English armies are still gonna be small for a very long time during which Vinland has the advantage in population (even if its only a couple thousand by then it still would outnumber the English colonies for awhile) its not permanent but from there its a stretch to say what would happen given what butterflies could lead to in the long run.
How far could Vinland grow?
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English armies are still gonna be small for a very long time during which Vinland has the advantage in population (even if its only a couple thousand by then it still would outnumber the English colonies for awhile) its not permanent but from there its a stretch to say what would happen given what butterflies could lead to in the long run.
Flubber
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Ah! Les brave gens... sniffle
To be fair, neither side feared the other or openly coveted the others' land claims for the first half of that period, British North America and French North America populations were rather closer in size for much of the first half of that period, and in the end France traded Quebec for a single Caribbean sugar island.
Why didn't such a settlement occur in the OTL then?
And why didn't that occur in the OTL too?
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Flubber
Banned
When you can determine why something did not happen, you can make the changes which can then allow it happen. Understand?
Too many people are dismissing the question with comments akin to "Oh it's easy, just get a hundred farmers to Vinland..." and "Have the Western Settlement relocate there when things go bad..." If it had truly been that easy it would have happened in the OTL.
So, why was it harder than we'd like to believe? And what changes can we make to make it easier?
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Those, however, are not worthwhile. Supposedly Vinland is growing into something that is. And California is a long way away, as is Texas to a lesser extent - so it's less "resisted English conquest" and more "English conquest didn't reach there".
And remember New Sweden or the Dutch presence in what became New York? That's what we need to compare Vinland to, not Quebec - which has France's might behind it.
Hundreds of thousands of Norse (and even more Iroquois)? Good luck.
Oddly enough, if you can find a reason why a couple of thousand of Norse decide to settle in Newfoundland in - say - 1050, then a figure of two hundred thousand Norse settlers in 1500 is not actually unreasonable. The climate is about as benign as it's possible to get, the disease environment is benign too, and if a viable population can get established in the first place, the technological advantage over the locals is pretty good, too.
The comparison which keeps springing to mind is that of the French-speaking population of Quebec. Most of that population, millions strong, is descended from only a few thousand (less than 5000, IMS) who were encouraged to settle there in one five-year period during the mid-seventeenth century. Once established in Quebec, these francophones achieved about the highest population growth rate in recorded history (over 3.25% a year, again IMS).
So if there is a hypothetical Norse settlement in Newfoundland in 1050, numbering about 2000 people, that could very easily grow to two hundred thousand-plus by 1500. The population would barely need to grow by 1% a year to achieve that, much less than the Francophones of Quebec did.
That population of a couple of hundred thousand Vinlanders would then be ravaged by Eurasian diseases after 1500, but that's another story.
The problem, as you and others have pointed out many times in this thread, is why the Norse would want to set up in Vinland in the first place. Getting them there is hard; once they get there, the population growth will be sky-high.
Oddly enough, settler colonies growing and thriving is hard. And Newfoundland as "about as benign as it's possible to get"?
I'd love to know what the standard of 'benign' is here.
And I'm not sure about the technology being all that great to be honest.
IMS? I suck at abbreviations.
I would love to know how the source for that (underlined) - what I know about Quebec is pretty scanty, so elaboration would be great.
Except that it would need to do so in less favorable circumstances than the creation of Quebec.
For instance, is there enough farmland in Newfoundland to support a couple hundred thousand souls? Will it be able to be mostly self-sufficient (kind of necessary without much in the way of imports available?
I'm gonna disagree with you on this one, and I think we might just have to agree to disagree.
This doesn't seem particularly relevant to me. Nobody tried to settle there because they had no knowledge of it.
How many troops was 16th and 17th century England sending on American expeditions?
and sure, maybe the English (of course you chose the English) seize it. So? You're still radically changing the history of North America.
ISTM that in some ways post 1100, Iceland had lost its "sweet spot," that is, a chance to propagate settlements. It basically ran out of timber, which is one reason there were no Icelandic ships sailing to Noway; instead you had Norwegian ships sailing to Iceland.
This may be part of the reason in OTL.
Although, interesting question, would Europe care?
Plop a late medieval, Christian civilization along the shores of New England Canada in 1590. No gold, but fish, some furs (although by 1590 I think the nearest hunting grounds are tapped out)... tobacco, but you can grow it better further south.
Who's going to rush to conquer it?
Newfoundland is slightly bigger than Iceland, and appreciably bigger than Ireland. It has warmer summers than Iceland, it is less mountainous and friendlier inland, it supports sustainable coniferous forests.
