No European colonization of the Americas

If there was a POD that took place in Antiquity, ans somehow somebody got a ship design that enabled them to get to the Americas, then maybe the natives could've built an immunity to Eurasian diseases, but other than that, there may be nothing. After a certain time, Eurasian disease were such that it was inevitable that upwards of 90% of the Native population would've died. For more reading on how Native Civilization was before the plagues hit, read 1491
 
European colonization of the Americas is inevitable. The Vikings were doing it in the Middle Ages and there is speculation that there was pre-Columbian contact dating to Antiquity.
 
There's about a million and one Americawanks (making the Americas more powerful early on), a lot of them are pretty good, but I don't think I've come across a TL where that ju--

No, hold on. I just remembered. Here you go.

5500 Years

It's a pretty okay TL, but it doesn't go into as much detail as other TLs here, and the OP's research seems (understandably) a bit lacking; there are no tin deposits in the American Southeast, for example. It's still a fun read.

I'm also more or less working on something along this line as well, though it's been 3 years and I'm -still- trying to learn enough for it. As you can probably tell such a POD has big implications and I'm not sure anyone can really pull it off 100%.
 
There's about a million and one Americawanks (making the Americas more powerful early on), a lot of them are pretty good, but I don't think I've come across a TL where that ju--

No, hold on. I just remembered. Here you go.

5500 Years

It's a pretty okay TL, but it doesn't go into as much detail as other TLs here, and the OP's research seems (understandably) a bit lacking; there are no tin deposits in the American Southeast, for example. It's still a fun read.

I'm also more or less working on something along this line as well, though it's been 3 years and I'm -still- trying to learn enough for it. As you can probably tell such a POD has big implications and I'm not sure anyone can really pull it off 100%.

Okay thanks.
 
While this was not inevitable that Europe would colonize the Americas at some point someone (say the Arabs or the Chinese) would have discovered it. In all probability they would colonize parts of it and try to conquer the larger civilizations with varying degrees of success.
 
European colonization of the Americas is inevitable. The Vikings were doing it in the Middle Ages and there is speculation that there was pre-Columbian contact dating to Antiquity.

Agreed. This is ASB. Even if no one from continental Europe discovers the Americas, it wouldn't be that hard to establish a colony of Greenland Vikings somewhere on the east coast of North America.
 
Agreed. This is ASB. Even if no one from continental Europe discovers the Americas, it wouldn't be that hard to establish a colony of Greenland Vikings somewhere on the east coast of North America.

Not necessarily. Greenland Vikings could hardly stay on Greenland and the rest of North America. Even the first European settlements had a hard time adjusting. A lot of them relied on being on good terms with the natives; the Vikings didn't quite seem so inclined to that, especially after their encounters with skraelings.

All you'd need really is a butterfly or two. True European oceanfaring technology only really came about after John I of Portugal and his Illustrious Generation (mostly Henry, but butterflying Henry away could just lead to one of his brothers filling his role)'s interest in oceanic exploration, the latter fueled by searches for Prester John and the source of African gold.

If you find a way to halt that instance of advancement of maritime technology (and preferably interest in it in the first place),you could potentially buy the Americas a lot of time. Can't sail west to the Orient if your best ships are too heavy and slow, and proposing to spend lots of money to create a new type of ship for an experimental trade route would be out of the question.

Alternatively, by the time Columbus was proposing circumnavigating the globe, Bartolomeu Diaz discovered a viable trade route by sailing around Africa, which seemed to be a very practical method and made it hard for Columbus to convince people to fund him. This combined with the fact that Columbus' figures for distances and logistics were far too low and looked down upon as unscientific, and took him two years in Spain to actually make Ferdinand and Isabella consider funding him, and the only reason they kept him around that long was because they didn't want him (successfully) selling his idea to other people. You can tip the balance by having general opinion being Diaz' route by far the most practical solution to reaching Asia, and emphasizing the unscientificness of Columbus' proposal to the point to where the two Spanish monarchs don't see any economical or political danger to letting him run off elsewhere. Columbus fades into history as a guy whose ideas were interesting, though immensely stupid (and in modern times perhaps looked back upon and considered that it just might have worked, sort of), and with little incentive to sail west due to the popularity of Diaz's Africa route, the Old World remains ignorant of the new and still considers it an untraversable massive ocean for a good long while, until economic conditions shift and someone needs to find an alternative route -again-, at least.

