7 - Atlantic Crossing: On to the Americas, 1600–1800

Summary

During the 1600s, the southwards and westwards expansion of Germanic, which had begun 2,000 years earlier in northern Europe, regained a new impetus. There was an explosive expansion of the English language into and across the Atlantic Ocean, which was to lead to the eventual death of a very large number of the indigenous languages of the Western Hemisphere. During the 1600s, 350,000 people left the British Isles for the Americas. Some of this expansion of English was the outcome of large-scale, planned, quasi-official attempts at colonisation. Others were haphazard settlements by refugees, pirates, runaway slaves, sailors, shipwrecked mariners and passengers and military deserters such those from the English army of Oliver Cromwell which had captured Jamaica from the Spanish in the 1650s.