European Footholds along the Atlantic, 1584–1650

As late as 1650, hardly a colonist in the Americas lived more than a dozen miles from deep water. Jamestown (1607), the first settlement, was on a swampy fist of land on the James River; most Virginians subsequently hugged the banks of the Chesapeake and its tributaries. English Puritans settled along the New England coast. The Dutch colony of New Netherlands stretched from Nieuw Amsterdam along the Hudson River, and Swedish merchants settled the mouth of the Delaware River. The settlers to New France, too, seldom strayed far from the St. Lawrence River and its tributaries in the west.