Timeline

The most detailed timeline of American history during the colonial era through the 1660s you will find anywhere!

This is a work-in-progress timeline of (almost) every date mentioned in episodes of The History of the Americans Podcast, with links to the respective episode or, in a few cases, other sources.

Dates are as reported in the podcast. Generally, the months and days are Old Style (when relevant), but with the New Style year. The Old Style year changed on March 25, which is very confusing, so this is the convention followed in most history books.

Please suggest revisions, correction, additions, or links. To do so, use the contact page for this website.

Before 1492

The Americans Before Columbus Part 1

The Americans Before Columbus Part 2

1430s – 1450s – Prince Henry “the Navigator’s” incubator for explorers discovered the western Azores for Portugal in the 1430s, and by 1452 the Portuguese reached Corvo, the westernmost of the chain sitting only about a thousand miles from Labrador.

Summer 1451 (precise date uncertain) – Christopher Columbus born in Genoa.

1460s – 1480s – Portuguese explore the west coast of Africa and set up trading operations. In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope, suggesting a sea route to India bypassing Arab-Muslim traders in the Middle East and Central Asia.

1484 – Portuguese King John II established a scientific advisory board, the Junta dos Mathematicos, to study “matters of navigation and discovery.” This board of accomplished scholars was charged with developing improved tools and tables for navigation and assessing the value of proposals for exploration.

Late 1484 – Christopher Columbus pitches his “Enterprise of the Indies” to John II of Portugal for the first time. He is turned down for the first time.

May 1486 – Columbus pitches the Dual Monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, for the first time. They turn him down in part because they are fully engaged prosecuting their war against the Muslims in Spain.

1488 – Columbus returns to Portugal at the invitation of John II, but is turned down a second time when Dias returns with the news that he had turned the Cape of Africa.

~1489 – Christopher Columbus dispatches his brother Bartholomew to pitch the deal to the King of England, Henry VII. Henry turns him down. Bartholomew heads to France.

1490 – Bartholomew Columbus is at the French court, trying to secure the backing of King Charles VIII. Charles doesn’t buy the deal, but his older sister, Anne de Beaujeu, promoted the expedition in court and gave Bartholomew a job and a bed at the palace.

Fall 1491 – Isabella sends Christopher Columbus, now back in Spain, money for clothes and a mule and summons him to court. Discussions resume while the Dual Monarchs wrap up the “reconquest” of Spain.

January 2, 1492 – Columbus joins the Spanish victory procession as it marches into Granada, the last Muslim stronghold to fall. Then, Ferdinand and Isabella turn him down, supposedly in a final decision. Columbus gets on his mule and heads to France to join his brother.

Later in January, 1492 – Ferdinand’s close advisor, Luis de Santangel, the “keeper of the privy purse,” persuades Isabella that backing Columbus is a very inexpensive hedge against the risk that France backs him and he succeeds. She dispatches fast riders to bring him back to Seville. Negotiations on the terms of the “Great Enterprise” begin immediately.

April 17-30, 1492 – The key documents reflecting the investments to be made and equity compensation and other emoluments for Columbus in the event of success are finalized and signed by Columbus and for the Crown. Columbus is made an Admiral of Spain.

Summer 1492 – With the backing of Ferdinand and Isabella, Columbus secures the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria, crews and officers to man them, and supplies necessary for the voyage.

August 3, 1492 The little fleet departs for points west.

September 9, 1492 – The fleet leaves the Canaries with water, food, and wine enough to last a year.

October 7, 1492 – Columbus ordered the course changed from straight west to west-by-southwest because he saw great flocks of birds passing overhead in that direction.

October 12, 1492 – “Rodrigo de Triana, lookout on Pinta’s forecastle, sees something like a white sand cliff gleaming in the moonlight on the western horizon, then another, and a dark line of land connecting them.  “Tierra! Tierra!” he shouts, and this time land it is.” – Samuel Eliot Morison. It was the Bahamian island the locals called Guanahani, and Columbus named San Salvador.

November 22, 1492 – The Pinta, under the command of Martin Alonso Pinzon, loses contact with Nina and Santa Maria off the coast of Cuba. Pinzon went on a frolic and detour looking for gold.

December 5, 1492 – Nina and Santa Maria reach the western end of Hispaniola, off the coast of today’s Haiti. On December 12 Columbus raises a “great cross” in a bay of the island.

December 25, 1492 – Santa Maria, the flagship, runs aground off the north coast of Hispaniola and cannot be refloated. Because Nina is a small caravel, she cannot carry most of Santa Maria‘s crew. Columbus picks 39 of them to remain behind in a fort built from lumber salvaged from Santa Maria. He names it La Navidad, in recognition of the day of wreck. It is the first European settlement in the New World. Columbus transfers his flag to Nina, along with indigenous peoples whom he had captured. Europeans would be left behind to a dire fate so that Columbus could bring Indians across the Atlantic.

January 4, 1493 – Nina departs for Europe carrying the greatest secret of all time. On January 6, her lookout spots Pinta sailing toward her. Columbus does not believe Pinzon’s explanation for the six-week separation, but lets it slide for practical reasons.

February 12-14, 1493 – A tremendous storm southwest of the Azores separates Nina and Pinta. On the 14th Columbus becomes so worried that Nina will go down and his secret will be lost he writes a short account of his discovery, seals it in a barrel, and tosses it overboard.

February 15-24, 1493 – The storm has pushed Nina to the Azores, which are under the control of the Portuguese. The governor assumes Columbus has been smuggling in Portuguese territory on the west coast of Africa, and imprisons some of Nina‘s crew when they go ashore. Columbus blusters his way out of the accusation, and the governor releases the prisoners. Nina resumes the voyage east on February 24.

February 26 – March 4, 1493 – Another massive storm hits Nina, and she is driven toward the rocky coast of Portugal at night. Columbus ordered the crew to pull the one remaining sail from storage, wind notwithstanding, and forced a tack to the northwest which the men struggled to maintain the rest of the night.  At dawn on March 4^th Columbus spotted the famous Rock of Sintra, which marks the entrance to the estuary leading to Lisbon. Nina turned and scudded up river in to the harbor and dropped anchor about four miles downstream from the center of Lisbon, again in the jurisdiction of Spain’s geopolitical rival following a storm.

March 4 -13, 1493 – After some back and forth with the Portuguese navy, King John II invites Columbus to visit him. Columbus brings along the Indians. The Indians make a map of the region on a table with dried beans, which persuades John II that Columbus has found previously unknown lands. He is mad, but perhaps mostly at himself, and releases Columbus who is, after all, an Admiral of Spain.

March 15, 1493 – Nina sails into Palos, Spain, with the disappeared Pinta a few hours behind on the same tide. Captain Pinzon was rowed ashore and taken to his house, where he promptly died.

April 7, 1493 – Columbus receives a letter of congratulations from the Dual Sovereigns, then sitting in Barcelona. Importantly, it commands the Second Voyage, which was important because after that there were always Europeans in the Western Hemisphere.

April 9, 1493 – Word of the discovery begins to spread. The earliest intact Italian letter discussing the discovery is dated April 9, 1493 from a Barcelona merchant to his brother in Milan, only two days after Columbus got his return letter from the Sovereigns.

July 12, 1493 – The date of The Nuremburg Chronicle. Notably, it includes no mention of Columbus’ voyage, Nuremburg being some distance from Spain.

November 1, 1493 – An Italian scholar in the service of Spain, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, refers to “that famous Columbus the discoverer of a New World,” the first known use of that phrase to describe the Western Hemisphere. Martyr thought the world was too big for Columbus to have found Asia, or lands proximate to it. The debate would rage until 1521, when the survivors of the Magellan expedition returned to Spain.

November 19, 1493 – On the Second Voyage, Columbus sees Puerto Rico for the first time. A young man named Juan Ponce de Leon is among the more than one thousand men of the Second Voyage.

November 23, 1493 – Columbus returns to La Navidad on the Second Voyage, and learns that every European had died.

1496 – With the fall of Tenerife, Spain completes the conquest of the Canary Islands, which has taken more than 90 years. During that long war, Spain had established a plantation economy based on enslaved labor.

1497 – The English King Henry VII hired the Italian Giovanni Caboto – known to Anglophones as John Cabot — to look for a northwest passage to Asia, and in search of that he discovered Newfoundland for the English. The English and northern Europeans would continue to search for a northwest passage for more than 130 years.

1504 – 1508 – Ponce de Leon is in command of a company of soldiers on Hispaniola. By 1506 he has heard rumors of gold on Puerto Rico, and crosses the Mona Passage to look for it. In 1508 he negotiates a license from King Ferdinand to mine gold for a share of the profits.

May 20, 1506 – Christopher Columbus dies, and his son Diego inherits his interests.

August 1509 – Diego Columbus arrives in Puerto Rico and tells Ponce de Leon that he owns the gold Ponce is mining. Litigation ensues, in which Diego successfully overturns King Ferdinand’s grant to Ponce, an example of the rule of law prevailing in an absolute monarchy. In recompense, Ferdinand grants Ponce a license to explore lands believed to lie in the north.

March 3, 1513 – Ponce de Leon leaves Puerto Rico in three ships, including a detachment of soldiers. On March 8 they spot the Bahamas, and on March 10 they anchor at Guanahani, the island at which Columbus first arrived on his First Voyage, to load water.

March 27, 1513 – The fleet first sights the mainland of North America. It is Easter Sunday.

April 2-8, 1513 – The fleet anchors off the site of today’s St. Augustine in the evening, and the morning goes ashore and explores for a few days. Ponce names it La Florida, because he had first seen the mainland on Easter, Pascua Florida in the Spanish of the time.

April 8, 1513 – The fleet leaves St. Augustine and sails south along the Florida Atlantic coast.

April 20-21, 1513 – The fleet spots Indians for the first time on the 20th, and on the 21st they go ashore near a village and are treated with great hostility. There were probably Tainos refugees from the Bahamas, which Spanish slavers had large depopulated. This was the first documented encounter between Indians and Europeans on North America’s mainland.

May 8, 1513 – The fleet sails west along the southern side of the Florida Keys, which Spaniards called the Martyrs, eventually crossing into the Gulf of Mexico. It is not certain whether they sounded their way between islands or sailed around to the west of Key West.

May 24, 1513 – The fleet anchors in a harbor on the west coast of Florida, probably Charlotte Harbor north of Sanibel, Island. There they gathered wood and fresh water and careened one of the caravels.

June 4, 1513 – Indians attack, killing one Spaniard. He may have been a ship’s master, Pedro Bello. Whatever his name, he is the first European to die at the hands of North American Indians.

June 14, 1513 – Ponce de Leon’s fleet leaves Charlotte Harbor, and sails to Cuba via the Tortugas, so named because they harvested tortoises to eat on the way back.

1514-1516 A slaver named Pedro de Salazar stumbled upon unknown coastline northwest of the Bahamas, perhaps the coast of today’s South Carolina or Georgia. He brought back Indians of “giant” stature, who commanded a high price in the Hispaniola slave market.

February 26, 1521 – Juan Ponce de Leon departs Puerto Rico with three or four ships to return to Florida. They would reach the west coast of Florida, and again fight Calusa Indians. Ponce was wounded with an arrow in the thigh, and would die after retreating to Havana in July 1521.

Spring 1521 – Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, a wealthy judge on Cuba and political ally of Hernan Cortes, hearing of Salazar’s favorable report, sends Francisco Gordillo in search of this beautiful land of the giant Indians. Gordillo sailed north from Great Abaco Island about 400 statute miles to the Waccamaw River and Winyah Bay, near present-day Georgetown, South Carolina. Gordillo stayed in the area for nearly a month trading with the unusually tall Indians – and then they grabbed sixty of them as slaves and returned to Santo Domingo.

Summer 1523 – Ayllón obtains a patent to settle the coast north of today’s Florida, South Carolina and Georgia.

Fall 1523 – France enters the exploration game. King Francis I hires yet another Italian navigator, Giovanni da Verrazzano, to explore the coast of North America. Verrazzano commanded a fleet of four ships, and headed west from Normandy across the North Atlantic. An early winter storm sank two of the ships, and he returned to France. In late 1523, he proceeded south to Portuguese Madiera in La Dauphine.

January 17, 1524 – Verrazzano sails west from Madiera.

March 1, 1524 – La Dauphine makes landfall at Cape Fear in today’s North Carolina.

April 17, 1524 – After exploring the coast from northern Florida to New Jersey, La Dauphine enters lower New York Harbor.

Late April – May 6, 1524 – After spending only one day in New York, Verrazzano sails along the southern shore of Long Island, past Block Island, and into Narragansett Bay in today’s Rhode Island, where he spends almost two weeks exploring and getting to know the local tribes.

May – June 1524 – Verrazzano sails up the coast of New England and Nova Scotia, then for France.

July 8, 1524 – Verrazzano arrives back in France and the same day dispatches the journal of his voyage to Francis I.

Summer 1525 – Ayllón sends another pilot, Pedro de Quejo, up the coast of North America to take soundings and make a map and rutter. It is believed Quejo made it up to Chesapeake Bay and Delaware Bay and charted them for the first time.

July 1526 – Ayllón assembles a fleet of six ships, and six hundred people, including women, children, and black slaves, the last to become the first African slaves in the lands now constituting the United States. His objective is a permanent settlement on the Atlantic Coast of North America.

August 9, 1526 – Ayllón’s fleet reaches the sandbar at the entrance to Winyah Bay, South Carolina, roughly halfway between Charleston and Myrtle Beach. It does not go well. The flagship runs aground and goes down with most of the expedition’s supplies. After a month the settlers head south, by land and sea.

September 29, 1526 – The Ayllón expedition arrives on the South Carolina – Georgia line, roughly Tybee roads and establishes the town of San Miguel de Gualdape.

October 18, 1526 – Ayllón dies of unknown causes. The aristocrats divide into opposing camps, and a mini-civil war breaks out. Indians attack after having been impressed for food, and Black slaves revolt, marking the first such rebellion within the borders of today’s United States. The colony was abandoned between late October and mid-November 1526.

December 1526 – Pánfilo de Narváez receives a patent from the king of Spain to explore and settle a vast territory from the Pacific to the Atlantic, south of a line running through Mobile, Alabama, and north of Rio Soto La Marina in Mexico.

Spring 1527 – Narváez organizes his expedition in Seville, and it would be there that he would have met the four ultimate survivors, Alonso del Castillo, Andres Dorantes, Esteban, a Black slave owned by Dorantes, and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, the royal treasurer for the expedition.

June 17, 1527 – The Narváez expedition, with around 600 men, leaves Spain for Santo Domingo on Hispaniola, arriving in late July after a quick crossing.

July – September 1527 – The Narváez expedition acquires more supplies on Hispaniola. Fatefully, it fails to recruit an experienced pilot. While there, 150 of the 600 men desert to see their fortune elsewhere in the New World.

Winter 1527-28 – After having been battered by a hurricane after leaving Hispaniola, the Narváez expedition spends the winter on the southern coast of Cuba. It hires a pilot. He would turn out to be incompetent.

February 1528 – The Narváez expedition leaves Cuba, but gets tied up in the shallow waters and islands in the south. It swings around the west coast of Cuba and reaches Havana in March 1528.

Late March 1528 – The Narváez expedition sails west from Havana under cloudy skies, aiming for Rio Soto La Marina on the east coast of Mexico. It gets caught in the Gulf Stream, which had not yet been mapped, and because of clouds had to navigate by dead-reckoning. The Gulf Stream pushed it east, but apparently nobody understood that.

April 12, 1528 – The Narváez expedition lands in Tampa Bay, more than 900 miles from its intended destination. Amazingly, it took a while for them to figure that out.

April 15, 1528 – Narváez makes the fateful decision to unload the settlers and the 42 surviving horses at Tampa Bay. They explore a quickly abandoned Indian village, and find a child’s rattle made of gold.

April – May 1528 – The Narváez expedition explores Tampa Bay and encounters the first Indians who do not shoot at them. These Indians send them north to “Appalachee,” in the vicinity of Tallahassee, where there was allegedly a lot of gold. Narváez decides that the men will march from Tampa Bay to Mexico, and the fleet will sail along off-shore. This was a bad idea anyway, but especially bad in the Gulf, where most of the mainland shore is screened from open water by barrier islands. The army and fleet were quickly separated. Forever.

August 1528 – The expedition reaches Appalachee, which is prosperous, agricultural, and populous but not possessed of gold. After a tense encounter turns south toward the Gulf. Of the original complement of 300 soldiers, 250 still survive. They make the beach, probably behind the barrier islands of Apalachicola Bay. To survive, they resolve to slaughter and eat one of their surviving horses every three days. They refer to their refuge as “the Bay of Horses.” They start to build five huge rafts to take them out past the barrier islands where they might see the fleet, and if necessary to Mexico.

Summer 1528 – The fleet, having returned to Cuba for more supplies, searches Tampa Bay for evidence of the now lost expedition. Local Indians capture Juan Ortiz. He would live as a slave among them for eleven years, only to be liberated when Hernando de Soto’s entrada would also land at Tampa Bay in 1539. Ortiz would then become Soto’s indispensable translator.

September 22, 1528 – The 240+ survivors of the Narváez expedition set sail on five immense rafts. They carry “fresh” water in immense canteens made from the skin from the hind legs of horses. Their food is a heap of corn looted from nearby villages in the middle of each raft. Their sails are made from old clothing. Seeing no ships beyond the barrier islands, they head west along the Gulf coast.

September – November 1528 – The rafts sail west, constantly battling thirst and starvation. They are scattered by the strong current at the mouth of the Mississippi – it is so strong, they can drink fresh water off the side of the rafts a couple of miles off the coast. Eventually, the five rafts land at different parts of the Texas Gulf Coast, scattered between Galveston and Corpus Christi.

Winter 1528-1529 – The vast majority of the 240+ men on the rafts die by various gruesome means, including Indian attack, starvation, and cannibalism. Panfilo de Narváez is one of the earliest to die. He slept on one of the rafts with a couple of aides, presumably to protect himself from Indians. One night, the raft was blown out to sea. He had no means to get back, and died of thirst and starvation. Other attempts to refloat the rafts fail. By the end of the very cold winter, only about 15 are still alive, including Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Esteban, but they are not in contact with each other.

Spring 1529 – Cabeza de Vaca has been taken in by local Indians, and he has been enslaved. He encounters survivors from the other raft that had landed on the back of Galveston Island, including Castillo, Dorantes, and Esteban, but they are living with another band and they are quickly separated again.

Winter 1529-1530 – Cabeza de Vaca contrives to escape his original tribe, and takes up with the Charrucos. For the next two years, he acts as an itinerant trader and intermediary among the tribes.

Spring 1532 – Cabeza de Vaca joins the Quevenes tribe, who were hunter gatherers. They traveled around south Texas seasonally. In the fall of 1532, Cabeza de Vaca was with them when they joined a gathering of small Indian bands on the southern Colorado River to eat the pecans that were in season then. There he ran into Dorantes, Castillo, and Esteban, whom he had not seen in 3 1/2 years. They compared notes, and believed they were by then the only survivors of the Narváez 300. Cabeza de Vaca also learned that the bands in the region would converge again the next summer west of Corpus Christi to eat prickly pears. When the tribes split up after pecan season, Castillo and Esteban left with the Yguases people.  Dorantes was with a family of the Mariames tribe, who took on Cabeza de Vaca as a slave as well.

Summer 1533 – The tribes gather again and the four are reunited, but the Yguases and the Mariames get into a dispute “over a woman,” and hastily, taking Castillo and Esteban and Dorantes and Cabeza de Vaca, respectively. Plans to escape are thereby foiled.

September 1534 – Now six years after they had left the Bay of Horses, most of it spent in servitude to the Indians, Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Esteban are reunited and arrange to escape. Their plan is to walk south until they get to the northern reaches of Spanish settlement.

Late 1534 – Castillo performs his first act of faith-healing. Soon all four of the survivors are healing, and Indians begin following them. The four spend the winter of 1534-35 with the Avavares band in south Texas, this time as honored guests rather than slaves.

Spring 1535 – The four survivors start walking south, crossing the Rio Grande the first time. During this period they “got drunk on a certain smoke,” thought now to be peyote.

Summer and Fall 1535 – Walking south near the Gulf coast of Mexico, the survivors get within 200 miles of Panuco, the northernmost Spanish settlement on that coast. Then, for reasons unknown, they start walking to the west and north. For the rest of 1535 the final four and a growing army of three or four thousand Indians moved northwest, now toward west Texas, then back across the Rio Grande roughly at Presidio, Texas, then along the north bank of the Rio Grande for a bit more than a hundred miles to the northwest and then again across into Mexico, heading generally southwest until reaching the coastal plain between the Sierra Madre de Occidental and the Pacific Ocean in late 1535.

