Colonial Zygotes — The Exploratory Microgeneration
Those Americans who directly preceded the Parliamentarians formed a cohort focusing on distinct corners of the continent
Much of my time throughout 2023 and 2024 was spent researching the historical and social dynamics endured by different American generations. By identifying 27 broad generational cohorts across six centuries, I developed a baseline for my anthological “Jigsaw Gens” series. There’s value in examining American history from these angles so we can have a better understanding of why Americans behaved the way they did during specific points in time.
Here are the 27 generations whom I have defined:
Parliamentarians | Concentrics | Inflectors
Kingdomites | Cavaliers | Magnas
Glory Warriors | Lumineers | Enlightening Rods
Septennials | Liberty Lords | Goodpublicans
Madisonians | Unimpressionists | Transcendentals
Redeemers | Golden Renegades | Stowegressives
Missionaries | Hemingrebels | GI-Gens
Traditionalists | Baby Boomers | GenXers
Millennials | Zoomers | Alphas
Now, I’m moving along to a survey of “microgenerations.” These are “cusps” between two main generational cohorts — bridging together the very youngest members of one generation with the very oldest members of the next one.
The oldest microgenerational cusp I’ve identified directly precedes the oldest generation out of the 27 main cohorts I’ve pinpointed.
I refer to these Sixteenth-Century cuspers as the Colonial Zygotes.
Who They Are
Colonial Zygotes were born approximately between 1555 to 1559 — give or take a couple of years on either end. This cusp forms a microgeneration that comes directly before the oldest Parliamentarians. The unidentified generation whose members were born throughout the 1530s and 1540s hasn’t been summarized by me.
As children, they were being raised by their families when René Goulaine de Laudonnière founded Fort Caroline in future Northeastern Florida on behalf of the French Huguenots. Forty miles southeast of them, the Spanish built St. Augustine. A decade of warfare ensued between France and Spain over that settlement. Colonial Zygotes were firmly in adulthood when Roanoke Colony collapsed. Those who survived into their sixties and seventies saw conflicts such as the Trans-Atlantic Chattel Slave Trade, the Mayflower’s landing at Plymouth Rock (and subsequent Mayflower Compact), the Anglo-Powhatan Wars, the Pequot War, and the very start of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.
I cooked up this nickname for people born on this cusp since they emerged into the world at the dawn of European colonization. Like a fetus or an undeveloped cell, they functioned as the “zygotes” who would plant seeds for the long American journey ahead consisting of both tragedy and innovation.
They watched as France gained a foothold on Parris Island. For the first halves of Colonial Zygotes’ lifetimes, the British failed to make the Roanoke Colony work but succeeded with the founding of Jamestown. Spaniards planted their feet on American shores bordering both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
Their adulthood spanned the early teachings of tobacco cultivation to White settlers by Indigenous tribes — leading up to the Puritan-driven “Great Migration.” Many of them crossed the Atlantic, westbound, for the first time after Puritans founded Plymouth Colony and owners of slave ships proceeded to kidnap (and sell into bondage) Africans.
They became society’s elders as Plymouth’s surviving Pilgrims branched out into additional New England colonies throughout the 1620s.
I call Colonial Zygotes “the Exploratory Microgeneration” because most of their European and African members were unfamiliar with North America after crossing the ocean to arrive here. For this cusp’s Indigenous members, even their familiarity with their North American homeland subsided as contact with Anglos, Franks, and Spaniards compelled them to journey beyond their villages. Indigenous Colonial Zygotes formed alliances they otherwise may not have pursued had European colonists never appeared in the hemisphere via boat.
Their Early Lives
Born into the mid- to late-1550s, Colonial Zygotes were largely unaware of the colonization that slowly seeped its way onto the North American continent. Indigenous members of this cohort were experiencing childhood amongst their Tribal Nations. White, Black, and Brown children belonging to this age group mostly remained on the European, African, South American, and Asian continents.
During their pre-pubescent lives, Colonial Zygotes were largely unaware of how Spain was exploring the future Pensacola and Chesapeake Bay areas while France planted a flag on Parris Island of future South Carolina.
For years, the Spanish and the French battled one another for control over Fort Caroline. 3,000 miles away, other Spaniards brushed against California’s Cape Mendocino as part of their search for a trans-oceanic gold-trading route. Colonial Zygotes were approaching puberty as Spanish raiders destroyed Chisca communities; on the opposite coast, Indigenous North Carolinians burned down Fort San Juan as retribution for kidnappings.
Again, children of any racial background had minimal direct involvement in most of these earliest conflicts. But written/oral documentation of such fledgling warfare would be shared with the Colonial Zygotes as they eventually became adults themselves.
Hence, the “zygote” moniker I’ve assigned to them. These kids had no control over the actions of their elders. The dubious sensations of entitlement, rage, fear, desperation, and superiority complexes would be passed down to them.