High medieval (late 13th century) OTL populations were Iceland, about 30 000, Ireland, about 1 000 000, Norway, about 350 000, Finland, I have heard estimates of about 100 000.
IMO, a population of fully settled High Medieval Newfoundland could quite reasonably be 100 000.
Plus the Norse settlers of Atlantic Maritimes... how far south?
When the Black Death hit Scandinavia in 14th century, it is interesting how the effects contrasted. Norway suffered large shrinking of population, and many marginal lands were deserted. Sweden and Finland, however... the expansion of population in Northern Sweden and Northern Finland went on through 14th, 15th and 16th century.
Was 16th century Iceland, Norway or Sweden poor compared to England or France? Yes... the contemporary European visitors would have regarded them as uncouth. But this did not mean that the English merchants were not trading with the cities of Bergen and Gothenburg in 16th and 17th century. Denmark and Sweden were parts of European diplomacy.
Novgorod and Muscovy were culturally more remote... but included in trade networks.
High medieval (late 13th century) OTL populations were Iceland, about 30 000, Ireland, about 1 000 000, Norway, about 350 000, Finland, I have heard estimates of about 100 000.
IMO, a population of fully settled High Medieval Newfoundland could quite reasonably be 100 000.
Plus the Norse settlers of Atlantic Maritimes... how far south?
When the Black Death hit Scandinavia in 14th century, it is interesting how the effects contrasted. Norway suffered large shrinking of population, and many marginal lands were deserted. Sweden and Finland, however... the expansion of population in Northern Sweden and Northern Finland went on through 14th, 15th and 16th century.
Was 16th century Iceland, Norway or Sweden poor compared to England or France? Yes... the contemporary European visitors would have regarded them as uncouth. But this did not mean that the English merchants were not trading with the cities of Bergen and Gothenburg in 16th and 17th century. Denmark and Sweden were parts of European diplomacy.
Novgorod and Muscovy were culturally more remote... but included in trade networks.
16th or 17th or 18th. And I defend choosing the English because England as a colonial power (not necessarily the one it was OTL, but "a" colonial power) is fairly likely, and it's more likely to exist than the Netherlands.
France's fate is more complicated - several centuries of butterflies are going to make France a lot harder to recognize given the many forks.
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I guess my point is, even if Vinland gets conquered, so what?
If all it does is transmit ironworking to Native Americans, along with horses and some of hte old world domestic package (along with writing), you have still radically reshaped the continent.
Maybe Cortes will still conquer Aztecs whose troops are equipped with a couple of pieces of metal, who don't use horses (even if they know what they are). But a Powhatan Confederacy (although I suspect the tribes will be radically different) which has iron armor, cavalry, and writing will be a different beast than the one that threatened Jamestown in OTL.
If all it does is transmit ironworking to Native Americans, along with horses and some of hte old world domestic package (along with writing), you have still radically reshaped the continent.
Maybe Cortes will still conquer Aztecs whose troops are equipped with a couple of pieces of metal, who don't use horses (even if they know what they are). But a Powhatan Confederacy (although I suspect the tribes will be radically different) which has iron armor, cavalry, and writing will be a different beast than the one that threatened Jamestown in OTL.
Sure.
Would there even be a Powhatan Confederacy in these circumstances?
Or would there be an entirely different arrangement of whatever tribes are in the area OTL knows as Virginia?
But in regards to whether or not it matters, it was more in regards to how Vinland existing (not its side effects) doesn't necessarily stop English colonies from being where they were OTL. Vinland transmitting iron working and Old World animals (and Old World diseases?) will matter more than Vinland itself, IMO.
Oh, probably not; one issue with doing a Vinland scenario is that you have centuries of different tribes moving around when we have mostly archaelogical sources to rely on and (some) oral history.
It's hard to build up an immunity to old world diseases, because in part you actually rely on a large enough population to sustain the disease pool. It's why smallpox was so deadly to Icelanders in OTL, and why smallpox was so devastating in OTL's early America.
I wouldn't discount Vinland having some effects on navigation technology either. It's hard to see what those would be; Vinland would be a marignal extension of Christian civilization.
Yeah. None of which is detailed enough to sketch out how major changes, let alone butterflies, would push events "off track".
But it would not be hard for it to transmit them in sufficient levels to have a devastating effect on the areas they reach - which brings us back to trying to sort out how the tribes are different.
I agree that founding settler colonies can be hard. That's why I said "if a viable population can get established in the first place".
