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An interesting counter-factual that comes to mind - if the Norse Greenlanders had brought smallpox or other diseases with them, then Native Americans would have

An interesting counter-factual that comes to mind - if the Norse Greenlanders had brought smallpox or other diseases with them, then Native Americans would have had 500 years to recover (and keep immunity?) - The conquistadors would have faced millions of not-dying-natives. A much different world would have resulted.

eurusd 5y ago
It is exactly one of the starting points of this uchrony, Civilizations from Laurent Binet (in french, i believe not translated to english), where native get sick during first venue of Vikings then when Colombus appears they just don't get sick at all + kill him and get to Portugal back on their boats and then travel in Europe, meet Luther, Erasme & Charles Quint, convert people to Sun god religion and create an Empire in Europe. Good book btw
saiya-jin 5y ago
maybe that 1/few ships just happened to didn't carry smallpox and other nasties aboard
sillyquiet 5y ago
yeah, unfortunately (I guess??!) smallpox didn't reach Europe until the Crusades.
BurningFrog 5y ago
That's really interesting! Of course, if the native population died off around them, the Vikings would probably have expanded their settlements and perhaps ruled North America instead.
- Symmetry 5y ago
  I dunno, the Norse settlers were apparently getting a lot out of trading red died cloth for native produce and if it hadn't been for the altercation that somehow grew up around that cow or bull the possibility of trade might have drawn a lot more Norse in, the way the fur trade did in French North America. But then again farming populations can expand really fast with low population pressure. The 13 colonies were seeing their populations double every generation just from natural fertility even before immigration.
- munk-a 5y ago
  It depends if they kept coming back. Smallpox worked to the settlers' advantage because colonizers were establishing themselves in the carribean and south america before any serious ventures into north america got going - so there was time for a pandemic to actually spread before folks really started getting serious about settling. I think with statistics and spread rates and all that it's likely that viking settlers would need to stick around for a decade or two to really see the effects in terms of population thinning.
- lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  I don't think it works like that. There seems to be a need for a minimum primary settler population and a decent amount of native assistance- it's fairly easy to build a new town 10 miles from your last but I am not aware of any long distance unsupported settlers. So if the natives around the Mayflower had all died, so would the Founding Fathers. If the Norse diseases had killed off the locals they might not have made it through winter.
  - vintermann 5y ago
    I agree with this. It's about economic and social support. Leif Eriksson was the son of the notorious murderer Eric the Red. Eric was twice outcast, first from Norway to Iceland, then from Iceland to Greenland. On top of that, Leif was an enthusiastic convert to Christianity, which somewhat alienated him from his still pagan father. They lived on a fringe of a fringe of the European economic, cultural and religious community. They didn't even really have the economic support to sustain a settlement on Greenland (where they were more by necessity than opportunity, due to Eric's crimes), let alone Nova Scotia.
  - eesmith 5y ago
    > long distance unsupported settlers There were 18 years between the European settlement of Pitcairn island and the next visitors - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcairn_Islands#European_settlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcairn_Islands#European_sett... . Your constraints are pretty strict. There aren't many places which could be settled (in recorded history) where there weren't already people living there, and where there was a reason for not continuing contact with the place of origin. Another possibility is Te Pito O Te Kainga / Rapa Nui / Easter Island. The first explorers met one person already there (Nga Tavake), then they go back to Hiva, and a double canoe returns to Easter Island carrying the settlers. They left "because a rising tide was destroying their land" and/or a power struggle with the Hanau Eepe, if I read http://archive.hokulea.com/rapanui/hotu.html http://archive.hokulea.com/rapanui/hotu.html correctly. In either case, the oral history suggest little continued connection with Hiva.
  - adolph 5y ago
    Some interpretations of the socio-political context of what is now New England see tribes more affected by disease presumably spread by earlier European contact as aiding incoming Europeans in order to ward off other tribes. The Narragansetts were the most powerful tribe in the southern area of the region when the English colonists arrived in 1620, and they had not been affected by the epidemics. Chief Massasoit of the Wampanoags to the east allied with the colonists at Plymouth Colony as a way to protect the Wampanoags from Narragansett attacks. In the fall of 1621, the Narragansetts sent a sheaf of arrows wrapped in a snakeskin to Plymouth Colony as a threatening challenge, but Plymouth governor William Bradford sent the snakeskin back filled with gunpowder and bullets. The Narragansetts understood the message and did not attack them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narragansett_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narragansett_people
- runarberg 5y ago
  I doubt it. The distances are simply too large to maintain a supply lines needed for a self sufficient colonies to thrive. The Norse needed the natives both to trade with and to learn from if they were to settle these lands, they couldn’t do it on their own. Now you might think of Iceland and Norse Greenland as a counter example. But Norse Greenland never really thrived, and was eventually abandoned. Iceland however thrived, but it is so much closer to Norway about 7 days at see with the potential to stop at the Faeroe Islands. The voyage between Greenland and Iceland is similar (only a bit longer + sailing up the west coast of Greenland). And finally you need another week or two to cross the Labrador sea from Greenland. However that route is much harder in the winter then between Iceland and Norway, and Greenland is not nearly as populated as Iceland or Norway and don’t generate enough surplus food which they can supply to a potential colonies on the North American mainland. So the logistics of supplying a colony in North America without help from the people already living there must include a summertime only supply line from Iceland with enough supplies to last the whole year. Where each voyage from Iceland is going take maybe a month, maybe more, just one way. These ships are still pretty small and not a lot of room for cargo, so you’ll need a few of them. I’m not sure the economy on Iceland could have afforded such an expensive endeavor.
