Primitive people of Asiatic origin, mistakenly named "Indians" by Columbus, were the first inhabitants of present-day Rhode Island. Archaeological evidence indicates their presence in this area more than eight thousand years ago.
European contacts with Rhode Island and its coastline have been claimed for several explorers, including medieval Irish adventurers sailing in skin-boats called currachs, Norsemen or Vikings (who were once thought to be builders of the Newport Tower), and the daring Portuguese navigator Miguel Corte-Real, who allegedly carved his name and a series of symbols into Dighton Rock in the nearby Taunton River. None of these visitations has been substantiated beyond reasonable doubt, though each has its scholarly supporters. Therefore, the 1524 voyage of Italian navigator Giovanni Verrazzano stands as the first verifiable visit to Rhode Island by a European adventurer.
Verrazzano made his famous trip, searching for an all-water route through North America to China, in the employ of the French king Francis and several Italian promoters. After landfall at Cape Fear, North Carolina, about March 1, 1524, he proceeded up the coast to the present site of New York City to anchor in the Narrows, now spanned by the giant bridge, which bears his name. From there, according to his own account, he sailed in an easterly direction until he "discovered an island in the form of a triangle, distant from the mainland ten leagues, about the bigness of the Island of Rhodes," which he named Luisa after the Queen Mother of France. This was Block Island, but Roger Williams and other early settlers mistakenly thought that Verrazzano had been referring to Aquidneck Island. Thus they changed that Indian name to Rhode Island, and Verrazzano inadvertently and indirectly gave the state its name.
Natives who paddled out to his ship off Point Judith were so friendly that Verrazzano sailed with their guidance into Narragansett Bay to a second anchorage in what is now Newport harbor. He remained for two weeks while his crew surveyed the bay and the surrounding mainland, noting the fertile soil, the woods of oak and walnut, and such game as lynx and deer. Their observations on the dress and customs of their hosts, the Wampanoags, were also most revealing. In early May 1524 Verrazzano departed to press on in vain search for a Northwest Passage to the Orient.
For ninety years following Verrazzano's visit, most European voyagers to North America unsuccessfully sought that elusive Northwest Passage or productively fished the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. In either case, their travels kept them far to the north of the Rhode Island coast. Not until 1614 were other significant visitations to Rhode Island made and recorded. In that year John Smith of Virginia fame explored and charted the New England coast and bestowed upon this region its name, while Dutch mariner Adriaen Block, en route to the Hudson River, visited Block Island and immodestly named it for himself.
From 1620 onward, settlers from nearby Plymouth Colony and the colony of Massachusetts Bay (established 1628) ventured into the Narragansett region to trade with indian tribes. Finally, in 1635, Rhode Island got its first white settler -- William Blackstone, an eccentric Anglican clergyman who built a home near Lonsdale on the banks of the river, which came to bear his name.
Blackstone and others who followed him found the area inhabited by several Indian tribes. The largest of these was the Narragansetts. These natives were part of the Algonquin family of Indian nations, a loose network of related peoples whose habitat stretched from what is now southern Canada to present-day North Carolina. Before the establishment of the permanent white settlements in New England, the Narragansetts occupied the area of Rhode Island from Warwick southward along Narragansett Bay to the present towns of South Kingstown and Exeter. The rest of Rhode Island was populated by other Algonquins, and some friendly, some bitter enemies of the Narragansetts.
The Wampanoags were undoubtedly the Narragansetts' principal rivals. Their sphere of influence extended throughout much of the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay and included Bristol Neck, portions of southeastern Massachusetts, Pawtucket, and parts of Lincoln and Cumberland.
The Nipmucks, a weak tribe by comparison with the Narragansetts and the Wampanoags, maintained a tenuous foothold in the northwesterly corner of the state. Initially tributaries of the Wampanoags, the Nipmucks by 1630 came under the yoke of the expanding Narragansetts, a fate that also befell two subtribes in the Warwick area, the Cowesetts and the Shawomets.
On the southern coast the Niantics populated much of what is now the towns of Charlestown and Westerly. II appears that they were driven out of Connecticut by the warlike Pequots sometime late in the sixteenth century. The Pequots -- who took their name from an Algonquin word meaning destroyer -- continued their expansion eastward, and in 1632 they engaged in a bitter war with the Narragansetts for control of the area just east of the Pawcatuck River in Westerly and Hopkinton.
Anthropologists have estimated the Narragansett Population at about seven thousand persons when the first white settlers arrived. This estimate also includes the Niantics, who were related to the Narragansetts by marriage and shared the same customs and language. These Indians subsisted on farming, fishing, and hunting. Roles were strictly defined in Algonquin society, and the women decidedly had the worst of it. Besides childbearing, females were responsible for planting, harvesting, toting of material possessions when the village moved on a seasonal basis, preparation of food, shellfishing, utensil manufacture, and the erection of wigwams (the bark huts of the Indians). Men, on the other hand, performed the far less strenuous duties of fishing and hunting, and they spent a good deal of time in recreational activities.
The Narragansetts and Niantics lived in compact villages that were composed of families who shared a kin relationship. Village leaders, sometimes called subsachems or petty sachems, answered to a higher authority. For the Narragansetts, the ultimate governmental leadership rested in the hands of two men, called chief sachems, who claimed an exalted status by virtue of royal blood. When Roger Williams founded the town of Providence, Canonicus and his young nephew Miantonomi reigned as the two chief sachems of the Narragansetts.