At the turn of the seventeenth century, few could have foreseen that England was going to be the great colonizer of North America. Wealthy Spain began colonizing in the New World almost immediately after explorer Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) set foot on the Caribbean islands. England was not rich enough to pay for colonizing expeditions (sending ships with settlers and supplies to establish a community ruled by, and part of, England) from its national treasury. England and Spain had been engaged in sea conflicts periodically during the second half of the sixteenth century and, as the weaker nation, England could not afford to exhaust its naval or military strength on colonizing. Nonetheless, the spirit of the age of exploration gripped the nation. Swift English sea vessels crossed the Atlantic regularly. Unable to mine for gold and silver themselves, as the Spanish had been doing since the early...