John White, sent by Sir Walter Raleigh, arrived in Roanoke with supplies and a new group of colonists. White departed after only a month, leaving about 120 settlers at Roanoke while he returned to England for more supplies and additional colonists. The colony was deserted when White returned in 1590.
The French establish Acadia in what is now Eastern Canada’s Maritime Provinces. Samuel de Champlain explored and claimed Huron country for France.
The Dutch West India Company was formed in 1621 with a charter to establish colonies in North America in part to prevent the growth of rival empires. The company’s director, Peter Minuit, negotiated the acquisition of Manhattan from the Manhate Indians in 1626. Though it had essentially been granted a monopoly on trade with the Americas, the company’s attempts at attracting Dutch settlers were largly unsuccessful. The company also took part in the slave trade, moving slaves from the west coast of Africa to the West Indies and South America...
The Plymouth Company was a British joint-stock company made up of merchants and financiers from Plymouth, Bristol, Exeter, and West Country ports. The company aimed to colonize the area between present-day Maine and the Chesapeake Bay and established the Popham Colony on the coast of Maine in 1607. The colony quickly failed, however, and the company disbanded.
The Virginia Company of London was a joint-stock company chartered by King James I in 1606 to colonize the area between what is now New York and South Carolina. The company established Jamestown in 1607. In 1624, however, the company was dissolved, and Virginia became a royal colony.
The Massachusetts Bay Company was the commercial venture founded by John Winthrop and chartered by King Charles I in 1629 to establish a colony in New England. The company founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 as a theocratic Puritan settlement.
Pilgrims were early settlers in the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts. They fled England as separatists from the Church of England and arrived in the New World with the aim of establishing a community where they could practice their religion without persecution.
Established in seventeenth-century England, the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, was a Christian Protesant sect. Persecuted in both England and early colonial America, Quakers found a home in William Penn’s Pennsylvania, which supported Quaker adherance to pacificism, religious tolerance, and the equality of men and women. Quakers were also instrumental leaders of the abolitionist movement in colonial America and the founding era.
The Dominion of New England was a single province created by the 1686 merger of the English colonies of New England—Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. The Dominion was created to give the monarchy greater power over colonial administration, but it was disbanded with the Glorious Revolution and Leisler’s Rebellion in 1689.