 There was a route into the east, traveled by merchants who brought back oriental luxuries. But this journey was long and difficult. Some sea captains began to seek a more convenient sea route around Africa, while others, certain that the earth was round, thought they could reach their goal by sailing west. Christopher Columbus, the first sea captain to look for India and China across the Atlantic Ocean, was an Italian serving the king and queen of Spain. In the year 1492, he found islands which he claimed for Spain. Thinking they were the East Indies, he called their people Indians. Now all the kings of Europe want land in this new world. In 1497, John Cabot, another Italian, crosses the ocean and claims the territory he discovers for the king of England. In 1500, Cabral, a Portuguese serving his own king, is blown off his course and reaches a southern shore, the coast of what is now Brazil. Sailing from the islands discovered by Columbus, Balboa reaches land which he claims for Spain. He crosses it and looks down upon a great new ocean, the Pacific. Magellan, a Portuguese, outlines the limits of the continent as he pushes south, then west and north again. The Italian Verrazano, traces the southern coastline of North America. He serves the king of France, as does Cartier, who plants the French flag farther north at the mouth of a great river. It is the 16th century and all Europe is discovering America, named for Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian who was one of the first to write of the new world. The northern continent is a great wilderness of plains and mountains, of forests, lakes and rivers, stretching from the Arctic to the tropics, between the shores of two great oceans. In the 20th century, 155 million people will make their homes in the United States. But now fewer than a million Indians live in this area, hunting the bison or the deer and cultivating their fields of maize and other vegetables. The people of this land make their home in the forests. Leave the wigwams of their villages to hunt or to fight rival tribes for control of the best hunting grounds. Their clothing is made from the skins of the animals they kill for food. They peel the bark of trees to make canoes that take them swiftly over lakes and rivers. Their tools are primitive, but they have many skills now lost to man. The skills they need for survival in the wilderness. Canoes are well suited to the Indians' needs, for they can move in very shallow water, and their shell-like hulls can be maneuvered skillfully between the sharp rocks of the rapids. While these men know nothing of the world beyond their shores, they know every turn in their rivers and every pathway through their forests. Spaniards are the first to bring European customs to America. They colonize the island discovered by Columbus, then spread over Central and South America. Churches replace Indian temples. First, the Indians think the strangers must be gods and offer precious gifts. But the Spaniards are only men, men who find wealth beyond their dreams. They see the jewels worn by Indian chiefs. The vases hammered out of precious metals by craftsmen and royal workshops. They see gold and silver dug from the earth by Indian miners. Before long, Spaniards are gathering new world riches for themselves. Fortunes in gold and silver, in sugar harvested on great plantations, are sent to Spain, while shiploads of colonists come from Spain. They build towns and settlements and bring old world architecture to the new continent. They teach Spanish laws and customs to the Indians and spread the Christian faith. But European nations grow envious of the wealth that flows from America to Spain. Gallions loaded with rich cargoes are anchored in colonial harbors. They face sudden raids by rival fleets. Toreus English captains are received in triumph at London's Royal Palace. Great honours are bestowed upon them for their courage and good fortune. Their stories of adventure in a land of endless wonders kindle dreams in many heads. As she listens, Queen Elizabeth begins to understand that the new world can add to the power and prosperity of the kingdom over which she rules. For now in England, the times are hard for many people. It was once a country where all who tilled the soil could find a simple livelihood. But the lords of great estates have turned farmlands into grazing lands. Farmers are homeless and dispossessed in their own land. Despairing of finding a living in the country, they plowed their way along the road that lead to London, already overcrowded. Few newcomers can find work in London's bustling streets. And soon the starving take to begging. The beggars and petty thieves are harshly punished in an age of cruel law. If men disobey the rules of the state church, they may be put to death or thrown into prison. A man of influence at the English court, Sir Walter Rolly, sees hope for his suffering countrymen in these lands across the sea. Can Englishmen live in the new world? He sends explorers to North America to make detailed reports. They find that Northern Indians have no precious metals. However, they raise plentiful crops around their peaceful villages. All waving stalks with ears of golden grain called maize. And tobacco plants whose broad green leaves the Indians roll and smoke for pleasure. Most plentiful, sweet, fruitful and wholesome of all the world are the words used to describe the new land of promise. In 1607, a party of Englishmen comes to establish the first settlement. Indians approach them with suspicion, but the