The Pilgrim Fathers

For thousands of years, America and its peoples were unknown to the rest of the
world. The Vikings visited Canada from Scandinavia around AD 1000, but did not
stay. Then, in 1492, a brave Italian sailor called Christopher Columbus reached the
Caribbean, while he was looking for a sea route from Europe to India. Columbus did
not stay either. It was only in the sixteenth century that the French, the Spanish,
and the British all started to come and live in North America.
In the early seventeenth century, two very different groups of English people made
the dangerous journey across the Atlantic. In 1607, a group of farmers began the
colony of Jamestown, in Virginia. They fought with the Indians, and many died
because they were ill and did not have enough to eat. But Pocahontas, the daughter
of an Indian chief, became a friend of Captain John Smith and helped him and the
other English people. She later married a man called Pocahontas John Rolfe and went
to England, where she died. The farmers discovered that it was easy to grow tobacco
in Virginia, so they brought African people to work in the fields as their slaves.
Smoking was becoming very fashionable, and the Americans found a big market for
their tobacco in Europe.