Re: Greetings and Felicitations

From: jeffrichard68 <richj_at_...>
Date: Fri, 07 May 2004 16:38:37 -0000

> > Most of the colonies were actually geographically
> > quite small - although spread out along a huge coastline.
>
> Yes, it wasn't the size of each settlement I was thinking of so
much as the
> distance between them. Not that I've ever understood *why* the
American
> colonists wanted to move so far away from each other! "As far as
you can
> walk in a day" is surely more than enough? They can't have been
*that*
> obnoxious, can they?

Actually, within the individual colonies, settlements tended to be pretty concentrated (at least initially). You had many different groups promoting and organizing settlement in different places - Puritans (at least initially) founding a New Jerusalem in the Massachussets Bay Colony, a commercial settlement of the Virginia Company at Jamestown, Lord Baltimore's Maryland Colony, the West India Company and the New Netherlands settlements, the charter of Charles II granted to eight gentlemen who helped him reclaim the throne (governed by the Lord Proprietors), the New Sweden Colony, the Duke of York's grant to Sir George Carteret and Lord Berkeley (which became New Jersey), the Quaker Province of William Penn, etc. Not to mention French settlements at Montreal and along the St. Lawrence, Spanish settlements at St. Augustine, and so on.

As I said, I drew on a lot of early North American settlement history for the Resettlement of Dragon Pass. There's a lot there.

Jeff