The name America' comes from an Italian businessman called Amerigo Vespucci, who sailed to South America between 1499 and 1502. But he was not the first European to make the dangerous journey across the Atlantic. The Vikings came to Vinland' (probably Canada or New England from Scandinavia around AD 1000, but they did not stay: Then, in 1492, a brave Italian sailor called Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean while he was looking for a sea route from Europe to India. Columbus called the Native Americans Indians' because he thought that he had reached India. When Columbus returned to Europe he told people about his adventures and other sailors like Cabot and Cartier followed him across the Atlantic. Europeans came to fish the rich seas of America too. But it was only in the seventeenth century that the Pocahontas French, the Dutch and the with her son British all came to live in North America: the French in Quebec, the Dutch in New York and the British in Virginia and New England. Two very different groups of English people crossed the Atlantic. The first group began the colony of Jamestown in Virginia in