Key Terms
- headright system
- a system in which parcels of land were granted to settlers who could pay their own way to Virginia
- indenture
- a labor contract that promised young men, and sometimes women, money and land after they worked for a set period of years
- Jesuits
- members of the Society of Jesus, an elite Catholic religious order founded in the 1540s to spread Catholicism and to combat the spread of Protestantism
- maroon communities
- groups of escaped enslaved people who resisted recapture and eked out a living from the land
- Middle Passage
- the perilous, often deadly transatlantic crossing of ships carrying captured Africans from the African coast to the New World
- musket
- a light, long-barreled European gun
- patroonships
- large tracts of land and governing rights granted to merchants by the Dutch West India Company in order to encourage colonization
- repartimiento
- a Spanish colonial system requiring Native American towns to supply workers for the colonizers
- Timucua
- the native people of Florida, whom the Spanish displaced with the founding of St. Augustine, the first Spanish settlement in North America
- wampum
- shell beads used in ceremonies and as jewelry and currency