  - vintermann 5y ago
    Not to mention that the ships, while nice by 11th century standards, were not exactly airline level safety. A significant number of would-be traders (and raiders for that matter) ended up on the bottom of the sea, with the implications that would have for prices.
- gremloni 5y ago
  Maybe but the Viking’s modus operandi seemed like it was pillage/rape/kidnap the best looking women and then head out. I can only think of one settlement the Vikings set up in Gaul.
  - vintermann 5y ago
    Not even close. For one thing, Leif was a Christian. For another, his father, who more lived up to the stereotype of the murderous psycho Viking, had been twice banished for murder already, which was why he found himself in Greenland in the first place. The Norse were never a lot like the rapey pagan party Vikings they're portrayed as in popular culture, and certainly not by 1021.
  - HarryHirsch 5y ago
    Not really - they had a three-pronged business model based on ranching sheep, trading and, yes, raiding. Wasn't it Erik the Red who had two brothers, and their father asked all three what they were going to be when they had grown up. Says the first he is going to be a farmer and his sheepflock is going to be so large that he will have to dig another waterhole. Says the second he will go trading and he will have to build another barn to keep his wares in. Says Erik, who was the youngest, he is going to be a Viking and he is going to raid both of them.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    There were norse settlments all over the place - Russia, Normandy, Lower and Central Germany, England (the Danelaw was a thing for a while), Ireland and, famously, Byzantium. For settling uninhabited locales you've got Shetland, Mann, the Isles, Iceland and some seasonal settlements on Greenland.
    - gremloni 5y ago
      Byzantium? I would love some reading material on that.
      - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
goldenshale 5y ago
I highly recommend you read (or listen, the audiobook was great) to Conquistador by Buddy Levy. It might change your mind on this point. It tells the story of Cortez from the day they arrive on the shores of Mexico to when they take over the Aztec empire, where there were still many, many native peoples. The European advantages were many more than just disease... for better and worse.
coliveira 5y ago
Smallpox only spread in Europe starting in the 15th century. Before that it was known mostly in Asia (China and India). It was probably the increased trade with Asia that was responsible for spreading smallpox in Europe.
Cyberthal 5y ago
I doubt you can assume that such diseases would spread and persist in the Native American dispersed population. European immivasion created adjacent disease reservoirs of urban and concentrated agriculturalists. Also, Europeans colonized other regions where they did not have as great a disease or technological advantage.
godelmachine 5y ago
Greenland is a cold country. I doubt if viruses can survive there for so long unlike a tropical country like Spain.
- chestertn 5y ago
  Spain is not tropical
- anthk 5y ago
  Spain is not tropical. It has three main climates: - Atlantic. Windy and coldish climate, with lots of rain. Like the UK, or worse. - Continental Mediterranean. Hot Summers (over 40c) and cold Winters (below 0). - Mediterranean. Overall a warm climate with a few days of slight cold in Winter, with OFC some spots of cold winter depending on the location. - On top of that, the mountain climate, chill and always snowy in winter. Then the Archipielagos (Canaries/Balearics) are their own thing, and Iberia has several distint microclimates and terrains everywhere because the highly mountainous orography distorts the overall climates a lot. Think of Spain as a micro-condensed US, where you have near every climate in the Earth.
hnbad 5y ago
Others have cited Guns, Germs and Steel but I hope I don't have to explain that its premises have in many parts been debunked by actual historians who specialize in these subjects. It's easy to forget that most of the Indigenous peoples in North America didn't die simply from "catching" diseases but were directly and intentionally killed or worked to death. Most people are hopefully familiar with the extent of the genocide in what is now the US (with everything from "plague blankets" to eradicating the bison to literally paying bounties for dead Indians) but Columbus' treatment of the Natives was also so violent and brutal that other Spanish colonialists complained about it. In other words, the problem wasn't so much settlers bringing their diseases with them than settlers capturing the natives, working them to death, destroying their livelihoods and then actively trying to genocide them. Having some level of immunity to smallpox or other diseases wouldn't have changed much.
OneTimePetes 5y ago
Not really. The disease was a important bio-weapon, but the technological gradient was what allowed the conquering and exploiting. There was no basis for a American Native Confederacy and a renaissance like fast build up towards a industrial basis. None of the American Native Factions ever showed the reaction that japan had - which is the only correct approach to a invading external force with technological superiority.
steve76 5y ago
Turns out, it belonged to Columbus all along. Put his his statue back up, or get off his land. Europeans did not have smallpox then. Europe got hit with germs from foreigners too.
munk-a 5y ago
Additionally - if natives had adopted and continued the domestication of animals that norse greenlanders brought over (probably pigs at least) then there might have been a counter-plague when europeans again visited in 500 years.
- jjk166 5y ago
  That's unlikely. Part of the reason for the one way transmission of disease is simply the fact that Europeans were the ones making the crossings. Plenty of europeans got sick in the new world, but they either died in the new world or died on the ships during the long return journey. For a disease to cross the ocean, a carrier who is adapted to the disease must make the crossing. A few natives did go to Europe, but they were likely to die en route while surrounded by Europeans in rather unsanitary conditions. Further, the europeans making these journeys were typically young and fit individuals who, again, could survive long voyages at sea and the difficulties of setting up new colonies. The elderly and infirm stayed in Europe. Thus the europeans were far less likely to suffer an outbreak of disease simply by virtue of having fewer human incubators. For the natives, however, there was nothing to prevent their most vulnerable from being exposed, nor any way to stop isolated cases from blowing up into large scale pandemics. The only ways for a counter plague to get to Europe would be for either large numbers of natives to successfully cross the atlantic, which is unlikely when their population is simultaneously being decimated by disease, or for the Europeans to pick up a disease that took a long time to cause serious problems and thus could survive the return journey, which may have been the case for Syphillis. Either way, an "America Pox" is highly unlikely.
