mport of slaves.
6/4/1712 Slave revolt in New York
17/1/1706. Benjamin Franklin, American scientist, was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the 15th of 17 children.
1702, French settlement of what is now Alabama began. The French explorer Jean Baptiste le Moyne founded a colony just inland, which he called Foret Loius de la Mobile, in honour of both Louis XIV of France and the local friendly Amerindian tribe, the Mabila.
24/7/1701, Antione Cadillac founded the French colonial settlement of Fort Pontcahrtain, later Detroit, to control the route between Lake Huron and Lake Erie.
1/5/1699, Pierre le Moyne d’Iberville founded the first European settlement on the Mississippi at Fort Maurepas, now Ocean Springs, Mississippi.
14/1/1699, Massachusetts held a day of mourning for having wrongly persecuted witches.
1/1/1698, The Abenaki tribe and the Massachusetts colonists signed a treaty ending the conflict in New England.
10/6/1692. The first of the Salem Witches was hanged. She was Bridget Bishop, one of 150 respectable citizens accused of witchcraft by a hysterical band of young girls in the isolated Puritan town in Massachusetts.
1/3/1692, In the US, the Salem witch hunt began.
26/5/1691. James Lesler was executed for treason in New York. He had led an uprising against the English in favour of James II.
12/9/1687, John Adlen, one of the Pilgrim Fathers, died in Duxbury.
24/7/1684, Rene-Robert Cavelier sailed from France with a large expedition, to establish a French colony on the Gulf of Mexico, at the mouth of the Mississippi River.
27/10/1682, Philadelphia, USA, was founded by William Penn.
9/4/1682, The explorer de La Salle reached the mouth of the Mississippi and claimed it for Louis XIV of France, naming the area Louisiana.
8/1/1679, La Salle, French explorer, reached the Niagara Falls.
4/3/1681, King Charles II granted the Quaker, William Penn, 38 years old, a Royal Charter for territory in North America, to be called Pennsylvania. In return Penn waived a debt of £16,000 owed by the Crown to his estate.
27/11/1679, A major fire in Boston, Massachusetts, burnt all the warehouses, all the ships in the dockyards, and 80 houses.
10/11/1674. All Dutch-held areas of New York were returned to Britain under the Treaty of Westminster. During the third Anglo-Dutch war, the Dutch had captured New York on 9/8/1672.
13/6/1674. Philip Carteret, the governor of New Jersey, launched a campaign to enforce the payment of quitrents; rents charged on land initially granted free to settlers from Europe. The colony had rebelled against this taxation. In 1673 London had enacted the Plantation Duty Act, imposing duties on any ship carrying certain products, such as sugar, cotton, or tobacco, between colonial ports.
17/5/1673, Jacques Marquette, a French missionary, discovered the Mississippi River.
1/1/1673. A regular postal service was set up between New York and Boston. The mounted service used a special ‘post road’ along which men and horses are posted at intervals.
18/10/1667, Brooklyn received its Town Charter under Mathias Nichols, Governor of the New Netherlands, as ‘Brueckelen’.
23/9/1667. A law passed in Williamsburg, America, prevented slaves from gaining their freedom by converting to Christianity.
2/2/1665. The British captured Manhattan Island from the Dutch, almost 40 years after the Dutch bought it from the Indians for beads in 1626. The Dutch colony was ruled by Peter Stuyvesant under strict Puritanical principles. The British renamed it ‘New York’ after King Charles II’s brother the Duke of York. See 31/7/1667. British rule was more relaxed.
12/3/1664, New Jersey became a colony of England.
24/3/1663, King Charles II of England granted Carolina (from Virginia down to Florida) to eight of his courtiers, who had helped him regain the throne.
1/10/1660. The English reinforced the Navigation Act by insisting that certain colonial goods were only to be shipped to Britain. This was directed against the Dutch but caused resentment in the British colonies.
3/10/1658, Myles Sundish, leader of the Pilgrim Fathers, died.
9/5/1657, Pil