The Wild Shores: America's BeginningsTo 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