Except I think it’s interesting this was not generalizable. The Spanish were looking for people, just different people at first. Cortez for example landed and immediately “employed” hundreds of native people to come up with some wealth to pay off the exploration debt. The friars were specifically there to convert people to Catholicism.

The British puritans were looking to build their personal Utopia, but the Spanish and others, it seems to me, were looking for a populated colony from the start.