WI: First English at Jamestown and Plymouth primarily pursue fishing?

Fishing is a more stable source of food anyway, and this will also reduce land conflict between English and Native Americas.

If the more minor version of smallpox is introduced first, and if we get lucky one more time with the next most serious disease, a larger number of native persons will probably be living to the present day.

The United States may be a more loosely held federation similar to the Articles of Confederation, with some of the largely sovereign areas being Native areas. Interesting!

What do you think?
 
Fishing is a more stable source of food anyway, and this will also reduce land conflict between English and Native Americas.

Initially relying on fishing actually might end up worse for the native Americans. Thousands of settlers died in the first years of Jamestown and Plymouth due to starvation and related effects. If they have a stable food source they don't die and the Indians get pushed off their land even faster. The English had no intention of living in harmony. They came there for gold and land and anybody in the way was getting moved. And most of the settlers were farmers, they're not going to give that up.
 
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This is an optimistic wank, no question about it. In another post, I made this conjecture.

DBWI: No horses in Pre-Columbian America

https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=322228

Without horses, Native Americans probably could not have fought the different European colonizers, primarily the Spanish and the English, relatively equally and to relative stalements. We may not now have the seven Native American states of Susquehanna, Niagara, Shoshone, Pensacola, Nebraska, Chinook, and Malibu. We might only have two or three.


The other bit of good luck was that the more minor form of smallpox (variola minor) arrived here first. This was a lucky break.


Without the Native American contributions, and without the loosening up of European doctrinaire religion, we may not be as far ahead scientifically, technologically, and economically. We may not have our fairly large space stations around Jupiter and Saturn and our exploratory stations as far as the Kuiper Belt. We could conceivably be stuck with just a pokey little Mars station.


It's hard to tell for sure.

Okay, as far as the vast majority of settlers being farmers, if the religious group could had some contingent of fishers, maybe as few as a dozen, who would have talked up the importance of fishing.

And if the English had just been less tighted-assed in general. Maybe taking the position, it is not our role to decide someone else's eternal salvation, all we can do is talk about what has worked for us. That is, if they had tried some missionary efforts but been more relaxed about the whole thing.
 
bumpity bump

And I think this is at least potentially a good way to reduce direct conflict between English and Native Americans, and give them a chance to get used to each other.

And these Atlantic fisheries continue to exist to the present day, although now we have to be more careful with them.
 
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