* Allerton, Isaac (London)
o Mary (Norris) Allerton, wife (Newbury, Berkshire)
o Bartholomew Allerton, son
o Remember Allerton, daughter
o Mary Allerton, daughter
* Bradford, William (Austerfield, Yorkshire)
o Dorothy (May) Bradford, wife (Wisbech, Cambridge)

* Brewster, William (Scrooby, Nottinghamshire)
o Mary Brewster, wife
o Love Brewster, son
o Wrestling Brewster, son
* Carver, John (Doncaster, Yorkshire)
o Catherine (Leggett) (White) Carver, wife (Sturton-le-Steeple)
* Cooke, Francis (Blythe, Nottinghamshire)
o John Cook, son
* Crackstone, John (Colchester)
o John Crackstone, son
* Fletcher, Moses (Sandwich)
* Fuller, Samuel (Redenhall, Norfolk)
* Goodman, John
* Minter, Desire (Norwich)
* Priest, Degory (London)
* Rogers, Thomas (London)
o Joseph Rogers, son
* Tilley, Edward (London)
o Ann (Cooper) Tilley, wife
* Tilley, John (London)
o Joan (Hurst) (Rogers) Tilley, wife
o Elizabeth Tilley, daughter
* Tinker, Thomas (Thurne, Norfolk)
o Mrs. Thomas Tinker, wife
o boy Tinker, son
* Turner, John (Whitechapel?)
o boy Turner, son
o boy Turner, son
* White, William (Sturton-le-Steeple)
o Susanna White, wife
o Resolved White, son
o Peregrine White, son (born in Provincetown Harbor)
* Winslow, Edward (Droitwich, Chester)
o Elizabeth (Barker) Winslow, wife

Planters recruited by London merchants

* Billington, John (London)
o Eleanor Billington, wife
o John Billington, son
o Francis Billington, son
* Britteridge, Richard (London)
* Browne, Peter (Great Burstead, Essex)
* Chilton, James (Canterbury)
o Mrs. Chilton, wife
o Mary Chilton, daughter
* Clarke, Richard
* Cooper, Humility (London)
* Eaton, Francis (Bristol)
o Sarah Eaton, wife
o Samuel Eaton, son
* Fuller, Edward (Redenhall, Norfolk)
o Mrs. Edward Fuller, wife
o Samuel Fuller, son
* Gardiner, Richard (Harwich, Essex)
* Hopkins, Stephen (Wooton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire)
o Elizabeth (Fisher) Hopkins, wife
o Giles Hopkins, son by first marriage
o Constance Hopkins, daughter by first marriage
o Damaris Hopkins, daughter
o Oceanus Hopkins, born en route
* Margesson, Edmund
* Martin, Christopher (Billericay, Essex)
o Mary (Prower) Martin, wife
* Mullins, William (Dorking, Surrey)
o Alice Mullins, wife
o Priscilla Mullins, daughter
o Joseph Mullins, son
* Prower, Solomon (Billericay, Essex)
* Rigsdale, John (London)
o Alice Rigsdale, wife
* Samson, Henry (London)
* Standish, Myles (Chorley, Lancastershire)
o Rose Standish, wife
* Warren, Richard (London)
* Wilder, Roger (Yarmouth, Norfolk)
* Winslow, Gilbert (Droitwich, Chester)

Men hired to stay one year

* Alden, John (Harwich, Essex)
* Allerton, John
* Ely, –?–
* English, Thomas
* Trevore, William

Family servants & young cousins

* Butten, William (Austerfield, Yorkshire)
* Carter, Robert (London)
* –?–, Dorothy, maidservant of John Carver, married Francis Eaton
* Dawra, Rohan (London)
* Holbeck, William (Norwich)
* Hooke, John
* Howland, John (Huntingdon)
* Lancemore, John (Essex)
* Latham, William
* Leister, Edward (Kensington)
* More, Ellen (Shipton, Shropshire)
o Jasper More, brother
o Richard More, brother
o Mary More, sister
* Samson, Henry (Eckington, Worcestershire)
* Soule, George, teacher of Edward Winslow’s children
* Story, Elias (London)
* Thompson, Edward
* Wilder, Roger

Source Wikipedia

The first governing document of the colony was the Mayflower Compact, drafted and ratified by the first group of colonists aboard their ship, the Mayflower, as it lay off-shore. On December 21, 1620, 102 Pilgrims from the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock on the western shore of Cape Cod Bay in southeastern Massachusetts.

