2 - Natives and Newcomers, 1000–1661

Summary

This chapter explores the conditions leading to the expansion of Europeans in the late fourteenth century; their tentative efforts to establish colonies in northern North America; and the impact of European contact on the Indigenous peoples who interacted with the intruders. The time frame is bounded by the Viking settlement at L’Anse-aux-Meadows in Newfoundland more than a thousand years ago and the founding by the English of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670, which claimed trading rights in Rupert’s Land, the vast area whose rivers drained into Hudson Bay. It focuses on the reasons for and the range of European exploration and settlement in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the rivalry among European countries (especially England and France) for dominance in North America; and the role of the cod fisheries and the fur trade in luring people across the Atlantic to exploit North American resources and to interact with local inhabitants in what was seen by Europeans as a “new world.” The chapter includes a discussion of the efforts by England, Scotland, and France to plant colonies in eastern North America (Newfoundland, Acadie/Nova Scotia, and Canada) in the early sixteenth century.