WI John Cabot's expeditions in the 1490s are followed up by an English colony in America, a century or so ahead of Jamestown?
Any thoughts on how the 16C goes?
Any thoughts on how the 16C goes?
Wouldn't it end up as a failure? What's the push to encourage settlement?
Was there any great rush to encourage settlement of Virginia a century later?
Okay, there are a couple things I think were different:
1) Tobacco. I don't think here's anything equivalent in the north. Maybe furs, but European demand was sated by the Russians at that point.
What about naval supplies? It's an interesting option for Atlantic states that want to break their dependency on the Baltic trade.
Hardly likely to work that early.
In general, England is not going to be able to offer any support whatsoever to colonies there at this point, for a number of reasons. I'm not saying it is a doomed attempt, but it is going to be even more difficult than Roanoke, which, by the way, utterly failed.
A problem among many others is that the England is still faithfully Catholic at this point, and the Pope had just said that stuff in the West was going to be either Spanish or Portuguese. I'm sure that ways to wark this around can be found if England commits to this, but it is precisely the English committment that I see likely to utterly lack at this point.
I can see a private sector response to this.
We think the fishermen of Bristol landed on the mainland to gut, preserve the cod.
If some merchant had the nouce to see the potential of the fur trade alongside the fish then a perminant settlement could be possible?
I thought the Indian population was considerably higher in 1509 than 1609. Diseases introduced by explorers and fishermen devistated the Eastern Seaboard during the 16th Century.