Europeans colonize northern America Successful European efforts to colonize the northern regions of the Americas began in the first decades of the 1600's. The English established their first permanent settlement in America at Jamestown in 1607. Quebec, a French fur-trading post along the Saint Lawrence River, became an early permanent settlement of France's American colonial empire. The Dutch and Swedish also established colonial settlements in northern America in the 1600's. Click here for a Puritan's first-hand account of colonial life in the Americas during the 1600's. View from Today