The first settlement of the colony was New Plymouth, later Plymouth, Massachusetts. By the end of that winter almost half of the settlers were dead, including their leader John Carver. Thus began one of the best-intended, historically renowned, and yet strangely ill-fated colonial ventures in America. When the Massachusetts Bay Colony got its new charter in 1691, Plymouth ended its history as a separate colony.

William Bradford became governor in 1621 on the death of Carver, served for eleven consecutive years, and was elected to various other terms until his death in 1657. The patent of Plymouth Colony was surrendered by Bradford to The Freemen in 1640, minus a small reserve of three tracts of land. On March 22, 1621, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony signed a peace treaty with Massasoit of the Wampanoags.

The colony contained roughly what is now Bristol County, Plymouth County, and Barnstable County, Massachusetts.

Source Wikipedia

The 1584 expedition, led by Captains Phillip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, chose the Outer Banks of modern North Carolina as an ideal location and made contact with the natives. They returned to England with a report of their find, samples of the local flora and fauna, and two natives: Manteo and Wanchese.

The following spring a colonizing expedition composed solely of men, many of them veteran soldiers who had fought to establish English rule in Ireland, was sent to establish a colony. The leader of the settlement effort, Sir Richard Grenville, was tasked with further exploring the area, establishing the colony, and returning to England with news of the venture’s success. Two occurrences could have led to his deciding to postpone the effort: 1) upon arrival at the Outer Banks the lead ship struck a shoal and flooded, ruining most of the colony’s food stores, and 2) after the initial exploration of the mainland coast and native towns there, a silver cup was noticed to be missing. The last native town visited was burned in retaliation. Despite a lack of food and this rocky start to relations with a potential neighbor, Grenville decided to leave Richard Lane and approx. 100 men to establish the English colony at the north end of Roanoke Island, promising to return in April 1586 with more men and fresh supplies.

Unbeknownst to the English, the Outer Banks area was at the beginning of one of the worst periods of drought in 400 years. Although the natives were willing to barter some food for trinkets in the colony’s early days, as the year progressed into winter the natives became more and more reticent to trade. Lane’s reaction was to procure food through threats, and when threats didn’t work, military action. Among other things, he took a local Weroance’s (Wereoance = leader) son, Skikko, hostage and demanded food in recompense.

By April 1586, relations with the neighboring tribe had degraded to such a degree that they attacked an expedition led by Lane to explore the Roanoke River. His response was to attack the natives in their capital, where he killed their Weroance, Wingina.

April passed and there was no sign of Grenville’s relief fleet. When Sir Francis Drake arrived in June, on his way home from a successful raid in the Caribbean, he offered to take the colonists back to England. They accepted. Shortly after Drake’s fleet left, Grenville and the resupply arrived.

Finding the colony abandoned, Grenville decided to return to England with the bulk of his force. Fifteen men were left behind to maintain both an English presence and Raleigh’s claim to Virginia.

Raleigh dispatched another group of colonists in 1587, this time composed of men, women, and children led by John White, an artist and friend of Raleigh’s who had accompanied the previous expeditions to Roanoke. The new colonists were tasked with picking up the 15 men left at Roanoake and settling in the Chesapeake Bay area. Upon arrival at Roanoke, however, the fleet’s navigator, Simon Fernandez, refused to transport the colony further than the Outer Banks, claiming that continuing to the bay would delay his return to England into the North Atlantic storm season, thereby risking the fleet.

Forced to accept this reasoning, unveiled after 40 of the colony’s men had already been shipped to Roanoke Island to search for the 15 stationed there, the Roanoke settlement was re-established. Of the 15 men left the year before only the bones of a single man were found. The one local tribe still friendly towards the English, the Croatans on present-day Hatteras Island, reported that the men had been attacked, and the nine survivors had taken their boat and sailed up the coast.

