Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, The: Father Gregorio Bolivar's 1625 report: A vactican source for the history of early Virginia

"WHEN European nations set out to colonize the New World during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they did so for a variety of reasons. Europeans hoped to expand their territorial empires, gain wealth from the New World, find a shorter route to the riches of Asia, and extend both the reach and influence of Christianity. National and religious rivalries that had developed in Europe, including competition between England and Spain, quickly imbued attempts at settlement in the Americas. By the time England began making serious efforts to plant colonies in North America during the 1580s and early 1600s, Spain had already established one of the largest empires in the history of the world. Settlement in the Spanish colonial empire stretched from the southern tip of South America to modern-day Florida, although the Spanish claimed the entire American southeast to at least 37 degrees north latitude (approximately the mouth of the Bahia de Santa Maria, or the Chesapeake Bay), a territory they called La Florida., Their New World empire had become a profitable one for the Spanish.

Mercantilism, the economic theory that dominated early modern Europe, held that a finite amount of wealth existed in the world and that one of the primary reasons for planting colonies was to help a mother country acquire as much of that wealth as possible through trade or the appropriation of natural bounty. Using the forced labor of thousands of New World slaves, Spanish colonists extracted gold and silver from mines in Mexico and South America to send back on board the yearly Spanish treasure fleet. Lacking colonies with which to exploit the bounty of the Americas, Queen Elizabeth I (born 1533; reigned 1558-1603) enco"