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1562: The first slave voyage of John Hawkins

• The voyages of English sailor John Hawkins around the West Coast of Africa in the 1560s are considered as England’s entry into the infamous Transatlantic Slave Trade.
• Whilst sailing off the coast of West Africa searching for Portuguese ships to hijack, he managed to acquire a Portuguese vessel that held 300 enslaved Africans.
• Hawkins sold the enslaved Africans and the rest of the stolen cargo in the Spanish colony of Santa Domingo for a great deal of money.

1584-85: Walter Raleigh’s establishment of the Roanoke Island colony

• Walter Raleigh was given royal permission by Queen Elizabeth I to establish a settlement on the coast of the Northern continent of America.
• The aim was to set up a base to use for attacks on the Spanish further south.
• Raleigh called the colony Virginia, in honour of the ‘Virgin Queen’.
• A group of English settlers sent by Raleigh established a settlement on Roanoke Island in 1584.

1607: The first Virginia colony establishing Jamestown

• The Virginia Company was established in 1606, with the aim of establishing a permanent English colony in North America.
• There was increasing demand for tobacco in Europe, which at the time only grew in the Americas.
• The first successful colony established by the Virginia Company was named Jamestown.

1620: The Pilgrim Fathers voyage

• In 1606 the Plymouth Company was also given a Royal Licence to establish a colony.
• They were not as successful as the Virginia Company and in 1620 gave a group of Puritans, known as the Pilgrim Fathers, the right to establish their own colony.
• They managed to land far away from their intended destination but established their own successful colony in Provincetown.

1759: The Battle of the Plains of Abraham

• On 13 September 1759 General James Wolfe defeated a French army just outside the city of Quebec, at the time the capital of New France.
• The French surrender at Quebec ensured that the whole of Canada would come under the control of the British.

1759: The Battle of Quiberon Bay

• On 20 November 1759 the British admiral Sir Edward Hawke demolished a French fleet in Quiberon Bay off the coast of France.
• A great deal of Britain’s navy was busy fighting the French in North America and Hawke’s victory against a French force that intended to invade an undefended Britain was a victory that would guarantee the rise of the British Empire in the century that followed.