One way you could have a Vinland survive is to have gold or silver discovered. No nation ever walks away from gold. You would have no shortage of settlers then.
And have it taken over by the British, French or Spanish?
Also getting Greenland to be more successful is crucial. Vinland was established mainly as a trade colony for Greenlanders to get wood. Even after Vinland was abandoned Greenlanders traveled often to Markland (Labrador) because of wood (and possibly to trade with natives). Thus getting Greenland colonies to survive and be prosperous would be very beneficial for Vinlanders.
Beneficial? Maybe. Necessary? not at all.
Vinland's going to be a settler colony with younger sons of Icelanders. Iceland was all settled by this point, and younger sons had no place to go. Vinland gives them that, if it can get established.
The Vikings have the advantages of steel, horses, and ocean going vessels but not gunpowder. They have an edge against teh natives but not a massive one. Unless disease wipes out the local populations they will have to deal with them through negotiation and treaty. Intermarriage and a mingling of cultures would seem likely within a hundred years.
Well, iron, anyway. Yes, iron tools are HUGE, huge advantage over stone. The population density they can get from farming means they'll be able to outnumber the locals fairly quickly. Until, of course, they pick up the same techniques.
That gold is way too deep to be useful.
The Vikings simply don't have the organizational and logistical means to keep up a colony on the other side of the Atlantic. Unlike Spain and England later on, they were no direct hop to the America's. They had to rely on Iceland and Greenland, both marginal places themselves.
We're not talking about a 'colony' run by Norway. We're talking about a settler colony of Iceland. Think Massachusetts (which got very little support from Europe after it got started) rather than... Mexico.
Besides. What do you mean 'no direct hop'? The one thing the Norse were amazingly good at is navigation. Get in a ship, sail to the right latitude, sail straight west until you hit land. That's next to trivial for a Norse sailor.
There was a also problem in that Viking ships couldn't carry enough cargo back to be profitable in Europe. At that time you can still got lots of timber and furs for example, from Russia, they won't be tapped out for centuries yet.
Vinland won't be trading with Europe. They'll be supplying wood to Iceland basically in exchange for settlers, more sheep, and the odd luxury good.
If they DO trade directly with Europe, it'll be small scale bulky goods (and the odd bit of ivory) for European luxury goods.
There was some amount of trade between Greenland and Europe, so obviously the Viking ships were enough to transport something of value--surely, live polar bears can't be that much more valuable than gold?
Very little. A ship or two a year, some years. Walrus ivory and walrus hide are the biggies. Also falcons.
Excepting disease leading to massive deaths the Vikings are not going to be there in great enough numbers to just sweep aside the locals. A few hundred Vikings with sword and shield are simply not enough. At some point they will have to learn to coexist with the natives.
If gold or silver is out of the question is there anything else of enough value there to be enticing? Furs? Lumber? The Viking were suffering from overpopulation at home and may immigrated to Scotland, England, the Baltic, Russia, as well as Iceland and Greenland. You had a population ready to colonize, you only need to make Vinland a more appealing destination.
No, they're not going 'sweep aside' the locals. However, once the settlement gets going, agriculture supports a much higher density than hunter gatherers, so the Vinlanders will soon have a population ADVANTAGE in places like Newfoundland.
Ja, they're not going to be trading. The only 'appealing' that needs to be done is free land, really. Families will send off their younger sons who otherwise wouldn't have a farm.
Ah, but it's only getting worse. The distance is greater, and as more of the Russian interior is opened up, and the climate continues to worsen it will drive up costs. This means there's more incentive to go elsewhere, not that there's no incentive. Note: I actually do think it's possible with certain changes, but I'm not sure if it's the Vikings that can do it. It might be better if they find more land to the south that is better climatically than where they ended up in OTL. Of course that also means they will fight with the natives more and that's a chancy proposition before disease. Even the English/French/Spanish didn't settle much until the native population died off.
see above
@ Winnabago:
Not if they were an asymptomic carrier, but that still creates the question of where the carrier caught it and the problem that it'd kill a bunch of Vikings too, as apparently smallpox hadn't reached them yet.
Look up small pox epidemics in Iceland. They happened every few centuries. The virus isn't going to make it to the New World until it makes it to Iceland, probably.
At an extremely convenient time an extremely convenient asteroid explodes over northern New Brunswick and PEI, flattening forests, killing lots of natives, and causing the survivors to flee the cursed place for a generation. (Um, yay?) What can I say, it’s only implausible if you run the numbers, and I find I like the idea of starting the timeline with a bang. This is very convenient for the Vikings, who find an uninhabited, fertile land to colonize, and maybe some thunderbolt iron; that’s always convenient.
