Taking a general view of America at the close of the sixteenth century, we find Spain in undisputed possession of Peru, Central America, the country west and northwest of the Gulf of Mexico, the greater part of the West Indies, and the coast of what is now Florida; while they claimed all of the southern third of the present United States and the greater part of South America, except Guiana and Brazil. The French laid claim to the basin of the St. Lawrence and to the coast northward and southward, but their colonies were not as yet permanently planted; the attempts to make Huguenot settlements in Brazil (1555) and Florida had been unsuccessful, and French claims there had been abandoned under Spanish influence. It was not until 1609, when Hudson sailed up the river named for him, that the Dutch laid any claims to American soil. Cabral discovered Brazil for the Portuguese in 1500; but when Portugal, eighty years later, became the dependency of Spain (a condition lasting sixty years), her South American colonies were harried by the Dutch, though she did not relinquish control of them. The English claimed all the North American coast from Newfoundland to Florida, and of course through to the Pacific, no one then entertaining the belief that the continent was many hundred miles in width; but as yet none of their colonizing efforts had been successful. The Bermudas, Bahamas, and Barbados were neither claimed nor settled by Englishmen until the seventeenth century. The great Mississippi basin had been visited by a few Spanish overland wanderers, but as yet was practically forgotten and unclaimed, except so far as it was included in the undefined Spanish and English transcontinental zones; the Hudson Bay country, Oregon, and Alaska were also undiscovered lands. A few thousand miles of American coast-line were now familiar to European explorers; but of the interior of the continent scarcely more was known than might be seen over the tree-tops from the mast-head of a caravel. CHAPTER III. COLONIZATION AND THE COLONISTS. 17. References. Bibliographies.--C. Lucas, _Introduction to Historical Geography of British Colonies_, vii., viii.; Winsor, _Narrative and Critical History_, III., V.; Larned, _Literature of American History_, 67-76; Avery, _United States_, II. 409-411; E. Greene, _Provincial America_, ch. xix.; Channing and Hart, _Guide_, §§ 92, 104, 110. Historical Maps.--No. 2, this volume (_Epoch Maps_, No. 2); MacCoun, Winsor, and Avery.