- kypro 5y ago
  Not quite a plague, but syphilis likely came from Native Americans.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
queuebert 5y ago
Parallel evolution of two strains of smallpox might have meant still no immunity to the Spanish version several centuries later. And the diseases were only a small factor in the outcome of the colonization. Guns being a much larger factor, for example.
- irrational 5y ago
  Is that true? I've read that 90+% of the population died from diseases, the vast majority without ever knowing about the European conquerors (that is, they never saw a gun). Imagine if 90% of the people in your nearest city died. How difficult would it be for a new group, immune to whatever killed almost everyone in the city, to move in and take over?
  - kristopolous 5y ago
    I've always wondered why this wasn't a two-way street. Wouldn't native people also have diseases to share? I know the imperialists weaponized their diseases and intentionally tried to spread it and that may be the difference. Usually the smallpox theory is presented in a way that removes agency and culpability from the conquerers. It's always struck me as remarkably convenient and quite unbelievable; they were an idyllic people in some wondrous land without their own disease. Oh really now ... we're talking the Caribbeans here. Even the Wikipedia page on the matter (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influx_of_disease_in_the_Caribbean https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influx_of_disease_in_the_Car...), does it cite epidemiological sources with someone looking at like bone sample DNA? No. It's economic and social science. Excuse me for questioning the qualification of economists for being able to authoritatively make confident statements about historical virology. It may be true but I'd like more evidence than convenient stories by the descendent of a conquerer about how by sheer coincidence his/her ancestors were actually not guilty of genocide and as of by miracle, North America became a land without people; it just happens to follow Frederick Jackson Turners Frontier Thesis a little too closely to be called a coincidence.
    - gameman144 5y ago
      From what I've read, native populations had less frequent interactions with livestock (through which many diseases arise) and less concentration in poor-sanitation settings (e.g. urban centers without sewers), both of which gave European settlers more exposure to transmissible pathogens in the centuries before settlement.
headcanon 5y ago
I do think about that idea as well, but population density (on both sides) is an important factor though. Both the Vikings and the native populations had far lower population densities than, say, 15-century Spain and Italy, which is likely why the diseases didn't spread in the first place. Mesoamerica a few centuries later did end up having the density required for disease transfer as history shows, but it was also helped along by the Spanish's active invasion. If the Spanish hadn't ever set foot on shore and the Mesoamerican society was allowed to develop, they would likely have developed their own diseases and the subsequent immune response, which may have helped fight Smallpox. But the Spanish got there before they had that opportunity. If the Spanish invasion had been replaced by a smaller troupe of Viking traders, I would be interested to see what would happen, and you might be right if you only change that one variable. But who knows?
- hyperpallium2 5y ago
  They were "living in the future", but that doesn't always work out so well.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  > If the Spanish hadn't ever set foot on shore and the Mesoamerican society was allowed to develop, they would likely have developed their own diseases Not really. Old World societies had access to many more domesticated animals, a key reason that they also had major diseases.
- bhickey 5y ago
  > If the Spanish hadn't ever set foot on shore and the Mesoamerican society was allowed to develop, they would likely have developed their own diseases and the subsequent immune response, which may have helped fight Smallpox. The most charitable reading of this is "if cowpox, monkeypox or some other zoonotic pox virus had an opportunity to spread through Mesoamerican society, they might've fared better with smallpox." A less charitable reading is "they might've faired better with smallpox if they had some other disease exposure prior to invasion." Either of these cases seems implausible. I don't know of any pox virus from the Americas that provides immunity to smallpox. In Europe we know that cowpox provided immunity among milkmaids. We also know that it didn't spread between people. There's no reason to believe that the only missing element was time for some other pox to emerge. As for the less charitable reading, prior infection with a pathogen is unlikely to provide any benefit against an unrelated pathogen. In the decades after smallpox swept through Aztec society the Cocoliztli epidemics killed twice again as many people. Fundamentally the problem was the introduction of a virus with a high mortality rate to an immunologically naive population. There's a major difference between a disease killing 50% of your under 12 population and 50% of everyone. The former is a disaster, the latter will collapse society, particularly one already fighting against an invasion.
29athrowaway 5y ago
Most of the time, Europeans fought one tribe at a time, rather than a large alliance of Native Americans. Then, in many cases, they made natives fight each other, and they recruited "auxiliary indians". The siege of Tenochtitlan involved 200,000 Tlaxcalans fighting on the European side. In other cases, such as the Battle of Cajamarca, they used their horse + armor advantage to kidnap the leader and ask everyone else to stand down. If natives had fought together as an alliance since the beginning, they would have time to adapt and catch up. Like the Mapuche did (they won the Arauco war).
- sillyquiet 5y ago
  "They made" natives fight each other is a weird way of putting it. Warring tribes were more than happy to use the Europeans against their enemies. And many of those enmities long predated the arrival of Europeans.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ProjectArcturis 5y ago
    Yes, many of the Central American tribes had been oppressed by the Aztecs for a long time, and were happy to have an advanced ally to fight against them.
    - toxik 5y ago
