The Beginning
Since Columbus’s voyage in 1492 there began more and
more expeditions to the New World by the Spanish, French,
Portuguese, Dutch, and English. By the 1500s, the Spanish and Portuguese were well settled with thriving sugar plantations and silver and gold mines in what is now Mexico and Central and South America, and the islands in the Caribbean, and the French occupied a large part of North America and Canada and had a thriving fur trade.
Why were the British so late entering the game? In actuality, John Cabot rediscovered Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island in 1497, but only in passing. 1Ivor Noel Hume, Virginia Adventure (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1994), 6. Again in 1527 Henry VIII sent two ships “to seke straunge Regions.” It was, however, at this time that Henry VIII was breaking from the Catholic church
No longer...would one look to distant Rome for spiritual leadership; God’s instrument was up the Thames at Hampton Court in the person of Bluff King Hal. This was an introspective concept that took some getting used to, one that kept the country physically and emotionally occupied while the monarchs and mariners of other countries, more secure in their faith and in their systems, were free to harness the wind. 2Ivor Noel Hume, Virginia Adventure (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1994), 9.
England was having its own internal problems and external conflicts with the Spanish, French and Irish on their side of the Atlantic. Religious and political upheavals kept England busy and exploration into the New World which may have been intellectually promising to some, was not economically or emotionally possible in the early part of the 16th century. In the latter part of the 16th century after Elizabeth I (1533-1603) rose to the throne in 1558, the country became more settled and prosperous. The battles with Spain ebbed and flowed, and during the peaceful times, the British set out to seek their fortune across the Atlantic. What they found there would not only change their destiny but the destiny of the millions of indigenous peoples across the continent who had thrived on the land for tens of thousands of years. The first peoples to have contact with the British in what was soon to be named “Virginia” were the Powhatans.