Newfoundland, New England, the St Lawrence and the Atlantic maritimes are about the easiest places to found them, though.
As OTL showed, quite a few settler colonies which were attempted to be established in North America failed. Once established, though, the population growth in North American settler colonies was very high.
I could have been clearer, but I was referring to the climate of the maritimes as a whole (as was mentioned in the previous post you quoted). Newfoundland is harsher than the rest of the maritimes, but not so cold to be unlivable.
The advantage of the cold is that most diseases don't thrive there. Partly due to the effects on the disease organisms themselves, and also the cold makes up for some of the lack of modern sanitation. Which is why on the whole diseases didn't hit Scandinavia as hard as they hit further south.
In OTL North American settler colonies, the further south in which people went, the worse diseases were in terms of getting established. Virginia was much worse than New York, and South Carolina was worse than Virginia.
Iron technology plus domesticated animals, at a level which is sustainable in North America. While ironworking isn't a magic solution which immediately gives the Norse victory over the local inhabitants, it is a force multiplier. And ironworking was easily conducted using available local sources of iron; the OTL settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows used iron created from locally available bog iron.
If memory serves. Meaning that I didn't have exact figures in front of me, but I've tracked some down sources (see below).
Essentially, before Louis XIV reformed colonial administration in New France, starting about 1662-1663, there were only a handful of permanent settlers. The population trebled within a decade after that, although not all of those were permanent settlers (some came home). The effective founding population was somewhere between 2500-5000. (One of the genetic studies I reference below suggests 2500+ founders).
And my apologies, it looks like the increase was mostly over a decade or so, not five years.
I was working from memory of previous discussions in soc.history.what-if. A bit of digging tracked down the original thread here).
The original post there is by Doug Muir, who in my experience knows his stuff. His main points are readily confirmed elsewhere, though. Here and here are a couple of pages about Louis XIV's reorganisation of New France and the growth in population.
Other sources confirm the main descent of the francophone population of Quebec. Here and here are a couple of genetic studies which refer to the founder effect of the seventeenth-century population of francophone Quebec. Here, too, is a reference to Louis XIV's efforts to increase the population of Quebec. It lists further written sources, which are however in French.
I can track down more sources if you need.
For the level of technology involved, yes, it would be self-sufficient. Iron and timber are the main requirements. Iron ore is locally available (bog iron), and there's timber aplenty, at least for the first few generations. If the population expands enough that deforestation becomes an issue, there is plenty more trees - and land - available on the mainland.
Likewise, I'm not sure if there's enough farmland on Newfoundland itself for a couple of hundred thousand people, though fishing would also be a major source of food. But provided that the colony gets established over the first few generations - and there's enough farmland for that - then it could expand from there as needed.
Of course, I'm not positing as high a population growth rate as Quebec either, but as I mentioned, even a touch over 1% a year would lead to 200,000+ people within 450 years. OTL settler colonies in such latitudes as Newfoundland/Quebec/Atlantic Maritimes had higher population growth rates than that via natural increase alone.
Offhand, I can't see a major attraction. Does tobacco even grow that far north anyway?
Doing it "just because" isn't really on. There's somewhat less interest on conquering Christians than non-Christians, too, although obviously that's not an insurmountable barrier.
Net of disease, as it probably knocked a half to a point off annual growth...
large families being the norm afterall.
Forgetting the word "permanent" are we?
Seriously, a failed effort is still a failure whether records come down to us or not.
Leifsbudir is not know tohave been anything more than a way station...it never was a permanent settlement.
My suspicion is that you'd see the Norse move in two directions; down the St. Lawrence, and along the coast. It's an interesting question how much they would spread out. OTL's colonization of Iceland showed that they were very land hungry, with an ideal of large, disparate estates (a lot of the settlers had multiple farmsteads scattered across the island). But IMO the threat from Native Americans would make the Norse in America settle in more defensible positions.
I wonder if the Native Americans would end up converting to Christianity. In OTL the Icelandic Church was pretty marginal, and elected its own bishops; but the Catholic church could be very cosmopolitan when the need arose (witness the missionaries sent to Karakorum).
Hrm.
I wonder if the Native Americans would end up converting to Christianity. In OTL the Icelandic Church was pretty marginal, and elected its own bishops; but the Catholic church could be very cosmopolitan when the need arose (witness the missionaries sent to Karakorum).
Hrm.
Tobacco can grow about as far north as Connecticut, actually. But IIRC it's not native to the region.