      There’s something to learn here about calling on a bigger bully to stamp out the local bully…
      - Brakenshire 5y ago
        The Romano-British and the Anglo-Saxons a similar lesson!
  - 29athrowaway 5y ago
    Yes, that characterization is a bit more accurate.
kens 5y ago
The book "1491" describes the Americas before Columbus, and is very interesting. In particular, the population density was much higher than generally realized.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  Especially in Aztec cities
zeckalpha 5y ago
Indigenous populations started dropping centuries before Columbus and we don’t know why. (Of course they dropped further after Columbian contact) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia#Decline%20(13th%20and%2014th%20centuries) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia#Decline%20(13th%20an... > The population of Cahokia began to decline during the 13th century, and the site was eventually abandoned by around 1350.
- lkrubner 5y ago
  As Fernand Braudel said, populations in Europe, China and and North America seems to roughly mirror one another for most of the last 5,000 years. The only possible explanation is the climate. Some centuries were good in the northern hemisphere, and some were bad. Not all at once, and not uniformly, but enough that we can see some link.
- noetic_techy 5y ago
  There are stories of Roman and Asian contact with the America's. Perhaps disease was brought over earlier then we thought. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_contact_theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co...
  - xanaxagoras 5y ago
    Is there a reason to assume disease couldn't have come into existence in this native population itself?
    - krrrh 5y ago
      If a disease native to the Americas emerged and became endemic, it would have infected Europeans when they arrived. There’s a good CGP Grey video on this called Americapox. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk
- ProjectArcturis 5y ago
  The Cahokia region did, certainly, but that would have been a minor blip in the total North American population, especially compared to the ~90% loss that happened following European arrival.
mytailorisrich 5y ago
Newfoundland is an island and it was, at best, extremely sparsely populated when the Vikings arrived. According to Wikipedia [1] the estimated local population when Europeans arrived in 1497 was 700 (that's on an area only slightly smaller than England). So I'm thinking that contacts were very limited and the potential for any disease to spread minimal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland_(island)#First_inhabitants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland_(island)#First_in...
ren_engineer 5y ago
is there any explanation for why disease didn't kill in the reverse direction? Why weren't Europeans wiped out by Native American diseases?
- noselasd 5y ago
  There were few, if any, diseases in the americas that was new to the europeans.
- sampo 5y ago
  According to Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond, Europeans had a history of living in close encounters with farm animals, so they had adopted diseases from the animals. And also the Eurasian geography made trade, and exchange of both culture and domesticated animals, and also diseases, easier in the east-west direction. Because in east-west direction the exchange happens inside the same climate zone. Cow, horse, pig, sheep, goat, donkey, chicken, duck, goose, cat, dog, these didn't all originate in a single location. But in Eurasia, people were able to adopt domesticated animals and plants from their eastern and western neighbors. The geography in the Americas makes it more easy to travel and trade in the south-north direction. But this is less useful, because you would only get access to domesticated plants and animals from different climate zones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel#Outline_of_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel#Outline...
  - mek6800d2 5y ago
    It's been a good while since I read Guns, Germs & Steel (and Diamond's equally excellent Collapse), but my remembrance is that physical obstacles in the north/south-oriented Americas and Africa -- e.g., deserts and extremely dense jungles -- inhibited the relatively "easy" transfer (given time) of technology, culture, etc. that happened in Eurasia. Climate would have affected the exchange of domesticated animals and plants to some extent, but such animals and plants or variants seem to have adapted to different climates in Eurasia. (It's been a while and I haven't read the Wikipedia article, so take what I say with a grain of salt!)
  - jcranmer 5y ago
cestith 5y ago
There are quite a few branching subthreads talking about the spread of different diseases, different living conditions leading to different immunity levels, and all sorts of ideas around why it didn't seem to spread deadly illnesses back to Europe as much as Europeans spread deadly ones to the Americas. One I don't see much about is that in the initial exploration, settlement, and colonizing groups the traffic of Europeans was largely one way and screened for serious diseases as best they could before being allowed on a ship. If Europeans became deathly ill in the Americas, they were probably left in the Americas to die rather than being taken back to Europe. The First Peoples from the Americas were not on average traveling to Europe and staying there for months, years, or lifetimes. They were staying among people in the Americas where they could continue to spread the illnesses. Healthy young soldiers, sailors, and merchants could bring both asymptomatic and presymptomatic cases of illness across an ocean to populations who weren't traveling nearly as much in the opposite direction. When entire colonies of mixed ages, genders, professions, and social roles moved permanently from Europe to the Americas, likewise the trips back to Europe also for former Europeans were far less common and included far fewer than the number of people continuing to interact with others in the Americas. In short, it was probably easier for mass migrations of Europeans to spread one or more cases of a disease to the Americas where it then spread from more prolonged contact with the population than it was for a European to contract a serious illness in the Americas and take it back to Europe on a military or merchant ship. As to the Norse and smallpox, the Crusades of the late 11th century and the 12th century were a big part of its spread to most of Europe. There's a very good chance I think there was little risk of a Norse ship spreading it in the early 11th century. As you said, it could be a very different world if they had.
- RugnirViking 5y ago
  while true that infectious diseases would have been unlikely to make it back to europe, at least in the early colonialism period, surely if there were a mysterious new disease that was affecting colonists it would still be known about, and probably still be around

