When the Europeans first began to land and stay in the early seventeenth century, they quickly realised that the east coast of this ‘virgin’ territory was packed with natural harbours and fertile soil. Here was a place where they could live and, unlike their home countries, a place where they hoped they could live freely. Their descendants would go on to deny the native inhabitants their freedom, but that was not the intention of the first settlers. Geography pulled them across the Atlantic in ever greater numbers.