Speaking of Columbus, the fact that he managed to make the return trip at all is complete pure dumb luck. First off, he sails the Atlantic right in the middle of hurricane season, and super close to the horse latitudes and potential tropical storms. There was plenty possibility for him to get either stuck or sunk. Returning from the Caribbean he decides to use knowledge from the Portuguese's volta do mar (or makes this decision on a hunch) and sails north into the mid-Atlantic, miraculously catches a source of wind going east and back into the tropical storm and hurricane zones. He basically had lots of opportunities for pretty much not coming back at all. Had he lost his ships, he would be remembered as the man with poorly educated ideas who led his men to certain death ("We tried to tell him that you couldn't traverse 7,000+ miles of ocean without running out of food and fresh water, but the poor bastard wouldn't listen"), and could serve to definitely scare Europe from ever trying anything similar until the proper technologies are refined in the areas of onboard food production (like Chinese exploration ships), desalination (Ancient Greeks had desalination devices, just refine them for use by large ships with lots of people and animals) and rainwater storage, and advanced maritime logistics and science. All of this would need both time and the incentive to develop.

And then there's that almost mythical story about Columbus' crew conspiring to mutiny to save their skins. Though I'm not sure about the historical accuracy of that, that could work too to accomplish the effect of the previous paragraph.

Really, there's quite a number of ways you could do this.
 
European colonization of the Americas is inevitable. The Vikings were doing it in the Middle Ages and there is speculation that there was pre-Columbian contact dating to Antiquity.

If you reword this as "Old World colonization of the Americas is inevitable" I tend to agree. But depending on when the PoD occurs and what it is, I can easily imagine a situation in which European contact and colonization of the New World is nonexistent or has only marginal impact on the New World.

Leaving out the ephemeral Viking settlement in Newfoundland, there is absolutely no broadly accepted evidence for any trans-atlantic contact between the Old and New Worlds until Columbus's voyage. The reason for Columbus's voyage west as not to discover or settle anyplace but to find a safe route for trade between Europe and China/India. Europeans sought this because overland trade directly between them and East Asia was blocked by Islamic dominance in the Middle East, which because of Islamic expansion and European crusades was a hostile power, and the sea route around africa and through the Indian ocean was extremely long.

Any number of plausible PoDs can be imagined that would eliminate or minimize this geopolitical impediment (surving and expanded Roman Empire or a sucessor, no Islam, neither Islam or Christianity spread as they did OTL, no bad relationships between Islam and Christian Europe), or to alter western European cultures to the extent that they just don't look west and remain a backwater to civilizations centered in the Mediterranean basin and near east.

Obviosuly at some point, improvements in technology, science, and society will make an Old World discovery of the New World inevitable (or less probably a New World discovery of the Old), but it is by no means inevitable that it would be Europeans in the forefront of this discovery.
 
Agreed. This is ASB. Even if no one from continental Europe discovers the Americas, it wouldn't be that hard to establish a colony of Greenland Vikings somewhere on the east coast of North America.

It's not ASB, you just need a really, really early POD that makes Europe lag behind China technologically.
 
What about all the Basque and Portugese sailors who mysteriously returned home with their holds full of cod fish?
Few Basques were literate and even fewer were willing to seel secret of their best fishing hole to a Spanish king only recently arrived on the throne.
What about the stories of that Irish monk: Saint Brendan?
I believe there were plenty of other European visitors to North America - before Columbus - but thier stories were either never written or were suppressed by the Catholic Church.
 
What about all the Basque and Portugese sailors who mysteriously returned home with their holds full of cod fish?
Few Basques were literate and even fewer were willing to seel secret of their best fishing hole to a Spanish king only recently arrived on the throne.
What about the stories of that Irish monk: Saint Brendan?
I believe there were plenty of other European visitors to North America - before Columbus - but thier stories were either never written or were suppressed by the Catholic Church.

I watched an entire documentary on this once. The arguments were...less than convincing. (Actually they were really, really bad, like arguing that some swirly South-American artwork was really the work of some thrown-together conglomerate of European cultures. Or better yet, that some Iberian ancestry found in the DNA of a modern Peruvian tribe was possible evidence for the theory, as opposed to being the result of, ya know, the Spanish Colonization)
 
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