Christmas 1535 – In a village called Corazones in the Sierra Madre Occidental, Castillo saw an Indian wearing a Spanish buckle and horseshoe nail around his neck as jewelry. The four asked him where he got them. “They told us that some bearded men like us, with horses, lances and swords, had come there from heaven….” They knew they were close.

April 1536 – The four, followed by hundreds of Indians, reach a spot where Europeans had recently spent the night, evidenced by stakes for horses and other signs. Cabeza de Vaca, Esteban, and 11 Indians pursue, going on a forced march ahead of the main group, moving thirty miles in a day. The very next day, more than eight years after landing at Tampa Bay and almost seven years after landing at Galveston, Cabeza de Vaca and Esteban encounter Spanish soldiers on horses looking for Indians to enslave. They send for Dorantes and Castillo, who arrive with 900 Indians in tow. Cabeza de Vaca intervenes to prevent their enslavement.

Spring 1536 – Hernando de Soto returns to Spain at age 36, after 22 years in Central and South America accumulating a vast fortune.

Spring 1536 – The party proceeds to Culiacan, a Spanish settlement on the Pacific coast. There the apparently emotional mayor dissolved into tears on learning of their trials. After getting some new European clothes, they travel to Mexico City.

July 23, 1536 – The four survivors reach Mexico City, and are celebrated as heroes. Esteban spends a lot of time in local taverns, perhaps telling stories that exaggerate the prospects for gold north of the Rio Grande. He comes to the attention of ambitious officials.

Spring 1537 – Cabeza de Vaca returns to Spain. He meets with Hernando de Soto, who invites him along on his planned entrada into North America. Cabeza de Vaca declines.

April 20, 1537 – Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, issues the patent giving Soto permission to invade, conquer, and fortify La Florida, which was then defined as essentially all of North America, and including particularly the territories previously covered in the patents issued to Panfilo de Narváez and Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón.

Fall 1537 – Soto tries to recruit Cabeza de Vaca to join his entrada, but Cabeza de Vaca turns him down for an opportunity to run a settlement in today’s Uraguay. Soto believes that Cabeza de Vaca’s reticence is because he wants the gold of North America for himself.

Spring 1538 – The Soto expedition leaves Spain for Cuba, arriving in June. Soto has been made governor of Cuba and requisitions horses, pigs and other resources to support his invasion.

Late 1538 – Soto sends a small reconnaissance force to the west coast of Florida. They explore either Charlotte Harbor or Tampa Bay, and report back that the Indians had told them “by signs” that there was a lot of gold to the north.

Winter 1538-39 – Franciscan Friar Marcos de Niza and Esteban are escorted from Mexico City to Culiacan on the west coast by Francisco Vazquez de Coronado in command of 300 soldiers and 100 Indios amigos.

~1538-1540 Francis Drake is born in the West Country town of Tavistock. His father is Edmund Drake.

March 1539 – Fray Marcos and Esteban leave Culiacan with a small escort to scout north of the Rio Grande for a “lost city of gold.” Esteban would soon run ahead of Marcos, planting crosses at intervals to indicate his route.

May 1539 – Fray Marcos learns that Esteban has been killed in a Pueblo in Arizona. There are conflicting accounts of the reasons, but the leading theory is that a local chief called his bluff about there being a huge number of soldiers on the way.

May 18, 1539 – The Soto expedition, with 600 men and hundreds of horses and pigs sails from Havana for Florida, arriving May 25 in Tampa Bay, quite near the landing place of Narváez in 1528 and Ponce de Leon in 1521.

July 1539 – The Soto expedition marches north through the peninsula of Florida toward the panhandle. Near Ocala they rescue Juan Ortiz, a fifth survivor of the Narváez expedition who had been living with the Indians of the area since 1528. Ortiz becomes an essential translator for Soto.

September 2, 1539 – Fray Marcos de Niza returns to Mexico City from Arizona and, perhaps while drinking wine in Mexico City’s taverns, considerably exaggerates the economic opportunities north of Mexico. This report, which was a failure of intelligence, catalyzes the Coronado entrada.

Late 1539 – Searching for Apalachee, last encountered by the Narváez expedition in 1528, and after bloody fighting with the Indians of the area, Soto reaches Tallahassee on October 6, 1539. This is the only spot in the entire expedition that has been definitively confirmed.

November 17, 1539 – The Viceroy of Mexico sends Melchior Diaz and fifteen men on horses and the usual Indios amigos to revisit the route Marcos had taken to Cibola and give his take on Fray Marcos’ report. Diaz reaches Arizona, but his men take ill and he returns unable to confirm or deny the friar’s report. He returns to Mexico, and in March 1540 runs into an advance team from Coronado’s expedition.

Winter 1539-40 The Soto entrada spends five months in Tallahassee, sending reconnaissance squads on horseback both north and south. To the south, they discover the gruesome remnants of the “Bay of Horses.” The mission to the north, into Georgia, found no gold, but many densely populated Indian towns. The expedition moves north through Georgia into the Carolinas.

April 22, 1540 – Coronado, with Fray Marcos in tow, leads a vast expedition, including a couple of thousand Spanish and Indian men and a thousand horses, north toward Arizona. Coronado and Marcos detach and move in front with an advance group of 75 men on horses.

May 1, 1540 – In eastern South Carolina, Soto first encountered the queen of Cofitachequi, a high Mississippian society wealthier than even the Apalachee.  She gave him blankets and clothing made of buffalo hide, and a strand of pearls which were, one of the chroniclers said, the size of hazelnuts. In her temple Soto found iron axes from the Bay of Biscay, Castilian axes for cutting wood, and beads that the Spanish explorers used to trade with the Indians. These must have come from the Ayllón disaster at Tybee Roads on 1526, roughly 90 miles away.

Spring 1540 – A maritime expedition under the command of Hernando de Alarcon departs May 9 and sails up the Gulf of California to the mouth of the Colorado River. His mission is to resupply the Coronado expedition. He does not do that, but in a conversation with a local chief confirms Esteban’s death.

June 17, 1540 – Coronado, Fray Marcos, and the advance group enter Arizona at Palominas.

Early July 1540 – Coronado and Marcos reach Cibola, a town about which Marcos had reported lavishly. This was the third or fourth time that Coronado had been disappointed in Fray Marcos’ reports, so he fired the friar and sent him back down south with a messenger to his main army, which was following along slowly.

Summer of 1540 – The Soto entrada moves through the Carolinas, then west into eastern Tennessee, probably near Knoxville, and then goes southwest into northern Alabama. At some point, “King Tascalusa” of the Atahachi is informed of the expedition, and starts to keep tabs on it. He knew about Europeans, because Don Teodoro, the Greek man sent ashore by the Narváez expedition as it sailed west along the Gulf coast, had lived with Atahachi for some time thereafter.

August – October 1540 – Coronado dispatches Lopez de Cardenas and some horsemen to the northwest, they would meet the Hopis, and at some point during this period they would become the first Europeans to see the Grand Canyon. 

October 10, 1540 – Tascalusa sends his son as ambassador to greet Soto and welcome him. It is a ruse. He has been watching the Spanish for weeks, and has resolved to ambush them at a town called Mabila (after which Mobile, Alabama, well to the south of the actual spot, is named).

October 18, 1540 – Tascalusa entertains Soto and his officers inside Mabila, and then slips away to trigger the ambush. Brutal fighting ensues. Indian casualties may have numbered into the thousands, but they kill 20-40 Spanish soldiers, wound many more, kill or wound dozens of irreplaceable horses, and sack the Spanish baggage train. The result of the Battle of Mabila is disastrous for both sides. The Soto expedition remains in the area for a month to recover before pressing on to the west.

Fall of 1540 – Coronado’s main army catches up with Coronado at Tiguex, a well-watered pueblo in western New Mexico, and they all settle down for the winter. Coronado’s men meet an Indian who looked like he came from the Near East, so they nickname him “the Turk.”  He tells the story of Quivira, a city of gold off to the northeast, across a vast desert of grass with many cows.

November 1540 – The Soto entrada moves northwest into northern Mississippi, into the territory of the Chicasa, an accomplished agricultural tribe with substantial food. They spend the winter there, enjoying friendly relations with the Chicasa. Soto lends the chief a horse so he can come and go in dignity.

Winter 1540-41 – The Tiguex War is fought between Coronado’s entrada and Pueblo Indians around the pueblo of Hawikuh and environs. This is the first “named war” within today’s United States, but only because nobody put a name on Soto’s war with the Atahachi in 1540.

March 5, 1541 – In northern Mississippi, the Chicasa attack Soto’s entrada, sneaking into the Spanish encampment and setting off incendiary devices. Eleven Spaniards, fifty-seven horses, and more than 400 of the 500 pigs (the herd having grown from 300 in the last three years) perish in the fire. In the confusion, the Chicasa break off the attack on the brink of victory. A few days later, the Spanish catch a big group of Chicasa warriors in the open and kill many of them. The Spanish are now down to fewer than 450 men of their original 600.

April 23, 1541 – August 1541 – The Turk leads Coronado and a big part of his army in search of Quivira, an alleged lost city of gold. It quickly becomes obvious that there isn’t enough food and water on the route to sustain the army, so Coronado sends it back. He continues on with thirty horsemen and the Turk.

May 1541 – In west Texas, one of Coronado’s scout teams meet Indians who had known Cabeza de Vaca and and his fellow survivors when they passed through in roughly 1535.

May 8, 1541 – The Soto entrada reaches a bluff over the Mississippi about 30 miles south of Memphis. This is the first European sighting of the central Mississippi river. There were heavily populated towns up and down the banks. Shortly after the entrada encamped on the eastern bank, there appeared an armada of Mississippian warships.  Dispatched by a large kingdom call Aquixo on the western bank, the chroniclers claim the fleet was as big as two hundred vessels deployed in battle formation. 

May – June 1541 – While under frequent arrow barrages, the expedition builds rafts to cross the river.

June 17, 1541 – At 3 am, to avoid an attack from the Indian navy, the entrada crosses the Mississippi into Arkansas. By 7:30 in the morning, all men, remaining equipment and supplies, and livestock have crossed into Arkansas.

June 1541 – May 1542 – The now declining army of Soto spent almost a year flailing about in Arkansas, chasing rumors of cities of gold. The historical record becomes thin during this period. During this period, Soto’s scouting parties may have come within 250 miles of the Coronado entrada.

August 1541 – Having traversed New Mexico, west Texas, and Oklahoma, Coronado and the Turk reach Quivera, in southeastern Kansas. There is no gold there, and Coronado orders “enhanced interrogation” of the Turk, who confesses that he has purposefully led the Spanish on a wild goose chase. He is garroted by one of the Spanish that night. Coronado returns to Tiguex in New Mexico, reaching it in early October 1541.

December 1541 – Coronado races another officer for fun, but his saddle girth breaks and he is thrown from his horse and trampled by the other. His injuries are severe. He determines to return to Mexico.

1542 (date unknown) – Cabeza de Vaca publishes his account of the ordeal of the survivors. It is the earliest work describing the tribes of the Texas Gulf coast, among other virtues.

May 21, 1542 – Hernando de Soto dies of an illness near the west bank of the Mississippi in southeast Arkansas or northeast Louisiana. Before he dies, he appoints Luis de Moscoso as his successor in command. Not wanting the Indians to learn that the legendary Soto had died, Moscoso and a small band of his friends weighed Soto’s body down with blankets filled with sand and sank it in the Mississippi.

June 5, 1542 – After deliberating with the surviving officers, Moscoso resolves to march through Texas and Mexico to reach New Spain. That summer they may have reached the Brazos River, but their scouts reported that there was little food and water.

July 2, 1542 – Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, exploring the Pacific coast, sees Baja California on his way north. It had been named the previous year by another explorer after a fictional island populated only by beautiful women from an early Spanish novel.

Summer 1542 – Somewhere in Texas, Moscoso’s men meet a “tattooed” Indian woman who had been held by Coronado’s men for a time the year before. She is the only known connection between the two expeditions while in the lands of today’s United States.

September 28, 1542 – Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo sails into San Diego harbor, discovering it for Spain.

October 1542 – Moscoso turns the entrada around somewhere in Texas and returns to the Mississippi in Arkansas or Louisiana. Their plan is to build boats and hope that the Mississippi in fact flows to the Gulf of Mexico.

Late autumn 1542 – Coronado and his officers arrive home in Mexico City.

July 2, 1543 – To sail down the Mississippi, 322 Spaniards, roughly 100 of the remaining Indian porters, and 22 of the best horses embarked, the mounts in canoes lashed side by side.

Mid-July – Having survived Indian attacks for much of the voyage, the Moscoso “fleet” passes the site of the future New Orleans.

July 18, 1543 – The surviving expedition, still more than 300 strong, reaches the Gulf of Mexico and sails for New Spain (Mexico).

September 10, 1543 – The 300 or so Soto survivors under Moscoso reach today’s Tampico, then the northernmost point of Spanish settlement in New Spain. The Soto entrada had spent 1570 days on its journey from Tampa Bay to Panuco, including 285 days in Florida, 61 days in Georgia, 21 days in South Carolina, 6 days in North Carolina, 27 days in Tennessee, 168 days in Alabama, 187 days in Mississippi, 103 days in Texas, and 443 days in Arkansas and Louisiana.   Not counting mounted reconnaissance operations, the expedition spent approximately 255 days on the march and on those days averaged a bit more than ten miles a day.  The balance of the 4000 or so miles were traveled in the pinnaces, down the Mississippi and along the Gulf coast. That roughly half the men who began the expedition survived it is quite astonishing, given the mortality rates in such projects at the time.

January 28, 1547 – England’s King Henry VIII dies, and his nine-year old son Edward VI becomes king under a regency.

June 6, 1549 – The Western Rising, also known as the Prayer Book Rebellion, starts in western England and Cornwall. Edmund Drake moves his family to Kent to get away from the violence. Young Francis grows up by the sea, and by the mid-1550s is apprenticed to the owner of a coastal trading bark.

June 1549 – The expedition of Fray Luis Cancer reaches the west coast of Florida, arriving at Tampa Bay on June 23. His translator, an Indian woman called Magdalena by the Christians, thought loyal to the Spanish, immediately leads Cancers and his party into an ambush. It would be nine more years before the Spanish would try again in North America.

Early 1550s – Geopolitical changes in Europe lead to a rapid decline in the export of English woolens, leading to an economic crisis. This catalyzes English interest in seeking a route to China (and its vast market) that does not depend upon the Spanish, Portuguese, or Arabs.

Late 1552 – A group of merchants, courtiers, and intellectuals, in consultation with Sebastian Cabot (John Cabot’s son), draw up plans for a new commercial venture and gave it a rather glorious name: “The Mysterie, Company, and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places Unknown.”

May 20, 1553 – The “Merchant Adventurers” dispatch an expedition of three ships to look for a northeast passage to China under the command of Sir Hugh Willoughby. One of them, under Richard Chancellor, would reach Archangel. Chancellor traveled to Moscow and opened up diplomatic relations and signed a trade deal with Ivan the Terrible. This was the first official contact between Russia and England in more than 500 years.

July 6, 1553 – Edward VI dies, and after some back and forth “Bloody” Mary Tudor becomes Queen. She would marry Prince Philip of Spain, who would eventually become Philip II, and re-establish Catholicism in England.

1557 – The first of the Soto entrada narratives is published, “True Relation of the Hardships Suffered by Governor Fernando de Soto and certain Portuguese Gentlemen During the Discovery of the Province of Florida, now newly set forth by a Gentleman of Elvas.” 

November 17, 1558 – Mary I dies, and is succeeded by her half sister, Elizabeth I. Elizabeth would re-establish the Church of England as the state religion, and pass an “act of conformity” that required everybody to worship in accordance with its liturgy.

Late 1558 – Tristan de Luna y Arellano is named governor of a territory including today’s Florida and the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina, more or less, and is charged with establishing bases at Pensacola and Parris Island, South Carolina.

January 15, 1559 – Elizabeth I crowned Queen of England.

February 27, 1559 – Elizabeth’s Act of Conformity, which establishes the Church of England and makes Protestantism the state religion in England.

June 11, 1559 – Tristan de Luna y Arellano’s fleet of 11 to 13 ships leaves San Juan de Ulua in Mexico and sails for Pensacola with the purpose of establishing a permanent colony there. The fleet carried 1500 people in total, 240 horses, cattle for breeding, and supplies of corn, biscuit, bacon, dried beef, cheese, oil, vinegar, and wine.  The ships carried materials to build an entire Spanish town at Pensacola, including a governor’s residence, storehouses, jail, and more than 100 houses. The fleet only arrives August 14, 1559, having taken an inexplicably long time to cross the Gulf of Mexico.

September 19, 1559 – A hurricane hits Pensacola, and sinks all but three of the ships in Tristan de Luna’s expedition, most of them taking down critical supplies. This would put his men in desperate straits.

February 1560 – Luna marches most of his men into the interior of Alabama, looking for food. They run into hostile Indians – who may have remembered the Soto entrada from 20 years before – and fail. They return to Pensacola by way of Mobile in the summer of 1560. A couple of small supply ships arrive.

April 1561 – Luna abandons his settlement and returns to New Spain. The survivors abandon the Pensacola area no later than July 1561.

Summer 1561 – The Spanish ship Santa Catalina, exploring the coast of North America at the behest of Luna’s successor Ángel de Villafañe, sails into the mouth of the Chesapeake in front of a storm. There they pick up two Indian teenagers, perhaps by consent and perhaps not. One of them, who goes by the name Paquiquineo, is perceived to be of noble rank. The Santa Catalina‘s master, Antonio Velazquez, perceives Paquiquineo’s value and takes him to court in Madrid.

1561-1562 Pacquiquineo stays at the court of Philip II, learns Spanish, and persuades Philip to send him back to the Chesapeake. Instead he is taken to New Spain (Mexico), and lives there until 1566. He is baptized Don Luis de Velasco, in honor of the governor of New Spain.

February – May 1562 – Jean Ribault sets sail from Le Havre with two ships and 150 French colonists, mostly Huguenots, for Florida. They reached the coast of Florida in the vicinity of Jacksonville by late April 1562, and on May 1 hold the first Protestant religious service in North America.

May-June 1562 – After erecting a stone marker at the Jacksonville site, Ribault and his men sail for Parris Island, South Carolina. There they build a strong-house, name it Charlesfort, and Ribault leaves a garrison of 27 men to hold it for France. Ribault heads back to France, but is caught up in the French wars of religion and imprisoned. The French at Parris Island never receive reinforcement.

June 1562 – Tristan de Luna’s successor, Angel de Villafane, leads three ships toward South Carolina, only to have a hurricane come along and wreck them. He would not see the French who were already working their way along the coast from Jacksonville to Parris Island.

Early 1560s – Francis Drake sells the bark he had inherited from his master and moves back to the West Country, where he connects with his cousins, William and John Hawkins, who were early pirates/privateers sailing against Spain and Portugal.

May 1564 – Having learned of the claims of the Huguenots at Jacksonville and Parris Island, King Philip II of Spain orders that the markers and any settlers be removed. Captain Hernando Manrique de Rojas sails up the coast with 25 soldiers. He finds nothing near Jacksonville, neither the marker nor Indians who would say they saw Europeans.

June 2 -11, 1564 – Manrique moves up the coast to the vicinity of Hilton Head Island. There they meet Indians, who report they have a single Frenchman in captivity. His name is Guillaume Rouffi, and he tells Manrique the story of how the other abandoned French built a twenty ton pinnace and tried to sail across the ocean to France in a small boat. Their fate would be ugly. Rouffi leads Manrique to Charlesfort, and he destroys it. In the summer of 1996, archeologists would find the foundation of the strong-house.

June 15, 1564 – Manrique sails for Cuba, with Rouffi as a captive. Rouffi disappears from history.

June 24, 1564 – Rene Laudonniere, veteran of Renault’s Charlesfort expedition, arrives at Jacksonville with 300 Huguenot settlers. Somehow, Manrique and Laudonniere miss each other along the coast of Florida. They build Fort Caroline.

Summer 1565 – The pirate John Hawkins visits Fort Caroline. This is why the sailors he later abandoned on the Gulf coast of Mexico or Texas, David Ingram, Richard Brown, and Richard Twyde, first walked all the way to Jacksonville.

August 28, 1565 – Jean Ribault, now released from prison, arrives at Fort Caroline with more than 600 additional settlers. Shortly after Ribault and his four ships arrive, Pedro Menendez de Aviles, acting on the same orders to roust the French from Florida, spots Ribault’s fleet. Ribault flees, so Aviles returns to the site of today’s and prepares for war. September 8, 1565 is regarded as the founding of St. Augustine.

