What Happens After England Sends Columbus to the Americas ?

This is post-Wars of the Roses England. And the part of North America they're likely to hit upon is less promising than the one Columbus encountered IOTL.
Fish and furs is what comes to mind first. Small, defendable trading outposts along the coast of New England and the Maritime provinces of OTL Canada as well as the mouth of the Saint Lawrence, I'd say. It would take quite a while for things to progress, I'd think. The Iberian kingdoms and Portugal may not even be in on the race. After all, Columbus' expedition, if announced like IOTL as a shortcut to India, is going to be seen as a lot more of a failure than IOTL when he just hits upon the Beothuk of Newfoundland and their barren island which looks a lot like something that belongs to Scotland. But IF England needs papal approval to monopolise their fishing grounds and trade routes with America, then at least you've butterflied the English Reformation away.
 
England gets the gold and becomes fat and lazy. Conquistadors in Spain, with nothing better to do, get on their boats and conquer England.
 
England gets the gold and becomes fat and lazy. Conquistadors in Spain, with nothing better to do, get on their boats and conquer England.

They do have something better to do; go to the Americas, considering the Papacy is far less likely to give England a Treaty of Toulouse.
 

raharris1973

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With Columbus possibly setting up shop in New England or the Chesapeake first, how would colonisation play out without the factor of gold or silver ?

And the part of North America they're likely to hit upon is less promising than the one Columbus encountered IOTL.

I do not think we have to assume that just because Columbus is launching his voyage a few hundred miles north of his OTL launch point that his landing point in the western hemisphere has to be proportionately further north to match.

For one thing, he chose in OTL to take a route down to the Canaries and from there due west to the Caribbean because that went with the current. At the latitudes of New England the Chesapeake, the currents would work against him instead of for him.

Also, he was aiming for what he thought was a prosperous point off Asia, Japan (Cipangu). Further north he would have expected to land in chilly northern extremes of Tarrtary, untold and unadvertised by Marco Polo, and certainly far from any spice islands.

So, Columbus turning south before heading west is quite likely, even in an English-sponsored voyage.

Of course that makes the voyage longer and requires more provisions. However, Columbus likely could re-provision in the Canaries on the way out and the Azores on his return as he did in OTL. England had a long-standing alliance with Portugal and not-bad-at-all relations with Castille-Aragon in the 1480s and 1490s. Religion did not yet set Englishmen and Iberians against each other in this pre-Reformation era, and Henry VII would go on to marry his son and heir to Catherine of Aragon by about 1500.

So the English are likely to first make landfall in the Caribbean, and explore it and the gulf of Mexico in follow-up voyages. From there they will start hearing about Mexico.
 
I believe there were some post-Cabot voyages from Bristol, with results that went inauspiciously unrecorded. And I read of an effort in a biography of Thomas More that some of his relatives were involved in efforts to organize a journey to the New World that ended in a ship's mutiny and a detour to Ireland. So I think that gives us an idea. There were voyages west at this time. What there was not was a compelling commercial, military or social justification to mobilize the necessary resources to build colonies at that time in the places the English were landing at.
 

raharris1973

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I believe there were some post-Cabot voyages from Bristol, with results that went inauspiciously unrecorded. And I read of an effort in a biography of Thomas More that some of his relatives were involved in efforts to organize a journey to the New World that ended in a ship's mutiny and a detour to Ireland. So I think that gives us an idea. There were voyages west at this time. What there was not was a compelling commercial, military or social justification to mobilize the necessary resources to build colonies at that time in the places the English were landing at.

But what if they land in a more interesting place by hiring Columbus and following his flight plan?
 
But what if they land in a more interesting place by hiring Columbus and following his flight plan?

Well that gets into some fascinating questions, none of which I'm really that prepared to talk about. Nothing is more contingent than those landing sites of the early explorers and colonizing missions. It's all sea currents, winds, seasonal changes, differences in weather from year to year, storms, and the ports you start out from. Throw that particular set of dice again, and even by pure chance or the odd voyage leaving earlier or later and you could have a completely different map of colonies. Even the ability to chart a course was compromised because no one really knew how far west they were on the globe. Yes, the English could get to the Caribbean. But Columbus could also just as easily vanish in a hurricane on the return trip, or discover some mosquito-infested hell pretty much uninhabitable before the cure for yellow fever.

And it's not just that England was geographically less likely to find and conquer the Aztecs. It's also that I would say England at this point probably does not have the same experience with plantation agriculture that the Iberians had in the Mediterranean and the pre-1492 colonies, which helped to make their New World project economically viable. The English circa 1500 weren't looking to reorganize, conquer and enslave these societies. Of course the same could not be said 100 years later. And I would say much of the reason for that has to do with the intervening English experience in Ireland, and the role that had in making them into colonizers.
 
Colombus didn't change the Portuguese projects much. Consensus is, the Portuguese already knew that something was out there in the west, they just didn't know how big it was, but they knew it was there. The concept of Colombus as some great discoverer that exists in Hispanic countries and the USA has never existed in Portugal and Brazil. Colombus is considered to be a moron that calculated the Earth's size wrongly (even through the Greeks already knew more or less how big it was) and had the luck of running into a continent on the way, else he would have starved to death in the ocean. Vasco da Gama is considered far more important.

When Colombus came to gloat to the Portuguese King, he just reminded him of the Tordesillas treaty. The King was clearly not impressed by this "discovery".

I don't think things would have changed much in Spain either. Far before Colombus, the Portuguese and the Castilleans had already fought a war whose reasons included controlling the trade with West Africa.

The main difference, I think, is going to be what happens in Hispaniola and surroundings. We might see english colonies in Hispaniola, or later Spanish colonies. This also has massive implications regarding re: Mesoamerica, Aztecs and Incas.

India shall be dealt with as per OTL, methinks. Brazil will be discovered and colonized on schedule as well.

I wonder if the Portuguese might help the English with any colonial projects in the Caribbean as kind of a move to screw over Spain without violating Tordesillas.
 
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