he seventeenth century. The first town founded was
that of St. Augustine, in Florida, in 1565, but this was destroyed
three years later by a French expedition. Sir Walter Raleigh attempted
to found a colony in 1584 near where Virginia now stands, but it
failed after three years, and it was not till the reign of James
I. that an organised attempt was made by England to establish
plantations, as they were then called, on the North American coast.

Two Chartered Companies, the one to the north named the Plymouth
Company, and the one to the south named the London Company (both
founded in 1606), nominally divided between them all the coast
from Nova Scotia to Florida. These large tracts of country were
during the seventeenth century slowly parcelled out into smaller
states, mainly Puritan in the north (New England), High Church
and Catholic in the south (Virginia and Maryland). But between the
two, and on the banks of the Hudson and the Delaware, two other
European nations had also formed plantations--the Dutch along the
Hudson from 1609 forming the New Netherlands, and the Swedes from
1636 along the Delaware forming New Sweden. The latter, however,
lasted only a few years, and was absorbed by the Dutch in 1655.
The capital of New Netherlands was established on Manhattan Island,
to the south of the palisade still known as Wall Street, and the
city was named New Amsterdam. The Hudson is such an important artery
of commerce between the Atlantic and the great lakes, that this
wedge between the two sets of English colonies would have been a
bar to any future progress. This was recognised by Charles II.,
who in 1664 despatched an expedition to demand its surrender, even
though England and Holland were at that time at peace. New Amsterdam
was taken, and named New York, after the king's brother, the Duke
of York, afterwards James II. New Sweden, which at the same time
fell into the English hands, was sold as a proprietary plantation
to a Jersey man, Sir George Carteret, and to a Quaker, William
Penn. By this somewhat high-handed procedure the whole coast-line
down to Florida was in English hands.

Both the London and Plymouth Companies had started to form plantations
in 1607, and in that very year the French made their first effective
settlements in America, at Port Royal and at Nova Scotia, then
called Arcadie; while, the following year, Samuel de Champlain
made settlements at Quebec, and founded French Canada. He explored
the