New Mexico And France example essay topic

277 words
At the end of the 16th century, and Spanish and French were the only Europeans involved in North America. The spanish built forts along Florida's coast to protect the Gulf Stream sea lands used by convoys carrying wealth from their New World colonies. The french were navigating the St. Lawrence River to find fur trade. Both countries were drawn into planting far more colonies, New mexico and New France, in North AMerica. Neither France nor Spain was willing or able to transport large numbers of it's people to populate these colonies, both relied on converting Indian's instead.

In new Mexico and France there was a good deal of cultural and social interaction between colonists and natives. There areas became 'Frontiers of exclusion" where natives people were part of colonial society, and they contrasted with the "frontiers of exclusion" developed later by the English. Within the next decade the Europeans learned that the Gulf of Mexico offered no westward passage, that the Aztecs possessed great wealth, and that Ferdinand Magellan's southwestern passage to the Far East was long and arduous. All this prompted a generation of probing north of Mexico, by sea and land. In 1524 Giovanni da Verrazano cruised the Atlantic Coast, failing to find any Northwest Passage to the Pacific but establishing a claim for the French king, who sent Jacques Cartier on similar missions to explore the St. Lawrence a decade later. In 1541 Cartier returned to establish the colony of Charles bourg-Royal.

The site near modern Quebec lay south of Paris in latitude, but the winters proved far colder and the French withdrew.