In an effort to find a sea route to Asia, the Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama in 1499 became the first to sail around the African coastline and reach India while the Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus headed the other way across the Atlantic Ocean and, in 1492, ended up in the Caribbean where he named the inhabitants he encountered, Indians. Seeking to exploit the new lands they encountered, and keep the profits for their respective kingdoms, Spain and Portugal appealed to the Pope for exclusive trading and colonization rights. The Pope granted them their exclusive rights and, through a series of papal bulls or decrees, a Doctrine of Discovery would emerge that would have a profound impact on Indigenous people everywhere.
These papal
bulls stated that any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be
discovered, claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers and that non-Christian
Indigenous people could be conquered and enslaved. The bulls also forbid other
Christian nations from infringing on one another’s discovered lands. The
Doctrine of Discovery became the international law that gave license to
explorers to claim vacant land (terra nullius) not populated by
Christians, in the name of their sovereign. The incredible arrogance of this doctrine formed the bedrock of European colonialism.
Armed with papal authority, various European nations headed off in a frenzy of exploration to discover new lands and colonize the world. In the Americas the Spanish Conquistadores such as Balboa, Cortez, and Pizarro focused on Middle and South America while the Dutch, British and French built settlements in North America. Ignoring the people already there, the Europeans spent the next 400 years exploring and claiming the land for settlement which resulted in violent acts of dispossession, massacres of Indigenous people, and the forced removal of these people from their lands.
With the exception of a Norse settlement being temporarily established in 1021 on the shores of Newfoundland, at L’Anse aux Meadows, the Indigenous people of North America had no contact with Europeans until the early 1500’s when Basque and Portuguese fisherman started harvesting cod stocks off the Grand Banks and began trading for furs with the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, and Passamaquoddy peoples who lived on the Eastern seaboard. This would all soon change.
In 1497 John
Cabot, an Italian explorer commissioned by the English king, made a brief
landfall in Newfoundland and claimed it for England but he did not encounter
any Indigenous people.
After Cabot came Jacques Cartier, a French explorer seeking to find a western passage to Asia. He became the first European to map the St. Lawrence River and subsequently claimed the land for France. On his first voyage he ended up taking two Iroquoian captives (sons of Chief Donnacona) to Europe but brought them back when he returned the following year and sailed up the St. Lawrence to the Iroquois villages of Stadacone and Hochelaga. He spent a miserable winter in Stadacone and returned to France with Chief Donnacona, who he also kidnapped.
His final
voyage was in search of the mythical “Kingdom of Saguenay” and its riches but
relations with the St. Lawrence Iroquois had by then soured and he ended up in
1541 establishing Fort Charlesbourg-Royal (near present day
Quebec City) France’s first attempt at a colony in North America.
Cartier
named the area from the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to the shores of the Saint
Lawrence River “the Country of Canadas” from the Iroquoian word Kanata,
which means village or settlement and what they called the settlements of
Stadacone and Hochelaga. The locations of these two settlements would
eventually become Quebec City and Montreal.
After these
expeditions, France mostly abandoned North America for the next 50 years
because of all the wars it was involved with in Europe. However, by the end of the 16th
century the demand for beaver pelts reignited French interest and Tadoussac,
a village located on the confluence of the Saguenay and St. Lawrence rivers that
was visited by Jacques Cartier in 1535, was made into the first trading post in
New France in 1599 by Pierre Chauvin and Francois Grave Du Pont (Samuel de
Champlain’s uncle) who had been granted a fur trade monopoly from the French
king Henry IV. In 1603 Champlain joined his uncle at Tadoussac along with the
leaders of the Montagnais (Innu), Maliseet, and Mi’kmaq with whom he developed
a long-term relationship and defence pact.
Returning in
1604 with the command of his own ship, Champlain in 1605 established the
settlement of Port Royal in Acadia and then in 1608 he established Quebec at
the site of the abandoned Iroquoian settlement of Stadacone. Named after the
Algonquin Kebec, which means, “where the river narrows” Quebec
officially marked the establishment of New France and was made its capital.
This settlement also marked the beginning of the westward movement of French traders
up the Saint Lawrence River and into the upper country around the Great Lakes.
In 1609 Champlain made efforts to form better relations with the local First Nations people. He made alliances with the Algonquin, the Montagnais and the Maliseet who lived along the St. Lawrence River and the Huron, (Wendat) further to the west.
The Huron
were an Iroquoian speaking people who would end up serving as middlemen between
the French and the First Nations in the upper country. These tribes wanted
Champlain’s help in their war against the Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee) made
up of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca tribes who lived south
of the St. Lawrence River. Champlain set off with soldiers and his Huron,
Algonquin and Montagnais allies to explore the Richelieu River and Lake
Champlain. In 1610, after two earlier skirmishes, nearly 300 Mohawk were either
killed or captured in the Battle of Sorel. While this ended hostilities with
the Mohawk for the next 20 years it also became the start of the Iroquois Wars or
Beaver Wars which would last for the next 100 years.