strangers offer tools and trinkets in exchange for a fresh-killed game. This simple trade is the beginning of a cautious friendship. John Smith, an English captain, takes command when men start off to hunt for gold. He sets them to building shelters and defenses. Soon the food they've brought will be exhausted. They must clear land to harvest their own crops. They must learn from their Indian friends how to raise maize and tobacco. When new settlers, both men and women, arrive to work the fields and a way is found to cure tobacco, it becomes the colony's most valuable crop for export. Soon Virginia ports are visited by the European trading ships, which have been sailing to Africa, taking on cargoes of captured Negroes and selling them in the Spanish colonies. Now the traders bring the Negroes to the new English colony, and the small farms grow into great tobacco plantations worked by slaves. In 1620, a second-list settlement was started far to the north in Massachusetts, where a hundred people landed on a bare and windy shore. Seeking freedom from the English church, their purpose was to live according to God's will as they understood it. For this, they were ready to confront the grim and grisly face of poverty. They copied the Indian way of raising crude shelters, but the New England winters soon forced them to build wooden huts. They covered them with thatch, like the homes they left in England. But for their governor, they built a better house, and they met under his roof to worship God in their own way. At first, there is little but hard work and faithful duty in their lives. Their Indian friends have taught them to grow maize and pound the grain to meal. They have shown them where to cast their nets, to find fish in abundance in the waters off the shore. To survive in the wilderness, the pilgrim family has adopted Indian ways. But in the evening, in the new world as in the English home they have abandoned, the mother spins while the father reads the Bible and the children sleep nearby. Their bedding is hung up by day to make more space in the crowded home. A second group of nearly a thousand Englishmen soon settles near the pilgrims. They are Puritans who also oppose the ceremonies of the English church. Their leaders are men of property who have come with servants, laborers, and craftsmen to supply the comforts they could not bring with them. In this colony, religion dictates government. The ministers of the church proclaim the laws and rule the conduct of the citizens. Since they preach that hard work is a virtue, the communities grow rapidly and soon begin to prosper. But to make sure of obedience, the judges impose many of the punishments that drove the Puritans from England. Toiling to win a livelihood from the thin and rocky soil tightly bound by the rules of their religion, the colonists have few diversions. Their society is centered in their meeting house. Here ministers teach the religion that shapes town laws passed by the congregation. But the Puritans still surrounded by the wilderness have many things to fear. They cannot relax their vigilance or their laborers. Within the next hundred years, these little New England settlements turn into bustling towns. New settlers, laborers, and craftsmen pour in from Europe to the new land where there is work for all willing hands. Many New Englanders work in the shipping industry which grows as the towns turn into ports. The rich forests provide wood for the fishing boats and for the ships of commerce that will sail across the ocean back to England and southeast to the West Indies and Africa. Many skills are needed for the making and handling of new vessels. Depended on a lifeline between the New World and the Dips carry their produce, lumber, grain and salted fish to other parts of the British Empire and back to the land from which they came so ill provided barely a hundred years before. The ocean which separates them from the rest of the world becomes their high road to prosperity. By 1730, a New England merchant can find time from his work to sit for his portrait. His eye proudly surveys the many comforts that he can afford. His wife has become the mistress of a house where luxury is joined to the simplicity of Puritan tradition. His son was born here and will grow up thinking of this new world as his home. He is native land, but it's not only in New England that colonists have prospered. Thousands of European families from many nations have found relative peace and security on this distant continent. For in a hundred years, 13 separate colonies have brought civilization to the wilderness. Settlements line the coast from New Hampshire in the north to Georgia and its broad tobacco fields in the south. Virginia, tobacco, and the work of Negro slaves have created vast plantations and, for their wealthy owners, the basis for a new kind of aristocracy. From his study, the planter manages the broad and varied industry of his estate. By 1750, the ships that carry his tobacco crops to England also carry his orders for European goods. The furniture of his mansion has been shaped by the skilled hands of old world craftsmen. But the food and almost all the clothing on the plantation and the tools needed to produce them come out of local workshops. The planter's family leads a life of ease but not of idleness. For the making of a colony requires industry, vigilance, and the constant search for ways to meet new problems. The planter's son finds the latest theories of European thinkers in the library of his home. For in Virginia, as in the