Land was something the early English Europeans craved for. With land exploration and religious tensions soaring this was the perfect time for England to spread out and create its own colonies. America was the most viable answer to their needs and as they settled the opportunity that was America gave some the rights of liberty and freedom while for others it was only a path into more poverty and dismay.
Settlement in the Americas for the English was something that painted “a portrait of a fertile land of “great plenty” (51). Even though the Spanish and French found the land to be useless because of its lack of precious metals and unsuitable land for faming sugar, the English found the land to be abundant. Exploration rumored to have found a land of plentiful; abounding animals and climate and soil so favorable that the colonists would have plenty of things to send back to their motherland after settling. This would be a “unique place of opportunity, where the English laboring classes could regain economic independence by acquiring land and where even criminals would enjoy a second chance” (52). As John Smith said, “every man may be the master and owner of his own labor and land” (52).
After settling in the Americas, the English found that “land… was the basis of liberty,” (54) and that by owning land it gave them control over their own labor and a way to procure the right to vote. Land was a very powerful thing as it was a “source of wealth and power for colonial officials and their favorites,” (55). But with no one to work the land for them, officials would turn to work forces to meet their needs.
As English settlers poured in the Indians started to realize how much a problem the English would prove to be. The Indians were chiefly interested in the land; they used the land as a means to eat and sustain a healthy life. But with the sudden migration of the Europeans, “English settlers presented the native inhabitants of eastern North America with the greatest crisis in their history.” (55). The English were not “conquerors”, they didn’t want supremacy over the population of the Americas, they just wanted land. The English were “chiefly interested in displacing the Indians and settling on their land” (55) but this was more dangerous than ever as they “threatened Indians’ ways of life more completely than any company of soldiers