The group of English settlers landed on Roanoke Island on 22 July 1587. Within a month (August 18), Governor White’s daughter had the first English child born in the Americas: Virginia Dare. Before her birth, Governor White reestablished relations with the neighboring Croatans and tried to reestablish relations with the tribes that Ralph Lane had attacked a year ago. The aggrieved tribes refused to meet with the new colonists. Shortly thereafter Ralph Howe was killed by natives as he crabbed alone in Albemarle Sound. Knowing what had happened during Ralph Lane’s tenure in the area and fearing for their lives, the colonists convinced Governor White to return to England to explain the colony’s situation and ask for help. There were approximately 117 colonists, 115 men and women who made the trans-Atlantic passage and two newborn babies (including White’s granddaughter) when White returned to England.

Fernandez was right; ships leaving Roanoke as late as White’s did were in danger. White’s vessel barely made it back to England. Plans for a relief fleet were put off at first by captains’ refusal to sail back during the winter, and then by political considerations: the coming of the Spanish Armada. Every able ship in England was commandeered to fight off the armada. This left White with no sound vessels with which to return to Roanoke, but he tried anyway.

In the winter and spring of 1588 White’s attempt to return to Roanoke was foiled, not by the weather but by human nature. The vessels released from defense duty were small, and the captains willing to sail them greedy. They attempted to capture several vessels on the outward bound voyage to improve the profitability of the venture, until they were captured themselves and their cargo taken. With nothing left to deliver to the colonists, the ships limped home to England.

For reasons unknown, John White wasn’t able to raise another resupply attempt for two more years, finally gaining passage on a privateering expedition that agreed to stop off at Roanoke on the way back from the Caribbean. John White returned on his granddaughter’s third birthday and found his settlement deserted. He organized a search, but his men could not find any trace of the colonists. Some 90 men, 17 women, and 9 children had disappeared; there was no sign of a struggle or battle of any kind. The only clue was the word “Croatoan” carved on to a tree. White took this to mean that they had moved to Croatoan Island, but was unable to search; a hurricane hit the Outer Banks and blew his fleet out to sea. By the time the storm abated the fleet was closer to England than Virginia and so, running low on provisions, returned home.

Controversy Over Lost Colony

While the ultimate disposition of the 1587 settlers is unrecorded (leading to their being known as the “Lost Colony”), there are multiple theories as to the colonists’ fate.

The most likely is that the colony dispersed and was absorbed by the indigenous population. The Lumbee, an indigenous people living on Croatoan, have the support of some historians in their belief that they are the descendants of a tribe that assimilated the Roanoke settlers. The settlers had left a clear message that they had gone to Croatoan (also spelled Croatan). The Lumbee people have in the past been denied federal Indian status due to their high degree of mixed blood. Despite John White’s difficulty in locating the settlers, some 50 years later the Croatan people were found to be practicing Christianity and having many of the last names of the Roanoke settlers. Stephen B. Weeks wrote in 1891, “their language is the English of 300 years ago, and their names are in many cases the same as those borne by the original colonists.”

Another is that the colony moved, and was then destroyed. When Captain John Smith and the Jamestown colonists settled in Virginia in 1607, one of their assigned tasks was to locate the Roanoke colonists. The natives told Captain Smith of men who dressed and housed as the English did living within fifty miles of Jamestown. Captain Smith was also told by Powhatan, Weroance (Chief) of the Powhatan Indians, that he had wiped out the Roanoke colonists just prior to the arrival of the Jamestown settlers, as they were living with the Chesapeake Tribe, a tribe that refused to join Powhatan’s confederacy. Powhatan reportedly produced captured English-made iron implements to back his claim.

Also, when Governor White left in 1587, he left the colonists with a pinnace and a number of small ships for exploration of the coast or removal of the colony to the mainland. Some surmise that the colonists may have tried to sail back to England and perished in the attempt.