September 19-20, 1565 – Aviles marches 400 soldiers overland to Fort Caroline. They attack at dawn, and kill 150 French. Aviles arrives and gives the order to spare women and children, of which about 70 survive.

Late September 1565 – Aviles leaves a garrison at Fort Caroline, which he renames San Mateo, and marches back to St. Augustine. Ribault’s fleet wrecks on the beach south of St. Augustine. Over the course of the next few days, Aviles kills groups of French, sometimes by execution after surrender. At least 470 Huguenots of approximately 800 French, including Ribault, were killed by Aviles in the two actions. Some professed Catholics were spared.

1566 – Pedro Menendez de Aviles spends much of the year exploring coastal Florida and building small forts. None of them, other than St. Augustine, would survive longer than five years. Along the way he rescues the surviving remnants of more than 200 Spanish who had been shipwrecked, believed lost, and held prisoner for more than 20 years by the Calusa Chief Carlos. Also, Aviles directs Captain Juan Pardo to explore the interiors of the Carolinas and Tennessee from St. Helena (Parris Island).

Summer 1566 – Paquiquineo/Don Luis helps Dominican friars and a company of soldiers from Havana look for the mouth of the Chesapeake. They fail to find it, perhaps because Paquiquineo does not want it found by Spanish soldiers, and instead of returning to Cuba they sail for Spain.

November 1566 – Francis Drake sails under John Lovell, who was one of the captains in the service of the Hawkins family, to Cape Verde and the Caribbean. Lovell captures a couple of Portuguese slave ships and attempts to sell them in the Caribbean, but fails to do and eventually releases them.

December 1, 1566 – Captain Juan Pardo departs St. Helena with 125 soldiers. They seem to have wended their way north through South Carolina into the province of the Cofitachequi, which in 1541 had been rich and led by a queen. No more.  From there Pardo moved up into central North Carolina, all along the way building small forts and leaving behind a few soldiers to garrison them.  Then at some point in January 1567, Pardo got a letter from Santa Elena calling him back to be on hand in case the French attacked in reprisal for their defeat at Fort Caroline.  Pardo left behind a detachment of perhaps thirty men under the command of one Sargeant Moyano in central North Carolina, and returned to Santa Elena on March 7, 1567.

April 1567 – Moyano reports by letter that he has fought Chisca Indians, killed more than a thousand of them and burned 50 of their buildings. He pushes into Tennessee and encounters a series of fortified towns, which he says he destroyed, killing thousands of Indians. His furthest reach was probably a bit south of Knoxville.

May 25, 1567 – Aviles again ordered Pardo to go into the interior to pacify the Indians, take possession of the land, and find an overland route to the mines of San Martin in Zacatecas, Mexico, and then return to Santa Elena by the following March! This order betrayed an astonishing misunderstanding of North American geography.

September 1, 1567 – July 1568 – Pardo and roughly 120 armed men departed Santa Elena for a roundabout trip through the Carolinas and into eastern Tennessee in an attempt to follow his impossible orders. The expedition spends ten months in the Carolinas and Tennessee and sets up a series of small forts. Pardo’s account reveals a massive decline in the Indian population in the region when compared to the narratives of the Soto entrada only 26 years before.

October 1567 – January 1569 – John Hawkins takes his young cousin Francis Drake and several ships, including one owned by Elizabeth I, on a mission against Portuguese and Spanish shipping. In December 1567, they capture a couple of small Portuguese ships, and Hawkins puts Drake in command of one of them. It is his first blue ocean command.

May 3, 1568 – French nobleman Dominique de Gourgues raises the money to finance an expedition to San Mateo, the site of the former Fort Caroline, to exact revenge.  De Gourgues’ men surprised the Spanish garrison lounging around after lunch, and slew most of them.  De Gourgues tacked a sign up over their bodies that said simply “Not as Spaniards, but as murderers.”

September 15, 1568 – After successfully selling captured slaves and other goods in the Caribbean and carrying a big load of treasure, the Hawkins fleet limps into the New Spain port of San Juan d’Ulua after having been been severely damaged by a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Francis Drake is in command of the Judith. Hawkins takes control of the gun batteries protecting the entrance to the harbor.

September 17, 1568 – Thirteen Spanish warship arrive at San Juan d’Ulua conveying the new Viceroy of New Spain.

September 23, 1568 – After an tense standoff, the Spanish repudiate their pledge of safe conduct and attack the Hawkins fleet in the harbor. Only two of the Hawkins ships survive – Drake’s Judith, and the Minion, to which Hawkins transferred his flag. When the Minion gets out of the harbor, the Judith is nowhere to be seen.

Late September – early October 1568 – Hawkins sails along the Gulf Coast hoping to find food and water, and within two weeks puts more than 100 men ashore, because they have insufficient food and water for all the men to make it back to England. Thirty of them walk to Florida, hoping to connect with the Huguenots they had heard of. Three of them eventually make it to Nova Scotia, where they are picked up by a French ship.

January 1569 – The Judith, under Francis Drake, and the Minion, under John Hawkins, make it back to England months after the catastrophic battle of San Juan d’Ulua. Drake arrives five days before John Hawkins, and reports the disaster to William Hawkins.

Autumn 1569 – The Gargaryne, a French trader anchored off Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, picks up three English sailors, David Ingram, Richard Brown, and Richard Twyde. They had walked all the way from the Gulf coast of Mexico, having been dropped there by the English pirate John Hawkins.

1570 – Francis Drake takes two small ships, the Swan and the Dragon, and perhaps fifty men on his first raid to the Caribbean. Little is known of this voyage, except that he learned of the route of the Spanish treasure fleets and the location of Nombre de Dios, the port for loading silver and gold on the Caribbean coast of Panama.

August 1570 – Jesuit Father Juan Baptista de Segura leads three other brothers and some laymen to establish a mission on the Chesapeake. Don Luis is their guide. They bring no soldiers. The area had been experiencing six years of drought.

September 1570 – The Segura mission picks a spot in the area of Don Luis’ tribe, almost certainly the Pamunkey. They start building small shelters and a chapel. Within five days, Paquiquineo/Don Luis abandons the Jesuits and returns to his family’s village.

Late 1570 – Francis Drake makes a second voyage to the Caribbean in the Swan.

February 4, 1571 – The Jesuits in Pamunkey country, now desperate for food, approach the Indians for help. Their emissaries are killed, and a few days later Paquiquineo/Don Luis returns with other Pamunkeys and murders everybody else at the mission encampment. They spare a boy named Alonso and take him with them.

February 21, 1571 – Francis Drake captures two small Spanish ships off the northern coast of Panama and leaves a hilarious note behind.

February 22, 1571 – Drake sails into Panama’s Chagres River and explores as far as it is navigable.

Spring 1571 – A Jesuit resupply ship arrives from St. Elena (Parris Island). When the ship arrived at the mouth of the York River they were greeted with the “astonishing sight of Indians parading on the shore vested in cassocks and religious robes.”  Because the Indians threatened to attack them, the Spanish did not land but returned to Santa Elena.

Spring 1571 – Francis Drake captures at least a dozen small Spanish ships along the Spanish Main in the Caribbean. The Spanish estimate total losses at an amount equal to 66,000 Elizabethan English pounds.

May 8, 1571 – Drake captures a frigate from Cartagena carrying Philip II’s correspondence for his officers in Panama and Peru. Drake allegedly tosses it overboard.

Summer 1571 – Philip II receives his first correspondence mentioning Drake and calling for stronger defenses in the West Indies. Also, while sailing back to England with his booty, Drake spots a small sheltering harbor on the coast of Panama, marks it as a potentially useful hideaway, and buries some supplies there for future use. He names it Port Pheasant.

May 24, 1572 – Francis Drake and his brother John leave Plymouth for a third raid on the Caribbean. Their ships are the Pasco and the Swan, and their crew is 73 men and boys. They sail for Port Pheasant.

July 12, 1572 – The Swan and Pasco reach Port Pheasant. There they found a note left only five days before from a fellow English pirate, warning that the Spanish had learned that Drake planned to use it as a refuge, probably from one of the Spanish sailors released by Drake the previous year. Nevertheless, he stays there long enough to assemble three pinnaces carried in parts in the holds of his two ships.

July 29, 1572 – Francis Drake and his men attack Nombre de Dios, the Caribbean depot for treasure from South America brought across the Isthmus from the Pacific coast of Panama. They discover a warehouse with a huge store of silver bars, but Drake is seriously injured and his crew breaks off the attack before they can cart it away. Also, Drake’s men free a Black slave named Diego, who attaches himself to Drake as his personal servant. Diego would remain with Drake until his death in 1579.

August 1572 – Pedro Menendez de Aviles, on his way back to Spain, stops by the Chesapeake to investigate what happened to the Jesuits. He extorts the Indians into returning Alonso, who relates what happened. The Indians refuse to surrender Paquiquineo. The Spanish retaliate with cannon fire against Indians on the shore, and then leave. The next attempt by Europeans to settle the Chesapeake would not be for 35 years.

September 1572 – January 1573 – Diego, a Black slave freed by Francis Drake, tells Drake about the cimarrones, escaped slaves who have built their own society on the isthmus of Panama and are waging war on the Spanish. Drake spends these months capturing Spanish ships and preparing for a raid on the mule train bringing silver north from the Pacific coast of Panama to Nombre de Dios.

February 1573 – Diego connects Drake with Pedro, the leader of a band of cimarrones. Drake and thirteen of his men and Pedro and thirty cimarrones hike into the heart of Panama to scout the route and schedule of the Spanish mule train carrying treasure from the Pacific coast to the Caribbean coast. Pedro takes Drake to a lookout platform in a tree on the top of a mountain, from which Drake was able to see both the Caribbean sea and the Pacific (“South”) ocean. He gets an idea.

March 23, 1573 – Drake encounters Guillaume Le Testu, a Huguenot privateer. They agree to team up against the Spanish.

April 1, 1573 – Drake, Le Testu, Pedro, and a combined force of their men ambushed a Spanish mule train as it approached Nombre de Dios. They take gold worth 100,000 pesos, and capture 15 tons of silver bars that they cannot transport in the jungle, so they bury it. Le Testu dies in the attack. Afterwards, in gratitude Drake presents Pedro with a jeweled sword that had belonged to the leader of the Huguenots.

August 9, 1573 – Francis Drake makes it back to Plymouth after the third expedition to the Caribbean, now extremely rich.

Fall 1575 – Francis Drake meets with Francis Walsingham, by then principal foreign policy advisor to Elizabeth I. Walsingham asks Drake where he proposes to go, and Drake points to the coast of Peru on a map. He will not agree to a plan in writing lest England ends up back in Catholic control. Drake begins planning to sail in the spring of 1576, but Elizabeth withdraws backing for the mission in favor of a voyage under Martin Frobisher to look for a northwest passage over Canada.

Early 1577 – John Dee, Elizabeth’s principal science advisor, concludes that it is pointless to keep looking for a northwest passage without knowing the western exit of it. This hypothesized exit becomes known as the Strait of Anian. This would become the secret objective of Drake’s next expedition.

July 9, 1577 – Francis Drake reports to the government that he has built at his expense a ship suitable for the voyage, the 150 ton Pelican of Plymouth. It looks like a typical merchant vessel, but is much studier and has a much bigger hold than ships with a similar silhouette.

December 13, 1577 – The crew of the Drake fleet, having departed England on the pretense of going to Egypt, learns that its destination is the Strait of Magellan and the Pacific.

February 1578 – Drake’s fleet captures a Portuguese caravel and the 100 ton Santa Maria just south of Cape Verde. More importantly, he picks up Nuna de Silva, a Portuguese pilot familiar with the coast of South America. When Drake tells de Silva that he is aiming for the Strait of Magellan, de Silva says he wants to come along.

April 14, 1578 – The Drake fleet reaches the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, at the border of today’s Uruguay and Argentina.

June 20, 1578 – Drake reaches Port St. Julien, within 100 miles of the eastern entrance to the Strait of Magellan. They find the scaffold on which Magellan had executed mutineers more than 50 years before. Drake stays there for two months, waiting out the southern winter. There he executes Thomas Dougherty for mutiny, and his cooper makes tankards from the wood of Magellan’s scaffold, perhaps the coolest souvenir in history.

Summer 1578 – Elizabeth I grants Sir Humphrey Gilbert a patent to settle a vast area of North America. It has a six year term.

August 21, 1578 – The Drake fleet enters the Strait of Magellan. That evening, Drake renames the Pelican, now the Golden Hind, in honor of Sir Christopher Hatton, one of his principal investors.

September 1578 – Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his half-brother, Walter Ralegh, depart for North America with 500 men in eleven ships. The expedition is riven with delays and dissent, and turns back after getting into a big fight with the Spanish off Cape Verde.

September 6, 1578 – Drake reaches the Pacific exit of the Strait of Magellan.

September 8, 1578 – The fleet is hit by a huge storm in the southeastern Pacific. The now three ships, the Golden Hind, the Marigold, and the Elizabeth, are blown hundreds of miles to the southwest over the course of a week.

September 15, 1578 – The clouds part long enough for Drake to see a lunar eclipse predicted by John Dee before the expedition had left England. This allows Drake to fix longitude, and the news is not good. The fleet is now as far as 700 miles west by southwest of the Strait, truly the middle of nowhere.

September 28, 1578 – The Marigold disappears, never to be heard from again.

October 8, 1578 – The Golden Hind and the Elizabeth reach the far west coast of South America and anchor, and then another storm hits. Drake takes the Golden Hind to sea, believing it safer, but the Elizabeth stays at anchor.

Late October 1578 – The second storm drives the Golden Hind south of Tierra del Fuego, and Drake discovers that South America is not connected to a hypothesized southern continent. The stretch of water is still known as Drake’s Passage.

November 1, 1578 – After having failed to rendezvous, the Elizabeth sails back into the Strait, and reaches England after an arduous journey in the spring of 1579. The Golden Hind is now alone.

November 25, 1578 – Drake reaches the island of Mocha, off the coast of Chile. There they are ambushed by Indians. Drake and his servant Diego are wounded, Drake taking an arrow in the face. He rejects his crew’s demand to retaliate, because he believes the Indians only attacked because they had mistaken them for the Spanish.

December 5, 1578 – Drake captures the Capitana in the harbor of Valparaiso, Chile. The haul includes 300 pounds of gold and 1770 jars of wine. He puts the crew ashore, but takes on board the ship’s pilot, a Greek, who has sailed with the Spanish across the Pacific and knows the winds and currents.

December 1578 – January 1579 – Drake works the west coast of South America with the Capitana, now crewed by his men, and they grab several more Spanish ships but no big haul of treasure. In January, the pilot guides them to a secluded roadstead to careen the Golden Hind. Drake decides he’ll move faster without the now three Spanish ships, so he empties them, raises their sails, and let’s them blow out to sea.

February 13, 1579 – Drake sails into the port of Lima, Peru, and grabs another Spanish ship, strips it of weapons and anything of value, and releases it.

February 28, 1579 – Drake captures a Spanish bark carrying 18,000 pesos in gold and silver. A Black slave on the ship tips Drake off that more treasure is hidden away.

March 1, 1579 – The Golden Hind crosses the equator, heading north hunting a rumored Spanish treasure ship, nicknamed Cacafuego. Shortly afternoon, young John Drake spots her 12 miles to leeward.

March 2, 1579 – Drake puts up all his sails and then slows the Golden Hind down by dragging wine casks behind, deceiving the Cacafuego‘s captain into believing she is a slow merchantman. Drake captures the Spanish ship by guile. The prize includes 26 tons of silver, and eighty pounds of gold.

March 20, 1579 – Drake captures the bark of Rodrigo Tello off the west coast of Costa Rica. It carries a cargo of sarsaparilla, lard, honey, and maize. More importantly, in a fantastic stroke of luck it is ferrying two pilots who had been sent by the Viceroy of New Spain to take the new governor of the Philippines to Manila. The pilots had the secret Spanish navigational charts and rutters to sail from Central America to the western Pacific. Drake retained the more senior of the two, Alonso Sanchez Colchero.

April 4, 1579 – Drake captures another small ship, the most notable passenger being Don Francisco de Zarate, who afterward wrote a long letter about the encounter to Spanish authorities. He trades the captured pilot Colchero for Zarate’s pilot. A Black woman named Maria on the Spanish ship moves from enslaved status to notionally free by joining the Golden Hind.

April 13, 1579 – Drake entered the harbor of Guatulco, on the southwestern coast of Mexico and captures a bark and frees three Black slaves, two of whom join his crew. The Spanish crew run away, and Drake’s men take the cargo but leave the bark.  The next morning, the Golden Hind and her consort sailed off.  When the crew of the bark returned that day, they discovered Drake’s Portuguese pilot, Nuno de Silva, whom he had conscripted off Cape Verde the year before, standing forlornly on the bark’s deck with his possessions.  De Silva’s journal fell into Spanish hands and would only be discovered in a dusty archive in Mexico City in the early 1900s, more than 300 years later. It would upend history’s understanding of Drake and his voyage of 1578-79.

April – May 1579 – The Golden Hind and Tello’s bark follow the Spanish navigational charts and sail west into the Pacific, then north, then northeast, in a loop of more than 2000 miles. They arrive somewhere on the northwest coast of North America, probably about 48 degrees, near Olympic National Park, in late May. The search for the Strait of Anian, and encounter some very cold weather. The ships again needed careening, so they sailed south looking for a protected beach on which to do it.

June 17, 1579 – Drake finds a “fair and good bay” to careen the ships. This was long thought to be on the coast of California in the vicinity of San Francisco, but in the early 20th century documents were discovered that pointed toward a location in Oregon or Washington. Drake claims the area for Elizabeth I, and names it Novo Albion. The ships stay there between five and ten weeks, and enjoy friendly relations with the local Indians. No blood is shed, making Drake’s visit almost unique in the early documented encounters between Europeans and North American tribes.

Late July 1579 – The winds being favorable, Drake prepares to head west across the Pacific, the other routes home being too dangerous. He cannot carry enough food and water for everybody, so he leaves twenty men behind with a pinnace. We do not know what befell the twenty.  The only thing we do know is that one of them, a Spanish speaking pilot named Morera, would end up walking to Mexico, where he surfaced in 1583, four years after the Golden Hind had sailed away from the Pacific northwest.

September 30, 1579 – After 68 days out of sight of land, they reach an island in the Caroline Islands, probably Palau. A trading encounter turns violent. Over the next few weeks the Golden Hind moves on to Mindanao in the Philippines and then the Moluccas.

October – November 1579 – The Golden Hind reaches Ternate and Drake meets Babu, the Sultan of the Moluccas, who has been at war with the Portuguese. Drake gave the Sultan a gold ring set with a precious stone, a coat of mail, and a fine helmet – and the Sultan gave Drake a trade deal, six tons of cloves, sugar cane, hens, rice, and fruit, which Drake would have wanted because scurvy was again setting in.

December 12, 1579 – The Golden Hind anchors at a small island off of Sulawesi. At some point in the run from the Moluccas, Diego died.

January 9, 1580 – The Hind runs aground on a reef off the east coast of Sulawesi, and is almost lost. The crew tossed three tons of cloves, two cannons, and some cannonballs over the side in the hope of lightening the load and floating off, but to no avail. But the next day the wind shifted, and a surge of water pushed the Hind off the reef. She proceeds south and through a gap between the main Indonesian chain, sailing along the southern coast of Java.

March 26, 1580 – After provisioning and repairing the Hind, probably over a few weeks, Drake sails west across the Indian Ocean.

May 21, 1580 – Summer 1580 Drake sees the east coast of Africa after a run of almost two months. Not seeing a good place to land or perhaps worried about the Portuguese, they sail around the Cape of Africa and up the west coast, finally landing in Sierra Leone, north of the equator. This had been an extraordinary run of 9700 miles, and one of the greatest feats of seamanship in history to that point. Drake brought on a supply of lemons to ward off scurvy, still almost 200 years before Scottish physician James Lind would prove that citrus would prevent the disease.

September 26, 1580 – Francis Drake and the Golden Hind return to Plymouth after having circumnavigated the globe in 1018 days. He asks a passing fisherman if the Queen is still alive, and he reports that she is, but that a flu epidemic is raging through Plymouth and it would be a bad idea to come ashore.

March 18, 1581 – Parliament passes the Act against Reconciliation to Rome, which, among other things, made attendance at Church of England services mandatory. The resettlement of the Catholic population of England would, eventually, become a rationale for North American colonization.

April 1, 1581 – Elizabeth I knights Francis Drake on the deck of the Golden Hind, by then anchored just down the Thames from London. He is now Sir Francis Drake.

