America’s First Century: The Mother Country, 1607 I

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: Europeans were not the first humans to inhabit North America, nor were the English the first Europeans to settle the New World. Norsemen, Basque fishermen, the colonial Spanish and Portuguese, a few lost Englishmen, and, of course, of most ancient vintage, Native Americans had visited, hunted, fished, mined, pillaged, cultivated, or settled North, Central and South America for centuries. Long before the three little ships of Christopher Newport’s armada dropped their human cargo on the misty peninsula in the Powatan estuary in 1607, the so-called Western Isles supported, in some places, quite brilliant human civilization.