Finally, some theorize that the colony was eradicated by the Spanish, as they had eradicated a similar French colony near present-day Jacksonville earlier in the century. This last is the least likely of the theories, as the Spanish were still looking for the location of the English colony as late as 1600, ten years after Gov. White discovered that the colony was missing.

Most likely is that the colonists dispersed throughout North Carolina to conserve resources: the Outer Banks areas was still in a drought period. Lee Miller, in “Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony: Roanoke”, surmises that the portion of the settlers who moved to Croatan Island probably intermarried with the inhabitants while those who moved inland were conquered and sold into slavery, which would explain the geographic dispersal of “Lost Colonist location” tales made during the 17th Century.

The Lost Colony Symphonic Drama

Written by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Paul Green in 1937 to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the birth of Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World, The Lost Colony is an epic outdoor drama combining music, dance, and acting to tell a fictional recounting of the ill-fated Roanoke Colony. It has played at Waterside Theater on Roanoke Island during the summer months near-continuously since that time with the only interrupion being the Second World War. Alumni of the cast who have gone on to fame include Andy Griffith, Chris Elliot, and Terrence Mann.

Source Wikipedia

The Icelandic poems are the first written sources in Europe that reference North America. Some scholars believe that South American petroglyphs are rune-like symbols and thus offer proof of Norse contact (e.g. Nazca urn in Peru, Brazil, Paraguay), but this assertion has never found support among Scandinavian runologists. There are also runestones found in North America (e.g. the Kensington Runestone, Newport Tower and Oklahoma runes) that are thought by some to descend from the Viking Age. Runological experts generally do not support either the North nor South American runestone finds to be sound proof of Viking contact, and some suggest that these stand merely as proof of the quality and diversity of pre-historic Native American arts. There is a map describing North America, the Vinland map, the age of which is subject to some debate. While it is at least based on a real, historical map, the Vinland map does show parts of the Greenland coastline that were covered with ice around 1100-1300th century.

Greenland

According to Icelandic Sagas, Vikings from Iceland first discovered Greenland in the 980s. Erik the Red led a settlement expedition there in 985. At its peak, the colony consisted of two settlements with a total population of between 3,000 and 5,000; at least 400 farms have been identified by archaeologists.

At its height, Viking Greenland had a bishopric (at Garðar) and exported ivory, rope, sheep, seals, and cattle hides. In 1261, the population accepted the overlordship of the Norwegian King, although it continued to have its own law. In 1380 this kingdom entered into a personal union with the Kingdom of Denmark.

The colony began to decline in the 1300s. The Western Settlement was abandoned around 1350. By 1378, there was no longer a bishop at Garðar. After a marriage was recorded in 1408, no written records mention the settlers. It is probable that the Eastern Settlement was defunct by the late 1400s, although no exact date has been established. The most recent radiocarbon date found in Norse settlements as of 2002 was 1430 A.D. +/- 15 years. Several theories have been advanced about the reasons for the decline. The Little Ice Age of this period would have made it harder to travel between Greenland and Europe, and more difficult for Greenlanders to farm for subsistence; in addition, Greenlandic ivory may have been supplanted in European markets by cheaper ivory from Africa.

Despite the loss of contact with the Greenlanders, the Danish government continued to consider Greenland a possession, and the existence of the island was never forgotten by European geographers. European whalers made occasional landfalls on the island in the 17th century. In 1721 a joint merchant-clerical expedition led by Norwegian missionary Hans Egede was sent to Greenland, not knowing whether the civilization remained there, and worried that if it did, it might still be Catholic 200 years after the rest of Scandinavia had experienced the Reformation. Though this expedition found no surviving Europeans, it marked the beginning of Denmark’s assertion of sovereignty over the island, a story that belongs to the Danish colonization of the Americas.

Vinland

According to the Icelandic sagas (“Eirik the Red’s Saga” and “the Saga of the Greenlanders” — chapters of the Hauksbók and the Flatey Book), the Vikings started to explore lands to the west of Greenland only a few years after the Greenland settlements were established. Bjarni Herjólfsson, a merchant, while sailing from Iceland to Greenland, was blown off course and sighted land west of the latter. He described his discovery to Leif Ericson, who explored the area in more detail and planted a small settlement.

