AHC: Colonise Antarctica

SinghKing

Banned
Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to feasibly have at least one 'nation' (/ethnic group/tribal society) with a permanent settlement located inside the Antarctic Circle, prior to 1900CE. Up for it?
 
Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to feasibly have at least one 'nation' (/ethnic group/tribal society) with a permanent settlement located inside the Antarctic Circle, prior to 1900CE. Up for it?

This is...difficult, but not impossible. First of all, our mission gets much easier if you allow Antarctic islands. In fact, people live in South Georgia today, and it's definitely survivable with 1900s tech. Get a British or American coaling station there, and bam!

Even if not...well, Antarctica is known since about 1820. There are some parts of Victoria Land aren't that cold, and the Antarctic Peninsula as a whole is the least freezing part of the continent (especially the northern tip, shocking no one). Chile and Argentina built partially civilian towns there in the second half of the 20th century, but that was more because of a need for prestige than any technological developments. They could well have done so decades before - or the British could have, if they'd wanted to strengthen their claim to the region. And if the British held Tierra del Fuego or Patagonia, well...
 
I suggested in an earlier thread that this could happen in a scenario like a crossover between Land of Red and Gold (specifically, something resembling the in-world ATL "For Want of Yam" from that ATL) and Land of Ice and Mice. That is, Maori colonize Patagonia and adapt a High Latitude crop and animal package from the Thule (need to work out who the heel brings it there though), then they colonize the Antarctic peninsula with it.
Sounds ASB I believe.
 

SinghKing

Banned
I suggested in an earlier thread that this could happen in a scenario like a crossover between Land of Red and Gold (specifically, something resembling the in-world ATL "For Want of Yam" from that ATL) and Land of Ice and Mice. That is, Maori colonize Patagonia and adapt a High Latitude crop and animal package from the Thule (need to work out who the heel brings it there though), then they colonize the Antarctic peninsula with it.
Sounds ASB I believe.

IMHO, no more ASB than the Inuits IOTL.
 
IMHO, no more ASB than the Inuits IOTL.

Well, not in the sense of requiring magic.

The point is, the Inuit cultures are the historical climax of a very long succession of Arctic and sub-Arctic cultures that adapted to extreme enviroment gradually as humans came from other populated areas. This because the Arctic is connected to other populated areas quite extensively. Critically, it is ecologically connected, meaning that a trickle of ecological diversity from the big landmasses gets there and has a chance to adapt. This means that Arctic areas have a fairly large variety of plants and both marine and land animals humans can live off.
OTOH, the unfrozen bits of Antarctica have a grand total of 4 species of vascular plants, one of which might (or might not) be marginally edible. There are no land animals to speak of. Essentially, no ecology that could feed humans, except from the sea. And Antarctic seas tend to freeze for obnoxiously long periods of the year and irritatingly large expanses of space. You have simply no local natural resources to build a trophic chain over, unless you import them. Importing them is difficult for the very reason they aren't there in the first place, namely that there is nowhere in the neighborhood to get there from. You have not enough ecological room to replenish local ecosystems with anything that isn't ice, or sea life. Hell, almost nothing that create soils or keep them there once created. So, a Inuit-like little group that accidentally ends in Antarctica has relatively dim chances unless they're bringing a self-susatining piece of ecology with them. This means having an extreme variety of Arctic "agriculture". DValdron's done an exceptional job at devising one, but IOTL it didn't happen, and probably there are strong reasons why the Inuit and other Arctic cultures didn't develop anything of the sort IRL. Let's say you have this package; it is developed in the Arctic. To get it into Antarctica, there's the whole planet in the way. That's why I suggest to take LoRaG's boosted Maori. They are very good sailors, and New Zealand is sort of closer to Patagonia than Alaska. In a LoRaG like scenario, they might be needing other places to go, and Patagonia is better than most in that at least very few are going to challenge them about that area. But still, we are assuming a lot of stuff that didn't happen IOTL.
Then, you have Maori people having colonized the southernmost tip of South America. You'd need them to get a suitably sub-Arctic crop package, let's say they get it with contacts from the Thule by sea (it's just sailing along the entire American continents to get to them somewhere around Alaska, after all). Then they'd need to have the population pressure that pushes them to island-hop into even more inhospitable places such as Falklands, South Georgia etc. until they stumble onto Palmer's Land, and when they do so, they'need to be desperate enough to decide to settle those most godforsaken barrens. Finally you'd need their settlement to survive in a very, very extreme environment to which they have only limited pre-adaptation (with relatively little gradual transition to new environment) where they have to build an ecology from scratch.

That's tall order.
 
That's tall order.

I think people don't appreciate how dynamic the paleo-Eskimo cultures were, and how recent the current Inuit culture is. The Thule cultural horizon didn't develop until 1000 AD IOTL, when they finally put together a tool package that gave them total dominance over the American Arctic circle. Developing that package took a very, very long time.

It would be an interesting Future History timeline though. Given how badly we're fucking up the environment, sooner or later Antarctica will probably be blossoming with invasive species, and the countries that lay claim to Antarctic territory may try for colonization. It would be difficult, though, given how dry it is.

