Maybe have Basque or Breton fishermen to maintain a small outpost for safe haven during storm and smoking/salting their fish ?
Point is that the Americas already had their disease going IOTL, they didn´t affect Europeans much because of their more robust immunity system(brought up through heavy exchange/trade with other civilization and domestical animals use for millennia). You have syphilis but I´m not sure how you are gonna find something bigger. We should ask those question to people more expert on this.
It didn't OTL, since for the most part, all that trade just created a dependence on European goods rather than making the goods themselves. And why not, since even if the natives did get their own blacksmiths or what have you, they'd make inferior quality goods to what European blacksmiths were making, PLUS that means that that individual was no longer available to do other tasks since he was now spending all his time blacksmithing, so why not just get the white man to do it for you? Only more organised societies would be able to truly adapt metalworking, and there weren't a lot of those outside the East Coast.
I doubt the tech exists at this point in time to get a ship to America. Europe at this point is just too divided and too torn up by the decline of the Roman Empire to have much interest in sailing off the western edge of the map, even if the technology to do so existed. There are lateen sails bouncing around in the period, sure, but mostly in the eastern Mediterranean - and the Persians and Greeks probably care more about their immediate neighbourhood than on looking to the ocean.
Maybe have Basque or Breton fishermen to maintain a small outpost for safe haven during storm and smoking/salting their fish ?
I certainly agree with that last bit, but since we're assuming that there will be no real effort at mass settlement for some considerable time, those more organised societies are exactly the ones that might very well profit from extended contact with European traders. They're also the ones most likely to have something of value to offer the Europeans in return, which would make the trade worth the effort. I'm fairly certain they'd be very interested in handsomely paying the Europeans in exchange for certain technological instructions, horse-riding lessons etc. -- and in such a scenario, provided relations are amicable, the Europeans would have few reasons not to comply. Even if European governments would balk, there would be adventurous individuals who would see the potential in becoming the valued technological advised to some native ruler. It would hardly be the first time in history such a thing happened!
Again, I stress that this is not the most likely outcome of the whole "Europeans get there 1000 years early"-POD... but I think it is possible. That's why I reject the somewhat pessimistic tendency to simply say "Well, in all likelyhood the native Americans would still get a raw deal in the end". Sure. But how raw? How different from OTL would it get, under which circumstances? We can consider various outcomes, and I'm simply considering one possibility.
After all, if we want to reject a scenario just because it's not the most likely one, we can basically throw all of AH out of the window, since all we're doing here is exploring the roads not travelled anyway...
As far as metal in Brazil goes, there are sources of iron ore in the south near Mariana and Ouro Preto. Gold was found near Belo Horizonte in the 1690's. Nowadays, the country is a producer of tin, copper, and bauxite. However, I haven't found any sources of these metals near the Amazon.If you have extended contact, then you have an extended supply of goods to trade, and thus the same scenario happens as later on. There's also the fact that furs (without a doubt the main good the natives have to offer) are less valuable in Europe at the time since there's still so much land where the animals that provide them haven't been extirpated from.
Horses, yes, an obvious one. But metalworking? That's a bit different since it's so much more complex in the process from raw materials to the finished goods. Technology doesn't transfer as easily as it does in Sid Meier's Civilization.
Which organised civilisations are you thinking of? Mesoamerica certainly had them, and would be by far the most likely to go about the process you described. But elsewhere on the east coasts? And I guess the cultures that made terra preta in the Amazon, but I don't know if there's any good sources of metals around there. North of Mesoamerica, you had the Hopewell culture, which happened to be severely declining and wasn't particularly complex of societies though certainly organised.
Crossing the Atlantic is hazardous, but not particularly demanding in terms of technology. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, small and very primitive boats undertook the crossing at times. In the modern era, people have done it in replicas of leather coracles and Viking ships, kayaks, reed floats and big surfboards. The need here is not technology, but knowledge: you have to know what you are doing. Without an understanding of prevailing winds, currents, and landfalls, it's not something anyone would willingly do, but someone has to do it to get that understanding. That's the real obstacle IMO.
THe problem is that these people didn't really get into high seas fishing until the High Middle Ages.
The Compass has yet to reach Europe and the Astrolobe has yet to be invented both of which were pivotal in exploration and cartography.
If you have extended contact, then you have an extended supply of goods to trade, and thus the same scenario happens as later on.
There's also the fact that furs (without a doubt the main good the natives have to offer) are less valuable in Europe at the time since there's still so much land where the animals that provide them haven't been extirpated from.
Horses, yes, an obvious one. But metalworking? That's a bit different since it's so much more complex in the process from raw materials to the finished goods. Technology doesn't transfer as easily as it does in Sid Meier's Civilization.
Which organised civilisations are you thinking of? Mesoamerica certainly had them, and would be by far the most likely to go about the process you described. But elsewhere on the east coasts? And I guess the cultures that made terra preta in the Amazon, but I don't know if there's any good sources of metals around there. North of Mesoamerica, you had the Hopewell culture, which happened to be severely declining and wasn't particularly complex of societies though certainly organised.
Basically, I suspect you'd want some kind of Phoenician-and/or-Carthaginian-wank as your POD, and let that develop (after several centuries) into a scenario where the means to cross the Atlantic become available at a much earlier stage.
Problem is, there wasn't much technology for long voyages over open ocean; the Egyptian circumnavigation of Africa in comparison was a much more coastal route. You need to min-max your storage load and your speed; so that you can have enough supplies to get there and then get there before you do run out. But the problem is that ships at the time couldn't go fast enough while still having enough food and fresh water to make it there. Not to mention your ships need to be much more durable. I don't think its possible for those nations to so much as discover the americas without some unprecedented advances in Naval Technoloy.I don't know about Carthage, but Phoenicia and Egypt are plausible candidates: http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/timelines/topics/exploration.htm