map from Spanish spy in London (Zuniga) used on modern interpretive sign at Jamestown
The Swedes established a colony in what is now Delaware, usurping the fur trade of the Susquahannocks after the northern part of the Chesapeake Bay was granted to Lord Baltimore and Maryland displaced William Claiborne of Virginia from Kent Island. The Swedes brought that icon of the American frontier, the log cabin, to the New World - look at the reconstructed buildings at Jamestown and you'll see a log palisade surrounding the fort, but there are no log cabins there...
In New Sweden, Fort Christina (now Wilmington) was founded in 1638. It was surrendered to the Dutch in 1655 and, in the next stage of international competition nine years later, the Dutch were then forced to surrender their North American colonies to the British.
The international context was critical to English settlements in the New World. Jamestown and the small plantations scattered across Tidewater Virginia were international seaports. The wide variety of currency used in the colonial era shows how Virginia was tightly connected to foreign lands. Less is known about the variety of languages spoken on the wharfs, but clearly early Virginia was not an "English-only" culture - especially after the massive importation of slaves started in the early 1700's.
The mix of cultures in Virginia were not completely independent of the status of national rivalries in Europe. Tensions between European powers competing for wealth and military control in the New World created tensions in the early settlements of Virginia. Though the Jamestown colony was desperate for settlers in its early years, rivalries were intense enough to permit hanging one of the members of the council as a Spanish spy. Still, Virginia welcomed most immigrants, no matter what alliances England was joining (or fighting). At various times, Virginia landowners struggled to recruit Huguenots, Catholics, Puritans, Royalists, refugees from the Palatinate, and virtually every other Northern European group that faced economic distress or persecution at home.
Virginians stayed connected to Europe - according to one writer in 1724, "the Virginia Planters, and even the Native Negoes generally talk good English without Idiom or Tone."1 To Europeans, however, Virginia was certainly not home - it was "somewhere else," way out there in the wilderness. In such a place, new riches could be discovered and adventurers could get a second chance at life.
Inevitably, the Europeans brought the prejudices and perspectives of their homelands to the New World. The culture of Virginia that evolved after 1607 was based on English society. Only five years after Columbus "sailed the ocean blue" and discovered the islands in the Caribbean, John Cabot travelled to North America.
This gave the English an opportunity to claim the continent by right of discovery, but it was the permanent settlement starting in 1607 that really determined that Virginia would be based on an English model. Had the Spanish or the French settled Virginia, the colonial churches might have mirrored the missions in Florida, or the colony could have been based on fishing and fur trading rather than tobacco...