SOURCE: The Fisheries and Fisheries Industries of the United States
http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/historic/nmfs/index.html
Columbus was not the first human to discover North America. The very first discoverers arrived 15,000 years (or more) ago, long before Columbus and the Europeans who sailed to Virginia from the east. In addition, Viking sagas and archeologic evidence suggests that Scandinavian explorers settled Greenland and built a village at L'Anse Aux Meadows in modern-day Newfoundland 1,000 years ago.
The Scandinavians were attracted not by a desire for gold, religious freedom, or conquest, but by... fish. Yes, fish, especially the Atlantic cod that provided protein for the Scandinavian diet.
The value of the protein was obvious to the Vikings, and later to other Europeans. The fastest European response to Columbus' discoveries was not to send people to occupy the new land, but to send fishing boats to the North Atlantic. The European fishing fleets built huts on the coast of Labrador, staying just long enough each fishing season to dry and salt their catch so the fish would not spoil in transit back to Europe.
When Europeans expanded their economic and political systems to the New World, inevitably the European conflicts came along with the settlement, technolgy, and other cultural patterns. North America was never "neutral territory," somehow exempt from the disputes in Europe. The fish in particular were valuable enough to fight over.
Gaining control over the fishing grounds was an early priority for the European nations, and establishing colonies was a secondary concern. The English defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, but did you know that the English had earlier sent ships to destroy the Spanish fishing fleet in the North Atlantic? The earliest English attemps to establish a colony in what today is North Carolina was interrupted by the Spanish Armada. Sir Walter Ralegh's "Lost Colony" was established in 1587, but resupply was blocked because England needed all ships to defend against the Spanish invasion. By the time help arrived in 1590, the colony was gone.
The Scandinavians who initially settled at L'Anse Aux Meadows in Newfoundland 1,000 years ago did not maintain their trans-Atlantic settlements. In the "Little Ice Age," icebergs that could crush their wooden ships drifted further south, and colder weather limited their ability to graze cattle and grow food in the high northern latitudes. The Scandinavian explorations were not followed by other European discoveries or settlement, and only recently have researchers concluded that the Vikings were familiar with the New World long before Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.
In contrast to the Scandinavians, the journeys of Columbus were critical in the development of Virginia because his discoveries triggered extensive exploration and then massive settlement by the Europeans. In 1497, only 5 years after Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, John Cabot explored the North American coast at the direction of Henry VII. The French commissioned Giovanni da Verrazzano to explore the coastline and search for the Northwest Passage in 1524. Verrazzano sailed from the North Carolina to Newfoundland, missing the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay but finding the location in New York where the Verrazzano Bridge is now located. A second explorer working for the French, Jacques Cartier, discovered the St. Lawrence River in 1535.
Being the first to discover lands in the New World (ignoring the obvious presence of Native Americans) had legal significance to the Europeans. The Europeans claimed ownership of land based on a "right of discovery" as well as a "right of conquest." Early explorations enabled countries other than Spain to establish legal title to various places in the New World.
Besides fish, the other stimulus for exploring North America - from the Atlantic Coast of Virginia all the way to the Pacific Ocean shoreline - was the hope of controlling the spice trade with Asia through discovery of a Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. (The Spanish referred to the idealized passage as the Strait of Anian.) Perhaps some ship captains and sailors who traveled along the North American coast were excited by the joy of discovery, but the individuals who financed their initial explorations were capitalists seeking wealth through trade with Asia.
Various options for the Northwest Passage/Strait of Anian, were explored in the colonial era. John Cabot explored the Labrador coastline as early as 1497, but found no passage to China. In 1610, over a century later and after Jamestown had been founded, Henry Hudson would still be looking for that passage - with such intensity that his crew mutinied and abandoned him to die in what we now call Hudson Bay.
Only in 1969 did a commercial ship actually navigate the Northwest Passage. It was the SS Manhattan, an oil tanker testing the feasibility of transporting crude oil from the oil fields on the North Slope of Alaska to the East Coast. It was quickly evident that an oil pipeline, from Prudhoe Bay to the port of Valdez on the Pacific Coast, was a better alternative... The only vessels that travel the Northwest Passage today are nuclear submarines sailing under the Arctic ice sheet, and transcontinental air flights following the "great circle" routes between Asia and Europe.