Gaaa! No. Don't do this.
1) give them a toe hold in Newfoundland. The Beothuk were very primitive, no agriculture at all, no pottery even. Once you have a good base in Newfoundland and some numbers, THEN you try taking on NS or NB.
2) As for iron, there's LOTS of bog iron available, and as the Icelanders have been using exactly that for centuries, they'll know just how to use it.
Let's not start by going ASB.
3) Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, you had a Tunguska size event. How much area was actually rendered unihabitable? Very little. Sure some people died, but nearby tribes will move in a lot faster than the Vinlanders could. So, you start with a (near) ASB event, and it doesn't even do you any good.
Vinlander traders travel up the St. Laurence to Niagara Falls (you know what I mean, nit-pickers!) and south to, oh, let’s say Virginia. Innitially they’re reluctant to trade in iron, especially iron weaponry, but the embargo cannot last forever—especially not with chiefs offering a good blacksmith a king’s ransom and his pick of the local women.
Oh, they'll TRADE iron. That's their best bargaining tool. Embargoing the knowledge of how to make it, that's what they'll try. And you're right, it won't last.
Natives are also eager to acquire shipwrights and domestic plants and animals—this last being relatively easy in some cases, with feral pigs spreading fast.
???why would they want shipwrights? The vinlanders will be using NATIVE canoes inland, and what use will the locals have for ships? Ship building requires towns, stratified societies, artisans. the locals have little of that yet.
No feral pigs, or at least not for a good while. There weren't pigs in Iceland, they'd have to be brought from Europe. Sure it would happen eventually, but the Icelandic animal package is horse, cow, sheep and dog.
Feral cattle, OTOH, are quite possible, although they might be hunted rather than captured...
In 1000 AD there's very little agriculture in the Northeast, although I believe it is starting. Barley, possibly rye and oats will still be a big leg up. Especially if the locals can seasonally migrate still.
Meanwhile, rumors of Vinlander wealth travel across the Viking world, drawing in immigrants from those distant lands (and beyond).
Wealth? what wealth? Land is enough of a draw, and the only one that would work. IMO.
Eventually, Eurasian diseases begin to appear (starting with mumps, probably), but the continent is by-and-large still relatively sparsely populated, and the areas with the highest populations are also the ones likely to have the highest concentrations of European blood, due to their contact with sailors, blacksmiths, and missionaries. The death toll is still brutal, however, especially since the arrival of diseases is more staggered than IOTL.
true, although it will be a VERY spread out process.
Natives learn how to build Viking-style ships and extend the trade networks even farther, down to the Caribbean,
Eventually, maybe. But why bother. You trade with your neighbour, not some guy a thousand miles away. Viking ship tech is likely to be more used for military purposes, IMO. Raid your neighbour down coast. I'd think it'd be a couple hundred years before there's real contact with the Caribbean, or especially South America.
where they discover tobacco and cocaine (and of course the ultimately more beneficial but boring maize). The drugs spread north, and it isn’t long before someone in Vinland or one of the ever-nearing-parity skraeling states decide to try to sell them in Europe, where they exploded in a drug-fueled frenzy. There had been trade between the continents up to this point, but aside from bishops going west and church tributes going east it had been mostly overlapping local trade networks; now trade took off, drug-fueled and strapped to the back of a Saturn V rocket.
Query: is Cocaine even available on the coast? I think of it as being Andean.
Drug fueled frenzy? ??? Say what? It didn't really happen OTL, why would it ATL. O, sure, tobacco eventually made it to Europe, and made traders a tidy profit, but 'drug fueled frenzy' and 'strapped to the back of Saturn V'???
Oh, and the biggest problem with corn (=maize) is getting it to grow in a new climate/latitude. You're not going to short circuit that much. OTOH, the Mississippians had corn in the Ohio valley by Vinland times, although it doesn't arrive in Iroquoian lands for a couple of centuries. (1300 is, IIRC, when pollen indicating any significant cultivation happens, although there are isolated finds of burnt remains from earlier. So people differ on what the conflicting evidence means.)
With increased trade came increased transmission of diseases, alas, but the skraelings were ever-increasingly immune to them, and the survivors likely to be armed with iron. It wasn’t that native populations weren’t being displaced, however—it was that they were being displaced by other natives who had acquired European technology and/or immunity to Eurasian diseases and/or domesticated plants and animals. The Mississippian cultures found themselves encroached on from the north (where the *Iroquois set up their own trade empire on the Great Lakes), then from the east (eastern seaboard cultures crossing the Appalachians), and, eventually, the south. And of course from within, as tribes who learn to take up farming and metallurgy attack and conquer their neighbors. They were even attacked from the east by the brand new Horse Warriors of the Great Plains.
