European Colonization of the Americas
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50 free European Colonization of the Americas trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Within a few generations of 1492, the Americas were remade. European ships brought soldiers, missionaries, farmers and fur traders, along with crops, livestock and diseases that changed life on both sides of the Atlantic. Rival crowns drew lines on maps of places they had never seen, and the people who already lived there resisted, traded, allied and adapted. This quiz follows the whole story of exploration and settlement: the Spanish conquests and missions, the French river routes into the interior, the Dutch and Scandinavian trading posts, and the English colonies along the Atlantic coast. Expect explorers and founders, lost settlements, famous ships, treaties and uprisings. It is pitched for students revising early colonial history, teachers looking for a ready-made review, and anyone who enjoys knowing how the modern map of North and South America came to be. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which English colony vanished by 1590, leaving only the word CROATOAN carved into its palisade?
Roanoke
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.
Q 02Which Norse explorer is thought to have reached North America about 500 years before Columbus?
Leif Erikson
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.
Q 03Which island did Peter Minuit acquire for the Dutch in 1626 for goods valued at 60 guilders?
Manhattan
Manhattan's famous price rests on a single letter: Dutch official Pieter Schagen reported the 60-guilder purchase to his government in November 1626.
Q 04Which staple of Italian cooking reached Europe only after Spanish ships brought it from the Americas?
Tomato
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.
Q 05Which animal, brought by the Spanish, transformed hunting for Plains nations like the Comanche?
Horses
Horses were coming home: the animal first evolved in North America and died out there thousands of years before Spanish ships carried it back.
Q 06Which city, founded in 1610, is the oldest state capital in the United States?
Santa Fe
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.
Q 07Which daughter of the chief Powhatan married colonist John Rolfe and died at Gravesend in 1617?
Pocahontas
Pocahontas was baptized under the name Rebecca while the English held her captive, before her 1614 wedding to Rolfe.
Q 08Which South American country is thought to be named after a red dyewood once shipped to Europe?
Brazil
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.
Q 09Which empire's fur traders built Fort Ross on the California coast in 1812, staying until 1841?
Russia
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.
Q 10Which cash crop, first exported from Virginia by John Rolfe, rescued the struggling colony?
Tobacco
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.
Q 11Which outpost, founded on a swampy peninsula in 1607, was England's first lasting American colony?
Jamestown
Jamestown, plagued by mosquitoes and brackish water, served as Virginia's capital until 1699, when the government moved inland to present-day Williamsburg.
Q 12Which ship carried the Pilgrims to America alone in 1620 after the leaky Speedwell was left behind?
Mayflower
Mayflower left Plymouth, England, on its own in September after Speedwell sprang three separate leaks and was judged unfit for the ocean.
Q 13Which disease, first recorded in the Americas in 1518, was the deadliest that Europeans brought?
Smallpox
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.
Q 21Which Spanish explorer named Florida in 1513 and is tied by legend to the Fountain of Youth?
Juan Ponce de León
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.
Q 22Which explorer crossed Panama in 1513, the first European to see the Pacific from the Americas?
Vasco Núñez de Balboa
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.
Q 23Which Inca emperor offered a roomful of gold and silver as ransom, yet was garroted in 1533?
Atahualpa
Q 14What name did Dutch settlers give the town that English forces seized in 1664 and renamed New York?
New Amsterdam
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.
Q 15Which conquistador scuttled his own ships in 1519 to stop his men retreating from the Aztec Empire?
Hernán Cortés
Hernán Cortés won allies among peoples who resented Aztec rule, including the Totonacs of Cempoala and the Nahuas of Tlaxcala.
Q 16Which city, founded by Spain in 1565, is the oldest surviving European settlement in the contiguous US?
St. Augustine
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.
Q 17Which Patuxet man, kidnapped to Spain in 1614, later taught the Pilgrims to grow native crops?
Squanto
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.
Q 18Which animal's fur, prized by Europe's hatmakers for its felt, drove the trade of New France?
Beaver
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.
Q 19Which city did French colonists found in 1718 and name for the duke then ruling France as regent?
New Orleans
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.
Q 20Which fabled lost city did Walter Raleigh hunt for along the Orinoco River in both 1595 and 1617?
El Dorado
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.
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.
Q 24Which Aztec capital, built on an island in Lake Texcoco, lies beneath modern Mexico City?
Tenochtitlan
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.
Q 25Santo Domingo, the oldest surviving European city in the Americas, stands on which Caribbean island?
Hispaniola
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.
Q 26Christopher Columbus, who sailed for the Spanish crown, was born in which Italian maritime republic?
Genoa
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.
Q 27Which queen of Castile, co-ruler with Ferdinand II of Aragon, helped finance Columbus's 1492 voyage?
Isabella I
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.
Q 28Which 1494 treaty divided new lands between Castile and Portugal at a line 370 leagues west of Cape Verde?
Tordesillas
Tordesillas left the far side of the globe undivided until 1529, when the Treaty of Zaragoza drew a matching line through the Pacific.
Q 29Which Spanish system gave conquistadors the labor of conquered peoples until the 1542 New Laws curbed it?
Encomienda
Encomienda literally means entrusting: in theory the grant holder owed his laborers military protection and education in return for their work.
Q 30Which friar, the first official Protector of the Indians, condemned Spanish atrocities in a 1552 account?
Bartolomé de las Casas
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.