June 5, 1581 – The expedition of Captain Francisco Sanchez Chamuscado and the friar Agustin Rodriguez, amounting to 29 or 30 people – two or three friars, eight soldiers, and nineteen servants or slaves, leaves central Mexico to explore New Mexico, the first such expedition since Coronado’s return in 1542. They would see vast herds of buffalo in eastern New Mexico or the Oklahoma panhandle, and return to Mexico by the end of January 1582.

November 10, 1582 – The expedition of Antonio de Espejo, a party of 14 soldiers, one priest, perhaps 25 servants and 115 horses and mules headed north to New Mexico.

December 9, 1582 – The Espejo expedition reaches the Rio Grande, where they encounter Indians who still talked of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions almost fifty years later.

February 1, 1583 – The Espejo expedition reaches inhabited Pueblos for the first time.

May 1583 – Having explored west, the Espejo expedition reaches Winslow, Arizona. At the time, there were no corners to stand on.

Summer 1583 – Sir Humphrey Gilbert and a fleet of five ships sail for Nova Scotia and then New England with the intention of establishing a settlement for English Catholics. On August 20, 1582, Gilbert’s flagship breaks up off the coast of Nova Scotia and Gilbert is financially ruined.

September 9, 1583 – Gilbert dies when his small ship, the 8-ton Squirrel, goes down in a storm in the North Atlantic. He is last seen reading the novel Utopia. His half-brother, Walter Ralegh, inherits his patent.

September 10, 1583 – The Espejo expedition recrosses the Rio Grande into New Spain (Mexico). Its return through the Pueblo country had involved considerable ugliness.

April 27, 1584 – Walter Ralegh dispatches two ships to explore the Outer Banks of North Carolina as the possible site for a settlement. The master is Philip Amadas, and the navigator is Simon Fernandes. Arthur Barlowe commands the smaller ship, a pinnace. John White, an artist, and Thomas Harriott, a naturalist, are also along.

Early July, 1584 – The Amadas expedition arrives at the Outer Banks of North Carolina. They drop anchor off Hatteras Island. The ships are under the observation of Wingina, a local chief. On July 4, 1584, he dispatches his brother, Granganimeo, to approach the English. Over the next few days, the English and the local Indians trade and establish diplomatic relations.

Summer 1584 – Arthur Barlowe takes the pinnace and a handful of men to explore the region and look for Granganimeo, and they find Roanoke Island. Meanwhile, Amadas picks up two Indians to bring back to England, Manteo and Wanchese.  We do not know by what means these Indians were recruited, but it may be that they came voluntarily, or at the direction of their own chiefs.  Manteo was from the Croatoan tribe, not the Roanoke, down near Hatteras, where his mother ruled over a tribal group still independent of Wingina and his brother.  Manteo seems to have developed a genuine fascination with all things English, and he would return to England two more times in the coming years.  Wanchese, one of Wingina’s subjects, was much more skeptical.

January 6, 1585 – Elizabeth I knighted Walter Ralegh, and granted him the right to name the land in his domain – up to 1800 miles of North American coastline and all that lay behind it – Virginia, in her honor.

April 9, 1585 – The first Roanoke expedition sets sail from Plymouth for the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The fleet was five ships and two pinnaces. There were more than 600 men along – including soldiers, tradesmen, and artisans – 300 of whom were intended to be left behind to start the colony. Key figures included Sir Richard Grenville as leader of the expedition, Philip Amadas and Thomas Cavendish as captains, and Ralph Lane in charge of the soldiers. John White and Thomas Harriott, who has learned some Algonquian from Manteo and Wanchese, come along as artists and naturalists.

Early May, 1585 – Philip II has lost patience with the English, and closes Spanish ports to English ships as a first step to war. It takes a while for England to learn that this has happened.

May 11 – May 19, 1585 – After a very fast crossing, various ships of the Roanoke fleet rendezvous as planned on the unoccupied southern coast of Puerto Rico. Other ships fail to make the rendezvous. By the end of May the ships leave Puerto Rico and head north.

June 20, 1585 – Ralegh’s second supply mission to North Carolina is diverted by Elizabeth I to attack Spanish fishing off Newfoundland. The goal is to cut off the Spanish supply of cod, which then was dried and used as protein on ships of war. The diversion is bad news for the men already arriving in North Carolina

June 23, 1585 – The ships from the Puerto Rico rendezvous arrive on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and begin exploring. During July the other ships begin arriving at various points in the area. One of them dumps 30 men on one of the barrier islands and takes off for Newfoundland. The Tiger runs aground, and in the course of refloating her many of the expeditions supplies are lost.

July 1, 1585 – Having learned of the Spanish closing their ports to English trade and of an attack on an English merchant ship, Elizabeth I gives Sir Francis Drake a commission to “visit” the ports of Spain to release impounded English ships. She also issued commissions of reprisal to merchants whose property had been lost in Spain, enabling them to recoup their losses by plunder. Under their color, Drake could hunt for Spanish prizes wherever he chose.

Mid July 1585 – Sir Richard Grenville and about sixty men explore Pamlico Sound and the barrier islands. In the course of trading, an Indian steals a silver cup owned by Grenville. He sends Ralph Lane to recover it, during the course of which he burns down a village and the fields around it.

End of July 1585 – Grenville, confronting the shortage of supplies, decides to leave Ralph Lane with only around 100 men on Roanoke Island instead of the 300 originally planned. They still expect to be resupplied, but Elizabeth I has commandeered the ships that were to do it.

August – September 1585 – Having reached an agreement with the Indians via Manteo, the English unload the remaining supplies and began building a settlement on the northeastern tip of Roanoke Island. By September 8 all the ships have departed, leaving behind 109 men, including Thomas Harriot and John White.

September 14, 1585 – Sir Francis Drake’s expedition against Spain, consisting of 27 ships, eight pinnaces, and more than a thousand men, leaves Plymouth. It is by far the largest fleet to have left England up to that point.

November 3, 1585 – Drake’s fleet attacks the Canaries, but resistance is stiff. A cannon ball passes right between Drake’s legs, but he is untouched.

November 1585 – February 1586 – Philip Amadas, who has stayed with Ralph Lane and the other settlers on Roanoke Island, leads an expedition in the pinnace to the Chesapeake Bay, described as the “land of the Chesepians.” Thomas Harriot and John White come along. On their return they report friendly relations with the Indians, who tolerated their encampment for some weeks, and describe the great fertility of the region. They do not, however, mention Wahunsonacock or the Powhatans.

November 17, 1585 – Drake’s fleet attacks Santiago, the principal city of Cape Verde. They capture the town and attempt to ransom it, but the governor didn’t respond so Drake’s men burned the town to the ground. On leaving Cape Verde, an epidemic sweeps through the fleet and hundreds die.

December 1585 – Philip II orders his nephew, Duke of Parma, the general who had defeated the Dutch in Flanders, to plan an invasion of England from Holland.

Winter 1585 – 86 – Wingina, the chief of the Secotans, the tribe in the vicinity of Roanoke Island, sours on the English because they make continued demands for food. Then Secotans die in huge numbers from an unknown disease, probably carried by the English, who did not suffer from it.

January 1, 1586 – Drake’s fleet attacks and captures Santiago, Hispaniola, the administrative capital of Spain’s empire in the West Indies. The Drake fleet controls the city for a month, and burns down about a third of it before the Spanish pay a ransom. The fleet leaves for Catagena on February 1, 1586.

February 9, 1586 – Drake attacks and captures Cartagena. Drake collects a ransom from the city and the Catholic church of almost 400,000 pesos, and briefly considers holding the city for England. Then an epidemic sweeps the city, and Drake loses even more men. Drake embarks Blacks, Indians, and Turks who had been enslaved by the Spanish. He considers them free. The fleet leaves on April 10, heading for Cuba. The fleet stops briefly on the west coast of Cuba to embark fresh water, but passes on attacking Havana because of adverse winds.

Spring 1586 – Wingina tries to trick the English into going to war with a tribe to the north. Lane takes soldiers to confront the tribe, but with Manteo translating he decides they are not his enemies. On this trip the English first hear of Wahunsonacock. They also hear stories of gold, and explore deep upriver into North Carolina looking for it before returning to Roanoke on April 7, 1586.

May 1586 – Food running very low, Lane disperses his men into small groups so that they can live off the lane. He learns that Wingina is conspiring with other tribes to attack them, so Ralph Lane pre-emptively attacks his village on Roanoke Island.

May 27, 1586 – Sir Francis Drake sacks St. Augustine, Florida. The Spanish had evacuated, so Drake stripped it of everything valuable, including the hardware on doors, with an eye to re-supplying the English settlement at Roanoke in North Carolina. In response, the Spanish retreat from St. Elena (Parris Island, SC) and consolidate in St. Augustine.

Late May 1586 – A larger reinforcing fleet of at least six ships and four hundred sailors and colonists departed England for Roanoke under the command of Sir Richard Grenville.

June 1, 1586 – Lane crosses over to the mainland with a force of men and destroys Wingina’s “capital” village and decapitates Wingina.

June 8, 1586 – Drake’s fleet, hot off of burning St. Augustine to the ground, is spotted by one of the roving bands of English. On June 9, fleet anchors on the Atlantic side of the barrier islands next to Roanoke. This is said to be the first time an English fleet anchored at an English colony in North America. Drake offers to resupply the settlement and Lane agrees, but then a hurricane hits and does considerable damage. The settlers decide they want to leave and board Drake’s ships to return to England, arriving there at the end of July. Only four of the original 109 had died in the ten months since the original ships had departed, and another four or five were left behind, probably because they had gone too far in foraging for food.

Late July 1586 – Grenville’s resupply fleet arrives in North Carolina just as Drake and the settlers are approaching England. Grenville is baffled to find Roanoke abandoned, explores the area, and leaves 15 men, believed to be volunteers, behind with supplies.

February 19, 1587 – The English execute the Catholic, Mary, Queen of Scots, for conspiring against Elizabeth. This would offend Philip II of Spain.

March 25, 1587 – Elizabeth I greenlights Drake’s proposal to raid Spain directly with the purpose of preemptively disrupting the Spanish Armada. Drake proposed a fleet of 25 ships, and Elizabeth contributed four, including the 600 ton Elizabeth Bonaventure for Drake’s flagship.

April 19, 1587 – Drake’s fleet arrives off Cadiz, where the supply ships for the Armada are anchored in the harbor. With no flags or markings they nonchalantly sail into the harbor at night under the shore batteries. They start grabbing ships and unloading anything valuable, and then burning them down. Drake’s men destroy as many as 35 Spanish ships, and thousands of tons of supplies. They burn the 1500-ton galleon that was to be the flagship of the Spanish fleet.

May 8, 1587 – Another expedition to Roanoke, this time with families, departed England under the artist John White, with Simon Fernandes as pilot. This would become the “Lost Colony.” They are headed for the Chesapeake. Roughly May 15, one of the ships, a “flyboat” commanded by Edward Spicer carrying 50 settlers, would vanish.

May 14, 1587 – Drake’s fleet, fresh from its victory at Cadiz, takes Sagres Castle at Cape St. Vincent, on the southwestern coast of Portugal. Nearby fortifications surrender without a fight. Drake turns it into a base from which to raid Spanish shipping. Over the next two weeks he destroys more than 100 small boats and ships, wrecking the Spanish fishing industry and burning the staves for the thousands of barrels needed to supply the Armada. The ultimate effect is that Philip II postpones the sailing of the Armada for a year, until 1588.

June 1, 1587 – Drake’s fleet suddenly sets sail for the Azores. He has heard of a treasure-laden Portuguese nau (a “carrack”) sailing in the region.

June 18, 1587 – Drake’s fleet seizes the nau, the San Felipe, off the Azores. The value of the prize was estimated at 114,000 English pounds, at a time when a big warship could be built for less than 3000 pounds. It was Drake’s biggest prize since at least the capture of the “Cacafuego” in 1579 and perhaps the greatest of all time up to that point.

~July 20, 1587 – The two surviving ships of the third Roanoke expedition reach the Outer Banks of North Carolina. On July 22, John White goes to Roanoke Island in the pinnace, and discovers a few skeletons. There is no sign of the survivors left behind in 1586. Fernandes abandons them. White makes the decision to stay at Roanoke temporarily. Then Spicer’s boat appears, bringing the population to 118.

July 28, 1587 – Secotans, naturally unhappy with the killing of Wingina, ambush George Howe and riddle him with arrows. White considers a retaliatory raid, but breaks it off when Manteo realizes the English have mistaken friendly Croatoans for Secotans.

August 13, 1587 – White presides over the christening of Manteo, the first indigenous American admitted to the Church of England.

August 18, 1587 – White’s daughter Elizabeth Dare gives birth to a daughter, who is named Virginia. Virginia Dare is the first person born of English parents in the lands now making up the United States.

August 28, 1587 – The Roanoke settlers, in close proximity to tribes made hostile by Ralph Lane two years before, send John White back to England to get more supplies and reinforcements. He would not see any of them again.

October 9, 1587 – Elizabeth I orders all ships in England to stay in port to support the defense of the realm against the looming Spanish invasion. One small consequence would be that John White would not be able to return to Roanoke until 1590.

May 1588 – Captain Vicente Gonzales, who had served as pilot on the voyage that dropped Paquiquineo and the Jesuits in the lower Chesapeake in 1570, takes 30 men in a bark to locate and destroy a rumored English colony in North Carolina or the Chesapeake.

Early July 1588 – Captain Vicente Gonzales sees evidence of English settlement on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, but no actual English people.

July 19, 1588 – The Spanish Armada leaves its last port in Spain, Corunna, destined for the English Channel.

July 29, 1588 – The vanguard of the Spanish fleet is spotted off Cornwall. Sir Francis Drake and the Lord Admiral Howard were playing bowls when Fleming rushed up to give his report. Drake famously, and supposedly, replied, “We have time enough to finish the game and beat the Spaniards, too.” Maybe it never happened.

July 31, 1588 – The English and Spanish fleets engage in the Channel. This is the first big battle between sailing ships using artillery, rather than by grappling, and would signify a revolution in naval warfare.

August 6, 1588 – After a week of inconclusive fighting in the English Channel, the Armada drops anchor off Calais, on the coast of France. They stop so quickly that the pursuing English scud past them and lose the “weather gauge.”

August 8, 1588 – In the wee hours, the English launch a fireship attack against the Spanish anchored in Calais. The Spanish fleet scattered, and the English pounced in the Battle of Gravelines. The wind shifted, and the Spanish fleet sailed into the North Sea. It would have to sail around the British Isles and through the Irish Sea to get home.

September 21, 1588 – Admiral Medina Sidonia finally reached Spain with the remnants of the Spanish fleet. Of the roughly 130 ships that had sailed for England in July, at least fifty had been sunk in combat or otherwise wrecked, and more than 12,000 Spanish sailors and soldiers had died.

Mid-August 1590 – John White is finally able to return to Roanoke. He finds the settlement abandoned, and he found the word “CROATOAN” carved on one of the main gateposts, without any cross or signs of distress that would have indicated the settlers had been in grave danger. A storm prevents White from investigating further, and he is never able to return. There were approximately 130 English people who had been left on that coast in three expeditions who remained (and remain) unaccounted for.

September 21, 1595 – Juan de Onate y Salazar signs a contract with the viceroy of Mexico to explore and settle New Mexico.

January 28, 1596 – Sir Francis Drake dies of illness just off the coast of Panama. His men bury him at sea in a lead coffin.

April 28, 1597 – The Hopewell and the Chancewell, carrying English “Separatists,” left Falmouth, in Cornwall, for the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. They were “the first Pilgrims,” and hoped to settle on the Magdalens. They arrived at Newfoundland on May 18.

June 18, 1587 – After a series of mishaps and internal dissension that resulted in the loss of the Chancewell, the “first Pilgrims” on the Hopewell reach the Magdalen Islands. Sadly, the harbor was crowded, there were two Basque ships, two Breton ships, and hundreds of Micmac Indians who were there from Nova Scotia to fish. After a comic confrontation, the would-be first Pilgrims sailed away. They recovered the survivors of the Chancewell wreck off Cape Breton on June 28, and sailed for home.

March 19, 1590 – William Bradford is born in Austerfield, in Yorkshire.

Late winter, 1598 – Don Juan de Onate y Salazar leads his expedition north to New Mexico. It includes 600-700 settlers, 1900 head of cattle, 1012 goats, and 4,439 sheep and rams.

April 20, 1598 – The Onate expedition crosses the Rio Grande just south of El Paso. They were on the brink of dying of thirst, and drank out of the Rio Grande. They held a feast of thanksgiving, which, according to Texans, was the first “thanksgiving” in today’s United States.

September 8, 1598 – Having reached the Pueblo country of New Mexico during the summer, Onate dedicates the first permanent Spanish building north of today’s border with Mexico, a small church. The site is the Pueblo of Ohkay Owingeh, which Onate names San Juan Bautista.

September 13, 1598 – Philip II of Spain dies. His son, Philip III, continues to prosecute the war against England but without enthusiasm.

October 1598 – Onate sets off on the first of a series of explorations of the American southwest, reaching Acoma Pueblo on October 27, 1598. He then proceeds west in search of the “South Sea” (Pacific Ocean).

December 1, 1598 – Onate’s deputy, Juan de Zaldivar, following Onate toward the west, reaches Acoma Pueblo with about 30 men. The Pueblo Indians ambush them, killing 13 of the Spanish, including Zalvidar.

January 1599 – Onate tapped Vicente de Zaldivar, brother of the now dead Juan, to exact retribution against Acoma Pueblo. The resulting massacre was so brutal that when Spanish authorities heard about it years later they recalled Onate. He would nevertheless stay on until the spring of 1610.

March 18, 1602 – The Viceroy of New Spain instructs Sebastian Vizcaino to explore the Pacific Coast of today’s United States. Vizcaino was to explore the coast from Cape San Lucas at the tip of Baja to Cape Mendocino, almost the northern edge of today’s state of California, a distance of more than 1400 miles as the super crow would fly, and considerably more by sail. He was not to go north of Cape Mendocino. 

March 26, 1602 – Bartholomew Gosnold sets sail from Falmouth with twenty aspiring colonists and a dozen sailors on a small bark named the Concord, destination “northern Virginia,” which today we would call “New England.”

May 14, 1602 – Gosnold’s Concord makes landfall near today’s Portland, Maine. Gosnold had innovated a northerly route, north of the Azores, and made the crossing in 49 days. They encounter eight Indians in a Basque shallop with mast and sail, an iron grapple, and a kettle of copper, one of them dressed entirely in European clothes.

May and June, 1602 – Gosnold explores and names Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and the Elizabeth Islands, and spends a couple of weeks on the last. The settlers decide not to stay, however, and the Concord sails for England on June 18, 1602.

May 5, 1602 – Sebastián Vizcaíno’s expedition up the west coast departs Acapulco.

November 10, 1602 – Vizcaíno’s fleet reaches the border of today’s State of California with Mexico. On November 12, he finds a big harbor just to the north, and names it after his flagship, the San Diego.

November 24, 1602 – Vizcaíno sees Catalina Island, and he so names it because it is the day of the Feast of St. Catherine. They land and explore the island on November 27.

December 15, 1602 – Vizcaíno reaches Monterey Bay, which he names in honor of the Viceroy of New Spain.

January 12, 1603 – Vizcaíno reaches Cape Mendocino. Facing a storm and burdened with a disease-ridden crew, the fleet turns around and sails south with the wind now at their back.

March 15, 1603 – Samuel de Champlain and his uncle, Captain Francois Gravé, known as “Pont-Gravé” to his men and history, sail from France with three ships, arriving at the mouth of the St. Lawrence in mid-May, 1603. They bring two Montaignais Indians who had been in France the previous year, having been brought back by Pont-Gravé on an earlier visit to the St. Lawrence. They will act as interpreters.

March 21, 1603 – Vizcaíno makes it back to Acapulco.

March 24, 1603 – Elizabeth I dies. She was sixty nine years old and had reigned forty-five years and one hundred and twenty-seven days. 

April 10, 1603 – Martin Pring, in command of Speedwell and Discoverer, sailed from Milford Haven in Wales to New England in search of sassafras. Sailing via the Azores, on the route pioneered for the English by Bartholomew Gosnold, the two ships reached the “northern coast of Virginia” at latitude 43 degrees, just south of today’s Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in the first part of June. From there they sailed north to roughly the mouth of the Saco River on the coast of Maine, and then turned around and went south to 41.5 degrees, Martha’s Vineyard, where they stayed for more than a month. He brings two mastiffs, Fool and Gallant, who are the first two dogs in North America whose names come down to us.

