单词/词组

Moor 摩尔人， 居住在伊比利亚半岛居民，信封伊斯兰教

piety 虔诚

pious 虔诚的

amenable 有义务的

convict / conviction 定罪

at loggerheads 对立的， 冲突的

charter 宪章，特许状

Charter of the United Nations 联合国宪章

Jamestown, Plymouth 位于美国马萨诸塞州

Hapsburg 哈布斯堡王朝。哈布斯堡王朝（Habsburg），欧洲历史上统治领域最广的王室，曾统治 神圣罗马帝国、西班牙帝国、 奥地利帝国、 奥匈帝国。

Early Settlers in the New World

The English arrived in North America with hopes of duplicating the exploits of the Spanish in South America, where explorer had discovered immense fortunes in gold and silver. Although Spain and England shared a pronounced lust for wealth, differences between the two cultures were profound.

Catholic Spain had, by expelling its Jews and Moors, achieved the spiritual security of a united church. To the Spanish policy-makers, the New World was a place that offered Spaniards adventure, romance, and religious converts, while it offered to the Spanish crown a financial base for the Hapsburgs’ European adventures.

England, unlike Spain, continued in the 16th and 17th centuries to be torn by political and religious disunity. Because of this English background of civil conflict, English -speaking America, where there were no religious wars, as such, is often described as a land of refuge to which men and women came in order to enjoy the religious and political freedom denied them in their homeland. This conception of America’s beginnings in the 17th century is for the most part true. Most of those who came to settle the early colonies sought not adventure or romance, but a new homeland. Some came to express religious piety; other s sought a free society. For example, the Puritans, a sizable percentage of the earliest settlers in Massachusetts ( the principal area of settlement), were a pious, self-disciplined people, but they were almost as intolerant of others’ views as were the people in England they viewed as having driven them out. Massachusetts was not amenable to those who did not share the majority ‘s convictions about right or wrong, nor was it comfortable for those who were unwilling or unable to work. What is called by many “the Protestant ethic” was clearly descriptive of the dominant mood in pre-revolutionary New England.

But settlers did not come to the New World solely because of motives of piety. Beginning with the Jamestown colony in 1607, charter companies founded colonies principally as business ventures. Yet that piety and profit were not necessarily at loggerheads. The Puritan settlement at Plymouth economic considerations. Nonetheless, early attempts at substantial profits were largely failures, at least for the original English investors. There was little gold, and mining was not economical on the East Coast. As a result, land for farming had to be cleared, and even when the harvests were good price were modest (little money was available) and so profits tended to be were in England. Both the Jamestown and the Plymouth colonies were quickly turned over by the original English investors to the settlers. The political implications were enormous; few Englishmen cared about the unprofitable colonies and left the colonials to build their own lives, their own communities, and their own economy.