Champlain
later secured the Ottawa River route to Georgian Bay and greatly expanded the
fur trade in the process. He also sent young French men to live and work among
the natives to learn the land, language, and customs, and to promote trade.
With the colonizers came the Jesuits and other Roman Catholic missionaries and,
most unfortunately of all, smallpox.
With Quebec
a permanent fur trading outpost, First Nations could now trade their furs for
French goods such as axes, knives, brass kettles, and cloth. Fur trading
included the hides of bear, moose, deer, marten, fox, and buffalo, but the most
important and valuable commodity was the beaver pelt. Beaver fur has two layers; the guard hairs, which are stiff, and
the downy undercoat. The undercoat was excellent for making felt which was
ideal for hat making. At this time in Europe, felt hats were extremely
fashionable, and this put beaver fur in high demand for Europeans.
Over the 250
years of the fur trade there were several alliances and many shifts in power
and advantage but the early part of the fur trade was particularly advantageous
to the two Indigenous powerhouses, the Algonquins and the Huron who
had longstanding trade relationships with each other.
The Huron would source furs from First Nations groups in regions north and west of their territory, the Anishinaabe people (Ojibwa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi) and Cree (Nehiyawak). In turn, the Huron would trade with the Algonquin traders, who would then trade directly with the French. This strategy put both the Algonquins and the Huron in an incredibly powerful position. It was also beneficial to the French traders, as it allowed them to stay at Québec, Montréal, and Tadoussac, where the furs were brought to them.
In 1609 Henry Hudson was hired by the Dutch East India Company to find a Northeast passage to Asia but, after encountering ice off the coast of Norway, he turned westward instead and ended up in Cape Cod where he then explored what would be later called the Hudson River. Anxious to get into the fur trade, the Dutch used his voyage to establish a claim to the Hudson Valley area and, in 1614, a trading post was established at Fort Nassau. In 1621 the area was set up as a colony by the Dutch West India Company and, in 1625, New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island was made the capital of New Netherland. Originally the Dutch started trading with the Mahicans, an Algonquian speaking First Nation but, in 1628, the Mohawks conquered the Mahicans and established a fur trade monopoly with the Dutch.
In 1610, on
Henry Hudson’s second voyage to find a Northwest passage to Asia, hired this
time by the English, he sailed up through what would be named Hudson Strait and
came into what would later be called Hudson Bay which he followed down to James
Bay until he became caught in the ice. After spending the winter there, he
wanted to continue exploring once the ice thawed but, the crew mutinied and left
him there to die. Once home the mutineers traded their knowledge of the journey
to escape execution and, in 50 years, the discovery would turn out to be one of
the most significant events in Canadian history.
After the
failure to establish a colony in Newfoundland, or Roannoke Island in North
Carolina, the English in 1607 finally established the first permanent colony in
Jamestown Virginia and, over the next 145 years, the 13 English colonies along
the Atlantic coastline came into being.
While all of
the colonies were founded for the purpose of business and economic expansion, they also provided a refuge for Puritans from religious persecution. In 1620 the Plymouth
Colony was founded in Cape Cod by a group of Pilgrims and in 1629 another group
of Puritans settled in Massachusetts. By 1635 there were over 10,000 settlers
in New England. Originally it was the local Indigenous people who helped the
Pilgrims survive but eventually the pressure of the settlers created conflict.
Between 1636-1638 the New Englanders went to war with the local Pequot tribe until
they eventually eliminated them. However, this
would be just a prelude to the much more devastating Wabanaki Wars to follow.
In 1632
Maryland was founded and, along with Virginia, came to be known as the
Chesapeake Colonies. Inspired by the success of slavery in Barbados they
started the mass importation of African slaves. In 1663 the Carolinas got their
start and, while they originally had reasonable trading relations with the
local First Nations, conflicts over slavery, trader abuse, debt, and
competition for land soon turned into war with the Yamasee and at least a dozen
other tribes from 1715-1717.
Meanwhile back in Europe, from 1652-1674, there were a series of naval conflicts between the Dutch Republic and England over trade and colonies that were referred to as the Anglo-Dutch Wars. In 1664 the British captured New Amsterdam and renamed it New York. In 1674, at the Treaty of Westminster that concluded the Anglo-Dutch wars, the colony of New Netherland was ceded to Britain. It was subsequently broken up into the colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. North America was now down to three European powers, Spain, France, and Britain.