The sagas describe three separate areas discovered during this exploration: Helluland, which means “land of the flat stones”; Markland, which was covered with forest (something of definite interest to the settlers in Greenland, which had few trees); and Vinland, which was somewhere farther south of Markland. It was in Vinland where the settlement described in the sagas was planted.

Leif’s settlement did not prosper; the settlers fought over the few women who accompanied the expedition, and also had conflicts with the local Native Americans (whom they called Skraelings). The settlement was abandoned after a few years. The Greenland Norse remembered the existence of land to the west, though, and continued to travel to Markland for wood. The final voyage may have occurred as late as the 14th century.

For some centuries after Christopher Columbus’s voyages opened the Americas to large-scale colonization by Europeans, it was unclear whether these stories represented real voyages by Vikings to North America. The sagas were first taken seriously after the Danish archaeologist Carl Christian Rafn in 1837 pointed out the possibility for a Norse settlement or voyages to North America.

The question was definitively settled in the 1960s, when a Viking settlement was excavated at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. The location of the various lands described in the sagas is still unclear, however. Many historians identify Helluland with Baffin Island and Markland with Labrador. The location of Vinland is a thornier question. Some believe that the L’Anse aux Meadows settlement is the Vinland settlement described in the sagas; others, based on elements in the sagas that depict Vinland as being warmer than Newfoundland, believe that it lay further south. For more on the debate, see the article on Vinland. There are still many questions remaining, and only new archaeological findings can supply more information.

Source Wikipedia

The Augsburg banking families of Anton and Bartholomeus Welser obtained rights to Venezuela from Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain in 1528. These rights were negotiated by Heinrich Ehinger und Hieronymus Sailer, either independently or as agents of the Welsers. However, by 1531, the Welsers certainly controlled the privilege. A colonization scheme was set up, with Ambrosius Ehinger arriving as governor in 1529. He explored the interior in search of the gold of El Dorado. Ehinger had left Seville on 7 October 1528 with the Spaniard García de Lerma and 281 settlers. At Santo Domingo, de Lerma with 50 companions left for his mission to Santa Marta, to reestablish Spanish control following the murder of the governor there. Ambrosius Ehinger and the remainder headed for the Venezuelan coast and landed on 24 February 1529 at Coro. Other German governors followed: Nikolaus Federmann, Georg Hohermuth von Speyer, Philipp von Hutten, who also engaged primarily in the search for gold. Federmann traveled over the Andes to Bogotá, where he and Sebastián de Belalcázar initially contested Jiménez de Quesada’s claims to that province. German miners were brought over, as well as 4,000 African slaves to work sugar plantations. By 1541 disputes had arisen with Spain, and the bankers were stripped of control of their colony in 1556.

Many of the German colonists died from tropical diseases or hostile Indian attacks during frequent journeys deep into Indian territory in search of gold.

Source Wikipedia

The Duchy’s ship were undertaking trade voyages to the West Indies at least as early as 1637 when a Courland ship attempted to found a colony on Tobago with 212 settlers. An earlier European settlement on the island, a Dutch colony, formed in 1628, had been wiped out by the Spanish a few months earlier. The first Courland colony was a failure as was a second attempted in 1639. In 1642, two ships under Captain Caroon with about 300 settlers attempted to settle on the north coast near Courland Bay but were soon driven off by the Carib natives. In 1651 the Duchy gained its first successful colony but in Africa, on St. Andrews Island at the Gambia River and they established Fort Jacob there.

Soon afterwards, on 20 May 1654, another colony was established in Tobago when the ship Das Wappen der Herzogin von Kurland arrived. The ship carried forty-five cannons, twenty-five officers, 124 Courlander soldiers and eighty families of colonists to occupy Tobago. Captain Willem Mollens declared the island “New Courland”. A fort was erected on the south-west of the island, also called Jekabforts (Fort James) with the surrounding town called Jekaba pilseta (Jamestown). Other features were given Courland names such as Great Courland Bay, James Bay, Courland Estate, New Jelgave, Liepaja Bay and Little Courland Bay. An Evangelical Lutheran church was built by the Courlanders in their first year on the island. A second Dutch colony was started a few months later and soon vastly outnumbered the Courland settlement. 120 Courland colonists came in 1657 but the Dutch colony reached a population of 1200 by the next year when 500 French settlers joined them.

