Introduction

The transportation of English outside the British Isles is closely connected to the history of colonial expansion which England embarked on at the beginning of the seventeenth century (Canny 1998b). Although the New World had been discovered at the end of the fifteenth century, England did not get involved in the colonial enterprise until a good century later, if one neglects the voyage of John Cabot to Newfoundland in 1497. What signals the beginning of English colonialism (Marshall 1996; Louis 1998) in the New World is the settlement of the east coast of the later United States, first with the unsuccessful attempt at Roanoke Island, North Carolina, in 1584 by Walter Ralegh and later with the settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. These were followed by the establishment of other colonies such as the Plymouth colony in 1620 in Massachusetts and the Maryland colony in 1634 (Algeo 2001a: 9). Parallel to forming a bridgehead on the mainland of America, the English established a presence in the Caribbean (Beckles 1998); the first and one of the most significant places was the small island of Barbados in the south-east which was occupied in 1627.

The settlers who left at the beginning of the seventeenth century came from different regions of the British Isles. A Scottish and an Irish element was present in this century (Cullen 1998) and these components are also dealt with in the chapters in the present volume on Scotland (Macafee) and Ireland (Hickey) respectively.