Native American "Red Indians"
A name given to them by Columbus because he thought he had discovered India.
The Americas were the last land mass to be colonised by humans, 15,000 years ago. Perhaps for this reason when the Europeans arrived they found a stone age society, (no swords and only stone tipped arrows), no horses or bullocks for transport, no wheel and very little land cultivation. Indians did grow a limited amount of, Maize (Sweet Corn), beans, squash and pumpkin. Indians also had no immunity to some killer European diseases, like smallpox. Their population of 20 million in 1500 was only about 2 million in 1800 largely due to death from smallpox.

Sexual Morals amongst the Red Indians was much observed and written about but not published until recently. Basically one man would have up to 7 wives but this did not stop Indians having sex with any body at any time and this included other peoples wives and husbands and one own children. Indians were blessed with being free from sexually transmitted diseases. Clearly they had not had the benefit of Moses and his Ten Commandments (actually about 100) which the Christian settlers took as their moral goal. (Sources, reports from the Hudson Bay Company in the north and Amerigo Vespucci in the south.)

Land ownership. Christian settlers believed that anybody who had the opportunity but did not till the land had no territorial rights. (Biblical Old Testament text origins) Hence they had no compunction about forcibly taking land occupied by Indians.

The above two differences between Indians and Christians contributed to Christians thinking the Indians were savages who had no territorial rights.

Slavery. Farming in the hot American southern colonies was originally undertaken by the settlers themselves. However as was also found in India the European soon suffered from heat or sun stroke and became useless. Indians were the next in line for "slave labour" but they very quickly died from smallpox or another European disease for which they had no immunity. The solution was the importing of black slaves from west Africa who were used to the heat and hard manual labour and where slavery was already practiced by the locals and the Arabs (mainly on the east coast). The Portuguese started the profitable slave trade around 1515 to feed their sugar plantations in Brazil. However English sea pirates soon followed suite and eventually dominated this trade. In Brazil the Portuguese settlers generally came without their families and regularly interbred with the female black slaves producing the interesting ethnic mix we have in Brazil today as is evidenced by their beautiful women and top class footballers.

In North America many settlers brought their wives and there was little interbreeding with either Indians or Black African slaves. White men who had sex with non white women were ignored but Blacks who had sex with white women were killed.

The English people who emigrated. Today England compared with America, is a class ridden society. (Much better now than 400 years ago over the whole of Europe). The English ruling aristocratic classes were notably absent from the hordes who emigrated and later American English wanted to keep it that way. Initially there were two types both described as Middling people:

• Calvinist or Puritan or Protestant fundamentalists
• Yeoman Farmers.

By 1700/50 the living standards of the successful settlers was better than if they had stayed at home. Visitors were impressed by the standards of their houses, their fashion, their education and their wealth. Some of the original immigrants while not being aristocrats were by no means poor. One "pilgrim" who travelled in the Mayflower took 126 pairs of shoes and 13 pairs of boots. A useful categorisation of immigrants is by those who paid for their passage and those who didn't. The former were immediately land owners by the laws of England and the latter had to work for the former for 5 to 7 years and then would be given (by the English Crown) enough land to be self sufficient. Early immigrants also included a manageable number of convicts (jailed for anything from petty larceny to murder) who again could gain their freedom after a period of "slave" labour. This group included many non Church of England worshippers including Catholics and Puritans.

1700 By this time the three English colonised areas in the west were:

• The Caribbean, Barbados
• Virginia
• And the six colonies in the north around New England

The early colonies in more detail

Virginia
This was Sir Walter Raleigh's "personal" territory which he had named after Queen Elizabeth 1st his virgin queen. He sold the idea of moving there to city entrepreneurs or adventurers for easy pickings from local silver and gold deposits. They settled on Roanoak Island c 1585 off the north coast of modern Carolina. There were no minerals and the settlement failed. A third attempt to settle in 1607 was a success this time a few miles north in Chesapeake Bay. The Town and the river were called after the current King James 1st who had granted a royal charter to the Virginian company to settle in Chesapeake Bay. The colony would not have survived without the leadership of a certain Captain John Smith (as portrayed in the film Pocohontas) but when he returned to England in 1609 the settlement almost collapsed with lack of discipline, disease and Indian attacks. Smith's mantle was eventually taken up by John Rolfe who revolutionised the settlement by

• Crossing a South American Tobacco with a local one and the flavour was an instant success back in England.
• Marrying Pocahontas, the daughter of the local Indian Chief whose dowry included thousands of acres of land.

By 1624 some 1400 people had emigrated to James Town but only 1,132 had survived. A sales document produced in 1620 asked for investment and entrepreneurs for the new colony of Virginia where the climate was good enough to supply many of the needs of the English now purchased from Francs and Spain such as wines, fruit and salt and even Chinese Silk and Scandinavian tar (for sealing ships). The promoters had collected £200,000 by 1633 but none of the above products were produced in Virginia. Instead it was John Rolfe's tobacco which was first planted in 1617 and by 1700 Virginian Tobacco was providing 20% of the English exchequers custom duties. Smoking which had been a rich mans pastime at £2 a pound of tobacco was now available to everybody at 5p per pound. England was now importing 13 million pounds annually for domestic consumption and a further 25 m pounds for export to tobacco hungry Europe.