Note that OTL the coming of the horse on the plains DESTROYED agriculture there.
And I'd think the Mississipians would pick up the new crops and tech faster than hunter gatherers would, so they're likely to be expanding as much as contracting.
As for the Iroquoians, they were actually pretty insular, OTL, until they could trade beaver pelts for guns and knives.
I'd think that Algonkian peoples from the St. Lawrence valley are going push the proto-Huron and Iroquois out of the way, but I could be wrong.
Adapt or die. The powers-that-be in the loose alliance of trading states that was the Mississippian culture didn’t want to adapt, but they were overthrown soon enough, Cahokia burned down and rebuilt, and the alliance itself rebuilt into a much more tight-knit federation…
In the lands of the Nahua, first the horses come, and an empire is built on the horse, and then falls. Then iron comes, and an empire is built on iron, and then falls. Then diseases come, though no empire is built on that. Then the missionaries come, many of whom are sacrificed to the gods, but not quick enough or in enough numbers to stop them. Christianity, it turns out, is popular amongst those who don’t want to be sacrificed to the gods and so social unrest grows…
Nahua? as in proto Aztecs? somewhere in Arizona?
Or do you mean Mesoamericans. (Or have the Aztec moved south yet, I forget)
Looks very nice, but I don’t see why the Vikings wouldn’t set out to look for wimmunz and plunder pretty quick, being Vikings.
Also, South America? That was pretty fast, wasn’t it?
Hello!! What vikings?!?
We're talking Icelandic farmers who are most assuredly not "Vikings".
The way I see it, the technology transfer from the Vikings go like this: The first thing the natives want to learn to do is domesticate plants and animals. Their population grows, and now they want to learn to make iron weapons instead of being forced to buy them off the Vinlanders. Once they have artisans, they start thinking about holding the whipping hand in trade for once, and want to build ships. That takes at least three or four generations (if that seems rather fast to anyone, remember that there's a lot of different tribes and the slower ones get pushed out or engulfed by faster neighbors), and by the time they decide to build ships, they're probably building enough that some captain's going to try his luck by going south (or in the case of the haudenosaunee, west).
Why ships? Why not just take your horse and cattle and move into your neighbour's land if he doesn't have those?
Are you suggesting that an established Vinland would run roughshod over the natives?
Walrus Ivory, that was the export valued in Europe.
Very true, also walrus hide for ropes, believe it or not.
@smjb:
Domestication of plants and animals takes a long time to get good at. In (pre-beaver hunting) swampy Canada, there probably wasn’t much good farming to be done, especially so far north. They would probably create herding societies.
No one is talking domestication, that I've seen so far. Learning better agriculture and husbandry from your neighbour is.
What swampy Canada?
Sure, they'll start in Newfoundland where the lands lousy, but the competition isn't very effective. Then they'll move to the St. Lawrence Valley and Nova Scotia, etc. Fine farmland there.
You can’t just magic artisans out of nowhere. In Africa, societies generally developed around exporting raw materials to other nations: we can expect American societies, with an even bigger lack of educated people (and people in general) would do the same.
Are we talking about the same Bantu peoples who have been smelting iron for as long as the Norse? Who built, e.g. Great Zimbabwe? Who worked copper and iron and ....
Why would some captain head south, when resources beyond your wildest dreams are to the west? Part of the reason for America’s tribal society is lack of infrastructure: those don’t develop very quickly. A tribe might defeat another, but an empire is too much.
I love the idea of a powerful Native America as much as the next guy, but you’re making it a bit fast.
Now, THIS I'll agree with.
Well, like I said there's no dates attached to anything yet, so...
Is this about the *Iraquois? Because there's evidence that their alliance is nearly a thousand years old, which wouldn't put them before the Vikings, but maybe close enough for them to exist anyway. In some form.
Yes, and there's also evidence that league only happened shortly before contact. Oral history collected 150 years ago differs from oral history today. The one possible date is a possible eclipse, and there are three possibilities. One is the 1000 years ago (for which there is litlle archaeological evidence), one is relatively shortly before Columbus (which will get you scorned as a patriarchal European oppressor these days), and one is that 'time of darkness' was metaphorical (it only shows up in a single phrase in a single context) and doesn't give us any dating help at all.