num_pages: 203
description: To the wild and unknown shores of a new world, hesitantly at first, then with growing expectations, came Europe's adventurers and dispossessed, saints and sinners, farmers and traders, poor hoping to get rich, and rich hoping to get richer. The people who followed Columbus were ill-equipped to start new lives on a continent whose hazards and dimensions they knew only vaguely. A century of trial, often ending in failure, gave them experience in settling the "newfound land." National Geographic writer Tee Loftin Snell journeyed first to Europe to seek out origins of America's early settlers. Then she traveled the coasts of North America, searching into the places where the French, Spanish, English, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedes, Germans, and Russians gained footholds on the land. In The Wild Shores: America's Beginnings, we experience both the triumph and the tragedy of early settlements. William Bradford, leader of the Pilgrims, wrote of the joy the men and women felt when they reached Cape Cod and "set their feet on the firm and stable earth." But for the Pilgrims, as for so many others, the joy was short-lived: "What could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men...and a mighty ocean...to separate them from all the civil parts of the world." The high adventure of America's beginnings is illustrated by the paintings of Louis S. Glanzman and by artwork of the time; the settings are presented through maps, and through a selection of photographs by Walter Meayers Edwards.
language: English
title: The Wild Shores: America's Beginnings
titlecomplete: The Wild Shores: America's Beginnings
genres: American History, History, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 10
publisher: National Geographic Society