The colony of Maryland, which King Charles I had granted to the Catholic Lord Baltimore in 1632, joins the Virginia colony on Chesapeake Bay.

Many of Baltimore’s co-religionists emigrate there to escape persecution, as was his hidden intention.

The Susquehannocks, an Iroquoian-speaking tribe living in the vicinity of the lower Susquehannock River valley near present-day Lancaster, Pennsylvania, had in 1658 used their influence with the Esopus tribe to end the Esopus Wars because the conflict interfered with the important fur trade with the Dutch of New Netherland.

The Susquehannocks have been at war with the Iroquois since 1658.

Maryland's treaty of peace is expanded by 1661, to a full alliance between the Maryland colonists and the Susquehannocks against the Iroquois, the English having grown fearful of the Iroquois and hopeful that an alliance with the Susqehannocks would help block the northern tribes' advance on the English colonies.

Besides goods and arms, fifty Englishmen are assigned to the Susquehannocks to guard their fort.

The Iroquois send an army of eight hundred warriors into the Susqehannock territory in 1663.

The Susquehannocks and their English allies repulse the attack, but the invasion prompts the colony of Maryland to declare war on the Iroquois.

The Iroquois are at war also in 1663 with the Sokoki tribe of the upper Connecticut River, a branch of the Abenaki.

Smallpox strikes again; through the effects of disease, famine, and war, the Iroquois are threatened by extermination.

An Oneida party strikes at allies of the Susquehannock on Chesapeake Bay in 1664.

The supply of artillery to Susqehannock forts by English settlers has made it impossible for the Iroquois to triumph by superior arms.

The Susqehannock, taking the upper hand, have begun to invade Iroquois territory, where they cause significant damage.

The Virginia Colony had fixed the Rappahannock boundaries in 1662 at Cat Point Creek on the west and Totuskey Creek on the east.

The Rappahannocks had soon given up on trying to defend their homeland and moved away; by 1669, they are settled at the headwaters of the Mattaponi River with thirty bowmen.

The Monacan towns of Mowhemencho and Mahock were still in the area in 1670, when they were visited by John Lederer and Major Harris, who found that the men possessed muskets.

Lederer recorded their tradition that they had settled in the area on account of an oracle four hundred years earlier, having been driven from the northwest by an enemy nation.

They told him they had found it occupied by the Doegs, whom they eventually displaced, in the meantime teaching them the art of growing corn.

Another Monacan tradition he records as follows: "From four women, viz. Pash, Sepoy, Askarin, and Maraskarin, they derive the race of mankinde; which they therefore divide into four tribes, distinguished under those several names."

At the time of Lederer's visit, the tribe had about thirty bowmen, out of a total population of perhaps one hundred.

Lederer also noted the towns of Sapon and Pintahae on the Staunton River; Swanton considers this last to be a Nahyssan village, which Batts and Fallam record as Hanahaskie in 1671.

English colonists in Philadelphia and the French in the Mississippi River Valley record major outbreaks in 1669, as well as additional yellow fever epidemics in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York City in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Yellow fever travels along steamboat routes from New Orleans, causing some one hundred thousand–to one hundred and fifty thousand deaths in total.

The British government in 1720 instructs governors of American colonies to consent to no Act permitting Bills of Credit.

The South Sea Company, established in 1711 by the Lord Treasurer, Robert Harley, had been granted exclusive trading rights in Spanish South America, anticipating the successful conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession, which did not end until 1713, and the actual treaty rights granted had not been as comprehensive as Harley had originally hoped.

Needing to provide a mechanism for funding government debt incurred in the course of that war, Harley could not have established a bank, because the charter of the Bank of England made it the only joint stock bank.

He had therefore established what was ostensibly a trading company, though its main activity was in fact the funding of government debt.

In return for its exclusive trading rights, the government had seen an opportunity for a profitable trade-off.

The government and the company had persuaded the holders of around £10 million of short-term government debt to exchange it with a new issue of stock in the company.

In exchange, the government had granted the company a perpetual annuity from the government paying £576,534 annually on the company's books: in essence, a perpetual loan of ten million pounds paying six percent.

This had guaranteed the new equity owners a steady stream of earnings to this new venture.

The Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 had granted the company the right to send one trading ship per year (though this was in practice accompanied by two 'tenders') and the 'Asiento', the monopoly contract to supply the Spanish colonies with slaves.

The company had not undertaken a trading voyage to South America until 1717 and had made little actual profit.

Furthermore, when ties between Spain and Britain deteriorated in 1718 the short-term prospects of the company had been very poor.

Nonetheless, the company had continued to argue that its longer-term future would be extremely profitable.

The company in 1717  had taken on a further two million pounds of public debt, and in 1719 proposed a scheme by which it would buy more than half the national debt of Britain (£30,981,712), again with new shares, and a promise to the government that the debt would be converted to a lower interest rate, five percent until 1727 and four percent per year thereafter.

The purpose of this conversion was similar to the former one, allowing a conversion of high interest, but difficult to trade, debt, into low interest, readily marketable debt/shares of the South Sea Company.

All parties could gain.

The Bank of England proposes a similar competing offer, which does not prevail when the South Sea raises its bid to seven and a half million pounds (plus approximately one point three million pounds in bribes).

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Aislabie, is a strong supporter of the scheme.

Parliament in April 1720 accepts a slightly altered form of the company’s proposal, and the ensuing speculation causes the company’s stock to rise from one hundred and twenty-eight and one-half pounds sterling in January to one thousand pounds sterling in August.

Panic selling by British investors in September 1720 bursts the South Sea Bubble.

The stock has fallen by the end of September to one hundred and fifty pounds.

The company failures now extend to banks and goldsmiths as they cannot collect loans made on the stock, and thousands of individuals are ruined (including many members of the aristocracy).

With investors outraged, Parliament is recalled in December and an investigation begins.