You're disregarding the extremely large number of people who were more or less forced to travel to the new world. Add up the slaves taken there, people sentenced to be sent there for crimes, people who had to leave their home country or starve and people who had to leave their home country or be murdered and you start to get a pretty large number.

Exactly. A large chunk of the population was forced to American against their will, and a large chunk of the people who chose to go to America only survived because of the labor of the people who were forced to be there. Claiming success on the back of slave labor isn’t something that’s super popular these days.

> That's a bit of an overstatement.

After reading few books from the period and later ones by Nathaniel Hawthorne, I don't think so.

> I expect if that were true, people wouldn't have kept on coming.

The people coming could have incomplete or incorrect information. Communication was slow back then. Separating fact from falsehoods about the New World would have been a crapshoot at best.

Even an entirely country got it wrong. Scotland bankrupted itself on the Darien scheme.

The bulk of immigration to the New World happened after the first 2-3 centuries, before that, the plurality were chattel slaves.

That’s of course ignoring the post apocalyptic lives of the natives that survived successive waves of disease and collapse radiating out from points of contact, but it’s habit at this point.