May 26, 1603 – Champlain and Pont-Gravé drop anchor at Tadoussac harbor on the St. Lawrence, about 100 miles downriver from the future Quebec City. They take the Indian interpreters and have a first productive encounter with the local tribes up the Saguenay river.

June 18, 1603 – Champlain and Pont-Gravé sail farther up the St. Lawrence, reaching the site of Quebec City on June 22. After exploring the area, they continue up river to the fall line, a place Jacques Cartier had named “Mont Real” during his explorations of the first half of the 1500s.

August-September 1603 – Champlain and Pont-Gravé return to France.

October 1603 – Pring returns to England.

May 8, 1604 – Samuel de Champlain and Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons, arrive off the coast of Nova Scotia with two ships, 200 or so skilled men, and supplies for a year. Their goal is to establish a permanent settlement in Acadia.

Summer 1604 – After exploring the region by shallop, Champlain and the Sieur de Mons choose a five-acre defensible island in the St. Croix River for their settlement. At that point the St. Croix River is the border between the United States and Canada, and their island is about 1700 feet inside the United States. They plant crops and build houses, a church, and a government building around a central square. Champlain and Sieur de Mons sent all but 70 of the men home in the two ships in September.

August 28, 1604 – James I signs a treaty ending the long war with Spain.

September 2, 1604 – Champlain begins the first of several expeditions along the coast of Maine in a shallow-draft boat with perhaps a dozen men, including two Indians to help with translation. On September 5 they reach Mount Desert Island, Maine. After further exploration, they return to St. Croix Island on October 2, 1604.

March 31, 1605 – George Weymouth, in command of Archangel, departs for New England with the purpose of finding a suitable settlement for a Catholic colony. He arrives at the coast of Maine in mid-May.

June 4, 1605 – Weymouth captures five Maine Indians – Nahanada, Amoret, Skidwarres, Maneddo, and Assacomoit – and takes them back to England, arriving there July 18.

June 1605 – After enduring a brutal and deadly winter on St. Croix Island, Champlain and Sieur de Mons again explore the coast of Maine, then known as Norumbega. They explore the Kennebec River in early July.

July 10, 1605 – Champlain and Sieur de Mons reach Saco Bay, Maine.

July 11, 1605 – Champlain and Sieur de Mons sail the coast of today’s New Hampshire, and reach Cape Ann, today’s Rockport, Massachusetts. There they had modest success communicating by signs, and got the Indians to draw a map with charcoal of the coastline ahead.  They described what would be the Charles River, and Boston’s Back Bay.

July 18, 1605 – Champlain and Sieur de Mons reach Patuxet, the future Plymouth, Massachusetts. On July 20 they sail around the tip of Cape Cod, and on July 21 they reach Nauset, Massachusetts. The Indians are hostile, and ambush sailors who went ashore to get fresh water. On July 25, they turn around and sail north, back to St. Croix River.

April 10, 1606 – James I signs the original Charter of the Virginia Company. It awards a patent for the southern part of “Virginia” to a group of investors from London, and the northern part – the mid-Atlantic states and New England – to a group of investors from Plymouth.

December 20, 1606 – The Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery leave England bound for the Chesapeake. The Susan Constant, was, at 120 tons, only 116 feet long. Her captain was Christopher Newport, the most experienced man at sea in the group, and John Smith was on board. Bartholomew Gosnold commanded the 40-ton, 68 foot Godspeed. The Discovery, roughly 20 tons and fifty feet long, was captained by John Ratcliffe.

February 13, 1607 – King Philip III of Spain orders St. Augustine abandoned, the withdrawal of Spain from La Florida, and the relocation of converted Catholic Indians to Hispaniola. Word of the King’s order doesn’t reach St. Augustine until October 1607, by which time the Spanish know of the English settlement at Jamestown. They ask the Crown to reconsider its decision, and in the summer of 1608 Philip III rescinds the order.

April 26, 1607 – The Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery spot land at Virginia Beach after an arduous and dissent-ridden crossing that had resulted in, among other things, John Smith being confined to the Susan Constant’s brig.

May 14, 1607 – After scouting the lower James River, the English settle on Pespahegh, a peninsula on the north bank of the James with deep water right up to the shore owned by a tribe of that same name. It was accessible by land only through a narrow neck, that seemed easily defend. They name the place James Fort.

May 18, 1607 – The local chief Wowinchopunck arrived with deer for feasting and with a hundred men armed with bows and arrows. A few of the nervous English had firearms at the ready. Wowinchopunck motioned for them to put down their weapons, which they refused to do. Then a Paspahegh warrior picked up an English hatchet, and a scuffle ensued over it. Wowinchopunck took his men and stormed off in anger.

May 21, 1607 – Captain Christopher Newport, John Smith, and a detachment of soldiers leave Jamestown to explore the region. It is on this trip that they first hear of a paramount chief in the region.

Late May, 1607 – While Newport and Smith were exploring the James, an alliance of five tribes – the Quiyoughcohannocks, the Weyanocks, the Appomattocs, the Paspaheghs, and the Kiskiacks attacked the settlement with at least two hundred soldiers, taking it entirely by surprise. The English pulled the guns from the crates and rallied to defend themselves. In James Horn’s account, “the Indians came right up to the camp and shot their arrows through the tents, wounding twelve of the English, two of whom later died.” The attack is repelled when the Indians retreat after seeing the Susan Constant‘s cannon take down a tree.

May 31, 1607 – Sir John Popham and Sir Ferdinando Gorges organized a colonizing expedition to Maine.  It consisted of two ships – the Gift of God under the command of George Popham, and the Mary and John under Raleigh Gilbert. They carried around 100 colonists, including the last two of the five kidnapped Indians, Skidwarres and Amoret.

June 22, 1607 – Christopher Newport with the Susan Constant and the Godspeed return to England, leaving behind the Discovery and a shallop. With the departure of the sailors, who had done much of the manual work, class differences emerged among the colonists and they essentially stopped working.

August 6, 1607 – The colonists at James Fort start dying in droves. On August 22, the wise and humane Bartholomew Gosnold dies. Governor Edward-Maria Wingfield does not get sick, and John Smith accuses him over helping himself to too many rations.

August 16, 1607 – The Gift of God and the Mary and John reach the coast of Maine near the mouth of the Kennebec River. Within a few days they identify a location for the their settlement, on the coast about 12 miles southeast of today’s Brunswick. They name it Fort St. George. This becomes known as the “Popham” or “Sagadahoc” colony.

September 10, 1607 – John Smith builds an alliance on the Jamestown council to oust Wingfield and replace him with Ratcliffe.

November 9, 1607 – Ratcliffe dispatches Smith with a detachment in the Discovery and the shallop to explore the Chickahominy River and trade for food. It is the first of three such food-buying trips Smith will make.

Early December 1607 – On the third food-buying trip, John Smith and a small party are attacked by Indians, probably Pamunkeys. Smith meets Opechancanough in a fateful exchange. Opechancanough took Smith to Werowocomoco, and he meets Wahunsonacock, also known as Powhatan.

January 2, 1608 – John Smith returns to Jamestown with a contingent of twelve Powhatan men led by Rawhunt, one of Powhatan’s most trusted lieutenants, having established diplomatic relations with the paramount chief. On arriving, Smith learned that a group of the “gentlemen” have commandeered Discovery and were preparing to sail her to England. He orders his men to point a cannon at the ship and the mutineers to return to shore.

January 3-7, 1608 – Captain Newport returns with 100 settlers and new supplies. On January 7, one of the new arrivals lets a fire get out of control and it burns most of the settlement, including the storehouse with the new supplies.

January-February 1608 – Newport and Smith meet with Powhatan again, and swap two teenagers, Thomas Savage to live with Powhatan and Namontack to live with the English. Namontack would return to England with Newport in April.

February 5, 1608 – George Popham died, leaving Raleigh Gilbert in sole command of the Popham Colony.

April 10, 1608 – Captain Newport sails for England from Jamestown with Namontack, among others.

April 20, 1608 – Captain Francis Nelson in the Phoenix arrived at Jamestown with between forty and sixty new settlers and a lot of food.

April – June 1608 – Samuel de Champlain sails for the St. Lawrence again, arriving in June. He proceeds upriver to build a settlement which he calls Quebec, after the Indian name for the place.

June 2, 1608 – Captain Nelson and the Phoenix departed Jamestown for England arriving there not long after Newport.  In addition to a load of cedar clapboard, Nelson carried something of immense value – a sketch map and a 13,000 word narrative diary that John Smith had handed him just before he embarked.

June – September 1608 – John Smith makes two separate expeditions to explore the Chesapeake, and opens up trading relations with the various tribes. Champlain learns that European demand for furs has already led to war between his Algonquian allies, including the Montaignais, and the Mohawks of the Iroquois in upstate New York.

July 5, 1608 – Raleigh Gilbert’s oldest brother, Sir John Gilbert died, leaving Raleigh the family estates. A final resupply ship would leave England in July bearing that news and arrive at the colony in September 1608.  Raleigh Gilbert immediately determined that he had to go back to England to take over the family lands.  With both leaders dead, no obvious successor, winter coming again, and financial support fading, the remaining colonists left with Gilbert in October, ending the story of the Popham Colony of the Virginia Company.

Late September 1608 – Captain Christopher Newport returns to Jamestown early than expected, bringing Namontack home. Newport also brought eight Germans and Poles – probably the first Poles ever to visit the New World – who were skilled in making glass, pitch, tar and potash. 

Autumn 1608 – Newport and Smith visit Powhatan at Werawocomoco, and attempt to put a crown on his head in a “coronation.” Gifts are exchanged, and Newport makes promises to Powhatan, including to build him an English style house. German carpenters are sent to do the work.

January 12, 1609 – Smith visits Powhatan at Weawocomoco again. Powhatan feigns good-faith negotiations, but prepares an ambush. Pocahontas warns Smith of the ambush, and they stay on their guard and prevent the attack.

January 14, 1609 (est) – Smith and his company visit Opechancanough, who has also prepared an ambush. When Smith is warned by a fellow Englishman that they are surrounded by Indian soldiers, Smith grabs Opechancanough by a knot in his hair, puts a pistol to his chest, and negotiates safe passage.

Late January, 1609 – Having returned to Jamestown, Smith finds it in disorder and running out of food. He gives his famous order that only those who work will receive food, an affront to the “gentlemen.”

April 6, 1609 – Henry Hudson, sailing for the Dutch, leaves Amsterdam in his new ship, the Half Moon. Per his instructions, he sails toward Norway, looking for a northeast passage to Asia.

May 23, 1609 – A new charter for Virginia colony is issued in London, dissolving the council and replacing it with a single governor. The new governor would be Sir Thomas Gates, an experienced military man who had fought in the Netherlands and Ireland, and as a young man had served on Francis Drake’s mission to the West Indies in 1585-86, and been at Roanoke when Drake picked up Ralph Lane’s colony.

June 7, 1609 – Samuel de Champlain and Pont-Gravé develop a plan for a preemptive attack on the Mohawks. The point is not conquest, but to deter further Mohawk aggression.

June 28, 1609 – A force of Frenchmen and Algonquians sail the Iroquois River south toward New York with the goal of fighting Mohawks.

July 13, 1609 – Samuel Argall arrives in Jamestown, having chased off a Spanish ship probing at the mouth of the Chesapeake. Argall tells Smith that he will be relieved of command and replaced by Sir Thomas Gates when the Sea Venture arrives with new orders.

July 14, 1609 – Champlain and his allies enter Lake Champlain from the north. They are almost certainly the first Europeans to see it.

July 18, 1609 – Henry Hudson and the Half Moon, having abandoned the search for a northeast passage and turned toward North America, arrive off Nova Scotia.

July 24, 1609 – A hurricane strikes “the third supply” to Jamestown, and the Sea Venture is believed lost. Instead, it is shipwrecked on Bermuda.

July 29 – 30, 1609 – Champlain, two other Frenchmen, and his Algonquians allies encounter Mohawks in canoes on the water near Ticonderoga. They agree to fight early on the morning of July 30. The result is a shocking victory for Champlain and the Algonquians.

August 11, 1609 – The first ships of the “third supply” arrive in Jamestown. Sir Thomas Gates and the orders to replace John Smith, however, were on the Sea Venture, which had been lost in a storm. Unbeknownst to the settlers at Jamestown, it had been shipwrecked on Bermuda. Without orders, Smith refuses to step down until the end of his term on September 10.

August 28, 1609 – After having sailed the Atlantic Coast of North America south all the way to North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Hudson turns the Half Moon around, and reaches Delaware Bay on August 28.

September 2, 1609 – The Half Moon reaches Sandy Hook. On September 4 Hudson and his men go ashore, and have their first encounter with Indians of New Jersey.

September 6, 1609 – The Half Moon sails into lower New York Harbor. Hudson sends out men in a ship’s boat to explore, and they are attacked by 26 Indians in two canoes. Englishman John Coleman dies from an arrow through the throat. Hudson would stay in the area until around September 10, both trading with and having hostile encounters with different Indian groups.

September 14, 1609 – Having sailed up the North/Hudson River, the Half Moon reaches West Point.

September 18, 1609 – The Half Moon nears the future site of Albany. On September 20, the ship’s carpenter goes ashore to cut a tree for a new spar, and encounters friendly Indians (probably people subsequently known as the Esopus). They come aboard and find out they rather enjoy beer.

September 22, 1609 – Hudson sends the ship’s boat to explore north. It reaches the mouth of the Mohawk River, at which point it returns to the Half Moon. On September 23, the Half Moon sails back down the North/Hudson River.

October 1, 1609 – The Half Moon reaches Stony Point, and a trading misunderstanding leads to conflict with local Indians.

October 2, 1609 – The Half Moon‘s crew learns that the big island on the east bank of the lower North/Hudson River is called Manna-hata. The Half Moon sails for England on October 4.

October 4, 1609 – John Smith, having been terribly burned in an accident (or perhaps an attempted murder) when his powder horn caught fire in early September, returns to England. He would live more than 20 more years, but would never come back to Virginia again.

Winter 1609-1610 (in New Mexico) – Almost twelve years after crossing the Rio Grande, Don Juan de Onate y Salazar establishes the capital of New Mexico at Santa Fe. The traditional founding of the city is 1610, but there is no documented founding moment.

Winter 1609-1610 (in Virginia) – The “starving time” at Jamestown. Powhatan launches the First Anglo-Powhatan War shortly after John Smith’s departure, focusing on cutting off the food supply to Jamestown. By March 1610, after a winter of great suffering and even cannibalism, only 60 of the ~500 settlers who had been there at Smith’s departure survived.

April 1, 1610 – Thomas West, Lord de la Warr, leads the “fourth supply” from England to Jamestown. He has been appointed governor, Sir Thomas Gates – shipwrecked in Bermuda – having been given up for dead.

June 7, 1610 – Sir Thomas Gates, now in Jamestown after having spent most of a year in Bermuda, deems the colony untenable and orders its abandonment. Sailing down the James River on June 8, they encounter lead boats from de la Warr’s fleet and turn around. Jamestown is recovered on June 10, having been abandoned for three days.

June 19, 1610 – The Council of Virginia sends Samuel Argall and George Somers in two small ships to Bermuda to retrieve hogs and other supplies that had been left there by the Sea Venture castaways. Along the way the two ships were separated, and at least Argall’s Discovery was swept up in the Gulf Stream to the north. Argall fished the Cape Cod shoals, sailed at least as far north as Penobscot Bay, sailed down the coast, named Point Delaware – after Lord De La Warr – and returned to Jamestown with his load of fish, most of which he donated.

July 9, 1610 – Reinforced by the soldiers in de la Warr’s fleet, Sir Thomas Gates initiated the English counteroffensive when his forces suddenly, and without provocation, descended upon the Kecoughtan village near Fort Algernon.  His musketeers killed some twenty men, women, and children, easily inflicting “extraordinary large and mortal wounds” on a high percentage of the population because the unsuspecting Kecoughtans had been lured into the open by the tunes and dancing of Gates’ drummer – a traditional Powhatan gesture of hospitality. 

March 28, 1611 – After having survived a long winter with a detachment of men up the James River under constant siege from the locals, Thomas West, Lord de la Warr, sails for England on Samuel Argall’s ship, never to return to Virginia. Testing the leadership change, the Powhatan Confederacy immediately attacks Jamestown.

May 12, 1611 – Sir Thomas Dale arrived in Virginia with three ships, a great store of armor, munitions, food, and three hundred more veteran soldiers who had been tempered in brutal fighting in Ireland and the Netherlands.  Dale and his men were very experienced, hardened soldiers, and were the first English fighters in North America to bring comprehensive steel armor. Dale himself was a very tough customer.

Early August 1611 – Sir Thomas Gates came back to Virginia with six more ships and another 250 soldiers, giving the English overwhelming military advantage. They build fortifications along the James River, and the Powhatans and their allies retreat to Pamunkey country. The war would continued for more than two years, but there would be very little fighting.

October 30, 1611 – Gustavus Adolphus ascended to the throne of Sweden at age 16. He would turn Sweden into a Great Power, and eventually cast his eyes to the New World, leading to Swedish settlement on the Delaware River.

September 12, 1612 – Samuel Argall returns to Jamestown, and trades with Chesapeake tribes further to the north, developing the relationships that would be useful in capturing Pocahontas.

April 11, 1613 – Samuel Argall captures Pocahontas by means of a ruse while she is visiting an allied tribe on the Potomac. He dispatches a runner to notify Powhatan and takes her back to Jamestown on April 13. Sir Thomas Dale, the deputy governor in Virginia, sends Pocahontas up river to the fort at Henrico, where she learns to read English. John Rolfe meets her for the first time there.

June 1613 – Argall in his ship Treasurer sails up the eastern seaboard looking for a French settlement along the coast of Maine. On the way he forces a Dutch merchant in New York harbor to submit to the English flag. On the same voyage, he bloodlessly rousts a small French base on Mt. Desert Island, Maine.

Spring 1614 – Sir Thomas Dale, governor of Virginia, allows some small freeholders to own their own land and keep their crops, a first departure from collective farming at Jamestown. By the end of the year, ninety small private farms were harvesting crops. Richard Hamor reported that three men were now as productive as 30 before. While an exaggeration, allowing private farms greatly increased food security in the colony.

April 5, 1614 – John Rolfe and Pocahontas get married, effectively settling the First Anglo-Powhatan War. Pocahontas is christened, and given the English name Rebecca.

April 1614 – John Smith and Thomas Hunt arrive at Saco Bay, Maine to explore Norumbega, the area that Smith would soon name “New England.” He and Hunt would separate. Smith would sail on a small bark southward along the coast more than 250 miles, to the southern end of Cape Cod. He documented large populations of Indians all along the coast, and identified Patuxet, where the Mayflower Pilgrims would eventually settle.

Summer 1614 – Thomas Hunt captures 27 Indians from Cape Code and Patuxet, and sails for Malaga, Spain to sell them as slaves. One of those captured Indians is named Tisquantum, who apparently already knows some English, probably learned from fisherman. He is rescued by Spanish priests, and goes to live in a monastery. In 1616, an Englishman named John Slany would hear that the Spanish had an Anglophone Indian, and would negotiate for Tisquantum, who would come to live in Slany’s household in London for more than a year.

January 30, 1615 – Pocahontas/Matoaka/Rebecca gives birth to a son, Thomas Rolfe.

April 24, 1615 – Samuel de Champlain and Pont-Gravé, returning to New France after several years, sailed from France for the St. Lawrence River. After a fast crossing, they reach Tadoussac on May 25. They assemble modular shallops, and reach Quebec on June 2, 1615. He learns that his Huron and Algonquian allies want help in contending with the western Iroquois.

July 4, 1615 – Champlain begins a long journey of more than 500 miles through eastern Ontario and western New York, rounding up Indian allies for an attack on Onondaga, the fortified town roughly at the site of Syracuse, New York.

August 17, 1615 – Champlain reached Cahiague, a town of three to six thousand people – Champlain says 6,000, but modern archeologists estimate 3,000 people — protected by a massive palisade, just west of today’s Orillia, Ontario, on the shore of Lake Simcoe.  The chief of the region was overjoyed to see Champlain.  It was quickly agreed that warriors would be assembled for an attack at the heart of the land of the Iroquois.  Between four and five hundred warriors materialized, and Champlain had perhaps a dozen arquebusiers.  The multinational army departed September 1 on a 40-day journey to Onondaga.

October 9-10, 1615 – Champlain and his Indian allies approach Onondaga, which is heavily fortified. They attack, and are repulsed. Champlain himself is wounded and has to be carried forty miles back to water transport. The attack is a tactical failure, but the Onondaga refrain from attacking Champlain’s allies for 20 years, suggesting they had been deterred.