As of now, my recommendation for colonizing Antarctica is planting the fastest-growing lichens and cold-resistant grasses from the Arctic circle in the wettest areas you can find. Once these have been established (and even with the fastest-growing ones, that would take some time) we can put in herds of animals for controlled grazing. Reindeer would be the best candidates, but seeing if llamas and alpacas can adapt to the conditions might be interesting.
 
The problem here is that there really is no rational reason to even attempt to colonize such crappy and remote land, even given the existence of Ice-and-Mice-type Inuit, and hyper-mobile Maori. That doesn't mean it is ASB. You just need a powerful, enduring, non-rational motivation. There is exactly one motivator in human history that fulfills those requirements, that being religion. You need a religion that pushes colonization of remote, inhospitable areas for the glory of God/the Gods.
 

Driftless

Donor
The problem here is that there really is no rational reason to even attempt to colonize such crappy and remote land, even given the existence of Ice-and-Mice-type Inuit, and hyper-mobile Maori. That doesn't mean it is ASB. You just need a powerful, enduring, non-rational motivation. There is exactly one motivator in human history that fulfills those requirements, that being religion. You need a religion that pushes colonization of remote, inhospitable areas for the glory of God/the Gods.

A monastery for the ultimate penitents?
 
The problem here is that there really is no rational reason to even attempt to colonize such crappy and remote land, even given the existence of Ice-and-Mice-type Inuit, and hyper-mobile Maori. That doesn't mean it is ASB. You just need a powerful, enduring, non-rational motivation. There is exactly one motivator in human history that fulfills those requirements, that being religion. You need a religion that pushes colonization of remote, inhospitable areas for the glory of God/the Gods.

To be fair, both the Inuit and the Polynesians IOTL are among the better testaments to human hability to settle "crappy and remote lands" if need be.
I'd admit that in this case, finding such a "need" is indeed a serious challenge.
Still, humans have tried to establish a living pretty much everywhere they could (or they thought they could; some islands formerly populated by Polynesians couldn't sustain their populations long-term, see Pitcairn) with remarkable persistency.
 
Incidentally, any culture that colonized Antarctica would probably wipe out penguins completely anywhere they settled. Flightless bird species with no previous contact with land-bound predators do not have a strong survival record when humans arrive, historically. Even today, penguins might walk right up to a human without the slightest bit of fear.
 
To be fair, both the Inuit and the Polynesians IOTL are among the better testaments to human hability to settle "crappy and remote lands" if need be.
I'd admit that in this case, finding such a "need" is indeed a serious challenge.
Still, humans have tried to establish a living pretty much everywhere they could (or they thought they could; some islands formerly populated by Polynesians couldn't sustain their populations long-term, see Pitcairn) with remarkable persistency.

Quite so, which is why I even think of it as just barely possible. Antarctica is a heaping pile of both crappiness and remoteness!
 
The waters around Antartica are very dangerous, specially the Drake Passage between South America and Antartica. I highly doubt some people before 1900 can complete a safe voyage to the southernmost seas, and stay living of whatever they find in Antartica to survive.

You will need something more than ASB for this.
 
The waters around Antartica are very dangerous, specially the Drake Passage between South America and Antartica. I highly doubt some people before 1900 can complete a safe voyage to the southernmost seas, and stay living of whatever they find in Antartica to survive.

You will need something more than ASB for this.

Some people before 1900 managed (sort of) safe round trips IOTL. It was certainly an extremely dangerous affair, but some Antarctic exploration occured in the nineteenth century. Now, living there is a much more complicated proposition.

However, it was done with Victorian navigational tech and skills. That's a hell of a long learning curve (consisting in centuries of Western tradition of oceanic sailing, oceanic whaling, etc. ) not to mention the ability to orient (say, cronometers and sextants) and the underlying social resources required to build large, solid oceanic ships.
 
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How about a state or quasi-state entity (ie. HEIC or the like) making a toe-hold on South Georgia? Maybe an eccentric billionaire gets it in his head that the island and the Antarctic Peninsula really need some human inhabitants and recruits people used to extreme polar conditions (Inuits, Norwegians etc.)
 
How about a state or quasi-state entity (ie. HEIC or the like) making a toe-hold on South Georgia? Maybe an eccentric billionaire gets it in his head that the island and the Antarctic Peninsula really need some human inhabitants and recruits people used to extreme polar conditions (Inuits, Norwegians etc.)

It's likely that this guy won't stay a billionaire much longer if invests a lot in this. I can see that being tried in a 1850-1900 timeframe, but chances of this scheme leading anywhere other than bankrupt and embarrassment are probably slim.
As noted above, even long training to the Arctic won't prepare you fully to the utter barrenness of Antarctic conditions. You don't have to recruit people, you'd have to import a whole ecology. It could be done in South Georgia I believe. IIRC, it was at least attempted in the Southern Shetlands.
In Antarctica, it's going to be awfully complicated and insanely expensive.
 
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