WI Jamestown fails/collapses, after Plymouth starts?

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
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Or even after Massachusetts Bay starts?

What are the effects of an aborted (or more likely delayed) Anglo-American eastern seaboard, in a world of strong growth in New England?
 
How do you know its delayed? In a world where there isn't an english presence there I could easily see a dutch or French presence establishing itself in its place.
 

Flubber

Banned
It's going to be hard to make Jamestown fail or collapse after 1620. Governor Dale has already made changes to the land grant system and the subsequent improvements in tobacco production has been making lots of people rich for nearly a decade. You can pretty much point to Jamestown "taking off" economically from roughly 1614 onwards. Even the Powhatan attack in 1622 which killed about a third of the colonists didn't delay things.

Politics back in Europe is going to keep immigrants arriving too. The Puritans moved 20,000 people across the Atlantic in little over a decade and they weren't the only English-speaking settlers arriving.

If Jamestown fails somehow, maybe another malarial epidemic coupled with a fiercer Powhatan attack, the surviving colonists will just do what colonists from other smaller outlying settlements did. They'll travel further up the Chesapeake to Calvert's Maryland colony and resettle there. A small Puritan settlement in Virginia did just that thanks to pressure from the natives and eventually became Quakers.

Jamestown failing somehow isn't going to prevent or substantially delay a British-dominated mid-Atlantic region.
 
And unfortunately France is busy with other things, so "someone else snatches up the area" isn't feasible.

France as potentially capable of actually seeding the mid-Atlantic with enough colonists to have an investment in the place.
 
The Atlantic coast is becoming prime real estate for the colonizing powers. If the English abandon the area, another power will move in. Most likely the Dutch, or the Spanish will move further north. The Spanish would definitely claim the area in the absence of any other European settlements, but these claims would be largely nominal, maybe with a few forts set up.

And unfortunately France is busy with other things, so "someone else snatches up the area" isn't feasible.

France as potentially capable of actually seeding the mid-Atlantic with enough colonists to have an investment in the place.

Ninja'd. It isn't feasible? The Spanish will claim the area at least nominally if nobody else does.
 
The Atlantic coast is becoming prime real estate for the colonizing powers. If the English abandon the area, another power will move in. Most likely the Dutch, or the Spanish will move further north. The Spanish would definitely claim the area in the absence of any other European settlements, but these claims would be largely nominal, maybe with a few forts set up.

I'm not sure how much the Dutch can actually establish a meaningful presence there. There are less than two million of them all totalled, and that's not increasing very much - meaning there's not really a surplus population that would look elsewhere. Plus, conditions back home are pretty good.

Ninja'd. It isn't feasible? The Spanish will claim the area at least nominally if nobody else does.

Nominally, yes, but that doesn't translate into anything serious - on paper, Spain's claims may even include it already.
 
And unfortunately France is busy with other things, so "someone else snatches up the area" isn't feasible.

France as potentially capable of actually seeding the mid-Atlantic with enough colonists to have an investment in the place.

What ties up france at the time? (not trying to be confrontational just curious)
 
Thirty Years War (1618-1648) & domestic issues.

The French where only involved in the actual fighting for a little bit of that, and its not like setting up a midatlantic colony would be to taxing on French Political willpower, it would only take a couple hundred people starting to grow cotton to really kickstart french colonization efforts.
 

Flubber

Banned
The Atlantic coast is becoming prime real estate for the colonizing powers. If the English abandon the area, another power will move in.


The trouble is that, absent whole scale changes in Europe, only the English have the numbers and the motivation for real settlement.

The Dutch? The population is relatively small, conditions are good at home, and they're already in the East Indies. If you're Dutch, if you don't want to stay home, and if you want to make a ton of money overseas, you go to the East Indies. It was only the few who were shut out of the VoC in some manner who tried to setup New Amsterdam.

The French? They've got the population but the motivation just isn't there. France basically had to draft people to get all of 5000 souls settled in Quebec over a decade, meanwhile the Puritans on their own settled 20+ thousand in New England.

Various Scandinavians? Again, the numbers and motivation weren't there. Neither was the transport. The Swedes had to hire other Europeans to sail them to New Sweden for example.

Most likely the Dutch, or the Spanish will move further north.

The Dutch are busy elsewhere as is Spain. Spain could place a few forts in the region but that won't stop the English from returning. Spain basically claimed all of North America, but anyone with enough muscle ignored them.

Knocking off Jamestown isn't going to slow the English that much. There are other settlements in the region already, Clavert is due to arrive with his huge colony efforts, and tobacco is already a proven money maker.
 
The French where only involved in the actual fighting for a little bit of that, and its not like setting up a midatlantic colony would be to taxing on French Political willpower, it would only take a couple hundred people starting to grow cotton to really kickstart french colonization efforts.

It's not just the actual fighting. It's the spending of money and attention.

A couple hundred people may well be another Roanoke - in fact, in this situation, where the natives are doing better than OTL I'd say the odds are higher that the colony will fail.

Plus, a couple hundred people even if that doesn't occur are going to be busy worrying about survival, not something as useless to immediate survival (and land depleting) as cotton. Cotton and tobacco took off after colonies were rooted, not before.
 

Flubber

Banned
The French where only involved in the actual fighting for a little bit of that, and its not like setting up a midatlantic colony would be to taxing on French Political willpower...


Setting up Quebec proved taxing, so why would setting up a mid-Atlantic colony be any different?

... it would only take a couple hundred people starting to grow cotton to really kickstart french colonization efforts.

Cotton? We're talking about the 1620s, not the 1820s. :rolleyes:

The cash crop is tobacco and widespread use of it among the French somehow didn't translate into French tobacco colonies.
 
The Puritans did try to take over Maryland in the Civil War in the 1660s, and some Puritans tried to settle Providence Island off Nicaragua.

Since Yankees have shown a tendency to want to expand in their general history (witness the above two situations, as well as their westward claims), who's to say some Puritan exiles don't simply set up shop in now-empty Virginia?
 
Politics will also change a well. How the policies if a governor who would have been change? We might get a Catholic Maryland-Hopefully. Say a riot of some sort results shortly after the arrival of Puritan settlers fleeing a ruined settlement and this results in stricter prohibitions against Protestant migration.
 
Politics will also change a well. How the policies if a governor who would have been change? We might get a Catholic Maryland-Hopefully. Say a riot of some sort results shortly after the arrival of Puritan settlers fleeing a ruined settlement and this results in stricter prohibitions against Protestant migration.

Why would there be prohibitions against Protestant migration by a country which is at best lukecold about its Catholics?S
 
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