Neither the exploration of Cartier in 1534, or that of the Cabots much earlier, was followed by any attempt to possess the land.

Breton fishermen visited the fisheries off Newfoundland, and various explorers attempted to find openings which would give them a north-west passage, but otherwise the more northerly part of the continent was left unoccupied till the beginning of the seventeenth century.

The first town founded was that of St.Augustine, in Florida, in 1565, but this was destroyed three years later by a French expedition.

Sir Walter Raleigh attempted to found a colony in 1584 near where Virginia now stands, but it failed after three years, and it was not till the reign of James I.that an organised attempt was made by England to establish plantations, as they were then called, on the North American coast.
Two Chartered Companies, the one to the north named the Plymouth Company, and the one to the south named the London Company (both founded in 1606), nominally divided between them all the coast from Nova Scotia to Florida.

These large tracts of country were during the seventeenth century slowly parcelled out into smaller states, mainly Puritan in the north (New England), High Church and Catholic in the south (Virginia and Maryland).