April 1616 – John Rolfe, Pocahontas, and their son Thomas sail for London on Samuel Argall’s ship Treasurer. In addition to the Rolfes, Powhatan’s son-in-law, Uttamatomakin, came along at the paramount chief’s behest to learn what he could of the English. There were at least six and probably eight or nine other Indians on board, a mix of nobles and servants, one of whom was to serve as Uttamatomakin’s interpreter.

March 17, 1617 – Pocahontas dies at Gravesend, after a visit to London.

1617 – John Slany sends Tisquantum to Newfoundland to translate for traders, but his dialect of Algonquian is too removed from the Indians in the region to be understandable. Tisquantum returns to London.

November 18, 1618 – The Virginia Company adopted a new charter. Known as the “Great Charter,” it did three important things.  First, it lifted the martial law that had prevailed since the darkest moments of the first Powhatan War in 1610.  It also authorized a general assembly, in which English men of property would have some capacity for self-governance.  Finally, the Great Charter provided for the widespread private ownership of land by Englishmen in Virginia by making grants to men who went there to settle and plant a farm.

January 29, 1619 – Sir George Yeardley, the next governor of Virginia, sails from England with the Great Charter.

Spring 1619 – Sir Ferdinando Gorges sends Tisquantum and Thomas Dermer, an English captain, down the coast of New England. They learn that the indigenous population on the coast south of Maine has been destroyed by an epidemic. Dermer leaves Tisquantum on Martha’s Vineyard, to connect with Epanow, another Indian from the region who had spent several years in London.

June 30, 1619 – The first General Assembly of Virginia convenes. It is the first gathering of a (sort of) elected representative body of Europeans in North America. The secretary of the meeting was John Pory, who would later lead an early expedition into North Carolina.

Late August 1619 – John Rolfe writes a letter to Sir Edwin Sandys, the treasurer of the Virginia Company. Rolfe reports: “About the latter end of August, a Dutch man of War of the burden of 160 tons arrived at Point Comfort, the Commander’s name Captain Jope, his Pilot for the West Indies one Mr. Marmaduke, an Englishman. They met with the Treasurer in the West Indies, and determined to hold consort ship hitherward, but in their passage lost one the other. He brought not anything but 20 and odd Negroes, which the Governor and Cape Merchant bought for victuals (whereof he was in great need as he pretended) at the best and easiest rates they could.”

September 6, 1620 – The Mayflower, after two aborted attempts, finally sets sail from Plymouth, England, intended destination New York harbor.

November 3, 1620 – Sir Ferdinando Gorges establishes the Council for New England, which would eventually legitimize the Pilgrim settlement at New Plymouth.

November 9, 1620 – The Mayflower spots land. It is the coast of Cape Cod. They spend the next two days picking their way south, hoping to reach New York, but they turn around when confronted with the very treacherous waters near Martha’s Vineyard.

November 11, 1620 – The Mayflower, carrying “Separatist” Puritans, makes landfall at Provincetown, at the end of Cape Cod. Before going ashore, most of the men on board sign the Mayflower Compact, which provides that they will “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and, by virtue hereof, to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most convenient for the general good of the colony.”

November 13, 1620 – The women of the Mayflower go ashore to do laundry. The day of the week was Monday, and for generations to come Mondays would be “wash day” in New England.

November 15, 1620 – Sixteen armed men of Mayflower, including Miles Standish, William Bradford, and Stephen Hopkins, row ashore in the ship’s boat. The water is so shallow that they have to get out and wade. They begin to explore, and spot a few Indians and a dog. The Pilgrims pursue, hoping to make contact. On November 16 they discover “Pilgrim Spring,” marked today in Nauset. On November 17 they find a store of Indian corn, and return to the ship on November 18.

November 28, 1620 – The ship’s modular shallop having been assembled, a second expedition from Mayflower explores the region.

November 30, 1620 – Peregrine White is born to William and Susanna White. He is the first child known to be born to English parents in New England, and would live almost 85 years, dying July 20, 1704.

December 7, 1620 – While William Bradford is with others in the shallop exploring, Dorothy Bradford falls off Mayflower and drowns. Some historians speculate she committed suicide because of depression.

December 11, 1620 – The Mayflower men in the shallop explore the harbor at Patuxet/New Plymouth and take soundings. They conclude that it would be a good place to settle, even though they had no authorization from England to do so.

December 23, 1620 – Mayflower has crossed from Provincetown to Plymouth. After two days waiting out bad weather, men go ashore and start cutting trees to make houses. The first house was framed by the end of December 25. The ensuing winter was rough, and during the course of it more than half the original passengers would die.

February 16, 1621 – A Pilgrim man hunting from a duck blind sees a band of Indians pass nearby. They do not see him. On February 17, a meeting was called to discuss defenses, and a small militia is established under Myles Standish.

March 16, 1621 – An Indian named Samoset marches through the front gate of the settlement and announces “Welcome Englishmen”! He turns out to be an Abenaki sachem visiting from Maine. Samoset explained in his rudimentary English that the name of this place was Patuxet, that almost everyone who had lived there had died of a plague in the last few years, and that the supreme leader of the region was Massasoit, who lived at a place called Pocanoket about forty miles to the south.  He told them that the Nauset, the people on Cape Cod who had attacked them during the famous “First Encounter,” were hostile to the English because of Thomas Hunt’s perfidy back in 1614. He also reported that there was another Indian back in Pokanoket named Squanto, who spoke better English than he did.  Samoset spent the night with Stephen Hopkins and his family – perhaps Hopkins volunteered because his Jamestown experience made him more comfortable than the other Pilgrims – and Samoset departed the next morning, promising to return in a few days with some of Massasoit’s men.

March 22, 1621 – Samoset returns to New Plymouth with Squanto and three other Indians. They report that Massasoit is near by. Soon that day, Massasoit appears with sixty warriors. With Samoset and Squanto translating, the Pilgrims and Massasoit hammer out a peace treaty that would survive largely without breach for more than 50 years. The next day, Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to hunt for eels under the mud in nearby streams.

July 2, 1621 – William Bradford, Edward Winslow, and Stephen Hopkins set out to walk the forty or so miles to Pokanoket, the seat of Massasoit’s government. Their mission is to deliver the grand sachem a red English coat and a copper chain, which he is to give to his messengers to confirm their legitimacy.

August 14, 1621 – Myles Standish and one of Massasoit’s men, Hobbamock, attack the wetu of Corbitant, a Narragansett sachem who was conspiring to break up the alliance between the Wampanoags and the English. It was the first military intervention by the Pilgrims in inter-Indian affairs. Although Corbitant was not at home, the attack was a success in the sense that in the weeks that followed the local sachems came to Plymouth and swore allegiance to King James.

Fall 1621 – The “first Thanksgiving”! A more nuanced examination here. The moment was, at a minimum, a reflection of the trust that had been established between the Pilgrims and the local Indians.

Late November 1621 – The Fortune arrives at Plymouth with 35 new settlers, only a few of which were Separatists. Among the passengers on the Fortune was a sixteen year-old young man named Philip de la Noye, whose French name was eventually spelled Delano and whose descendants included Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

December 1, 1621 – Parliament sends James I a list of fourteen grievances, all concerning Catholics. It demanded the enforcement of the laws of conformity against Catholics and further that Prince Charles, the King’s son, “be happily married to one of our own religion,” a slap at James’s flirtations with Spain. In the resulting confrontation, James would arrest Sir Edward Coke and send him to the Tower. This would be the first assertion of Parliament’s prerogative against the Crown, initiating a crisis that would result in the Puritan Great Migration to New England seven years later and the English Civil Wars 25 years later.

Late 1621 – early 1622 – Tisquantum travels around the region claiming to have influence on the English at Plymouth, while conspiring to garner support for his own elevation at Massasoit’s expense. Naturally, word gets back to Massasoit.

Spring 1622 – The Pilgrims hear that the Narragansetts may attack them. Myles Standish drills a small “trained band,” and the settlers build a palisade of more than a thousand pales to fortify the town.

Mid-March 1622 – John Pory, the secretary of state for Virginia, traveled some sixty miles south of the James into North Carolina and explored the Chowan River. Pory is the first known Englishman to visit North Carolina since John White investigated the aftermath of the “Lost” Colony of Roanoke in 1590.

March 22, 1622 – Opechancanough launches a surprise attack, the opening battle in the Second Anglo-Powhatan War. Hundreds of English die on the first day.

May 1622 – Thomas Weston, the primary financier of the Pilgrims, sends another sixty settlers to Plymouth for the Pilgrims to feed. None of them are religious Separatists. At about the same time, the Pilgrims learn of Opechancanough’s attack from a cod fisherman.

June – November 1622 – The English in Virginia regrouped into fortified settlements after Opechancanough’s surprise attack, and then counterattacked against the tribes of the Powhatan Confederacy.

September 5, 1622 – The Great Storm of that year strikes the Florida Keys and the Atlantic off of Florida, destroying shipping from Key West to Bermuda.

Fall 1622 – The 60 new settlers at Plymouth move to Wessagussett, in close proximity – too close – to the Massachusett nation. They promptly failed to feed themselves.

Fall 1622 – Tisquantum dies of a sudden illness while with Bradford and others on a trading mission to Cape Cod, in the vicinity of Chatham, Massachusetts. Some historians speculate that he may have been poisoned at the direction of Massasoit for having conspired against the sachem.

1623 (date unknown) – The Jemez Revolt. Indians at the Pueblo near Albuquerque rise up and destroy the Spanish mission at Giusewa. They destroy a church capable of holding 2000 worshipers, burning it to the ground.

March 1623 – Edward Winslow treats Massasoit, who has fallen extremely ill, and seemingly saves his life. The treatment involves, among other things, chicken soup. A grateful Massasoit warns Winslow of a plot by the Massachusetts to attack the English at Wessagussett and then Plymouth.

March 23, 1623 – William Bradford convenes a public meeting to discuss the threat from the Massachusetts. Upon the advice of Myles Standish, and by now knowing the impact of Opechancanough’s attack in Virginia the year before, they decide on a pre-emptive strike at Wessagussett.

May 22, 1623 – Opechancanough has offered peace to the Virginians, and proposes to release captives. The English agree to meet and feign a deal, which they seal with a cask of poisoned wine. More than 200 Indians die in the trap, but Opechancanough escapes. He may have been injured, because the English did not see him again for seven years. The Second Anglo-Powhatan War would continue at low intensity until 1632.

Summer 1623 – Plymouth gives up collective farming and gives families private lands in proportion to their size. Food production soared once families were able to keep the output of their own private plots. This is in spite of a severe drought from mid-May to mid-July, a dry-spell worse than any time in Plymouth during the entire 20th century. The drought ended immediately after the Pilgrims had a day of fasting to pray for rain.

August 14, 1623 – William Bradford marries Alice Southworth. There to commemorate the governor’s nuptials was Massasoit, with a black wolf skin draped over his shoulder and, for propriety’s sake, with just one of his five wives by his side. He brought along 120 soldiers, who “danced with such a noise that you would wonder.”

January 1624 – The first permanent settlers in New Netherland leave the mother country on a small ship named Eendracht commanded by Adriaen Jorisz Thienpont. It is believed these colonists were divided over four locations: the mouth of the Fresh River (probably Kievits Hoeck (now Old Saybrook, Connecticut) on the western bank), Fort Wilhemus on the Hooghe eylant (now Burlington Island, between Philadelphia and Trenton) on the South River, Nooten Eylandt (now Governor’s Island) near Manhattan, and the upper reaches of the North River, where Fort Orange was founded (near today’s Albany.) The reason for the dispersion of the colonists was to lay claim to the whole area.

March 1624 – Thomas Morton was on his way to New England on a ship called Unity under the command of Captain Richard Wollaston and another adventurer, Humphrey Rastall. In New England by the summer, they established a colony at the site of today’s Quincy, Massachusetts, which they named Mount Wollaston.

May 24, 1624 – James I of England revokes the Charter of the Virginia Company and establishes a Crown or “royal” colony in its place. Virginia thereby becomes the first royal colony, which would become the most common type by the American revolution.

March 27, 1625 – James I dies, and his son, now Charles I, becomes King of England. There would be consequences.

November 5, 1626 – The date of the first documentary evidence that Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan Island for the Dutch West India Company from a band of the Leni Lenape tribe, probably in mid-May 1626.

October 1627 – Isaack de Rasieres, secretary of New Netherland, visits Plymouth and persuades them to start using wampum as a currency. The monetization of wampum among Europeans in the northeast would transform the geopolitics of the region.

Spring 1628 – George Calvert, the first Baron Baltimore, brings forty settlers to his new Avalon colony in Newfoundland. The winter is brutal, and by the following summer he pulls the plug.

June 1628 – Thomas Morton having renamed Mount Wollaston “Merrymount,” set up a maypole, and encouraged no end of debauchery (as well as having sold the Indians guns), the Pilgrims dispatch Myles Standish and a few soldiers to arrest him. This they do, and send him to England for prosecution.

July 1628 – Charles I appoints William Laud to the post of Bishop of London. Laud begins cracking down on “non-conforming” Puritans.

September 6, 1628 – John Endecott, leader of the vanguard of the Puritan Great Migration, arrives at Merrymount and cuts down the maypole Thomas Morton had erected there.

January 13, 1629 – Plymouth colony gets an exclusive right called “Warwick Patent” or “Kennebec Patent ” for the trading post Cushnoc (now Augusta, Maine) that they had founded the previous year on the banks of the Kennebec River.

February 11, 1629 – A Puritan fleet of six ships and 350 settlers, including as many as 180 indentured servants, departs the Isle of Wight for Salem, Massachusetts. It arrives in June.

March 4, 1629 – The Massachusetts Bay Company receives its charter from Charles I.

March 10, 1629 – Charles I dissolves Parliament, which was heavily Puritan, and would not call another until 1640. The dissolution of Parliament and resulting crackdown accelerates Puritan emigration to New England and elsewhere. Roger Williams was, at the time, working for Parliament as a messenger among the members. The dissolution would influence his thinking for the rest of his life.

June 2, 1629 – Charles I gives the Earle of Carlisle a proprietary charter for the Caribbean islands, particularly Barbados. It would become the precedent for subsequent proprietary colonies in North America.

August 19, 1629 – George Calvert sends a letter to Charles I requesting a grant of land for his new colony in “Virginia,” where the weather is a lot nicer than Newfoundland.

October 30, 1629 – Charles I grants a proprietary colony for the land south of Virginia to Sir Robert Heath.  The Heath proprietary – named Carolana in honor of Charles  – covered the territory between 31 and 36 degrees, which extends from just north of Florida in today’s Georgia to the southern bank of Albemarle Sound. Various attempts to settle the Heath proprietary fail before they get to North Carolina.

Late 1629 – Thomas Morton returns to Merrymount after having avoided prosecution in England.

April 8, 1630 – The flagship of the “Winthrop fleet,” the Arbella, and several consorts sails from Yarmouth, Isle of Wight. She would arrive at Salem on June 13, 1630, with other ships following along.

June 17, 1630 – John Winthrop begins exploring the rivers and bays around Boston. He meets Samuel Maverick, who had been living with his wife in a palisaded house on the site of Logan Airport since 1624. On the same trip, Winthrop decided that his people should build their settlement at the site of Charlestown.

July 12, 1630 – Michael Pauw, an important merchant of Amsterdam and a director of the Dutch West India Company, armed with a patent from the WIC, purchases land from local Indians on the west bank of the Hudson River across from Manhattan. Pauw makes a second purchase on November 22, 1630. The territory extends from Bayonne, New Jersey, north to roughly the Bergen County line. Pauw names the territory, which is the first known purchase of land in today’s New Jersey, “Pavonia.”

August 1630 – John Winthrop orders that Thomas Morton be arrested on the (probably trumped up) charge of stealing an Indian’s canoe. He is convicted, banished, and sent back to England. Once again, the charges against him would be dismissed in England. Morton thus became the first person banished by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but he would not be the last.

October 1630 – The Winthrop Puritans determine that there is inadequate fresh water at Charlestown, so some of them decide to remove to the peninsula they would soon name Boston. The problem is, another “straggler” recluse, William Blackstone, has his farm there. Winthrop buys it from him, and Blackstone moves to the northern part of today’s Rhode Island, where he would live for another 40 years. Blackstone’s Boston farm becomes the town Common.

December 6, 1630 – Governor Winthrop and his “assistants” meet and decide to fortify the neck of the Shawmut peninsula (Boston).

December 12, 1630 – A ship with some 28 settlers set sail from Holland under the leadership of David Pieterszoon de Vries, with the goal of establishing a colony on the Delaware River. They would land at Lewes, Delaware and give it the old college try, but at some point in the next two years would be wiped out by local Indians.

February 6, 1631 – The Lyon, a ship of the Winthrop Fleet that had sailed back to England in September 1630, arrives back in Massachusetts Bay with new passengers, the most consequential being Roger Williams.

April 12, 1631 – Roger Williams has been offered the job of “teacher” at the Boston church, but finding it insufficiently pure he turns down the honor and moves to Salem, where John Endecott offers him the job of minister at the church there. On April 12, the now quite annoyed Winthrop and his Court of Assistants write to Endecott suggesting he withdraw the offer to Williams. Endecott does, and by August 1631 Williams and his wife Mary move to Plymouth and live under the protection of William Bradford and Edward Winslow.

August 17, 1631 – William Claiborne of the Virginia Colony purchases Kent Island in the northern Chesapeake from local Indians. He establishes a settlement and a trading post. His authority for doing so is an ambiguous patent for trading in the region, but not settlement per se.

November 4, 1631 – The Lyon returns again from England, this time bringing John Winthrop’s wife and children. The harvest is in, and they have a big feast to celebrate.

April 15, 1632 – George Calvert, the first Baron Baltimore, dies before the Maryland Charter can “pass the seals.”

June 20, 1632 – The Charter of Maryland is granted the George Calvert’s eldest son, Cecil, the Second Lord Baltimore.

March 4, 1633 – Boston’s first pub opens.

June 1633 – The Dutch build Fort Good Hope on the Connecticut (Fresh) River at the site of today’s Hartford.

September 1633 – The Pilgrims of Plymouth build their own trading post on the Connecticut River, just north of Hartford. Because it was upriver, this put them in the lead position to buy furs coming down the river from the north. It is the first of three settlements that the English would build on the river in the next three years.

November 22, 1633 – The Ark and the Dove, the ships that would carry the founding settlers of the Maryland Proprietary, leave the Isle of Wight for the Chesapeake. They would take the southern route and be separated by a storm. Ark reached Barbados on January 3, 1634, and Dove caught up within three weeks.

Late 1633 – Roger Williams and his growing family have been in Plymouth for more than two years. He has many friends, but stokes controversy by asserting in a treatise (lost to history) that Indians developed their land in the English sense and therefore owned it, and that the English could only acquire land from Indians in honest arms-length purchases. This amounts to accusing Charles I of having lied in his official pronouncements, which is too much for Plymouth. In late 1633, Williams asks for permission to withdraw from the Plymouth church, and returns to Salem. He assumes the informal role of “teacher” at the Salem church, and keeps a low profile.

January 24, 1634 – Ark and Dove, carrying the first settlers for the Maryland Proprietary, leave Barbados together, and reach Point Comfort, at the mouth of the Chesapeake, on February 27, 1634.

Winter 1633 -34 – An epidemic, probably smallpox, sweeps through the Indians of the Connecticut River valley. It is estimated that the population of the powerful Pequot tribe declined from 16,000 to 3,000.

March 3, 1634 – After a brief stop in Virginia, Ark and Dove sail up the Chesapeake, and reach the mouth of the Potomac River on March 5.

August 2, 1634 – Samuel Skelton, the minister at the Salem church and the man to whom Roger Williams deferred, dies. Williams becomes actual and spiritual leader of the Salem church, and can no longer avoid theological controversies. Soon thereafter, the General Court of Massachusetts declared a public day of fasting and “humiliation.” Williams objected, identifying eleven public sins for which “it pleased God to inflict and further threaten public calamities.”  They included his objection to the government enforcement of the first four of the Ten Commandments, because that amounted to state contamination of a worshiper’s personal relationship with God and the covenant of grace.  He objected to government-compelled church attendance and the loyalty oaths on the same grounds. Finally, he made public his heretofore private argument that the King had no right to grant the lands used by the Indians.  Williams was effectively arguing that only wholesale reform of the church and government of Massachusetts could prevent the wrath of God. The General Court did not take this well.

August 1634 – Will Hutchinson and his wife Anne and their children arrive in Boston.

Late August 1634 – Jean Nicolet, a young Frenchman under orders from Samuel de Champlain, engages Ottawa Indians to guide him from the eastern end of Lake Huron to the vicinity of Green Bay, Wisconsin. His purpose is to negotiate peace and trading relations with tribes in the region who have been harassing Hurons and Ottawas, allies of the French against the Iroquois, from the west.

