Introduction

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Chapter 1: Alien Encounters: Europe in the Americas

Introduction
Since at least the thirteenth century, Europeans placed a high value on Oriental products such as spices, tropical fruits, silk, and cotton, and, to obtain them while avoiding dangerous and expensive overland journeys as well as Italian middlemen, by the fifteenth century endeavored to discover direct sea routes there. Sailing west for Spain in search of Asia in 1492, Christopher Columbus made landfall in the Caribbean and set the stage for what would in fifty years be Spanish domination of the Caribbean, South America, and the lower reaches of North America. Sharing Spain's internal stability and thus its similar ability to back New World exploration, England by the late sixteenth century was making its own forays into colonizing the Americas. Unlike Spain, however, England was not religiously united, and so not only were some of its colonies proprietary or profit-seeking ventures—like Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas—but others—Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania—were established by dissident religious groups or even dissidents from those dissenting groups, as was the case or Rhode Island and Connecticut. At the same time that Spain and England were conquering their American empires, the French, in the West Indies, Mississippi valley, and St. Lawrence River area, and the Dutch, in the Caribbean and Hudson River Valley, were also establishing New World presences, though the Dutch would lose New Netherland in 1673 to the British. Everywhere the Europeans went, they encountered native peoples, and, although after getting over their initial bewilderment at the natives’ often very sophisticated but inevitably entirely alien cultures, the Europeans’ reaction was to steal from, subjugate, enslave, and/or kill them by various means from military force to disease, the meetings set in motion the development of a culture distinct from both, or, as we might put it, American.

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