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The vanishing of the Raleigh Colony
The first ever English settlement in North America had actually been established in 1587, when a group of colonists (108 men & woman together including 9 children) led by Sir Walter Raleigh traveled to the island of Roanoke. Obscurely, by 1590 the Raleigh colony had vanished unexpectedly. People still do not know what became of its vanishing. -
The Starving Time
During the winter, Jamestown had "the starving time." The population decreased from 300 to about 60 after this winter. In June, they had to go back to England due to lack of supplies. -
The Arrival of the Puritans
About 100 people wanted to get religious freedom in the New World. They were called Puritans. They landed on the shores of Cape Cod, which is now present day Massachusetts. In late December, the group landed in Plymouth Harbor where they formed one of the first permanent settlement of Europeans in the New World. -
Giving Land to William Penn
In 1680, the king gave 45,000 square miles of land in the west of the Delaware River to William Penn, a Quaker who owned humongous grass of land in Ireland. Penn’s North American property became the colony of “Penn’s Woods,” or Pennsylvania. Lured by the fertile soil and the religious toleration that Penn promised, people migrated there from all over Europe. As a result, Pennsylvania soon became a prosperous and relatively egalitarian place. -
The Carolina Territory
By contrast, the Carolina colony, a territory that stretched south from Virginia to Florida and west to the Pacific Ocean, was much less cosmopolitan. In its northern half, hardscrabble farmers eked out a living. In its southern half, planters presided over vast estates that produced corn, lumber, beef and pork, and–starting in the 1690s–rice. As a result, slavery played an important role in the development of the Carolina colony.
