anadyr River on the Pacific Ocean. Vitus Bering, the Danish seafarer for whom the strait is named, sailed from the Pacific to the Arctic Ocean between 1725 and 1730, and Baron Nils A. E. Nordenskjold, a Swede, made the first through passage from west to east in 1878-79, wintering off the Chukchi peninsula.

Sir Walter Raleigh was a favorite courtier of Queen Elizabeth 1, who knighted him in 1584, the year he obtained Gilbert’s patent. By the 1590s, Raleigh fell out of favor with a jealous Elizabeth after he married one of her maids of honor, and the queen imprisoned him briefly in 1592. He was later “rehabilitated,” however, and went on to serve with distinction in naval expeditions to the Guiana coast of South America (1595), Spain (1596), and the Azores (1597). In 1600, he was appointed governor of the Isle of Jersey, serving until 1603, when advisers to Elizabeth’s successor, James 1, persuaded the new king that Raleigh had conspired against his ascension to the throne. Raleigh was sentenced to death, but execution was stayed for 13 years, during which he languished in the Tower of London. In 1616, he appealed to James to send him on an expedition in search of South American gold. When he returned empty-handed, he was sent back to the Tower—at least in part because the Spanish crown demanded that he be punished for having sacked a Spanish settlement in Guiana. James then ordered his execution, for the original conspiracy conviction, on October 29, 1618.

Most of the colonists obtained passage to the New World by signing a contract called an indenture, thereby becoming indentured servants–in effect, slaves for the seven-year term of the agreement. This would prove a very popular method of bringing settlers to the fledgling English colonies.

Here is the original Pocahontas—John Smith story, as related in A History of the Settlement of Virginia, by the early Virginia merchant Thomas Studley and Smith himself—

In This Chapter

Puritans, Separatists, Pilgrims

Settlement of Plymouth and Massachusetts By colonies

Religious tolerance in Rhode Island, Maryland, and Pennsylvania

Oglethorpe’s utopia experiment

Introduction of slavery

The settlement of Virginia was motivated by a combination of commercial enthusiasm and the intense social and economic pressures of an England that had outgrown its ancient feudal system. Farther north in America, in the area still known as New England, settlement was motivated more immediately by religious zeal.

As early as the reign of Elizabeth I, certain members of the Church of England (which the queen’s father, Henry VIII, severed from the Roman Catholic Church during 1536-40) had become extremely critical about what they considered compromises made with Catholic practice. A group of Anglican priests, most of them graduates of Cambridge University, advocated such articles of religion as direct personal spiritual experience, rigorously sincere moral conduct, and radically simple worship services. They felt that the mainstream Anglican church had not gone far enough in reforming worship and purging it of Catholic influence. When James I ascended the throne in 1603, Puritan leaders clamored for reform, including the abolition of bishops. James refused, but Puritanism (as the new reform movement came to be called) gained a substantial popular following by the early 17th century. The government and the mainstream Anglican Church, especially under Archbishop William Laud, reacted with repressive and discriminatory measures amounting to a campaign of persecution. Some Puritans left the country, settling in religiously tolerant Holland, while others remained in England and formed a powerful bloc within the parliamentarian party that, under the leadership, of Oliver Cromwell, ultimately defeated (and beheaded!) Charles I in the English Civil War (1642-46).

The Puritans who left England were, logically enough, called Separatists. Most of them were farmers, poorly educated, and of lowly social status. One of the Separatist congregations was led by William Brewster and the Reverend Richard Clifton in the village of Scrooby, Nottinghamshire. This group left Scrooby for Amsterdam in 1608, then, the following year, moved to another Dutch town, Leyden, where they lived for 12 years. Although the Scrooby group had found religious freedom, they were plagued by economic hardship and were concerned that their children were growing up Dutch rather than English. In 1617, they decided on a radical course of action. They voted to immigrate to America.

Brewster knew Sir Edwin Sandys, treasurer of the Virginia Company of London, and, through him, the Scrooby congregation obtained a pair of patents authorizing them to settle in the northern part of the company’s American territory. With supplementary financial backing from a London iron merchant named Thomas Weston, somewhat less than half of the congregation finally chose to leave Leyden. They boarded the Speedwell, bound for the port of Southampton, England, where they were to unite with another group of Separatists and pick up a second ship. However, both groups were dogged by delays and disputes. Ultimately, 102 souls (fewer than half of whom were Separatists) piled into a single vessel, the Mayflower, and embarked from Plymouth on September 16, 1620.

After a grueling 65-day voyage, the Pilgrims (as their first historian, William Bradford, would later label them) sighted land on November 19. Apparently, rough seas off Nantucketforced the Mayflower’s skipper, Captain Christopher Jones, to steer away from the mouth of the Hudson River, where the Pilgrims were supposed to establish their “plantation,” to a landing at Cape Cod. This lay beyond the Virginia Company’s jurisdiction, and some historians believe that the Pilgrims actually bribed Captain Jones to alter course precisely in order to insure the group’s independence from external authority. Be that as it may, the Mayflower dropped anchor off present-day Provincetown, Massachusetts, on November 21.