eurusd 5y ago

It is exactly one of the starting points of this uchrony, Civilizations from Laurent Binet (in french, i believe not translated to english), where native get sick during first venue of Vikings then when Colombus appears they just don't get sick at all + kill him and get to Portugal back on their boats and then travel in Europe, meet Luther, Erasme & Charles Quint, convert people to Sun god religion and create an Empire in Europe. Good book btw

saiya-jin 5y ago

maybe that 1/few ships just happened to didn't carry smallpox and other nasties aboard

sillyquiet 5y ago

yeah, unfortunately (I guess??!) smallpox didn't reach Europe until the Crusades.

BurningFrog 5y ago

That's really interesting! Of course, if the native population died off around them, the Vikings would probably have expanded their settlements and perhaps ruled North America instead.

Symmetry 5y ago
I dunno, the Norse settlers were apparently getting a lot out of trading red died cloth for native produce and if it hadn't been for the altercation that somehow grew up around that cow or bull the possibility of trade might have drawn a lot more Norse in, the way the fur trade did in French North America. But then again farming populations can expand really fast with low population pressure. The 13 colonies were seeing their populations double every generation just from natural fertility even before immigration.
munk-a 5y ago
It depends if they kept coming back. Smallpox worked to the settlers' advantage because colonizers were establishing themselves in the carribean and south america before any serious ventures into north america got going - so there was time for a pandemic to actually spread before folks really started getting serious about settling. I think with statistics and spread rates and all that it's likely that viking settlers would need to stick around for a decade or two to really see the effects in terms of population thinning.
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
I don't think it works like that. There seems to be a need for a minimum primary settler population and a decent amount of native assistance- it's fairly easy to build a new town 10 miles from your last but I am not aware of any long distance unsupported settlers. So if the natives around the Mayflower had all died, so would the Founding Fathers. If the Norse diseases had killed off the locals they might not have made it through winter.
- vintermann 5y ago
  I agree with this. It's about economic and social support. Leif Eriksson was the son of the notorious murderer Eric the Red. Eric was twice outcast, first from Norway to Iceland, then from Iceland to Greenland. On top of that, Leif was an enthusiastic convert to Christianity, which somewhat alienated him from his still pagan father. They lived on a fringe of a fringe of the European economic, cultural and religious community. They didn't even really have the economic support to sustain a settlement on Greenland (where they were more by necessity than opportunity, due to Eric's crimes), let alone Nova Scotia.
- eesmith 5y ago
  > long distance unsupported settlers There were 18 years between the European settlement of Pitcairn island and the next visitors - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcairn_Islands#European_settlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcairn_Islands#European_sett... . Your constraints are pretty strict. There aren't many places which could be settled (in recorded history) where there weren't already people living there, and where there was a reason for not continuing contact with the place of origin. Another possibility is Te Pito O Te Kainga / Rapa Nui / Easter Island. The first explorers met one person already there (Nga Tavake), then they go back to Hiva, and a double canoe returns to Easter Island carrying the settlers. They left "because a rising tide was destroying their land" and/or a power struggle with the Hanau Eepe, if I read http://archive.hokulea.com/rapanui/hotu.html http://archive.hokulea.com/rapanui/hotu.html correctly. In either case, the oral history suggest little continued connection with Hiva.
- adolph 5y ago
  Some interpretations of the socio-political context of what is now New England see tribes more affected by disease presumably spread by earlier European contact as aiding incoming Europeans in order to ward off other tribes. The Narragansetts were the most powerful tribe in the southern area of the region when the English colonists arrived in 1620, and they had not been affected by the epidemics. Chief Massasoit of the Wampanoags to the east allied with the colonists at Plymouth Colony as a way to protect the Wampanoags from Narragansett attacks. In the fall of 1621, the Narragansetts sent a sheaf of arrows wrapped in a snakeskin to Plymouth Colony as a threatening challenge, but Plymouth governor William Bradford sent the snakeskin back filled with gunpowder and bullets. The Narragansetts understood the message and did not attack them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narragansett_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narragansett_people
runarberg 5y ago
I doubt it. The distances are simply too large to maintain a supply lines needed for a self sufficient colonies to thrive. The Norse needed the natives both to trade with and to learn from if they were to settle these lands, they couldn’t do it on their own. Now you might think of Iceland and Norse Greenland as a counter example. But Norse Greenland never really thrived, and was eventually abandoned. Iceland however thrived, but it is so much closer to Norway about 7 days at see with the potential to stop at the Faeroe Islands. The voyage between Greenland and Iceland is similar (only a bit longer + sailing up the west coast of Greenland). And finally you need another week or two to cross the Labrador sea from Greenland. However that route is much harder in the winter then between Iceland and Norway, and Greenland is not nearly as populated as Iceland or Norway and don’t generate enough surplus food which they can supply to a potential colonies on the North American mainland. So the logistics of supplying a colony in North America without help from the people already living there must include a summertime only supply line from Iceland with enough supplies to last the whole year. Where each voyage from Iceland is going take maybe a month, maybe more, just one way. These ships are still pretty small and not a lot of room for cargo, so you’ll need a few of them. I’m not sure the economy on Iceland could have afforded such an expensive endeavor.
- vintermann 5y ago
  Not to mention that the ships, while nice by 11th century standards, were not exactly airline level safety. A significant number of would-be traders (and raiders for that matter) ended up on the bottom of the sea, with the implications that would have for prices.
gremloni 5y ago
Maybe but the Viking’s modus operandi seemed like it was pillage/rape/kidnap the best looking women and then head out. I can only think of one settlement the Vikings set up in Gaul.
- vintermann 5y ago
  Not even close. For one thing, Leif was a Christian. For another, his father, who more lived up to the stereotype of the murderous psycho Viking, had been twice banished for murder already, which was why he found himself in Greenland in the first place. The Norse were never a lot like the rapey pagan party Vikings they're portrayed as in popular culture, and certainly not by 1021.
- HarryHirsch 5y ago
  Not really - they had a three-pronged business model based on ranching sheep, trading and, yes, raiding. Wasn't it Erik the Red who had two brothers, and their father asked all three what they were going to be when they had grown up. Says the first he is going to be a farmer and his sheepflock is going to be so large that he will have to dig another waterhole. Says the second he will go trading and he will have to build another barn to keep his wares in. Says Erik, who was the youngest, he is going to be a Viking and he is going to raid both of them.
- munk-a 5y ago
  There were norse settlments all over the place - Russia, Normandy, Lower and Central Germany, England (the Danelaw was a thing for a while), Ireland and, famously, Byzantium. For settling uninhabited locales you've got Shetland, Mann, the Isles, Iceland and some seasonal settlements on Greenland.
  - gremloni 5y ago
    Byzantium? I would love some reading material on that.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago

