Almost two hundred years before the Boston Tea Party, Europeans were exploring and claiming parts of what they called the New World. North America’s east coast was rich in natural resources. Once forests were cleared, the land could be used for grazing and for growing corn (which the Native Americans were already growing!), beans, and other crops. So Europeans began to settle there in the 1500s.
Life in the New World wasn’t easy for the early European settlers. Many died from disease or starvation during the long and treacherous trip across the ocean. Those who survived the voyage often became sick with diseases such as malaria and yellow fever. When they tried to claim land that Native American Indians had been living on for thousands of years, they found that the Indians would not give up the land without a fight.
A drawing of early European settlers fighting with Native American Indians
By the start of the 1600s, enough Europeans were living in the New World that they began to set up colonies. They were known as colonists. Colonists are people who leave their homelands to live in places that are often far away.
The first British colony was set up in Jamestown, Virginia, on May 14, 1607. Life in Jamestown was hard for the settlers, who struggled to grow food and find clean drinking water. Mosquitoes and other insects carried diseases. Out of the one hundred colonists who settled in Jamestown, eighty became ill and died within the first three years.
A drawing of the Jamestown colony in Virginia
After the initial hardships, the Virginia colony began to grow and thrive. The settlers were able to plant tobacco plants, and they made money selling the plants’ leaves to tobacco companies back in England.
Thirteen years later, in 1620, another group of English settlers landed on Plymouth Rock, about six hundred miles north of Jamestown. These settlers, known as Pilgrims, established Plymouth Colony.
The first Plymouth settlers arrived on a three-masted ship called the Mayflower. Many people thought girls weren’t strong enough to make the hard trip across the ocean and then survive the harsh conditions of life in the New World. Despite that common belief, there were eleven girls aboard the Mayflower in 1620 as it sailed to Plymouth Rock. The youngest, Humility Cooper, was only a year old!
The oldest girl on the Mayflower was Priscilla Mullins, who made the trip with her father, mother, and brother when she was about seventeen years old. Priscilla was the only one in her family to survive the first cold and brutal Massachusetts winter.
A drawing of the Mayflower
In 1629, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded by about four hundred settlers. Its numbers quickly grew. By 1640, as many as twenty thousand settlers had arrived from England to join the new colony. Like many of the settlers before them, they had braved the long journey and the tough life of settling in a strange and wild land because in England they weren’t allowed to worship God the way they wanted to. The official religion, the Church of England, was against their particular form of Christianity.
Religious freedom was one reason people traveled to the New World. There were also those who wanted a say in their local government and to be allowed to vote. Any white male landowner could vote and have a say in the government, which wasn’t the case back in England.
There was another good reason to come to the New World: It offered new ways to make money. The land was rich in natural resources like trees for fuel and lumber and animals for food and fur. Many settlers were farmers. Some built mills along rivers for sawing lumber and grinding wheat and corn. Others pulled cod, lobsters, whales, and other sea life from the mighty Atlantic Ocean.
Still, life was hard for the colonists. In Boston, there were outbreaks of smallpox, a painful disease that caused sores all over the body and was often fatal. Food could be hard to grow in the rocky soil. The Great Boston Fire of 1760 destroyed nearly 350 buildings and left more than a thousand people without homes. Still, despite the many hardships they faced, the British colonies in Boston and beyond continued to grow.
We sailed into Boston Harbor today. The Dove docked at Griffin’s Wharf next to another ship that also arrived today, called the Dartmouth, which had sailed all the way from England. I saw a stern group of men lined up on the wharf like stone statues. When the crew tried to unload cargo from the Dartmouth, the men blocked their way. “We don’t want your tea!” one shouted.
“What is this trouble?” Father asked Uncle George as he hurried us away from the wharf.
“We colonists have demanded that the Dartmouth—and its cargo of tea—return to England immediately. We don’t want to sell the tea and pay the tax on it,” Uncle George explained. “But the king’s man, Governor Thomas Hutchinson, has refused our demand.” Uncle George sighed. “We’re in for a fight now.”
It seems the fight is not only at the wharf. As we walked through the streets, I saw two British soldiers in red coats. Uncle George said the king has sent soldiers to Boston to police the colonists, which they don’t like.
Aunt Charlotte welcomed us into her house with a cup of tea.
