[Sun] more intolerance and war, by 1676
The Dutch had a harder time recruiting colonists than the British, and the Dutch Republic did not have as many people seeking refuge or a new life as the British. By 1640, nearly 60,000 Englishmen had emigrated to the New World, several times more than the Dutch and French.
The British sent a hundred settlers to establish a colony in Guyana. Then came the Civil War in England, the execution of Charles I and the coming to power of Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans. Migration to America slowed down, except for sending captured Scots to America after Cromwell waged war against them.
The Congress gave Virginia's colonists a year to obey its religious and political orders, while those who did not would be threatened with expulsion, but attempts to turn Virginia into a Puritan colony failed.
On the contrary, Virginia still had royalists who supported Charles I, and from 1647 wealthy royalist refugees fled from England to join the Puritans.
At the beginning of 1650, competition with Dutch merchants inspired the English to go to war against the Dutch - Protestants against Protestants. Cromwell ended the war in 1655, the year he began his military campaign against Catholic Spain, which took place in the Caribbean.
The British occupied Jamaica in 1655, when there were still 1500 Spanish settlers and their black slaves. The British began to deport the Spaniards and used slave labor to manage the sugar cane plantations there.
Jamaica became a base for English "privateers", including the notorious Henry Morgan, and the activities of English privateers (pirates) would continue until 1670, when Britain would sign a treaty with Spain to end their war.
In 1652, the Catholic colony of Rhodes (centered on the town of Providence) made slavery illegal. Farther south, the colony of Virginia, there were fewer than 500 slaves.
Only three percent of its nearly 17,000 colonists, tobacco plantation owners there still used indentured servant labor, who did not require the initial investment that would be the case with the purchase of slaves.
Quakers and Baptists began arriving in the colonies. The Puritans in Massachusetts hated Quaker pacifism, interpreting the Quaker's belief in inner light and the divine spark as pride. To the Puritans, the lack of authoritarian leadership of the Quakers seemed anarchist.
Then rumors spread among the Puritans that the Quakers were burning Bibles. By 1660, in order to maintain order and religious unity in the colony, the Massachusetts colony had imprisoned and hanged 3,000 Quakers, who sought refuge in the more tolerant colony of Providence.
Two Quaker women expelled from the Massachusetts colony mistakenly traveled to the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam and preached on the streets there. They were fired. Other Quakers who intruded into New Amsterdam were imprisoned and flogged, and the Dutch in New Amsterdam wanted to prevent "all kinds of improvisation" from coming to their colony.
The Dutch also expelled William Wickendam, a Baptist shoemaker who wandered from Rhode Island to New Amsterdam. Vickendan has been seen "dipping" converts in river water.
In 1660, after Cromwell's death after 18 years of Puritan rule in England, the Puritans lost power in England, the English monarchy was restored, and a second wave of English immigration to the Americas began.
Merchants in England remained concerned about competition from Dutch and colonial English craftsmen. In 1663, Charles II of England approved the Navigation Act, which required that all trade with the English colonies must be conducted using English ships, and that the colonies could only export certain products, including tobacco and sugar.
To counter Dutch trade in the Americas, England imposed a naval blockade around New Amsterdam in 1664. The Dutch had been fighting the local Indians in the so-called "Peach War", and they also faced resistance from the Portuguese colonists in Brazil.
The second war between the British and the Dutch ended in 1667, when the Dutch recognized New Amsterdam as part of the British, and the Dutch exchanged their nascent British colony in Guyana for the British renaming New Amsterdam New York.
Indian crops were sometimes destroyed by insects that colonists inadvertently brought from Europe, and Indians increased hunting, in part to obtain furs in exchange for European hardware: rifles, cooking utensils, axes, knives, needles, and other iron tools.
Traditional crafts such as pottery and baskets are in decline, as is the use of bows and arrows. Around some of their villages, there are now chickens, pigs, cows or sheep. The Indians became more experienced and shrewd in trade, more greedy, and more economically connected to the Europeans.
Heading north along the coast near Plymouth into what is now Maine, the Indians were depleting the beaver population, which would leave them without commodities to exchange.
The Indians were not familiar with alcoholic beverages, and at first they refused to drink it, thinking that it did not taste good. They don't have a tradition of social drinking, but eventually some of them take it, incorporating it into their own traditions by associating it with their traditional dream state spirituality. Drinking became their paradise.
Some Indians who did not like to drink were frustrated by the inability of their traditional medicine and spirituality to fight the new diseases that plagued their people. Their sweat hut is one of those failures. The sweat hut was once a place of spiritual purification, but it was disastrous for smallpox.
This frustration prompted them to accept Christian modifications to their traditions, which led them to be ridiculed by other Indians.
Alcohol undermines individual commitment and tears communities apart. Drinkers may sell their property or their wives and children. Resentment can escalate into murder. Drunkard killings are often forgiven, and drunken people are considered sacred in their dreams.
