earl of Orkney, visited Nova Scotia in 1398. In the early years of Spanish colonization of the Americas, a Scot named Tam Blake spent 20 years in Colombia and Mexico. He took part in the conquest of New Granada in 1532 with Alonso de Heredia. He arrived in Mexico in 1534–5, and joined Coronado's 1540 expedition to the American Southwest. Scottish-American naturalist John Muir is perhaps best known for his exploration of California's Sierra Nevada mountains during the 19th century. Traders After the Union of the Crowns of Scotland and England in 1603, King James VI, a Scot, promoted joint expeditions overseas, and became the founder of British America. The first permanent English settlement in the Americas, Jamestown, was thus named for a Scot. The earliest Scottish communities in America were formed by traders and planters rather than farmer settlers. The hub of Scottish commercial activity in the colonial period was Virginia. Regular contacts began with the transportation of indentured servants to the colony from Scotland, including prisoners taken in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. By the 1670s Glasgow was the main outlet for Virginian tobacco, in open defiance of English restrictions on colonial trade; in return the colony received Scottish manufactured goods, emigrants and ideas. In the 1670s and 1680s Presbyterian Dissenters fled persecution by the Royalist privy council in Edinburgh to settle in South Carolina and New Jersey, where they maintained their distinctive religious culture. Trade between Scotland and the American colonies was finally regularized by the parliamentary Act of Union of Scotland and England in 1707. Population growth and the commercialization of agriculture in Scotland encouraged mass emigration to America after the French and Indian War, a conflict which had also seen the first use of Scottish Highland regiments as Indian fighters. More than 50,000 Scots, principally from the west coast, settled in the Thirteen Colonies between 1763 and 1776, the majority of these in their own communities in the South, especially North Carolina, although Scottish individuals and families also began to appear as professionals and artisans in every American town. Scots arriving in Florida and the Gulf Coast traded extensively with Native Americans. Settlers Scottish settlement in colonial America has often been divided by historians into three separate streams—Lowlanders, Highlanders, and Ulster Scots. Lowland Scots began to migrate to North America in the eighteenth century after the union of England and Scotland. They tended to