goldenshale 5y ago

I highly recommend you read (or listen, the audiobook was great) to Conquistador by Buddy Levy. It might change your mind on this point. It tells the story of Cortez from the day they arrive on the shores of Mexico to when they take over the Aztec empire, where there were still many, many native peoples. The European advantages were many more than just disease... for better and worse.

coliveira 5y ago

Smallpox only spread in Europe starting in the 15th century. Before that it was known mostly in Asia (China and India). It was probably the increased trade with Asia that was responsible for spreading smallpox in Europe.

Cyberthal 5y ago

I doubt you can assume that such diseases would spread and persist in the Native American dispersed population. European immivasion created adjacent disease reservoirs of urban and concentrated agriculturalists. Also, Europeans colonized other regions where they did not have as great a disease or technological advantage.

godelmachine 5y ago

Greenland is a cold country. I doubt if viruses can survive there for so long unlike a tropical country like Spain.

chestertn 5y ago
Spain is not tropical
anthk 5y ago
Spain is not tropical. It has three main climates: - Atlantic. Windy and coldish climate, with lots of rain. Like the UK, or worse. - Continental Mediterranean. Hot Summers (over 40c) and cold Winters (below 0). - Mediterranean. Overall a warm climate with a few days of slight cold in Winter, with OFC some spots of cold winter depending on the location. - On top of that, the mountain climate, chill and always snowy in winter. Then the Archipielagos (Canaries/Balearics) are their own thing, and Iberia has several distint microclimates and terrains everywhere because the highly mountainous orography distorts the overall climates a lot. Think of Spain as a micro-condensed US, where you have near every climate in the Earth.

hnbad 5y ago

Others have cited Guns, Germs and Steel but I hope I don't have to explain that its premises have in many parts been debunked by actual historians who specialize in these subjects. It's easy to forget that most of the Indigenous peoples in North America didn't die simply from "catching" diseases but were directly and intentionally killed or worked to death. Most people are hopefully familiar with the extent of the genocide in what is now the US (with everything from "plague blankets" to eradicating the bison to literally paying bounties for dead Indians) but Columbus' treatment of the Natives was also so violent and brutal that other Spanish colonialists complained about it. In other words, the problem wasn't so much settlers bringing their diseases with them than settlers capturing the natives, working them to death, destroying their livelihoods and then actively trying to genocide them. Having some level of immunity to smallpox or other diseases wouldn't have changed much.

