Columbus Delayed

It took Columbus years to finally get the support from Spain to embark on his journey to the Western Hemisphere, after also spending time asking Portugal, France and England for support as well. Given the time that passed it does not seem unreasonable that he could have suffered further delays.

Specifically, what if he did not get the support he needed in 1492 and then the word arrived in Spain that John Cabot, sailing for England, had apparently discovered an unknown territory instead?
 
Several issues here:
(1) Where would he land if he sailed from England? Columbus historically landed among one of the most vulnerable Indian populations. The Taino apparently didn't have bows and arrows, weren't very warlike, and had no tradition of hunting large animals (because there weren't any in the West Indies). That made them horribly vulnerable to the Spanish and their horses. Almost any other landfall would be faced with a tougher set of Indians, and the North American Indians proved capable of pushing the Spanish back into the sea numerous times in the early 1500s.

(2) Would England be capable of exploiting his discoveries? Historically they didn't follow up the Cabot voyages.

(3) Would this seriously delay the settlement of the New World. Almost certainly not. The Portuguese would have discovered Brazil in a few years, if they hadn't already secretly discovered it, and they would work their way up the coast and eventually find the Aztecs.

The shape of the contact might change quite a bit though. The Portuguese mindset would probably be to trade with the Aztecs rather than to try conquest, and as long as the Aztecs were willing to trade gold for iron or glass beads I'm guessing the Portuguese would go with 'factory' trading posts along the coast for decades. I'm guessing that the Spanish, French and English would all try to horn in on that trade. You would see intrigue and raids on each others factories and ships--probably pirates lurking in the West Indies to raid returning treasure ships eventually.

I did a scenario much like that in my AH Newsletter years ago and I should flesh it out sometime. It's actually a pretty cool playground, and the most plausible I've come up with for a kind of Aztec survival.
 

yourworstnightmare

Banned
Donor
The reason Spain went along with his dangerous idea to reach Asia by sailing West (everyone knew it was possible, but no one knew how long the trip would take) was because they were falling behind Portugal, and Portuguese sailors already dominated the ports in Africa and were very close to reaching India. For Spain to have any chance to catch up they were in need of some kind of miracle, like Columbus finding the Western route. France was not that interested in trading with Asia at the time. England was in no shape of profiting from such a trade route. Portugal was sailing around Africa, and had no need exploring another route. It had to be Spain.
 
DaleCoz, actually my idea was that Columbus sails for Spain but for a Spain which just got the word about Cabot and is suddenly concerned that they may have missed a boat by stringing Columbus along all these years while this Cabot fellow got an English commission.
 
Has anyone done a WI where say Columbus was successful but for some reason (say either a tropical storm or the Bermuda Triangle!) none of the ships make it back to Europe? The possible benefit of this being that the first stage Columbian transfer has a much longer gap before the second stage, so perhaps some societies or cultures may not collapse in the same way
 
It took Columbus years to finally get the support from Spain to embark on his journey to the Western Hemisphere, after also spending time asking Portugal, France and England for support as well. Given the time that passed it does not seem unreasonable that he could have suffered further delays.

Specifically, what if he did not get the support he needed in 1492 and then the word arrived in Spain that John Cabot, sailing for England, had apparently discovered an unknown territory instead?

Would England back Cabot¿s expedition if Columbus hadn't find something earlier (and hadn't die at sea)? Would England be willing to back an expedition that had, acording to the wise men of the time, very few chances of succeeding (given the size of the Earth*)? Would they do so even if they didn't know somebody had done a similar trip, and survived? Spain did, after all. But would england do the same?


* Which they had correctly estimated. It was Colombus who calculated it wrongly, and assumed the Earth was smaller than it is.
 
Cabot was already on the way to North America while Columbus was still in the Caribbean.

As for Columbus and his well known error, if it was not deliberate, once someone comes back proclaiming the discovery of land his error, correctly seen as such by learned men, his claim suddenly looks much more fortuitous.
 
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Cabot was already on the way to North America while Columbus was still in the Caribbean.

But, if that's so, he had already returned from the Caribbean in 1493 (Columbus' first voyage), and proclaimed his discovery to the world. If he was at sea, it must have been on his second or third voyage.

That doesn't mean we cannot deliverately create a scenario in which Cabot's journey is the one were America is discovered. I just wanted to say that, IOTL, Cabot's journey had a lot to do with news of Columbus discovery, and may have not existed otherways. One can write a timeline or devise a scenario saying, as you do, "Cabot discovers America in 1947". But it's not right to assume automatically, as I've often seen it, that "no matter what, even if there's no Columbus, America get discovered by Cabot in 1497". Because there might be no Cabot journey if Columbus didn't find something first.

As wikipedia puts it,
"Like other Italian explorers, including Christopher Columbus, Cabot was commissioned by another country, and in Cabot's case it was England. Once Henry the Navigator began searching for a route around Africa, the Iberian peninsula (Portugal and Spain) began to attract Italian navigational talent, especially after Columbus's discovery of "the Indies" (as all Asia was called at the time) by sailing west. After that voyage, a number of explorers headed in that direction; Cabot had a simple plan, to start from a northerly latitude where the longitudes are much closer together, and where, as a result, the voyage would be much shorter"

Of course, on the other hand, England could count on the Vikings' accounts to know that "there was something out there". So, in a way, she might have thought there were less risks in backing such an expedition than the ones Spain assumed IOTL, and end up backing it.


As for Columbus and his well known error, if it was not deliberate, once someone comes back proclaiming the discovery of land his error, correctly seen as such by learned men, his claim suddenly looks much more fortuitous.

Certainly.
 
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I am skeptical of the idea of peaceful Portugal. Their first actions in the Indian Ocean were to conquer Malacca, the Spice Islands, and seize a variety of ports along the coast.
 

Sandmannius

Banned
(3) Would this seriously delay the settlement of the New World. Almost certainly not. The Portuguese would have discovered Brazil in a few years, if they hadn't already secretly discovered it, and they would work their way up the coast and eventually find the Aztecs.

Yeah, didn't the Portuguese already have parts of the Brazilian coast on their maps before 1492?
 
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