50 Fun Facts About European Colonization of the Americas

Which English colony vanished by 1590, leaving only the word CROATOAN carved into its palisade?

Roanoke's governor John White sailed home for supplies in 1587 and could not return for three years, partly because England held its ships back to face the Spanish Armada.

Which Norse explorer is thought to have reached North America about 500 years before Columbus?

Leif Erikson, the sagas say, named the land Vinland, or Wineland, after the wild grapes his crew found, and sailed away with a cargo of grapes and timber.

Which island did Peter Minuit acquire for the Dutch in 1626 for goods valued at 60 guilders?

Manhattan's famous price rests on a single letter: Dutch official Pieter Schagen reported the 60-guilder purchase to his government in November 1626.

Which staple of Italian cooking reached Europe only after Spanish ships brought it from the Americas?

Tomato first appears in European writing in 1544, in a herbal by the Italian Pietro Andrea Mattioli, who later named the fruits pomi d'oro, or golden apples.

Which animal, brought by the Spanish, transformed hunting for Plains nations like the Comanche?

Horses were coming home: the animal first evolved in North America and died out there thousands of years before Spanish ships carried it back.

Which city, founded in 1610, is the oldest state capital in the United States?

Santa Fe began as the capital of Nuevo México, a province of New Spain, and has kept the job almost constantly under Spanish, Mexican and American rule.

Which daughter of the chief Powhatan married colonist John Rolfe and died at Gravesend in 1617?

Pocahontas was baptized under the name Rebecca while the English held her captive, before her 1614 wedding to Rolfe.

Which South American country is thought to be named after a red dyewood once shipped to Europe?

Brazil probably owes its name to brazilwood, whose deep red dye was the colony's first commercial export; the same timber is still the premier wood for stringed-instrument bows.

Which empire's fur traders built Fort Ross on the California coast in 1812, staying until 1841?

Russia used the fort to grow food for its Alaskan outposts, then sold it to John Sutter, the Swiss settler at whose mill California's gold was later found.

Which cash crop, first exported from Virginia by John Rolfe, rescued the struggling colony?

Tobacco from Rolfe's fields was a sweeter strain grown from Trinidad seed, which Spain had forbidden anyone to sell to foreigners on pain of death.

Which outpost, founded on a swampy peninsula in 1607, was England's first lasting American colony?

Jamestown, plagued by mosquitoes and brackish water, served as Virginia's capital until 1699, when the government moved inland to present-day Williamsburg.

Which ship carried the Pilgrims to America alone in 1620 after the leaky Speedwell was left behind?

Mayflower left Plymouth, England, on its own in September after Speedwell sprang three separate leaks and was judged unfit for the ocean.

Which disease, first recorded in the Americas in 1518, was the deadliest that Europeans brought?

Smallpox is widely blamed for the death of the Inca emperor Huayna Capac and his heir, which left two rival sons fighting a civil war just before the Spanish arrived.

What name did Dutch settlers give the town that English forces seized in 1664 and renamed New York?

New Amsterdam was renamed for the Duke of York, the future King James II; when the Dutch briefly retook the town in 1673 they called it New Orange.

Which conquistador scuttled his own ships in 1519 to stop his men retreating from the Aztec Empire?

Hernán Cortés won allies among peoples who resented Aztec rule, including the Totonacs of Cempoala and the Nahuas of Tlaxcala.

Which city, founded by Spain in 1565, is the oldest surviving European settlement in the contiguous US?

St. Augustine takes its name from the calendar: the Spanish fleet first sighted land on 28 August, the saint's feast day, eleven days before the founding.

Which Patuxet man, kidnapped to Spain in 1614, later taught the Pilgrims to grow native crops?

Squanto came home in 1619 to find he was the last of the Patuxet: an epidemic had wiped out his village, the very site where the Pilgrims then settled.

Which animal's fur, prized by Europe's hatmakers for its felt, drove the trade of New France?

Beaver pelts were at first a sideline for cod fishermen on the Grand Banks, until the fashion for felt hats turned bartering for them into an industry.

Which city did French colonists found in 1718 and name for the duke then ruling France as regent?

New Orleans honors Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, regent for the young Louis XV, and went on to serve as the capital of French Louisiana.

Which fabled lost city did Walter Raleigh hunt for along the Orinoco River in both 1595 and 1617?

El Dorado was first a person, not a place: Spanish accounts told of a ruler, the Golden One, who covered himself in gold dust and washed it off in a sacred lake.

Which Spanish explorer named Florida in 1513 and is tied by legend to the Fountain of Youth?

Juan Ponce de León chose the name because he arrived in the Easter season, which Spaniards called Pascua Florida, the Festival of Flowers; no contemporary evidence backs the fountain story.

Which explorer crossed Panama in 1513, the first European to see the Pacific from the Americas?

Vasco Núñez de Balboa had reached the mainland as a stowaway, hiding in a barrel with his dog to escape his creditors, and was later beheaded by Spanish authorities.

Which Inca emperor offered a roomful of gold and silver as ransom, yet was garroted in 1533?

Atahualpa was sentenced to burn at the stake, a fate the Inca believed would bar the soul from the afterlife, so he accepted baptism and was strangled instead.

Which Aztec capital, built on an island in Lake Texcoco, lies beneath modern Mexico City?

Tenochtitlan held an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 people when the Spanish arrived, which placed it among the largest cities in the world at the time.

Santo Domingo, the oldest surviving European city in the Americas, stands on which Caribbean island?

Hispaniola also held the first European fort in the Americas, La Navidad, which Columbus's crew built in 1492 from the timbers of their wrecked flagship.

