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2. GETTING STARTED IN AMERICA

THE EARLIEST ATTEMPTS AT EUROPEAN SETTLEMENT

CONTENTS

The Spanish colonies

Portuguese Brazil

The French and Dutch in North America

The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
        America's Story – A Spiritual Journey © 2021, pages 47-48.
THE SPANISH COLONIES

Meanwhile, across the seas in America, the ongoing plundering of American Indian wealth in gold and silver was beginning to slow up for the Spanish.   However, as an alternative source of status improvement, extensive land ownership in America itself came to be considered as an acceptable substitute – since the acquiring of more land was always the main path to much higher social status within the dominant feudal system.  Thus the feudal social pattern was naturally extended to the Spanish lands of the New World as large landed estates or haciendas – similar to the manorial estates back in Europe – were put in place around the Spanish colonies.  These haciendas were naturally supported economically by the labors of local Indians bound, like European peasants back in Spain, in lifetime service to the noble Spanish families that took root there.

Also, alongside this feudal landholding system, the Spanish (Catholic) Church, with its religious hierarchy of priests and monks, was put in place in the Spanish colonies to give them a character as close as possible to the culture back in Spain. This was also intended to help the Spanish Habsburg kings keep a close watch over these royal colonies, which ultimately were the king's personally to rule, exploit and protect.  In a way also it was to put Catholic priests and Dominican and Franciscan monks on site in America to protect the king's Indian subjects (they were his subjects as well) from the worst of the exploitation by the Spanish lords.

PORTUGUESE BRAZIL

Likewise the Portuguese established a foothold on the Eastern shores of South America in a region of what would come to be called Brazil – a convenient refueling station for ships heading onward with the trade winds across the Southern Atlantic to Angola in southwestern Africa, and then the tip of South Africa at the Cape, and from there up the African coast to Mozambique, and then to India ... and eventually beyond that to the Spice Islands of Southeast Asia (the future Indonesia) – and finally onward as far as China (the port of Macau).

Like Spanish America, Portugal's American colony of Brazil would also develop along feudal social-cultural lines similar to the mother country of Portugal – except that alongside the local Brazilian Indian population, slaves from Africa were brought in to Brazil (much as they were, however, also in the Spanish Caribbean Islands) to constitute the huge class of servant-workers supporting the whole system.

THE FRENCH AND DUTCH IN NORTH AMERICA

The Spanish and Portuguese had shown little interest in North America, although they considered the Atlantic Ocean their private domain and thus blocked efforts of other European powers to explore the New World.  But after the Spanish had suffered a number of defeats, the opportunity to explore and secure the riches of the New World (American furs were particularly popular) both the French and the Dutch got into the act.

But the French sent not only explorers (Cartier, 1530s; Champlain, early-1600s; Joliet mid-1600s) to what would eventually become New France (basically Quebec and the Maritime Provinces), they sent Jesuit priests (for instance, Father Marquette, mid-1600s) to claim Indian souls for the Church, not just along the St. Lawrence riverway but well beyond that into the Ohio region and then finally down the Mississippi River, establishing French outposts along the way.

The Dutch meanwhile hired the English explorer Henry Hudson to do some exploring for them along the middle reaches of the North American Atlantic coastal region, where, in 1609, he discovered a river (named after him) which he hoped would provide the greatly hoped-for passage through the Americas to the Pacific Ocean and thus also to the wealth of Asia across that great ocean.  Although that plan did not work out, it enabled the Dutch in 1615 to place a trading post (for valuable Beaver pelts) up that river at Fort Nassau (Albany), soon to be joined by another Dutch settlement (1624) at the mouth of that river at Manhattan (New Amsterdam), and also claim the land between these two settlements, which became the basis of New Netherland.  Then the Dutch attempted to expand that position further south into what today constitutes New Jersey and Delaware.



Go on to the next section:  Establishing an English Settlement in Virginia

  Miles H. Hodges