They were inspired by Indian folktales and the very real wealth the Spanish discovered in the defeated Incan and Aztec empires. The region’s indigenous people called this vast territory Guiana (“the land of many rivers”), and the explorers were Spaniards eagerly searching for El Dorado, the reputedly dazzling City of Gold. In the sixteenth century, gold was the incentive for the earliest European explorers of the vast territory between the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers that included what would become Willoughbyland. I suspect that most Americans-and I daresay most Brits-don’t know Willoughbyland’s peculiar history. Over a hundred years earlier, in the seventeenth century, Willoughbyland (named for its founder, Sir Francis Willoughby), located in what is now Suriname on South America’s northeast coast, was a prosperous colony that the English ceded to the Netherlands through the exigencies of national and international realpolitik. However, as Matthew Parker shows in Willoughbyland: England’s Lost Colony, there was at least one precursor. Were North America’s original thirteen British colonies the first ones relinquished by their mighty mother country? Most Americans probably smugly believe that’s the case.
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