Christopher Columbus, who sailed for the Spanish crown, was born in which Italian maritime republic?

Genoa's most famous son first took his plan for a westward voyage to King John II of Portugal, around 1484, years before Spain agreed to back it.

Which queen of Castile, co-ruler with Ferdinand II of Aragon, helped finance Columbus's 1492 voyage?

Isabella I backed the voyage in the same year that she and Ferdinand rode into Granada to accept its keys, ending a ten-year war for the last Muslim kingdom in Iberia.

Which 1494 treaty divided new lands between Castile and Portugal at a line 370 leagues west of Cape Verde?

Tordesillas left the far side of the globe undivided until 1529, when the Treaty of Zaragoza drew a matching line through the Pacific.

Which Spanish system gave conquistadors the labor of conquered peoples until the 1542 New Laws curbed it?

Encomienda literally means entrusting: in theory the grant holder owed his laborers military protection and education in return for their work.

Which friar, the first official Protector of the Indians, condemned Spanish atrocities in a 1552 account?

Bartolomé de las Casas knew the abuses from the inside: he held Indigenous laborers himself before he gave them up and began preaching that other colonists should do the same.

Which settlement did Samuel de Champlain found in 1608 where the St. Lawrence River narrows?

Quebec City takes its name from an Algonquin word meaning where the river narrows, and its ramparts are the only fortified city walls left in the Americas north of Mexico.

Which French explorer, the first European to map the St. Lawrence, gave Canada its name?

Jacques Cartier heard the Iroquoian word kanata, meaning village, used for the settlement of Stadacona, then applied it to the whole surrounding region.

Which English navigator was cast adrift by mutineers in 1611 in the Canadian bay now named for him?

Henry Hudson was set adrift in a small open boat with his teenage son and a few loyal or sick crewmen and never seen again; two years earlier he had explored the New York area for the Dutch East India Company.

Which French explorer canoed down the Mississippi to the Gulf in 1682 and named the basin Louisiana?

Robert de La Salle chose the name to honor Louis XIV; five years later, on a failed attempt to plant a colony on the Gulf coast, one of his own men ambushed and killed him.

Louisiana's Cajuns descend from French colonists whom Britain expelled in the 1750s from which region?

Acadia gave the Cajuns their name: in Louisiana the word Acadian was worn down to Cadien, which English speakers turned into Cajun.

Which one-legged Dutch governor surrendered New Netherland in 1664 after his colonists refused to fight?

Peter Stuyvesant lost his right leg leading a 1644 attack on Spanish-held Saint Martin, and replaced it with a wooden peg studded with silver nails.

Which kingdom built Fort Christina in 1638, the Delaware Valley's first permanent European settlement?

Sweden named the fort after its queen and held the colony for only 17 years before the Dutch Republic conquered it in 1655.

Which English Quaker received a vast land grant in 1681 to settle a royal debt to his admiral father?

William Penn planned Philadelphia on a grid so that it would be easy to navigate, unlike London, and it grew into the largest city in the Thirteen Colonies.

Which colony did Roger Williams found in 1636 after Puritan leaders expelled him from Massachusetts?

Rhode Island's founder slipped away into a January blizzard three days before the sheriff came for him, then built a refuge for what he called liberty of conscience.

Which colony, founded by the Calverts as a haven for English Catholics, passed a Toleration Act in 1649?

Maryland's act ended up shielding the founders' own faith: by 1649 Protestants dominated the assembly, so the law protected Catholics rather than the reverse.

Which colony did James Oglethorpe plan as a haven for debtors, with slavery banned in its early years?

Georgia, named for King George II, also banned rum at Oglethorpe's urging; the ban on slavery was lifted by 1751, just before it became a royal colony.

Which captain, who later named New England, told idle Virginia colonists that no work meant no food?

John Smith was echoing a New Testament verse, and the threat worked: the settlers set to with more industry and the colony's situation improved.

Which Puritan lawyer led the 1630 fleet to Massachusetts Bay and governed it for 12 of its first 20 years?

John Winthrop is traditionally credited with the sermon that pictured the new colony as a city upon a hill, an image American politicians still borrow.

Which Native nation, led by the sachem Massasoit, made peace with the Plymouth colonists in 1621?

The Wampanoag had been weakened by the same plague that emptied Patuxet, and Massasoit wanted armed allies against the Narragansett, who had largely been spared.

Which sachem, known to the English as King Philip, led a 1675 war against New England's Puritans?

Metacom was the younger son of Massasoit, and abandoned his father's alliance with the colonists after their repeated violations of it.

Which elected Virginia body first met in 1619, part of the Americas' first representative legislature?

The House of Burgesses lasted until 1776, long enough for Thomas Jefferson to sit in it and for Patrick Henry to denounce the Stamp Act before it.

Which 1676 uprising against Virginia governor William Berkeley collapsed after its leader died of dysentery?

Bacon's Rebellion failed in its aim of driving Native Americans out of Virginia, but it did get Governor Berkeley recalled to England, where he soon died.

Which global conflict ended in a 1763 treaty that cost France Canada and lands east of the Mississippi?

The Seven Years' War started early in America, where it is called the French and Indian War: a young George Washington led the 1754 ambush that opened the fighting.

What name is given to the Atlantic crossing that carried enslaved Africans in the triangular trade?

The Middle Passage killed an estimated two million of the Africans forced to make it, about 14 percent of those carried.

Which Virginia land scheme, begun in 1618, gave 50 acres to anyone who paid a new colonist's fare?

Headright grants were meant to cure a labor shortage, but the land went to whoever paid the fare, so indentured workers who served out their terms had little chance of owning any.