Goods exported to Europe included sugar, tobacco, coffee, cotton, ginger, indigo, rum, cocoa, tortoise shells, tropical birds and their feathers.

The Duchy of Courland was a focus of interest for both Sweden and Poland. In 1655 the Swedish army entered the territory of the Duchy and the Northern Wars (1655–1660) began. Duke Jacob was held captive by Swedish army in 1658–1660. During this period both colonies were taken by more numerous Dutch colonists, and the merchant fleet and factories were destroyed. The Dutch settlers on the island surrounded Fort James and forced Hubert de Beveren, Governor of the Courlanders to surrender. Courland officially yielded New Courland on 11 December 1659. This war ended with the Treaty of Oliwa (signed near Gdańsk) of 1660, on the basis of which Tobago was returned to Courland. The Courlanders left Tobago in 1666, possibly after a pirate attack which occurred that year. In 1668 a Courland ship attempted to reoccupy Fort Jacob but was driven off by the Dutch. Tobago was regained again just for a short period at the end of Jacob’s rule with an attempt in July 1680 at a new colony which also later failed. He began to restore the fleet and factories, but the Duchy never again reached its previous level of prosperity. The island was abandoned from March 1683 – June 1686, and, in May 1690, shortly after the island was sold by Courland the previous year, the Courlanders permanently left Tobago, although absentee governors would continue to be appointed until 1795.

The Courland Monument near Courland Bay commemorates the Duchy’s settlements.

Source Wikipedia

Explorers and settlers from Denmark took possession of the Danish West Indies (present-day U.S. Virgin Islands), which Denmark later sold to the United States. Beginning in 1721, they also founded colonies in Greenland, which is now a self-governing part of the Kingdom of Denmark.

Denmark started a colony on St Thomas in 1671, St John in 1718, and purchased Saint Croix from France in 1733. During the 18th century, the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean Sea were divided into two territorial units, one British and the other Danish. The Danish islands were run by the Danish West India and Guinea Company until 1755 when the Danish king bought them out. Sugar cane, produced by slave labour, drove the islands’ economy during the 18th and early 19th centuries. A triangular trade existed with Danish manufactures buying African slaves which in turn were sold for West Indies sugar for Denmark. Although the slave trade was abolished in 1803 by the Danes, slavery itself was not abolished until 1848 after several mass slave escapes to the free British islands and a non-violent slave protest. The Danish Virgin Islands were also used as a base for pirates. The Danes encouraged English and Dutch settlers who became the largest non-slave groups on the islands. Their languages predominated with even the Danish government, in 1839, declaring that slave children must attend school in the English language. The colony reached its largest population in the 1840-50s, after which an economic downturn increased emmigration and populations dropped, a trend that continued until after the purchase by the United States. The Danish West Indies had 34,000 people in 1880.

In 1868, the islanders voted to sell the colony to the United States but their offer was rebuffed. In 1902, Denmark rejected an American offer. In 1917 the United States purchased the islands, which had been in economic decline since the abolition of slavery.

Source Wikipedia

Explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral landed on April 22, 1500 in what is today Porto Seguro, Brazil. Permanent habitation did not begin until São Vicente was founded in 1532, although temporary trading posts were established earlier to collect brazilwood, used as a dye. With permanent settlement came the establishment of the sugar cane industry and its intensive labor demands which were met with Native and later African slaves. The capital, Salvador, was established in 1549 at the Bay of All Saints. The first Jesuits arrived the same year. From 1565 through 1567 Mem de Sá, a Portuguese colonial official and the third Governor General of Brazil, successfully destroyed a ten year old French colony called France Antarctique, at Guanabara Bay. He and his nephew, Estácio de Sá, then founded the city of Rio de Janeiro on March 1567.