Mid-September 1634 – Jean Nicolet and his Indian guides reach the northern shore of Green Bay at roughly the border between Michigan and Wisconsin. After some grand gestures – donning a silk French diplomatic robe and firing pistols into the air – the tribes of the region throw a huge feast for Nicolet. He negotiates trading relations with the tribes along Green Bay, including Door County, Wisconsin.

November 27, 1634 – The General Court of Massachusetts Bay meets to consider, among other things, a response to Roger Williams and attack on Boston church practices. It does not yet expel him, but dispatches clergy to persuade him of the error of his ways.

December 12, 1634 – Two Pequot sachems arrived at Boston, bearing furs and wampum.  They asked the Puritan magistrates to use some of the wampum to broker an end to the Pequot-Narragansett conflict. The Boston authorities and the Pequot envoys negotiated a trade agreement, but the English would not agree to even a defensive military alliance.  Though the treaty has not survived it was written down, the Pequot sachems making their mark by drawing a bow and arrow with a hand. The envoys asked the English to send a pinnace with cloth to trade, and offered them big land concessions in the Connecticut River valley.  Weakened as they were, they thought that more English in the valley would help maintain the peace.

April 5, 1635 – Two ships owned by the Calvert family, the proprietors of Maryland Colony, seized the Longtail, a pinnace that belonged to William Claiborne of Kent Island, whom the Calverts had been trying to evict. Claiborne begins arming his ships.

April 23, 1635 – The Boston Latin School is founded. It is the oldest still-operating school in today’s United States.

April 23, 1635 – William Claiborne’s armed sloop Cockatrice confronts the St. Helen and the St. Margaret sailing out of St. Mary’s City, Maryland. Shots are fired. One Marylander dies, as does Claiborne’s captain and one other crewman. The Cockatrice surrenders to the Calvert ships.

July 8, 1635 – The General Court again demanded that Roger Williams appear to account for himself, this time to answer specific charges. He engaged them in theological debate, and rallied the clergy outside of Boston to his arguments. By going public with the dispute throughout the Colony, Williams enraged the Court.

1635-1636 – Anne Hutchinson holds after-church theological discussion groups at her house with the women in her congregation to study John Cotton’s sermons. By the summer of 1636, even men are coming to her discussions, including Sir Henry Vane, now the governor of Massachusetts Bay. Word gets out that she is critical of preachers she regards as teaching a “covenant of works.”

August 14, 1635 – The great New England hurricane of 1635 smashes into the region. It is believed to be the worst such storm until 1938, when a Cat 5 hurricane hit New England. William Bradford’s description of the storm is at the link.

September 1635 – William Pynchon and some of his men visit Agawam, on the upper Connecticut River at the site of today’s Springfield, Massachusetts, and buy land from a local tribe. The transaction is eventually memorialized in a deed dated July 15, 1636. Pynchon returns to the Bay for the winter, but leaves men behind to build a house. He returns with settlers in 1636, and founds Springfield.

September 3, 1635 – The General Court of the Bay met again, this time bringing charges against the allies of Roger Williams, who one by one recanted under the threat of imprisonment or expulsion. Amazingly enough, even now the Court gave Williams the opportunity to recant, and offered him “further conference or disputation” with learned clergy who could, presumably, show him his error. Williams declined.  Still hoping to avoid sentencing Williams – perhaps a measure of his personal appeal and popularity – the court offered to delay the proceedings for another month. Williams again declined.

October 9, 1635 – Out of moves, the General Court pronounced its sentence upon Roger Williams:  That “the said Mr. Williams shall depart out of this jurisdiction within six weeks.”

Late 1635 – Roger Williams falls ill, and his friends obtain permission from the General Court to remain in Salem through the winter on the condition that he no longer spread his dissenting opinions. Williams cannot help himself, so in December the Court orders him arrested and sent back to England.

Early January 1636 – Secretly warned by John Winthrop that soldiers were coming to deport him, Roger Williams flees into the woods alone and finds refuge among his Indian friends. For the next fourteen weeks, until late March 1636, Williams moves from one Wampanoag village to another, finally arriving at today’s Rumford, Rhode Island. A few families who still believed in Williams follow him there, and they start a small settlement, just inside the claimed territory (via their alliance with the Wampanoags) of Plymouth Colony.

Spring 1636 – Lion Gardener builds Fort Saybrook at the mouth of the Connecticut River. Parts of the building would last for 300 years, until all traces of it were destroyed to make way for a Works Progress Administration project during the New Deal. More importantly, it put the English in close proximity with the Dutch, the Pequots, the Niantics, and the Narragansetts, and that would destabilize the region.

June 1636 – Peter Minuit, late of New Netherland, submits his proposal to establish a colony called New Sweden on the Delaware River between New Netherland and Maryland Colony.

July 20, 1636 – John Gallop discovers the murder of John Oldham by Block Island Indians, his “head cleft to the brains.” Through a series of poor decisions and misinformation, Oldham’s murder becomes one of the pretexts for the Pequot War.

Summer 1636 – The Bay Colony, which still regards Roger Williams as a fugitive, pressures Plymouth into evicting him. This Winslow and Bradford do with great reluctance, mindful that the Bay Colony is vastly more powerful and might well absorb them. He and his settlers move west across the river and found Providence under the protection of his allies among the Narragansetts. Their great sachem, Canonicus, grants Williams and his settlers land, and out of great respect for their friendship refuses payment.

August 24, 1636 – At the direction of the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Endecott leaves Boston with a force of 90 armed men for Block Island to avenge John Oldham’s murder. He fails to find any Indians around, so over the next few days Endecott leads his men to the Connecticut coast where he completely misunderstands the intertribal relations and attacks the Pequots. They evade him, so he burns down a bunch of crops without inflicting more than a couple of casualties. During the fall of 1636, the Pequots launch small reprisals against English interests in the area, but in general there was very little fighting.

Fall 1636 – Sir Henry Vane, then governor of Massachusetts Bay, requests the assistance of Roger Williams to negotiate a pledge of neutrality from the Narragansetts, who were being courted by the Pequots to join in their war against the English. Williams translates for the Narragansetts, who enter into a written treaty with the Bay.

October 1636 – The magistrates and clergy of Massachusetts Bay met in Boston for the regular meeting of the General Court.  Thomas Shepard, minister at Cambridge, Hugh Peter, minister at Salem, and other clerical leaders meet with John Cotton and John Wheelwright in Cotton’s home to discuss doctrinal differences sparked by Anne Hutchinson’s after-church talks.

December 1636 – The magistrates and clergy call upon Anne Hutchinson to answer questions about her preaching for the first time. Boston is increasingly divided into pro- and anti-Hutchinson camps, in part because Hutchinson’s followers oppose waging war on the Pequots.

January 19, 1637 – The leaders of the Massachusetts Bay call for a day of fasting to promote Colony-wide reflection on its external and internal crises. Anne Hutchinson’s brother-in-law, John Wheelwright, gives an extremely divisive sermon that does more to polarize the factions around Hutchinson than reconcile them.

February 22, 1637 – The Pequots launch a major attack at Fort Saybrook. The Pequot War resumes in full fury.

1637 – Thomas Morton publishes New English Canaan, a scathing attack on the Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Puritans of Massachusetts.

April 18, 1637 – Massachusetts Bay Colony raises a force of 150 men to reinforce Fort Saybrook against future attacks by the Pequots.

April 23, 1637 – Pequots attack the English settlement of Wethersfield, on the Connecticut River a few miles south of the Dutch Fort Hope and the English town of Hartford.  They killed six English men working in the fields, three women, twenty cows, and a mare.  They captured and took away two English girls.

April 30, 1637 – Charles I imposes exit restrictions on Puritans who want to emigrate. The Hector, which carried 250 Puritans to New England under the leadership of John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton, departed just before the new requirement for permission to leave.

May 16, 1637 – In response to the attack at Wethersfield, the Connecticut General Court at Hartford declared an offensive war against the Pequots. They raise a force of 90 soldiers, and requisitioned the shallop of the merchant William Pynchon, the ancestor of the great 20^th century novelist Thomas Pynchon, to take the new soldiers downriver.

May 17, 1637 – The General Court of Massachusetts Bay holds elections on the town common in Newtown, soon to be Cambridge. Sir Henry Vane, the governor of the colony and a supporter of Anne Hutchinson, is turned out of office and replaced with John Winthrop. The government of the Bay is now solidly in the hands of men who oppose Anne Hutchinson’s teachings. In the coming months, the clergy develop a list of “82 errors” in Hutchinson’s teaching. John Cotton, Hutchinson’s minister since England, tries to shape a compromise.

May 24, 1637 – A mixed force of English soldiers under Captains John Underhill and John Mason and Narragansett fighters reach the territory of the eastern Niantics. There they recruit more allies, bringing the total force to about 500 English and Indian soldiers. They plan to attack the Pequot fortified village at Mystic, Connecticut.

May 26, 1637 – The English, Narragansetts, and Niantics attack the Pequot fort at Mystic. They English break through the palisade, set fire to the buildings, and their Indian allies surround the town to prevent Pequots from escaping. As many as 700 Pequots die, shocking even the Narragansetts. For sheer brutality, this was the bloodiest fighting between Europeans and Indians in today’s United States since at least 1599, when Spanish under Don Juan de Onate, the so-called last conquistador, slaughtered eight hundred or more Pueblo Indians at Acoma mesa in New Mexico. 

June – August 1637 – The English and their Indian allies pursue remaining Pequots, who flee west through Connecticut to New Netherland and south to Long Island. Pequot sachems who flee into the Hudson valley are killed by Mohawks, who send the skin and hair of seven of them to Boston, presumably to ward off English incursions into their territory.

June 7, 1637 – Samuell Gorton and family arrive at Portsmouth, Aquidneck, Rhode Island.

June 26, 1637 – The Hector and its consort arrive in Boston.

August 20, 1637 – Roger Williams drafts and the town adopts the Providence Agreement, which establishes majority rule as the basis for government in Providence.

August 31, 1637 – Theophilus Eaton leads some of the men from the Hector to explore the coast of Connecticut west of Fort Saybrook. Their purpose was to find a suitable place to establish a colony. They reach Quinnipiac, the site of the future New Haven, and spend the rest of September investigating the area. By early October, Eaton and most of the men return to Boston, but leave behind seven men to build a house.

November 1637 – The General Court of Massachusetts Bay banishes John Wheelwright, and orders Anne Hutchinson’s male supporters to surrender their arms. Anne Hutchinson herself appears before the Court and is interrogated on her religious views for two days. Now 46, she is ill from a pregnancy, and yet manages to parry the charges against her. She declines all efforts to get her to recant or qualify her opinions. After a theologically intricate trial, the General Court convicted Hutchinson of heresy and sentenced her to be banished with the coming of spring, pending the finding of her church’s inquiry.

Winter 1637-38 – Anne Hutchinson spends the winter before her banishment in the house of a minister in Roxbury.

January 25, 1638 – The first session of the General Assembly of Maryland for which records survive sat in St. Mary’s City, with intermittent recesses, until March 24.

February 25, 1638 – Leonard Calvert and 30 musketeers take over Kent Island while William Claiborne is back in London.

March 7, 1638 – The male relatives and followers of Anne Hutchinson prepare her for exile on Aquidneck Island in Narragansett Bay, and sign the Portsmouth Compact, an agreement for their governance.

Early to mid-March, 1638 – The Kalmar Nyckel and the Gripen, carrying the first settlers for New Sweden, arrive at the mouth of the Delaware and proceed directly to the site of today’s Wilmington.

March 15, 1638 – Anne Hutchinson now goes on trial in her church to determine whether the church’s compact with her has been broken. She is excommunicated, as expected.

March 29, 1638 – Five Lenape chiefs, known to us as Mattahorn, Metatsimint, Elupacken, Mahamen, and Chiton, came aboard the Kalmar Nyckel.  They agreed to convey to Peter Minuit on behalf of his Swedish investors all the land they needed to start a colony in return for a pile of the usual trade goods, including cloth, axes, iron pots, mirrors, and the like.  They affixed their marks to two deeds.  The first transferred lands from the Minquas Kill south to at least Duck Creek, the mouth of which is at today’s Woodland Beach, Delaware. The second deed conveyed lands north to the Schuykill River, which flows into the Delaware River just north of Philadelphia International Airport, although one source said it went as far north as the west bank opposite Trenton, now Morrisville, Pennsylvania. There was no western limit in either deed.

End of March 1638 – Willem Kieft arrives in New Amsterdam and becomes the next governor of New Netherland. It would not go well.

April 1, 1638 – Anne Hutchinson and a few of her friends and followers begin the week-long walk to Rhode Island, and exile. The Puritan clergy of the Bay make periodic attempts over the next few years to persuade her to recant, sometimes with threats.

April 14, 1638 – The main group of settlers under John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton arrive at Quinnipiac, and found the colony that will soon be named New Haven. Their original group of 250 settlers on the Hector had grown to 400 during their winter in Boston, as John Davenport built his flock.

April 1638 – John Wheelwright, now banished to New Hampshire, buys land and founds the settlement of Exeter, New Hampshire.

November 24, 1638 – Theophilus Eaton and John Davenport enter into a deed with the sachem Momaugin to memorialize their earlier agreement for land in the vicinity of Quinnipiac for their settlement.

April 3, 1639 – Charles I grants the proprietary colony of Maine to Sir Ferdinando Gorges.

June 4, 1639 – The freemen of Quinnipiac gather to establish their government. John Davenport persuades them to run the colony in strict accordance with the laws of God as described in the Scriptures, and to limit the franchise and participation in government to church members. Davenport would determine who would be admitted to the church as members.

September 15, 1639 – Willem Kieft, governor of New Netherland, proposes to his council of advisors that Indians under the protection of the Dutch be taxed to pay for Dutch military expenses. This he attempts to do over the council’s objections.

Late 1639 – About 50 settlers at Quinnipiac leave and settle along the coast about ten miles away, still under the jurisdiction of New Haven Colony. They would soon build the first mill in the area, and on November 24, 1640 would name their town Milford.

July 1, 1640 – The General Court of New Haven purchases land from the local Indians in the area of today’s Stamford, Connecticut for the purpose of settlement. On November 4 New Haven would sell the same land to a group of settlers from Weathersfield, Connecticut who wanted to live under the strict religious regime of New Haven Colony.

July 4, 1641 – Willem Kieft, governor of New Netherland, puts a bounty on the heads of the Raritan Nation, raising tension among the tribes in the area of Manhattan.

August 1641 – A 27 year-old Wickquasgeck Indian murders an old Dutch merchant, Claes Swits, in his home, which stood approximately at the corner of today’s 2nd Avenue and 47th Street in New York City. Governor Kieft uses Swits’ murder as a pretext to launch a wider war against Indians in the region.

March 23, 1642 – The Maryland General Assembly proceedings show that among the freemen in attendance, and thereby permitted to vote, was Mathias de Sousa, a free Black man and trader.

May 17, 1642 – The French found Montreal, around 150 miles southwest (and upriver) of Quebec City. Their purpose was to gain a trading post closer to the retreating lengthening supply lines for fur.

Summer of 1642 – Will Hutchinson having died that spring, Anne Hutchinson fears that the Bay Colony will continue to pursue her. She and her household, sixteen people, leave Aquidneck Island and move to the Bronx to live under the Dutch of New Netherland. She and most of her household would die the following summer at the hands of Indians during Kieft’s War.

September 23, 1642 – Harvard graduates its first class, Governor John Winthrop presiding over the commencement. Among the graduates was George Downing, Winthrop’s nephew, who would go on to become a decisive figure in England’s expansion during the Stuart Restoration.

November 13, 1642 – John Lewger, secretary of the Maryland Proprietary, takes the deposition of Mathias de Sousa, a free Black man and trader.

February 14, 1643 – Johan Björnsson Printz, the new governor of New Sweden on the Delaware, arrives at Fort Christina (Wilmington) with his wife and five daughters and a son. One of those daughters, Armegot, would settle in the region and live there until 1675 under successive rule by Sweden, the Dutch, and English administration.

February 23, 1643 – The bloodiest day in Keift’s War. Kieft ordered two nighttime attacks, one on Indians camped at Pavonia, the site of today’s Jersey City, and the other at Corlaer’s Hook on the East River, a spot of land just below the Williamsburg Bridge.

Spring 1643 – Roger Williams travels back to England to secure a charter for Rhode Island. He stops in New Amsterdam to secure passage to England, and while there may have helped broker a truce in Kieft’s War. During the voyage at sea he writes A Key Into the Language of America, or an Help to the Language of the Natives in That Part of America, Called New-England. In addition to being one of the earliest European studies of Indian language, it establishes Williams as a credible expert on New England. Williams arrives in London in June.

May 19, 1643 – Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven colonies form the United Colonies of New England to provide for mutual defense against both Indian Nations and New Netherland. They pointedly exclude Rhode Island from membership.

January 12, 1643 – The Massachusetts Bay Colony tries to confine Rhode Island by purchasing land from two minor Narragansett sachems in Pawtuxet through proxies. This sets up a crisis in governance in Rhode Island, which requires Roger Williams to go to England to secure a charter.

1643 – Thomas Morton, now almost 70, returns to New England. William Bradford, always forgiving, lets him spent the winter in Plymouth over the objections of Myles Standish, but requires him to leave in the spring of 1644. He goes to Massachusetts Bay, where he is banished again, this time to the coast of Maine. There he dies in 1647.

January 18, 1644 – Acting governor of Maryland, Giles Brent, on a pretext orders the arrest of Richard Ingle, a Protestant trader and master of the ship Reformation. Ingles had sued the Giles Brent and his sister Margaret for various reasons the year before, and those cases were still pending. This was the first origin of “the Plundering Time” of Maryland during the English Civil War.

January 26, 1644 – Charles I grants Leonard Calvert, governor of the Maryland Proprietary, a commission (essentially an expansive letter of marque) that give broad powers to Leonard Calvert for taking ships, cargoes, and debts, on sea or on land, that belonged to residents of London or other ports then in rebellion against the Crown.

March 16, 1644 – Roger Williams secures a charter for Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations that “passed the table” with all appropriate process, signatures, and seals.  The charter specifically authorizes a democratic form of government. Williams also obtained a letter of safe conduct signed by leading members of Parliament, which would allow him to return to Providence with his charter via Boston, where he could not now be arrested notwithstanding his banishment eight years before.

April 10, 1644 – Ships loyal to Parliament and the Crown, respectively, exchange fire on the James River in Virginia. Not only does this raise the possibility of the English Civil War spreading to North America in a big way, but it suggests to Opechancanough that the Civil War might make the English vulnerable to attack.

April 18, 1644 – Opechancanough launches the Third Anglo-Powhatan War, and once again the English were caught entirely off-guard.

September 6, 1644 – Leonard Calvert, having obtained his commission to plunder pro-Parliament ships and properties on land from Charles I, returns to Maryland. He relieved acting governor Giles Brent, who was up at Kent Island, and forthwith sailed down the Chesapeake to enforce his commission against Parliamentarians in Virginia. On October 1 he meets with the Virginia General Assembly, which is Royalist but far more concerned with staying united in the war against Opechancanough than alienating Parliamentarian Virginians.

September 17, 1644 – Roger Williams returns to Boston bearing Rhode Island’s new charter and his letter of safe conduct.

November 23, 1644 – After having befriended Roger Williams, John Milton publishes Areopagitica, today considered among history’s most influential philosophical defenses of the right to speech and expression. Areopagitica represents a reversal in Milton’s opinion, which may have happened under Williams’ influence.

Mid-December 1644 – Richard Ingle, now bearing his own letter of marque from Parliament, and his ship Reformation reach Virginia on the way back to Maryland. There he learns about Calvert’s commission to plunder Parliamentarians.

~December 24, 1644 – William Claiborne, with two ships and a few armed men, lands at Kent Island in the Chesapeake planning to incite rebellion against Giles Brent and the Calverts. He fails, and soon thereafter sails away.

February 14, 1645 – Richard Ingle and his ship Reformation reach St. Mary’s City, now even more unhappy with the Calverts. Over the next few weeks he captures a Dutch ship trading with Royalists, and stirs up the colony’s Protestant residents into a revolt. And, yes, he plunders assets of the Catholics, especially the priests. The population of Maryland temporarily falls by 80% because most people flee to Virginia during the Plundering Time.

Summer 1645 – Protestants set up a provisional government in Maryland, and declare themselves no longer under the authority of the Calverts. There are fewer than 100 remaining residents.

Late 1645 – Hugh and Mary Parsons marry in Springfield, Massachusetts.

