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EXPLORING NORTH AMERICA
After Columbus and Vespucci discovered the new continent, many explorers decided to continue. Some of them were just adventurers looking for glory and fun. Some dreamed of rich, golden cities. Slowly they found the mountains, lakes and trails and made it possible to bring people to settle America.


Click on the explorer to learn more:


 John Cabot
John Cabot's real name was  Giovanni Caboto and he was from Italy.  He was adventurer and wanted to sail West.  In 1494  he moved to England. That's where his name became John Cabot.  He wanted to  reach Asia by sailing west across the north Atlantic. He thought this would be shorter and quicker  way than the way Columbus went.
Cabot first tried his idea in 1496  and failed.  Crew was unhappy with conditions on the ship, and they turned back before reaching the land. He tried again next year and  reached Labrador and Newfoundland. He explored under the British flag and claimed the new land for England.



 Giovanni da Verrazzano

He was born in Italy and was very educated, especially in math. He did his exploration for France. At the time he started exploring, people already heard about the new land across the ocean. Verrazzano wanted to explore the coast of the new land. He thought that he can find a pass over that land to Asia. He is most known for discovering
is most well known for discovering the New York Harbor, Block Island, and Narragansett Bay. He was also the first European explorer to name the new sites in North America after people and places in the Old World. He saw anicad traded with Indians in America. But when he went to explore Florida and Bahamas in 1528 he found some not very friendly Indians.  They were cannibals, which means they ate human meat. They killed Verazzano and ate him.



 Jacques Cartier

Jacques Cartier was born in France in 1491. His goal was to find a passage through or around North America to  Asia.
He made the crossing of the Atlantic in only twenty days, and landed on an island near the coast of Newfoundland.  He sailed north, and entered the Strait of Belle Isle. He sailed into the Bay of St. Lawrence and along the west coast of Newfoundland. Then he went to Chaleur Bay and Gaspé peninsula.  Cartier departed on a second voyage in the next year. He sailed through the Strait of Belle Isle again, but this time followed the coast westward, and reached the St. Lawrence.  The Hurons told him stories about a land in the north, called Saguenay, full of gold and other treasure.  Willing to let king Francis I to hear about these stories, Cartier kidnapped Donnaconna and his sons, and took them with him to France.
He wanted to make another expedition, this time to look for Saguenay, but because of a war with Spain, and the difficulties of preparing the voyage, he was not able to do so until 1541. He never found the Northeast passage, nor the treasures.


 Henry Hudson

Henry Hudson led the first expedition that spent  the winter in the Canadian North. They were searching for the Northwest Passage and, instead, found the mouth of the Hudson River.  At the end of his expedition, there was a mutiny on his ship. Hudson and his son tried to escape with a small boat. No one ever heard from them again. Most of the other crew died from disease scurvy.



 Samuel de Champlain
He was a French explorer. One of the most important things he did was to map a lot of Northeast America. He also started settlement in Quebec. He also discovered the lake on the border of New York  and Vermont that is now named for him He helped found a colony in Port Royal, Nova Scotia. In 1608, Champlain led 32 colonists to settle Quebec in order to establish it as a fur-trading center. He died from a stroke on December. 25, 1635.

 Louis Jolliet  and  Jacques Marquette

Louis Jolliet was a French-Canadian explorer who led an expedition down the Mississippi River. He and Jacques Marquette from Francethe first white explorers to reach the upper Mississippi and parts of Illinois and Wisconsin.
Marquette knew some Indian languages.They  explored  the Great Lakes.  Jolliet created a fur-trading post in Ontario, Canada. He traded guns, knives, and other things to Indians  in exchange for beaver pelts. As Jolliet and Marquette paddled down the Mississippi, they realized that the river flowed south, not west. They concluded that it probably emptied into the Gulf of Mexico. Once the figured out where it goes, they returned back and decided not to follow Mississippi all the way to its mouth.



 Sieur de La Salle

Sieur de La Salle  was a French explorer.La Salle thought one or both of the rivers might be a route through North America to the Pacific Ocean. He led the first European expedition to track the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. La Salle claimed the entire Mississippi Valley for France.  La Salle established a fur trading post at the Fort  Frontenacand soon became one of the most powerful persons in Canada.  In 1679 La Sallestarted an expedition that gave  France control of the great Lakes region. In 1680 he founded the first European settlement in what is now Illinois.He led a party of about 20 Frenchmen and about 30 Indians down the Illinois River in canoes to the Mississippi. The expedition started down the Mississippi River on Feb. 13, 1682, and reached the Gulf of Mexico on April 9. Ne La Salle named the region Louisiana in honor of King Louis. In 1682, La Salle built Fort Saint Louis on a bluff along the Illinois River.

