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This chapter examines how London had to learn to be colonial. From the very first moments of sustained encounter in the late sixteenth century, places like Ossomocomuck and London were entangled through the creation of knowledge. Even before explorers stepped ashore in “Virginia,” they were propelled there by an unprecedented urban crisis that threatened the stability of London society. This urban context shaped how English explorers and colonists saw the territories and people they encountered and how they attempted—often unsuccessfully—to organize themselves and others in these unfamiliar places. Meanwhile, the experiences of Indigenous travelers to London, and in particular those originating in the homelands of the eastern Algonquian peoples suggest that parallel Indigenous processes of exploration were taking place.

This chapter focuses on the descendants of the Algonquian peoples who once inhabited the region of New York Harbor. The descendants have recalled that the first Dutch colonists asked for as much land as the hide of a bullock could cover, then claimed as much land as that hide, cut into strips, could encircle. The author believes, however, that this fantastical story preserves the memory of an actual event. Moreover, the story threads the history of the founding of New Amsterdam together with those of other, far-flung maritime colonial outposts, and offers a window onto the cultural history of early modern European imperialism. This episode with the bullock's hide is the culmination of a longer historical tradition about “The Arrival of the Whites.” The first written version of this tradition is in an 1801 letter from the Moravian missionary John Heckewelder to the historian Samuel Miller.

This chapter explores how the the combination of animal domestication and widespread urbanization across Europe, Asia, and Africa had led to the development of epidemic diseases against which Indigenous peoples in the Americas and elsewhere had little or no natural resistance. It was this urban reality that had likely cost the lives of the Algonquian people who disappeared into the city and that had prevented four of the five Inuit from making it home. Meanwhile, in London, for all the improvements of the Enlightenment—new understandings of disease, inoculation, and advances in urban design—disease remained one of the most intractable and threatening of urban realities. What scholars have called ecological imperialism, the means by which biology facilitated Europe's imperial and colonial incursions, had its roots in the city.