January 1646 – George Lamberton’s ship sets sail from New Haven, after workers cut a path through the ice on the frozen harbor for a distance of three miles. It would never be seen again. Or would it?

Summer 1646 – The English in Virginia capture Opechancanough, who is by then close to 100 years old. In the words of Robert Beverley, writing early in the 18th century, “one of the soldiers, resenting the calamities the colony had suffered by this prince’s means, basely shot him through the back, after he was made prisoner; of which wound he died.”

December 1646 – Leonard Calvert had returned to Maryland with a force of 28 soldiers and a promise of amnesty for rebels who declared their loyalty to the Calverts, and by December 29 St. Mary’s City was back in his control with no blood having been spilled.

April 1647 – Leonard Calvert regains control of Kent Island from Protestant rebels. The Plundering Time is over.

June 9, 1647 – Leonard Calvert dies in Maryland after a brief but severe illness. On his deathbed, he names Margaret Brent his executor.

January 21, 1648 – Margaret Brent, executor for Leonard Calvert’s estate, appears at the Maryland Assembly and demands two votes, one for her as a landholder and a second in her capacity as Lord Baltimore’s legal representative (by virtue of being Calvert’s executor). Her request was respectfully denied.

March 14, 1648 – The town of Shawomet, is admitted to the colony of Providence, along with Portsmouth and Newport on Aquidneck.  

June 15, 1648 – The Massachusetts Bay Colony hangs Margaret Jones for witchcraft on the Boston Common. She is the second person executed for witchcraft in New England.

June 1648 – Numerous witnesses in New Haven testify to having seen a “ghost ship,” thought to be George Lamberton’s lost vessel.

January 30, 1649 – Parliament executes Charles I after its victory in the English Civil Wars. His death warrant is signed by 59 commissioners, known as “judges.”

July 3, 1649 – The Katten, supplied with arms, ammo, food, and a bunch of new colonists, mostly Finns, sails from Sweden to resupply New Sweden on the Delaware. She and her passengers would meet an extremely ugly fate in the Caribbean. The failure of the Katten to reach New Sweden probably sealed the fate of the colony.

February 26, 1651 – William Pynchon, the chief magistrate of Springfield, receives complaints against Mary Parsons, alleging that she is a witch.

March 1651 – Baby Joshua Parsons dies under the care of his mother Mary, who does not deny having murdered him. On March 24, 1651, Springfield sends Hugh and Mary Parsons, cuffed to each other, to Boston for trial for capital offenses.

May 13, 1651 – Mary Parsons goes to trial in Boston, John Endecott presiding. She confesses to murdering her baby Joshua on the stand, and is convicted of murder. She is sentenced to hang on May 29, 1651, but she dies in prison before that date.

May 12, 1652 – After a series of continuances, Hugh Parsons goes on trial for witchcraft after having been in jail for more than a year. He is convicted by the Court of Assistants. Within two weeks, the General Court, sitting as an appellate court, reversed the conviction and released him. He would eventually move to Rhode Island, and would live until June 18, 1685.

June 5, 1652 – Englishman Thomas Chambers, a carpenter who had been working in New Amsterdam, buys land from Esopus sachems Ankerop and Sowappekat on the west bank of the Hudson near today’s Kingston, New York. Then it is in the territory of New Netherland. Chambers is the first European to settle in the area.

July 17, 1652 – “[I]n the chapel of Whitehall Palace in Westminster, … in front of a congregation composed of Oliver Cromwell … and various republican dignitaries and soldiers, a [Quaker] woman appeared “stark naked”. According to several witnesses, she called out, ‘Resurrection, I am ready for thee,’ before being removed by the guards and causing considerable disturbance.”

October 2, 1652 – Roger Williams, back in London, secures a reaffirmation of Rhode Island’s charter.

September 1653 – Trader Nicholas Batts explores northeastern North Carolina, the first Englishman known to have done for more than 30 years. He speaks coastal Algonquian, and establishes good relations with the Indians in the region. He brought North Carolina Indian leaders back to the home of his employer, Sir Francis Yeardley. A visiting chief is so taken with seeing Yeardley’s daughters read that he asks if he can send his son to be taught, and Yeardley agrees. Yeardley offers to send carpenters to build the chief an English house.

December 15, 1653 – Johan Klaesson Rising is appointed assistant governor of New Sweden, but he would immediately become governor once it is learned that Governor Printz had already set sail for Sweden.

April 22, 1654 – The Treaty of Westminster settles the first Anglo-Dutch War, just in time to stave off a New English invasion of New Netherland.

May 1, 1654 – A group of 45 Roanoke Indians, including their chief, visit Sir Francis Yeardley at his home in Virginia. He is away, so his wife Sarah gamely entertained them. Yeardley and his trader Nicholas Batts would go on to develop extensive trading networks in North Carolina, including with the Tuscaroras, which would be the foundation of Old Albemarle County south of the Great Dismal Swamp.

May 19, 1654 – The General Court at Fort Orange bans the sale of alcohol to Esopus Indians.

May 21, 1654 – Johan Rising and roughly 300 settlers arrive in New Sweden.

March 24, 1655 – The Battle of the Severn River, in which Maryland’s royalist acting governor William Stone attacks a settlement of rebellious Puritans on the Severn River. It ends calamitously for Stone and his forces, who lose 17 dead and 30 wounded in a very short time.

August 31, 1655 – Governor of New Netherland Pieter Stuyvesant arrives at the mouth of the Delaware with more than 500 soldiers and sailors. His objective is to take over New Sweden, which he accomplishes in a series of bloodless confrontations and negotiations over the next two weeks. Governor Rising and New Sweden surrender to the Dutch on September 15, 1655.

September 15, 1655 – The “Peach Tree” War begins. An armada of canoes loaded with five to six hundred Munsee and Hackensack Indians, and fewer members of other tribes in the region, moved silently across the Hudson to the southernmost point of Manhattan. They then rampaged through the city.

September 3, 1658 – Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, dies. More than a year of political uncertainly follows.

September 20, 1659 – At Esopus (near Kingston, New York) and environs, a band of six inhabitants and six soldiers plus their respective leaders, Jacob Jansen Stoll and Sergeant Andries Lourensen, encountered a party of four Indians who lay huddled around a campfire in an intoxicated stupor. The Indians had been given liquor by Thomas Chambers, in exchange for husking corn. Without apparent provocation, Stoll, the sergeant, and several other Dutch attacked the four Indians.  One Indian was shot in the head, another was taken prisoner. The next day Esopus Indians counterattacked, and war was on.

October 8, 1659 – Hundreds of Esopus soldiers besiege the palisaded Dutch settlement. There are only a few Dutch casualties, but the Indians destroy most of the settlers’ livestock outside the fort. On October 9 the settlers lift the siege, and on October 10 Peter Stuyvesant arrives with 180 armed men.

February 2, 1660 – General George Monck, the future Duke of Albemarle, finally intervenes, and leads his army of Scotland into London unopposed. By the end of March the final rump of the Long Parliament dissolved itself, and a royalist Parliament was elected in its stead.

March 12, 1660 – The lower house of the Maryland Assembly, over the protests of Philip Calvert, declares it “is the highest court of Judicature,” in effect a repudiation of the authority of the proprietors. This is known as Fendall’s Rebellion.

March 17, 1660 – Near today’s Kingston, NY, a detachment of forty soldiers under Dutch command stumbled upon a group of sixty or more Esopus Indians about 11 miles out from the settlement.  They attacked, and killed 3 or 4 Indians and captured as many as fifteen.  The Dutch destroyed the village, including a large quantity of maize, and bear meat and skins.  Twelve of the Indian captives, considered to be important men in their community, were sent down the Hudson to New Amsterdam.

May 1, 1660 – The new Parliament votes to restore the monarchy. During the next month, Charles II returns to London triumphantly from exile in France.

May 25, 1660 – Peter Stuyvesant sends 10 captured Esopus Indians to Curacao to be enslaved, his purpose being to increase pressure on the Esopus leadership to come to peace.

July 15, 1660 – Peter Stuyvesant comes to Esopus in the central Hudson valley to participate in a ceremony ending the First Esopus War.

July 27, 1660 – Edward Whalley and William Goffe, both “regicides” who had signed the death warrant of King Charles I in 1649, arrive in Boston, having fled England to avoid probable execution. On August 11 John Davenport sends a letter from New Haven to Boston saying that he knew who Whalley and Goffe were and would like to meet them. Whalley and Goffe move to Cambridge to live with Daniel Gookin.

August 29, 1660 – Parliament passes the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, which calls for the “judges” who signed the death warrant of Charles I to be hunted down. On September 22 Charles II put a bounty of 100 pounds sterling on the heads of each of Whalley and Goffe.

February 22, 1661 – Governor John Endecott convenes the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay to discuss the fate of Whalley and Goffe, because he is increasingly worried about sheltering the regicides in the face of the King’s order to hunt them down. On February 26 the two fugitives set out by foot for New Haven. They reach New Haven on March 7, and move in with John Davenport. Word gets around that they are staying with Davenport, and on April 30 they move secretly to the home of William Jones.

April 28, 1661 – John Endecott receives an order from London to hunt down Whalley and Goffe, and on May 7 engages two Royalists to search for them. They go to New Haven, get the runaround from the Puritans there who are protecting the regicides, and after three futile weeks return to Boston on May 30.

May 15, 1661 – Whalley and Goffe move to the farm of Richard Sperry, and shelter in a rock formation now known as “Judge’s Rock.”

May 16, 1661 – Peter Stuyvesant establishes a plan of government for Wildwyck, the Dutch settlement formerly known as Esopus in the vicinity of today’s Kingston.

August 19, 1661 – Whalley and Goffe move to Milford and live secretly in the house of Michael Tomkins for the next two years.

April 23, 1662 – John Winthrop the Younger secures a new charter for the Connecticut Colony from Charles II. This would put Connecticut in the position to pressure New Haven Colony, which had no charter, to submit itself to Connecticut.

August 14, 1662 – A group of New Englanders, who had no charter or other authorization, set sail from Charlestown, Massachusetts Bay, for the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, bringing cattle and pigs and fully intending to put down stakes.  For reasons that are not entirely clear, the Bay men had such a rough go of it that they returned to Massachusetts after a few months, leaving at least some of their livestock to roam free. 

March 24, 1663 – Charles II establishes the Proprietary of Carolina for the benefit of George, Duke of Albemarle; Edward, Earl of Clarendon; William, Lord Craven; John, Lord Berkeley; Anthony, Lord Ashley; Sir George Carteret; Sir William Berkeley, who was again the governor of Virginia; and Sir John Colleton. These eight men, along with James, Duke of York (and the future James II), Prince Rupert, and William Penn would become the key players in English North America during the Stuart Restoration.

June 7, 1663 – Soldiers of the Esopus Indians attacked the fortified Dutch settlements of New Village – now Hurley, New York – and Wildwyck, now Kingston.  New Village was fundamentally destroyed.  Wildwyck, more populous and better defended, fought off the attack but not before suffering grievous casualties. So began the Second Esopus War.

June 14, 1663 – Peter Stuyvesant arrives at Wildwyck and gives orders for the administration of the new war against the Esopus.

July 26, 1663 – Dutch commander Martin Kregier left Wildwyck with an army of over 200 men, including 35 local volunteers and 41 Indians from Long Island, with a captive Indian woman as guide.  They arrived at the Esopus Indian fort late in the day on the 27^th and found it deserted, save for an Indian woman in a nearby field of maize.  The next day, Kregier’s army destroyed about 200 acres of maize and more than 100 storage pits of corn and beans. On the 31^st, Kregier’s men burned the stockade and all the houses.  They marched out with the blaze raging, arriving back at Wildwyck about nine o’clock that evening.

August 10, 1663 – William Hilton, in command of the ship Adventure, sails from Speightstown, Barbados to explore the coast of southern Carolina. The expedition arrives off Fripp Island, South Carolina, on August 26.

September 13, 1663 – English, Irish, African and Indian indentured servants and slaves in Gloucester County, Virginia conspired to revolt, the first meaningful slave revolt in English North America.  The plot was foiled when one of the servants, John Birkenhead, tipped off the authorities. 

October 1, 1663 – Having learned of a new Esopus fort, Martin Kregier and his men again marched out of Wildwyck.  They proceeded to the site of the New Fort, arriving there on October 2. It had largely been abandoned, and the Dutch destroyed it. This was the last meaningful military action of the Second Esopus War.

October 16, 1663 – William Hilton and the Adventure, having explored Port Royal on the coast of today’s South Carolina, arrive at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. They would explore the river and its tributaries until December 4, 1663.

January 1664 – The English Council for Foreign Plantations decides that New Netherland must be conquered for England.

March 12, 1664 – Charles II grants his brother James, Duke of York, a vast stretch of English North America from Maine to the eastern side of Delaware Bay, carving out Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

May 15, 1664 – The peace treaty ending the Second Esopus War was concluded with surviving Esopus sachems at New Amsterdam.

May 29, 1664 – John Vassall landed a colony of Barbadians and possibly a few New Englanders on the Cape Fear River, founding Charles Towne. It would be abandoned by early 1667.

June 24, 1664 – James, Duke of York and Albany, conveys New Caesarea, otherwise known as New Jersey, to Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret. Unfortunately, York’s first governor in New York and New Jersey, Richard Nicolls, would not learn that this had happened for quite some time.

July 1664 – Four “royal commissioners” and 400 soldiers come to Boston. Their purpose is to investigate the English colonies in New England, which are suspected of anti-Royalist sentiments, and reduce New Netherland. They are also charged with hunting the fugitive regicides Whalley and Goffe.

August 24, 1664 – The Duke of York’s fleet, under the command of Richard Nicolls, arrives off New Amsterdam.

September 8, 1664 – The Duke of York secures the surrender of New Amsterdam and takes over New Netherland.

October 13, 1664 – Whalley and Goffe leave Milford and move to Hadley, Massachusetts, where they take shelter.

October 28, 1664 – Captain John Baker, acting on behalf of others, negotiates the purchase of the land between the Passaic River and the Raritan River from local sachems. On December 1, 1664, Governor Richard Nicolls grants them the land from the Duke of York’s proprietary. This becomes Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and encompasses more than 500,000 acres. Among the first four settlers was John Ogden, ancestor of your podcaster! (Ogden had built the first stone church in New Amsterdam in 1642, and in 1644 established the first commercial whaling operation in North America based on Long Island.)

December 13, 1664 – After several years of political maneuvering, New Haven Colony agrees to merge into Connecticut Colony and submit itself to the jurisdiction of Connecticut’s General Court.

February 10, 1665 – John Dixwell, another regicide hiding in New England about whom we know little, visits Whalley and Goffe in Hadley. Dixwell had been much more careful about concealing his identity, and went by the pseudonym James Davids. Dixwell moved to New Haven, and lived there until his death on March 18, 1689.

February 10, 1665 – Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, proprietors of New Jersey, promulgate The Concession and Agreement of the Lords Proprietors of the Province of New Caesarea, or New Jersey, to and With all and Every the Adventurers and All Such as Shall Settle or Plant There.

April 4, 1665 – Governor Richard Nicolls issues the “Navesink patent,” covering today’s Monmouth County, New Jersey. This is the basis of the townships of Middletown and Shrewsbury.

June 30, 1665 – The execution of the “Concessions and Agreements of the Lords Proprietors of the Province of Carolina, 1665,” an amended and restated version of the original proprietary grant for Carolina.

July 29, 1665 – Philip Carteret, 26 years old and cousin of Sir George Carteret, arrives at New York harbor. On August 1 he succeeds Richard Nicolls as governor of New Jersey. He informs Nicolls that James, Duke of York, has transferred New Jersey to Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, which calls into question grants made by Nicolls in New Jersey.

May 21, 1666 – Puritans from various of New Haven Colony’s satellite towns signed an agreement to establish Newark, New Jersey, named in honor of the reverend Abraham Pierson, whose old home was in Newark-on-Trent in today’s Nottinghamshire, England.  

June 16, 1666 – Robert Sandford, late of Surinam and Barbados, and 20 other men leave the Cape Fear River to explore South Carolina south of Cape Romain. He would return on July 12, having explored Port Royal, Edisto, Kiawah, and Charleston Harbor, and having named the Ashley River. Sandford would recommend Port Royal (the harbor behind Hilton Head) to be the site of the first English settlement in South Carolina.

December 11, 1666 – John Ogden, Daniel Pierce, and other owners of the Elizabethtown, New Jersey patent originally confirmed by Richard Nicolls sell a piece between the Rahway and Raritan rivers. It becomes the town of Woodbridge, New Jersey.

December 16, 1666 – Daniel Pierce, one of the owners of the vast Elizabethtown patent, sells the western third of his holdings to a group of men from New Hampshire, who form the town of Piscataway, named for the Piscataqua River, which divides New Hampshire and Maine.

May 29, 1668 – The dread pirate Robert Searles attacks St. Augustine and pillages the city, but does not burn it down. He takes soundings of the harbor on the way out, suggesting he intends to return. In response Spain constructs Fort San Marcos.

May 30, 1668 – The first Assembly of New Jersey meets in Elizabethtown and assesses a tax on the towns of the colony. They are not delighted, and mostly refuse to pay.

March 1, 1669 – The Proprietors of Carolina approve the The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, drafted principally by Lord Ashley, Earl of Shaftsbury, and John Locke. They are never implemented, but are important to understanding the origins of American constitutional development.

June 1, 1669 – Woodbridge, New Jersey receives a charter from Governor Philip Carteret.

August 17, 1669 – The Carolina, the Port Royal, and the Albemarle, carrying the first settlers to today’s South Carolina, set sail from England.

November 2, 1669 – The Albemarle is wrecked during a hurricane at Barbados.

January 12, 1670 – The Port Royal is wrecked at Abaco, in the Bahamas.

February 26, 1670 – The reconstituted fleet for the Carolinas, now consisting of the Carolina, the Three Brothers, and an unnamed Bermudan sloop, leave Bermuda for Port Royal, South Carolina.

March 25, 1670 – Quitrents are first due to the proprietors of New Jersey, Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret. Their attempts to collect lead to a tax revolt in today’s Monmouth County that quickly spreads to other settlements in the colony.

May 15, 1670 – The Three Brothers, now separated from the Carolina fleet, arrives at St. Catherine’s island in Georgia. The ship is attacked by Spaniards and Indians, and the captain and several others are taken prisoner, eventually to go to St. Augustine.

July 8, 1670 – England and Spain sign the Treaty of Madrid, mostly to gang up on the French. The treaty resolves competing claims to North America, providing that England shall have sovereignty over lands previously settled by them, and Spain likewise. Carolina is unspecified, and would become a point of contention between the two countries.

June 19, 1671 – The town meeting of Elizabethtown, New Jersey rejects a grant of land by Governor Carteret to his servant, and join other towns in rejecting Carteret’s authority in such matters.

September 1, 1671 – The new settlement on the right bank of the Ashley River, just across from today’s Charleston, adopts the name Charles Town.

September 21, 1671 – Governor Joseph West of Carolina and his council declare war on the Kussoe nation, after the Kussoes align with the Spanish. The Carolinians launch a pre-emptive raid, and sell captives into slavery in the West Indies, the first of many such transactions.

May 14, 1672 – The rebellious towns of New Jersey convene an unlawful assembly, and elect Captain James Carteret as “president” of the colony. On May 28 Governor Philip Carteret (cousin to James) declares the assembly unlawful.

July 1, 1672 – New Jersey Governor Philip Carteret departs for England to secure the support of the Crown and the proprietors for his authority against the rebellious towns.

December 10, 1672 – King Charles II issues an order demanding that the rebellious towns of New Jersey submit to his authority and that of the proprietors. It does not reach the colony until May 1673.

Late June 1673 – Under threat of arrest, James Carteret, the unlawful “president” of New Jersey, flees with his wife and a few supporters to Carolina. They would be captured by the Dutch in the Chesapeake less than three weeks later.

July 18, 1673 – A Dutch fleet under the command of Cornelis Evertson the Youngest, known to his many fans as “Kees the Devil,” captures a ketch in the Chesapeake carrying James Carteret, fleeing prosecution in New Jersey for having led a rebellion against the proprietors. Evertson learns about the defenses of New York.

Late 1674 – Edward Whalley dies in Hadley, Massachusetts.

Summer 1676 – To the great surprise of the locals, William Goffe emerges from hiding in Hadley to rally the townsfolk to the defense of the town from an attack by Indians during King Philip’s War. He becomes known as the “ghost of Hadley,” and thereafter moves to Hartford where he lives under the pseudonym “T. Duffel” until the end of his days.

February 20, 1681 – Charles II grants the proprietary charter for Pennsylvania to William Penn.