OneTimePetes 5y ago

Not really. The disease was a important bio-weapon, but the technological gradient was what allowed the conquering and exploiting. There was no basis for a American Native Confederacy and a renaissance like fast build up towards a industrial basis. None of the American Native Factions ever showed the reaction that japan had - which is the only correct approach to a invading external force with technological superiority.

steve76 5y ago

Turns out, it belonged to Columbus all along. Put his his statue back up, or get off his land. Europeans did not have smallpox then. Europe got hit with germs from foreigners too.

munk-a 5y ago

Additionally - if natives had adopted and continued the domestication of animals that norse greenlanders brought over (probably pigs at least) then there might have been a counter-plague when europeans again visited in 500 years.

jjk166 5y ago
That's unlikely. Part of the reason for the one way transmission of disease is simply the fact that Europeans were the ones making the crossings. Plenty of europeans got sick in the new world, but they either died in the new world or died on the ships during the long return journey. For a disease to cross the ocean, a carrier who is adapted to the disease must make the crossing. A few natives did go to Europe, but they were likely to die en route while surrounded by Europeans in rather unsanitary conditions. Further, the europeans making these journeys were typically young and fit individuals who, again, could survive long voyages at sea and the difficulties of setting up new colonies. The elderly and infirm stayed in Europe. Thus the europeans were far less likely to suffer an outbreak of disease simply by virtue of having fewer human incubators. For the natives, however, there was nothing to prevent their most vulnerable from being exposed, nor any way to stop isolated cases from blowing up into large scale pandemics. The only ways for a counter plague to get to Europe would be for either large numbers of natives to successfully cross the atlantic, which is unlikely when their population is simultaneously being decimated by disease, or for the Europeans to pick up a disease that took a long time to cause serious problems and thus could survive the return journey, which may have been the case for Syphillis. Either way, an "America Pox" is highly unlikely.
kypro 5y ago
Not quite a plague, but syphilis likely came from Native Americans.
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queuebert 5y ago

Parallel evolution of two strains of smallpox might have meant still no immunity to the Spanish version several centuries later. And the diseases were only a small factor in the outcome of the colonization. Guns being a much larger factor, for example.

irrational 5y ago
Is that true? I've read that 90+% of the population died from diseases, the vast majority without ever knowing about the European conquerors (that is, they never saw a gun). Imagine if 90% of the people in your nearest city died. How difficult would it be for a new group, immune to whatever killed almost everyone in the city, to move in and take over?
- kristopolous 5y ago
  I've always wondered why this wasn't a two-way street. Wouldn't native people also have diseases to share? I know the imperialists weaponized their diseases and intentionally tried to spread it and that may be the difference. Usually the smallpox theory is presented in a way that removes agency and culpability from the conquerers. It's always struck me as remarkably convenient and quite unbelievable; they were an idyllic people in some wondrous land without their own disease. Oh really now ... we're talking the Caribbeans here. Even the Wikipedia page on the matter (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influx_of_disease_in_the_Caribbean https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influx_of_disease_in_the_Car...), does it cite epidemiological sources with someone looking at like bone sample DNA? No. It's economic and social science. Excuse me for questioning the qualification of economists for being able to authoritatively make confident statements about historical virology. It may be true but I'd like more evidence than convenient stories by the descendent of a conquerer about how by sheer coincidence his/her ancestors were actually not guilty of genocide and as of by miracle, North America became a land without people; it just happens to follow Frederick Jackson Turners Frontier Thesis a little too closely to be called a coincidence.
  - gameman144 5y ago
    From what I've read, native populations had less frequent interactions with livestock (through which many diseases arise) and less concentration in poor-sanitation settings (e.g. urban centers without sewers), both of which gave European settlers more exposure to transmissible pathogens in the centuries before settlement.

headcanon 5y ago

I do think about that idea as well, but population density (on both sides) is an important factor though. Both the Vikings and the native populations had far lower population densities than, say, 15-century Spain and Italy, which is likely why the diseases didn't spread in the first place. Mesoamerica a few centuries later did end up having the density required for disease transfer as history shows, but it was also helped along by the Spanish's active invasion. If the Spanish hadn't ever set foot on shore and the Mesoamerican society was allowed to develop, they would likely have developed their own diseases and the subsequent immune response, which may have helped fight Smallpox. But the Spanish got there before they had that opportunity. If the Spanish invasion had been replaced by a smaller troupe of Viking traders, I would be interested to see what would happen, and you might be right if you only change that one variable. But who knows?

hyperpallium2 5y ago
They were "living in the future", but that doesn't always work out so well.
fennecfoxen 5y ago
> If the Spanish hadn't ever set foot on shore and the Mesoamerican society was allowed to develop, they would likely have developed their own diseases Not really. Old World societies had access to many more domesticated animals, a key reason that they also had major diseases.
bhickey 5y ago
> If the Spanish hadn't ever set foot on shore and the Mesoamerican society was allowed to develop, they would likely have developed their own diseases and the subsequent immune response, which may have helped fight Smallpox. The most charitable reading of this is "if cowpox, monkeypox or some other zoonotic pox virus had an opportunity to spread through Mesoamerican society, they might've fared better with smallpox." A less charitable reading is "they might've faired better with smallpox if they had some other disease exposure prior to invasion." Either of these cases seems implausible. I don't know of any pox virus from the Americas that provides immunity to smallpox. In Europe we know that cowpox provided immunity among milkmaids. We also know that it didn't spread between people. There's no reason to believe that the only missing element was time for some other pox to emerge. As for the less charitable reading, prior infection with a pathogen is unlikely to provide any benefit against an unrelated pathogen. In the decades after smallpox swept through Aztec society the Cocoliztli epidemics killed twice again as many people. Fundamentally the problem was the introduction of a virus with a high mortality rate to an immunologically naive population. There's a major difference between a disease killing 50% of your under 12 population and 50% of everyone. The former is a disaster, the latter will collapse society, particularly one already fighting against an invasion.

