What was the goal of the English settlers who founded the colony at Jamestown? How did the settlement in New England differ? Were their relations with nearby Indians similar or different?

English Exploration and Settlement-The first English attempt to settle in America began in 1585, when a band of colonists led by Walter Raleigh settled on Roanoke Island off the coast of present-day North Carolina. More settlers arrived on Roanoke in 1587, but a third group arrived in 1590 to discover that the previous settlers had vanished. These first English settlers became known as the Lost Colonists and their fate remains a mystery to this day, although historians assume that they were killed by Indians, or were suffering from starvation and so left Roanoke in search of a different place to settle.

Permanent European settlement in North America began in 1607, when one hundred British men and four boys founded Jamestown, a village along the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia. Most of these settlers traveled to Virginia in the hope of finding gold or other sources of wealth, but were soon disappointed to discover that Virginia did not possess gold, silver, or other highly valuable resources. Only the cooperation of the local Indian Chief Powhatan enabled the colonists to survive at all. Still, the first few years of this settlement were plagued by starvation, disease, and other difficulties.

In the north a British settlement very different from Virginia was established at Plymouth in 1620. A larger number of English settlers began arriving in Massachusetts in 1629, and nearly twenty thousand settled during the Great Puritan Migration of the 1630s and 1640s. These Puritans founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which included the town of Boston.

The Puritans' growing population placed increasing strains on relations between English settlers and local Indians. In 1637, Puritans fought the Pequot War, in which they repelled nearby Indians from the areas around their villages. Tensions persisted with Indians for decades. In the 1670s, Metacom, an Indian leader (known to colonists as King Philip, because colonists sometimes gave Indian chiefs English names), launched a widespread Indian attack on Puritan villages. During Metacom's War, Indians attacked fifty-two Puritan villages, destroying twelve. Metacom's forces seemed at first to be winning, and perhaps even in a position to drive the English entirely out of New England. The Indians could not continue to supply themselves with food and other supplies amid the war, however, enabling the English to turn the tide. Thousands of Indians and settlers were killed during the war, and the colonists would not regain the territory they had lost for forty years.