Newfoundland
Never included as one of the 13 colonies but founded in 1620 some 120 years after it had been discovered by Italian John Cabot who was financed by English King Henry 7th. During those 100 years English fishing fleets had sailed on a regular basis (300 ships a year by 1620) all the way to the coast of Newfoundland to fish (initially with line and hook) for the prized Cod to be salted and smoked and sold mainly to fish loving Spain. The land and climate were harsh and the colony only existed to serve the English fishing fleets.

New England, Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay Colony
Whereas the original settlers in Virginia were adventurers looking to copy the Spanish and get rich quick from gold the New England settlers were fleeing religious persecution in England. In brief before the Reformation commenced by the German priest Luther in1517 and reinforced by the Swiss Zwingli and John Calvin in 1520 the whole of Europe had been spiritually ruled by the Pope in Rome for over 1000 years and the Church had become "worldly" or corrupt. The reformers wanted to bring the Church back to basics and get rid of corruption. In England as elsewhere taxes were collected and sent to Rome to finance the Church. In England in 1530 the current king Henry the 8th wanted to divorce his first wife and as was required had to ask the Pope who refused. Henry immediately took England away from the Popes rule and married his second wife the attractive Anne Boleyn. This set the scene for a 100 years of bloody religious turmoil. The next King Edward commenced the move of the now independent English Church from the Roman Catholic Church to a mixture of Lutherism and Calvinism called Protestantism. Mary the next Queen took the country back to the Catholic faith and was called Bloody Mary as she murdered so many of the new Protestants. Elizabeth 1st was the next English Queen and she had the task of persuading the now Catholic English Bishops to change to Protestantism, she failed but a compromise was developed which combined some of the "old" Catholic rules with the new rules of Protestantism in the Church of England. This left some half a dozen versions of the original faiths whishing to pray their specific version of the rules when only one was permitted by law. This religious chaos remained at least until 1690. It was during this time that the New England territories were the refuge for a number of diverse Protestant religions who wanted freedom from religious persecution.

Massachusetts
In England in 1607 a group of Calvinists also called Pilgrims, Puritans, Presbyterians or Separatists fled from England to the already Protestant Holland but were not accepted into Dutch society. So in 1620, having obtained a land grant from the English Virginian Company set sail from Plymouth England for the Hudson River area (discovered in 1609 by Englishman Hudson funded by the Dutch Royal Family). They were blown off course and landed further north near Cape Cod at the start of winter. Two things stopped them starving:

1. They were few in number, about 100, 40 Puritans and 60 ordinary folk. They were sensible enough to make friends with the local Wampanoag Indians who shared some winter food and survival habits with them (hunting and fishing). Even so 50% of them died mainly from disease. In the spring the Indians showed then how to crow the local corn crop (Maize/Sweet corn) and the following autumn they celebrated their "thanksgiving" with full bellies in prayer. Americans have celebrated this Thanksgiving ceremony every year since. Originally based on the Harvest festival in England. Abraham Lincoln set the first official date and Roosevelt changed it to the current forth Thursday in November.
2. Their Puritan religion taught hard work and a stoic mind to fight off the pain of hunger as a way of getting nearer to God without the constant help of a priest. Puritans being religious escapees always showed a healthy disregard for English Royal authority right up to the American War of Independence.

The initial leader of this group was called William Brewster supported by William Bradford who called his followers Pilgrims and who also became known as the Founding Fathers. Their colleague John Carver became the first "Governor" to be succeeded on his death by Bradford.

News of the success of this colony prompted King Charles 1st to encourage all the troublesome Puritans to emigrate to New England and by 1630 Puritans were leaving in droves. By 1660 the largely Calvinist population of Massachusetts with its main town Boston had increased to 30,000 people. These numbers were not sufficient however to stop a Puritan Uprising in England under Oliver Cromwell, the English Civil War of 1642-49, when Charles 1st was beheaded and England was ruled as a republic.

Rhode Island c. 1636
Not everybody could live under the fundamentalist Calvinist rule of Massachusetts were all work was done in Gods name and non Calvinists including Indians were Heretics. Land was taken from Indians without discussion or payment and when many Indians died of Smallpox the Calvinist leader John Winthrop wrote in his diary "they are all dead of the small pox so as the Lord cleareth our title to what we possess". A John Williams educated at Cambridge University (England) where he joined the Calvinist following, arrived in Massachusetts in 1631 but by 1636 was expelled for his heresy. Actually he openly questioning the treatment of the Indians and the right of Charles 1st to grant Indian lands to English settlers. A man of some means he purchased land to the south of the Massachusetts colony from the Narragansett Indians and started a new settlement in what is now called Rhode Island. Here he ensured that religion would always be separate from the state and that immigrants from any religion could settle there. The Rhode Island freedom of religion clause found its way into the U S constitution.

New Haven Colony in Connecticut
1637 A Calvinist Puritan leader the Rev. John Davenport also fed religious persecution, indeed in England he was on the special extermination list of Charles 1st and his tough Archbishop Laud. Not liking the Massachusetts regime he also settled to the south and created the New Haven colony. The grandson of his friend Theophilus Eaton made a fortune in India and was persuaded by the grandson of Davenport to start a university with his money. He was called Elihu Yale, hence the university.

Maryland
1632 Calvinist Puritans were not the only religious group wanted out of England in the reigns of James 1st and Charles 1st as they tried to establish the unique Church of England. Catholics were seen to be just as bad if not worse and the Catholic Lord Baltimore persuaded Charles 1st to give him land north of the Potomac river. The first town was called St Mary's and is to be found near the junction of the Pontiac and Chesapeake Bay. Hence Maryland.