The Pilgrim voyage was the successful culmination of a century of maritime efforts along the New England coast by Spanish explorers, Portuguese fishermen, French and Dutch fur traders, and Elizabethan English “sea dogs.” All the western ports of Europe seethed with ambitious shipmasters in search of opportunities for profit in commerce or fishing, free-booting, the slave trade, warfare or piracy. Some, like Henry Hudson, visited New England primarily as geographers looking for a Northwest Passage through North America. A few were probing out possibilities for a colonial beachhead in the New World. One of these, led by French Jesuits, had, like the Pilgrims, a religious motive. Three or four others attempted New England colonies, but failed. Only the Pilgrims succeeded in hanging on, through the inevitable preliminary disasters of the first year or two, to found a permanent colony. Indians of Massachusetts probably first saw Europeans during the four Vinland voyages of Leif Ericsson and his successors between 1003 and 1015 A.D. There is good reason to suppose that these voyages touched the shores of Cape Cod and the islands about Martha’s Vineyard, but no direct evidence connects them with Plymouth Harbor. Continuous contact with Europeans did not begin until nearly five hundred years later when John Cabot’s second Newfoundland voyage coasted North America southward to the Carolinas in 1498. The Portuguese nobleman, Miguel Cortereal, a castaway on a voyage of exploration, may have lived among the Indians at the head of Narragansett Bay from 1502 until 1511. Certainly these Indians, the ancestors of Massasoit, were visited in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazano, whose French expedition spent two weeks in Narragansett Bay in that year. Verrazano wrote that he was met by about twenty dugout canoes filled with eager people, dressed in embroidered deerskins and necklaces. The women wore ornaments of copper on their heads and in their ears, and painted their faces. These Indians were delighted to trade furs for bright bits of colored glass. They lived in circular houses “ten or twelve paces in circumference, made of logs split in halves, covered with roofs of straw, nicely put on.” From the description, these people were no doubt the Wampanoags, who a hundred years later were such friendly allies to the Pilgrims at Plymouth, only thirty miles away.