Between 1638 and 1640 the Netherlands came to control part of Brazil’s Northeast region, with their capital in Recife. The Portuguese won a significant victory in the Second Battle of Guararapes in 1649. By 1654, the Netherlands had surrendered and returned control of all Brazilian land to the Portuguese.

Unlike the Spanish, Portuguese did not divide its colonial territory in America. The captaincies there created were subdued to a centralized administration in Salvador which reported directly to the Crown in Lisbon. Therefore, it is not common to refer to “Portuguese America” (like Spanish America, Dutch America, etc.), but rather to Brazil, as a unified colony since its very beginnings.

As a result, Brazil did not split into several states by the time of Independence (1822), as happened to its Spanish-speaking neighbors. The adoption of monarchy instead of federal republic in the first six decades of Brazilian political sovereignty also contributed to the nation’s unity.

Source Wikipedia

The peak population of the Russian colonies was about 40,000, although most of these were aboriginals.

The colony was never very profitable, because of the costs of transportation. At the instigation of Secretary of State William Seward, the U.S. Senate approved the purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7,200,000 on April 9, 1867.

In 1818, Dr. Schaeffer, a Russian entrepreneur, occupied Kauai and negotiated a treaty of protection with Queen Kaumualii of Hawaii, but the Russian Tsar refused to ratify the treaty.

In Russia and even in its predecessor, the Soviet Union, there has been speculation in the mass media that Alaska was not, in fact, sold, but was instead leased to the U.S. for 99 or 150 years and has to be returned to Russia. It may be explained in part by the notion that soon after the 1917 revolution in Russia all the secret tsarist international agreements were officially denounced and declared void by the new government.

The Orthodox Church in America can trace its activities back to early Russian missionaries. The witness of Herman of Alaska, Saint Innocent of Alaska, and Peter the Aleut has contributed to the continuing strong Orthodox community in Alaska.

Source Wikipedia

The late 17th century was difficult economically for the Scots. A number of remedies for the desperate situation were enacted by the Parliament of 1695. The Bank of Scotland was established. The Act for the Settling of Schools established a parish-based system of public education throughout Scotland. Given the late development and deplorable state of public education in England this gave a substantial advantage to Scots for centuries to come. The Company of Scotland was chartered with capital to be raised by public subscription to trade with “Africa and the Indies.”

In attempts to expand the Scots had earlier sent settlers to the English colony of New Jersey and had established an abortive colony at Stuart’s Town in what is now South Carolina. The Company of Scotland soon became involved with the Darién scheme, an ambitious plan devised by William Paterson to establish a colony on the Isthmus of Panama in the hope of establishing trade with the Far East – the principle that led to the construction of the Panama Canal much later. The Company of Scotland easily raised subscriptions in London for the scheme. But the English Government was opposed to the idea, being at war with France and not wanting to offend Spain, which claimed the territory as part of New Granada, and the English investors were forced to withdraw. Returning to Edinburgh, the Company raised 400,000 pounds in a few weeks, with investments from every level of society, and totaling roughly a third of the wealth of Scotland. Three small fleets with a total of 3000 men were eventually dispatched to Panama. It was a disaster. The colony was sold to prospective colonists as a tropical paradise with friendy natives eager for trade. The colonists instead arrived in Darien to find a harsh, unforgiving and pestilent jungle with poor soil and natives uninterested in the trinkets the colonists had packed instead of good farming equipment. Poorly equipped, beset by incessant rain, under attack by the Spanish from nearby Cartagena, and refused aid by the English in the West Indies, the colony was abandoned, and most of the colonists died of starvation or disease. Only 1000 survived and only one ship managed to return to Scotland. A desperate ship from the colony which called at Port Royal was refused assistance on the orders of the English government.

The failure of the Darién scheme has been cited as one of the motivations for the Act of Union 1707. The English agreed to cover the Scottish Government’s debt to its people, and this was likely one of the main reasons the Act of Union was not resisted by the people of Scotland as they had with other English attempts to amalgamate the two countries.

Source Wikipedia