Chapter 2:(1500-1733)
The Planting Of English America
As the 17th century dawned, scarcely 100 years after Columbus's momentous landfall, the face of much of the New World had already been profoundly transformed.
European crops and livestock had begun to alter the very landscape, touching off an ecological revolution that would reverberate for centuries to come.
From Tierra del Fuego in the south to Hudson Bay in the north, disease and armed conquest had cruelly winnowed and disrupted the native peoples.
Several hundred thousand enslaved Africans toiled on Caribbean and Brazilian sugar plantations.
From Florida and New Mexico southward, most of the New World lay firmly within the grip of imperial Spain.
But north of Mexico, America in 1600 remained largely unexplored and effectively unclaimed by Europeans.
Then, as if to herald the coming century of colonization and conflict in the northern continent, three European powers planted three primitive out posts in three distant corners of the continent within three years of one another: ↓
the Spanish at Santa Fé in 1610, the French at Québec in 1608, and, most consequentially for the future United States, the English at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607.