During the course of the sixteenth century, the New World Columbus had "discovered" in 1492 was the object of a wave of European expeditions and efforts at colonization. The Spanish and the Portuguese were the first to divide the area south of the West Indies (the Portuguese received what is now Brazil and the Spanish nearly everything else). Explorer Hernando Cortez gained a foothold in Mexico and plundered South America early in the sixteenth century. Later in the century the Spanish also landed in Florida, and the Dutch and French established outposts farther north in what is now the eastern part of the United States and Canada. Although it would not be until after the beginning of the seventeenth century that the first of their colony was begun in what is now the United States, the English subsequently made the greatest inroads into North America.
In 1497, John Cabot (1450-1499) was the first to explore the coast of North America for England, and Sir Francis Drake (15407-1596) surveyed much of the Western Hemisphere's coastline after 1572, but the early English explorers were less interested in the New World itself than in finding a water trade route to China.
Another great English treasure hunter, Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618), hoped to find gold in North America as the Spanish had in South America, but he failed both in his efforts to locate gold and in his 1584-1587 attempts to start a permanent English colony. He did, however, claim a slice of the Atlantic coast for England, naming it Virginia for his friend and monarch Elizabeth I.
In 1607, the English finally planted the seed that evolved into the largest English-speaking nation in the world. Captain John Smith (15797-1631) founded his settlement at Jamestown (named for King James I) in the territory of Virginia.
The colony nearly failed several times, but the colonists held on, and in 1619 the people of Jamestown inaugurated the first representative assembly in North America, a precursor to the form of government that would later predominate.
Another settlement was established at Plymouth in 1620 in what is now Massachusetts, by a group of British subjects who called themselves the Pilgrims. Fleeing what they perceived as political persecution of their religious sect, the Pilgrims came to America in their ship the Mayflower to establish a colony in which they could worship as they wished without governmental interference. Plymouth was important because it was the first successful North American settlement founded by ordinary Europeans without a charter from a European government.