European Contacts
The greatest seafarers of early medieval Europe, the Vikings , are known to have established a colony in Greenland around 982 AD. Under the energetic leadership of Erik the Red, this became a base for voyages of exploration and even colonization along the mysterious coastline that lay to the west. Traces of permanent Viking occupation have been uncovered at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, though the exact location of their southernmost outpost, Vinland , will probably never be known. It seems likely, however, that they ventured as far as Maine, and that while the Algonquin may have been inquisitive enough to trade, they forcibly prevented permanent settlement. The Vikings remained a presence in Greenland until about 1500 AD, by which time it appears that European fishermen , such as the British and the Spanish Basques, were already familiar with the cod-rich seas off Newfoundland. The world first took notice of the region when organized voyages dispatched in search of China began to return with news of a new continent. Christopher Columbus reached San Salvador in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, and a mere four years later the English navigator John Cabot officially "discovered" Newfoundland. Soon British fishermen in particular began to set up makeshift encampments in what became known as New England , to spend the winter curing their catch. Over the next few years various expeditions mapped the eastern seaboard. In 1524, for example, the Italian Giovanni Verrazano sailed past Maine, which he characterized as the "Land of Bad People" thanks to the inhospitable and contemptuous behavior of its natives, and reached the mouth of what would become the Hudson River. The great hope initially was to find a sea route in the Northeast that would lead to China - the fabled Northwest Passage . To the French Jacques Cartier , the St Lawrence Seaway seemed a distinct possibility, and successive expeditions explored and attempted (unsuccessfully) to settle the northern areas of the Great Lakes region from the 1530s onwards. Intrepid trappers and traders began to venture ever further west. To the south, the Spaniards had started to nose their way up from the Caribbean in 1513, when Ponce de Leon 's expedition in search of the Fountain of Youth landed at what is now Palm Beach, and named the region of Florida . Spanish attentions for the next few years focused on the lucrative conquest of Mexico, but in 1528 they returned under Panfilo de Narvaez, whose voyage ended in shipwreck somewhere in the Gulf. One of his junior officers, Cabeza de Vaca , managed to survive, and together with three shipmates spent the next six years on an extraordinary odyssey across Texas into the Southwest. Sometimes held as slaves, sometimes revered as seers, they finally managed to get back to Mexico in 1534, bringing tales of golden cities deep in the desert, known as the Seven Cities of Cibola . One of Cabeza de Vaca's companions was a black African slave called Estevanico the Moor , a giant of a man who had amazed the native peoples they encountered. Rather than return to a life of slavery, he volunteered to map the route for a new expedition; racing alone into the interior, with two colossal greyhounds at his side, he was killed in Zuni Pueblo in 1539. The following year, Francisco Vazquez de Coronado 's full party managed to prove to everyone's intense dissatisfaction that the Seven Cities of Cibola did not exist, encountering the Hopi and other pueblo peoples along the way and reached as far as the Grand Canyon. Hernan Cortes, the conqueror of the Aztec, had meanwhile traced the outline of the peninsula of Baja California, and in 1542 Juan Cabrillo sailed right up the coast of California, failing to spot San Francisco Bay in the usual mists. It was the Spanish who established the first permanent settlement in the present United States, when they founded St Augustine on the coast of Florida in 1565 - permanent, at least, until it was burned to the ground by Sir Francis Drake in 1586. In 1598 the Spanish also succeeded in subjugating the pueblo peoples, and founded the colony of New Mexico along the Rio Grande. This was more of a missionary rather than military enterprise, and its survival always precarious due to the vast tracts of empty desert that separated the colony from the rest of Mexico. Nonetheless, the construction of a new capital, Santa Fe , began in 1609.
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