other colonies, new principles of government are being studied. At the same time, the elegance of English aristocracy is carefully cultivated. The colonies growing Atlantic trade and the arrival of new European settlers by the thousands is developing great harbor towns such as Charleston, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. New York, first settled by the Dutch in 1624 and taken over by the English in 1664, now receives the people of many lands who bring their different customs, their skills, their arts along with their dreams of opportunity and freedom. Building houses that recall ancestral homes in Holland, the New Yorkers create a snug harbor town on the banks of the Hudson and East Rivers. They live in comfort true to their old customs of neatness and cleanliness, surrounded by the things they love. This home in New York looks Dutch and is furnished like homes along the Zyder Zee. But through the years, as Americans are born here, live and die here, it has become an American home. Just as Dutch furniture produced in America becomes American furniture, American culture has been born of this and many other cultures. Southwest of New York, land had been granted by the English king to William Penn, a leader of the Society of Friends. The Quakers, as they were called, practicing their creed of universal brotherhood, made a pact of friendship with the Indians. Here through the years, settlers dealt justly with the Indians and the Indians kept faith with them. The Quakers invited people of other faiths and other nations to join them. Many Germans came to Pennsylvania, pious and hardworking farmers who reaped the harvest of comfort and security. Their contentment is expressed in the gay decorations of their homes. In the new land, old German crafts can flourish. In time they will be called American, like the German settlers themselves, with their solid virtues and their devotion to religion. The Bible, printed in German and in many other languages, is the book most widely read in all the colonies, just as the church is always the most important meeting place. A man's right to worship, as he chooses, will be the heritage of coming generations. Religious freedom and the promise of peace and prosperity had brought the first colonists from England to New England and Virginia. The Dutch had found new prosperity in their new Amsterdam. Germans of many persecuted faiths were flourishing on the rich soil of Pennsylvania. Protestants had come from Catholic France and brought their culture to Carolina, while hardy Scots moved beyond the coastal settlements, pushing up the rivers to make homes in the wilderness. By 1750, more and more colonists are moving inland. In distant hamlets and on isolated farms, they must rely on their own efforts for all their needs. There are skilled tasks and simple manual tasks to fill long days of work for all. Frontier families have no servants, and there are many mouths to feed. So, resourcefulness becomes part of their character. Gears and pulleys can roast a chicken. Devices like this are the first of many which Americans will invent to meet the shortage of working hands. The table of pioneers like their customs and their language shows the mixture of their traditions. For even the Indian's maze has become part of their daily meals, along with dishes that have English, Scottish or German names. In the wilderness, the family is self-sufficient and self-taught. Their school is the farm kitchen. By candlelight, after days spent in the fields or in the forest, parents hand down their knowledge and children answer with their own new thoughts, born of their new life on the frontier. As they pushed westward, the colonists had pushed the Indians before them. Now the settlers who are living on the far edge of civilization face the constant menace of attack. At the warning of a raid, homes are abandoned and people flee from Indian vengeance. Most settlers have traded fairly with the Indians, exchanging firearms for land and furs. But some have cheated them and killed them. Enraged, the Indians rise and turn their guns on both the innocent and the guilty. The settlers have come to know the wilderness as hostile, and the Indians as a mortal enemy who can suddenly destroy in a few hours the work of many months. How still another enemy appears, for the Indians are often armed and led by Frenchmen. The French, strong rivals of England in Europe, also contend with the English for control of the new continent. While the English were first settling in Virginia, the French were building an outpost at Quebec. In time, the French province reached the Gulf of Mexico. Explorers spread a network of small forts to mark their claims to land. By the middle of the 18th century, the French and English are face to face. But danger does not stop the forward surge of pioneers in search of homes. It is 250 years after the new world was discovered by Columbus. From its coastal towns and cities, from Europe across the ocean, England's colonists are pushing into the heart of the American continent. Cutting their way through forests, clearing ground, building log houses, raising stockades and forts, spreading their roots in the new land of promise. Food migration that begins in far off Europe. Men and women of many faiths in many countries are joined in a common adventure for freedom and security. Out of their rich and varied qualities, the continent that lies before them will forge a character. The character of a new people, the character of a new country they are making in the wilderness.