North America

A

Age of Exploration

Consecutive European explorations in North America began with the voyage made in 1492 by Christopher Columbus in the service of Spain. His three ships sailed from Palos de la Frontera, Andalucía, on August 3, and on October 12 made landfall in the Bahamas. Although the exact landing site is disputed, most historians favor Samana Cay. Before returning to Europe, Columbus also landed on Cuba and Hispaniola. It was on Hispaniola that he established the first Spanish settlement in the Americas. He made three additional voyages between 1493 and 1502.

In 1497 an Italian navigator in English service, John Cabot, landed on Cape Breton Island; in 1498 he also sailed along the Labrador, Newfoundland, and New England coasts, and possibly as far south as Delaware Bay. Portuguese navigator Gasper Corte-Real made a voyage in 1500 to the North American coast between Labrador and southeastern Newfoundland. In 1513 Juan Ponce de León, the Spanish governor of Puerto Rico, landed in Florida. Four years later Spanish soldier Francisco Fernández de Córdoba explored the Yucatán, and in 1518 Juan de Grijalva, a nephew of Spanish soldier Diego Velázquez, explored the eastern coast of Mexico, which he called New Spain. The following year Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico; he conquered it during the next two years.

B

Spanish Conquests

Spanish conquest of the southern portion of the continent was substantially facilitated by the strife prevailing among the indigenous peoples of the region. Internal turbulence had been especially acute in the Aztec Empire, the rich domain that fell to Cortés in 1521. The Aztec Empire was the largest and most politically powerful in North America at that time. However, the empire was hated by many of the tribes under its sovereignty, and some of these tribes became willing allies of Cortés. Through this circumstance and superiority in weapons, Spanish victory was ensured. The Maya, another Mexican nation, living mainly on the Yucatán Peninsula, were also disunited and incapable of offering effective resistance to the Spanish. Although tens of thousands of indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America were exterminated during the period of Spanish conquest and rule, the Aztec, Maya, and other peoples survived and multiplied. Their descendants constitute a majority of the present-day population of these areas.

Cortés reached the region now known as Baja California in 1536. Among other important Spanish leaders of exploring expeditions during the first half of the 16th century were Pánfilo de Narváez and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who explored parts of Florida, the northern and eastern coasts of the Gulf of Mexico, and parts of northern Mexico between 1528 and 1536; Hernando de Soto, who reached and crossed the Mississippi River in 1541; and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, who from 1540 to 1542 explored large areas in the southwestern part of the present-day United States. Saint Augustine, Florida, established in 1565 by Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, is the oldest permanent European settlement in what is now the United States.

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By 1600 the Spanish had subjugated the indigenous peoples of the larger West Indian islands, of the Florida Peninsula, and of southern Mexico (New Spain). For administrative purposes the colonies founded by the Spanish in these areas were grouped in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. After consolidating their control of New Spain, the Spanish authorities gradually pushed northward, completing the conquest of Mexico and taking over large areas in the south of what is now the United States. The colonial policy of Spain in North America was identical in all important respects with its South American colonial policy—that is, economic exploitation. Regarding the colonies merely as a source of wealth, the Spanish rulers imposed confiscation taxation and maintained a monopoly of colonial trade. The Spanish government even forbade commercial trading among its American colonies. This oppressive economic policy and political tyranny created discontent that finally flared into open rebellion.

C

French and English Colonization

While Spain was consolidating its position in southern North America, France and England explored and settled the continent from present-day Canada southward. England and Spain had been generally allied in international politics during the early part of the 16th century, and as a result the English did not then attempt to compete with Spain in North America. France, the chief rival of Spain for hegemony on the European continent, entered the race for colonial empire somewhat belatedly, but its territorial acquisitions in the New World were nonetheless important. In 1524 Florentine navigator Giovanni da Verrazzano, sailing in French service, followed the North American coast from Cape Fear northward to a point usually identified as Cape Breton. In the course of this voyage he explored what are now called Narragansett and New York bays. French explorer Jacques Cartier made three voyages between 1534 and 1542 in an area including the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the St. Lawrence River, and the settlement of indigenous people that later became the site of Montréal. France claimed most of the northern part of the continent on the basis of these explorations. Because of domestic turmoil resulting from the Protestant Reformation, the French were forced to suspend colonial activity for more than half a century. Beginning in 1599, they established fur-trading posts along the St. Lawrence River. Numerous French Jesuit priests came thereafter to the St. Lawrence region, seeking to convert the Native Americans to the Roman Catholic faith, and various French explorers found and claimed for France new and widely separate sections of the continent. Among the most notable of these explorers were Samuel de Champlain, who founded Québec in 1608 and explored what is now northern New York; Jesuit missionary Claude Jean Allouez, who opened up new territory around Lake Superior; and Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette and explorer Louis Joliet, who in 1673 together explored the upper Mississippi River as far south as present-day Arkansas. In 1682 one of the most noted French pioneers in North America, René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, and his associate, Italian explorer Henri de Tonty, navigated the Mississippi from its junction with the Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico, claiming all the land drained by the river for Louis XIV, king of France, and naming it Louisiana.

