
Nicolas Denys was a French-born explorer, colonizer, soldier and leader in New France. He founded settlements at St. Pierre, Ste. Anne and Nepisiquit.

Pierre Dugua de Mons was a French merchant, explorer and colonizer. A Calvinist, he was born in the Château de Mons, in Royan, Saintonge and founded the first permanent French settlement in Canada. He travelled to northeastern North America for the first time in 1599 with Pierre de Chauvin de Tonnetuit.

John Leverett was an English colonial magistrate, merchant, soldier and the penultimate governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Born in England, he migrated to Massachusetts as a teenager. He was a leading merchant in the colony, and served in its military. In the 1640s he went back to England to fight in the English Civil War.

Charles de Menou d'Aulnay was a pioneer of European settlement in North America and Governor of Acadia (1635–1650).

Charles de Saint-Étienne de La Tour (1593–1666) was a French colonist and fur trader who served as Governor of Acadia from 1631–1642 and again from 1653–1657.

Cornelius Steenwyck served two terms as Mayor of New York City, the first from 1668 to 1672 (or 1670, and the second from 1682 to 1684.

William Alexander, 1st Earl of Stirling was a Scottish courtier and poet who was involved in the Scottish colonisation of Habitation at Port-Royal, Nova Scotia and Long Island, New York. His literary works include Aurora (1604), The Monarchick Tragedies (1604) and Doomes-Day.

Daniel d'Auger de Subercase naval officer and French governor of Newfoundland and later Acadia, born Orthez, Béarn died Cannes-Écluse, Île-de-France. Subercase was baptised a Protestant to Jean Daughter, a rich merchant and bourgeois who had purchased several noble estates, including the lay abbey of Subercase, near Asson.