 Sir Walter Raleigh   

 Sir Walter Raleigh was famous as a writer, poet, spy, and explorer.  Raleigh wanted to make a colony in North America, and to call it "Virginia" never happened in 1585.  Walter put together a brochure to get people to move to the New World. He took colonist to the new world and founded Roanoake, the first English colony in the new world. When they ran out of supplies, Raleigh wen back to England to get them. He came back three years later, but found no one in Roanoake. What was even stranger is that he found no signs of battle or notes to tell him where the settlers went. After Queen Elizabeth died, Raileigh was put on trial for treason.While he was in the prison in the Tower of London he wrote books including A History of the World. Later he took expedition to the South America looking for ElDorado, a city of gold. He never found it/ He was beheaded for plotting against King James I.

 Vitus Bering

Vitus Bering  was one of the world's famous explorers. In 1728, Bering discovered that Asia and America are two separate continents! In 1741 he was the first person to map the west coast of Alaska. He  wanted that there was water between Asia and America.  Because American coast was covered in fog, he never really saw America. Therefore, he went back to the second Kamchatka expedition. It included 10.000 men  and it was the largest expedition ever. They called it the Great Nordic Expedition. Bering  reached America on the 15th of July 1741. On the way home his ship stranded on a small bare island that is now known as the Bering Island.


 Cabrillo
Cabrillo started as a conquistador.  Conquistador is the name given to the  Spanish soldiers who explored, conquered, and settled in the New World. After the defeat of the Aztecs, Cabrillo joined other Spanish military expeditions in what is today southern Mexico, Guatemala, and San Salvador. He  settled in Guatemala. When, in 1540, an earthquake destroyed Santiago, Cabrillo's report to the king of Spain on the earthquake's destruction became first known piece written in the New World.The Cabrillo expedition sailed out of the port of Navidad, near modern day Manzanillo, on June 24, 1542. Cabrillo also sought seven  wealthy cities known as Cibola that some believed were near the Pacific coast.  One hundred and three days into the journey, Cabrillo's ships entered San Diego bay. He claimed the land for Spain The expedition continued north to Monterey Bay and may have reached as far north as Point Reyes before storms forced the ships to turn back. Interestingly, the expedition failed to sight San Francisco Bay, which remained undiscovered until 1769.




 Captain Vancouver

Captain George Vancouver was born in King's Lynn, Norfolk, on June 22, 1757. He explored the Pacific Coast. He  was looking for the Northwest Passage, a river or passage that connect the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. In April 1791 Vancouver sailed from Falmouth, England. In March 1792, the ships left their winter harbor at Hawaiian Islands. A month later they arrived off the coast of California at 35 degrees north latitude. As the expedition sailed north from Cape Mendacino to Cape Flattery, Vancouver checked latitudes and mapped unrecorded--but he missed the Columbia River!   He then went on northward, where he discovered and explored Puget Sound, naming it after one of his lieutenants, Peter Puget. He saw and named Mount Baker in honor of another of his lieutenants who first spotted it. He explored the mainland of British Columbia, and, circumnavigated the island that is now known as the Vancouver Island. Many of the places  he named remain today, Port Discovery, Mount Rainier, Port Orchard, Whidby Island, Vashon Island, Hood Canal etc. To make his discoveries official and  claim it for England, he took possession of the entire region June 4, 1792 near the present site of Everett, Washington. he called this region Georgia after the king George.

 Lewis and Clark

Lewis was born to a Virginia planter family in 1774 Jefferson  seems to have selected Lewis for this post with a view to placing him in charge of an already-contemplated transcontinental expedition. When Jefferson had proposed such an expedition in 1792, Lewis had been among the first volunteers,To accompany him as co-leader of the expedition, Lewis selected William Clark, a fellow Virginian with whom he had served on the frontier in 1795. After Clark had spent several months studying astronomy and map-making, they set out by keelboat in 1803 to Wood River, Illinois,The next spring, they began their journey up the Missouri River and by October had reached the Mandan villages in present-day North Dakota, where they decided to stay for the winter.Their most valuable help came in the form of Touissant Charbonneau, a French Canadian whom they hired as an interpreter, and his Shoshone wife Sacagawea, who provided help as a guide and interpreter.In April of 1805 all thirty-three members of the expedition left the Mandan village and started up the Missouri again. They reached the upward limit of the river's navigable stretch four months later.By late September, they had crossed the Bitterroot Mountains, cold, wet, hungry and exhausted, and were taken in by the Nez Percé. They traveled down the Columbia River basin and reached the Pacific Ocean in November.