The English crown laid claim to the North American continent on the strength of the Cabot voyage of 1497 to 1498, but for nearly a century made no attempts at colonization. The earliest colony in North America was established in 1583 near the present city of St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, by English navigator and soldier Sir Humphrey Gilbert, but the settlers returned to England the same year. Twice, in 1585 and in 1587, Sir Walter Raleigh attempted to establish a colony on Roanoke Island, in present-day North Carolina, but when English explorers called at Roanoke in 1590, they found no trace of the colonists (see Croatan). The first permanent British colony on the continent was Jamestown, established in Virginia in 1607. Plymouth Colony was founded in 1620 on the shores of Cape Cod Bay, and Massachusetts Bay Colony was established between 1628 and 1630 on the shores of Massachusetts Bay. After 1630 the English systematically colonized the entire Atlantic seaboard between French Acadia and Spanish Florida. In 1664 they annexed the Dutch colony of New Netherland, settled in 1624, which they renamed New York, and the settlements on the Delaware River that the Dutch had seized from Swedish colonists in 1655. The English colonies grew rapidly in population and wealth. For details, see United States (History).

At the beginning of the last decade of the 17th century, most of the North American continent from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico was occupied by the French and English colonial empires. The French colonies were widely scattered. The principal settlements were grouped in Canada and near the mouth of the Mississippi River, and a line of trading and military posts along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers connected the two regions. The English colonial holdings consisted of 12 colonies extending along the Atlantic seaboard. A 13th, Georgia, was chartered in 1733.

D

War and Revolution

As a consequence of efforts to expand westward beyond the Alleghenies, the English eventually came into conflict with the French in the Ohio Valley. In 1689 the two powers began a worldwide struggle for military and colonial supremacy. In North America the conflict was fought in four successive phases: King William's War, which lasted from 1689 to 1697; Queen Anne's War, from 1702 to 1713; King George's War, from 1744 to 1748; and the French and Indian War, from 1754 to 1763. Reverses suffered in the French and Indian War and in its European extension, the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), forced the French to capitulate. By the Treaty of Paris of 1763, France was forced to yield to Great Britain all its holdings in Canada and also all of Louisiana east of the Mississippi. France had previously ceded to Spain, its ally, New Orleans and all French territory west of the Mississippi.

The outstanding event of the two decades from 1763 to 1783 on the continent was the economic, political, and military conflict between Great Britain and its 13 colonies along the Atlantic seaboard south of Canada. Generally called the American Revolution (1775-1783), this conflict ended in the establishment of the United States of America. The success of the 13 colonies in freeing themselves from the rule of their parent country soon had repercussions among the Spanish colonies in the Americas. Inspired by their victory and also by the outcome of the French Revolution (1789-1799), and taking advantage of the involvement of Spain in the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), in 1810 the Spanish colonies in the Americas began a struggle for independence. Mexico revolted against Spain in that year but did not actually become free until 1821. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Canada also succeeded in obtaining from Britain a full degree of self-government. See Canada: History.

E

United States Expansion

Other developments marked the history of North America in the 19th and 20th centuries. The first involved the increasing importance of the United States, marked by the nation's unparalleled growth in population and wealth, and its territorial growth; its resolution of many internal economic and political problems, particularly those of slavery and national unity; and its emergence toward the end of the 19th century as a world power.

The U.S. territorial expansion was marked by warfare against Native Americans who resisted encroachment on their domains. Except in scattered areas, particularly in the southern Appalachians, the Native Americans living east of the Mississippi River had been eliminated as an effective force by the final decade of the 18th century. Some of the tribes had withdrawn westward, but the great majority had been substantially diminished or completely destroyed. To a large degree, the fate of the indigenous peoples of eastern North America was a result of the wars and political rivalries among the colonizing powers, particularly the French and English, who involved the tribes in their struggles for territorial supremacy. Many thousands of indigenous peoples, however, perished in attempts to maintain their ancestral lands and cultural identity in spite of the usurpers. Between 1832 and 1877, the Native Americans of the Great Plains, the Southwest, and the Rocky Mountains contested almost every major European move westward. Ultimately, however, it was not primarily armed battles that subjugated the Native Americans, but rather devastating disease, forced assimilation, and expropriation of their land by means of treaties and legislation. Both in the United States and Canada the majority of Native Americans continue to live on reservations. In many of these areas, which represent a poorly integrated fusion of Native American civilization with that of whites, the economic plight of the indigenous peoples is serious.

In addition to acquisitions of contiguous territory in the 19th and 20th centuries, the United States obtained other regions in North America: Alaska, purchased from Russia in 1867 for $7 million; Puerto Rico, ceded by Spain in 1898 after the Spanish-American War; the Panama Canal Zone, acquired in 1903 but ceded to Panama in 1979; and the Virgin Islands of the United States, purchased from Denmark in 1917 for $25 million.

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