When They Came-of-Age
Compared to the American microgenerations who would succeed them, Colonial Zygotes had perhaps the least eventful adolescences of any historical cohort. They continued to be told by their elders of the latest intercultural clashes.
Prolonged attempts by Spaniards to convert Indigenous Virginians to Catholicism came to a head in the early-1570s. The Algonquian warrior Don Luis (believed by some to have been synonymous with Opechancanough, a Powhatan chief) led a massacre of Spaniards at Ajacán Mission. It’s speculated that a surviving male servant named Alonso de Olmos may have been one of the earliest-recorded Colonial Zygotes — a Spanish boy possibly absorbed by one of the local tribes.
In retaliation, Spanish conquistador Pedro Menéndez de Avilés (the founder of St. Augustine) exacted revenge against Indigenous locals for the prior Ajacán massacre. However, Menéndez de Avilés would depart from the Virginian coast to spend the remainder of his life in Cuba and Spain.
Pedro Menéndez Márquez, a nephew of Menéndez de Avilés, oversaw Spanish exploration stretching from La Florida to modern-day Chesapeake Bay. He focused on staving off incursion onto Spanish settlements from France, England, and Indigenous tribes. But, when juxtaposed against the discord in subsequent decades, the mid-1570s were relatively quiet.
By 1579, Francis Drake and his fellow privateers scraped the present-day Oregonian and Californian coasts. These logged journeys would be amongst those Drake would go on to share with the British Crown, upon arriving back in Europe.
In these days, news of expeditions traveled at a snail’s pace. Years and years of radio silence would linger before explorers and colonists were able to report back to their proprietors.
How They Shaped The World
For Colonial Zygotes, average lifespans rarely extended beyond their teens or twenties. However, for those from this cohort who did persevere further into adulthood, they bore witness to more sweeping changes in daily life than they could have ever imagined.
Colonial Zygotes would have been amongst the primary adults — in their mid-twenties through their mid-thirties — during the rise and fall of the lost colony of Roanoke. Barely a few years older than them, Sir Walter Raleigh presumably hoped to nurture it as a cornerstone for immigration into Virginia and surrounding regions. Raleigh tasked his own elders — Ralph Lane, Richard Grenville, Simon Fernandes, and John White — to launch Roanoke’s prosperity.
Simultaneously, Drake had found his way to St. Augustine; in short order, he plundered and set ablaze the colony. This was one of the first hostile exchanges between Protestants (represented by the English and the French) and Catholics (represented by the Spanish) on North American shores.
Spaniards conducted their first religious rites at San Diego in 1602. Four years later, Anglos established Virginia Crown Colony. By 1608, Captain John Smith set off the first firecrackers documented on the North American continent. Children of this era — the Concentric generation — would find it to be scary yet exciting when considering what life might have in store for them.
Inching closer to old age, Colonial Zygotes watched Pocahontas and John Rolfe become somewhat of a “power couple” in their time period. Americans on this cusp prepared to take a backseat as Parliamentarians, Concentrics, and Inflectors built upon the tobacco cultivation that would elevate international trade.
The House of Burgesses convened as the first European-style body of American government. Its assemblymen considered how to expand the British presence in North America. 1622’s massacre of English settlers by Powhatans opened the floodgates for individual power brokers who’d try to impose authoritarian rule over their subjects.
Their Golden Years
Aging into their seventies and eighties, Colonial Zygotes were a sliver of the colonial population by the time King James VI & I had passed away. Massachusetts Bay Colony was set up to facilitate northward Puritan migration.
As they died out, Colonial Zygotes saw some of the newest revolutionaries from this era arise. Roger Williams — of the Inflector generation — put forth a counternarrative to Puritan rigidity. Anne Hutchinson and John Cotton carried forward such resistance during the Aninomian Controversy.
By the late-1630s, John Wheelwright had led the Exeter Compact on behalf of freethinking religious liberty. Nathaniel Ward went to bat for individual rights by compiling the Massachusetts Body of Liberties. Congregationalists promoted “The New England Way.” Catholics gained some limited sovereignty through the Maryland Toleration Act.
Most Colonial Zygotes had passed away by the time King Charles I was beheaded for treason. For significant chunks of their lives, very few of them had been able to observe international exchanges up close.
But, for those who found themselves living on the North American continent, they went through feral attempts at surviving unfamiliar elements or tenuous neighbors. They lived a day-to-day exercise in trying to avoid disease, territorial wildlife, pillagers, religious extremists, or other manifestations of human brutality.
Those Colonial Zygotes who, through luck or stealth (or a combination of both!), kept adding decade after decade to their lifespans would receive a starker glimpse into the bloody, rancorous, insatiable future of the American experience.
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