29athrowaway 5y ago

Most of the time, Europeans fought one tribe at a time, rather than a large alliance of Native Americans. Then, in many cases, they made natives fight each other, and they recruited "auxiliary indians". The siege of Tenochtitlan involved 200,000 Tlaxcalans fighting on the European side. In other cases, such as the Battle of Cajamarca, they used their horse + armor advantage to kidnap the leader and ask everyone else to stand down. If natives had fought together as an alliance since the beginning, they would have time to adapt and catch up. Like the Mapuche did (they won the Arauco war).

sillyquiet 5y ago
"They made" natives fight each other is a weird way of putting it. Warring tribes were more than happy to use the Europeans against their enemies. And many of those enmities long predated the arrival of Europeans.
- deleted 5y ago
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- ProjectArcturis 5y ago
  Yes, many of the Central American tribes had been oppressed by the Aztecs for a long time, and were happy to have an advanced ally to fight against them.
  - toxik 5y ago
    There’s something to learn here about calling on a bigger bully to stamp out the local bully…
    - Brakenshire 5y ago
      The Romano-British and the Anglo-Saxons a similar lesson!
- 29athrowaway 5y ago
  Yes, that characterization is a bit more accurate.

kens 5y ago

The book "1491" describes the Americas before Columbus, and is very interesting. In particular, the population density was much higher than generally realized.

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
Especially in Aztec cities

zeckalpha 5y ago

Indigenous populations started dropping centuries before Columbus and we don’t know why. (Of course they dropped further after Columbian contact) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia#Decline%20(13th%20and%2014th%20centuries) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia#Decline%20(13th%20an... > The population of Cahokia began to decline during the 13th century, and the site was eventually abandoned by around 1350.

lkrubner 5y ago
As Fernand Braudel said, populations in Europe, China and and North America seems to roughly mirror one another for most of the last 5,000 years. The only possible explanation is the climate. Some centuries were good in the northern hemisphere, and some were bad. Not all at once, and not uniformly, but enough that we can see some link.
noetic_techy 5y ago
There are stories of Roman and Asian contact with the America's. Perhaps disease was brought over earlier then we thought. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_contact_theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co...
- xanaxagoras 5y ago
  Is there a reason to assume disease couldn't have come into existence in this native population itself?
  - krrrh 5y ago
    If a disease native to the Americas emerged and became endemic, it would have infected Europeans when they arrived. There’s a good CGP Grey video on this called Americapox. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk
ProjectArcturis 5y ago
The Cahokia region did, certainly, but that would have been a minor blip in the total North American population, especially compared to the ~90% loss that happened following European arrival.

mytailorisrich 5y ago

Newfoundland is an island and it was, at best, extremely sparsely populated when the Vikings arrived. According to Wikipedia [1] the estimated local population when Europeans arrived in 1497 was 700 (that's on an area only slightly smaller than England). So I'm thinking that contacts were very limited and the potential for any disease to spread minimal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland_(island)#First_inhabitants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland_(island)#First_in...

ren_engineer 5y ago

is there any explanation for why disease didn't kill in the reverse direction? Why weren't Europeans wiped out by Native American diseases?

noselasd 5y ago
There were few, if any, diseases in the americas that was new to the europeans.
sampo 5y ago
According to Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond, Europeans had a history of living in close encounters with farm animals, so they had adopted diseases from the animals. And also the Eurasian geography made trade, and exchange of both culture and domesticated animals, and also diseases, easier in the east-west direction. Because in east-west direction the exchange happens inside the same climate zone. Cow, horse, pig, sheep, goat, donkey, chicken, duck, goose, cat, dog, these didn't all originate in a single location. But in Eurasia, people were able to adopt domesticated animals and plants from their eastern and western neighbors. The geography in the Americas makes it more easy to travel and trade in the south-north direction. But this is less useful, because you would only get access to domesticated plants and animals from different climate zones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel#Outline_of_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel#Outline...
- mek6800d2 5y ago
  It's been a good while since I read Guns, Germs & Steel (and Diamond's equally excellent Collapse), but my remembrance is that physical obstacles in the north/south-oriented Americas and Africa -- e.g., deserts and extremely dense jungles -- inhibited the relatively "easy" transfer (given time) of technology, culture, etc. that happened in Eurasia. Climate would have affected the exchange of domesticated animals and plants to some extent, but such animals and plants or variants seem to have adapted to different climates in Eurasia. (It's been a while and I haven't read the Wikipedia article, so take what I say with a grain of salt!)
- jcranmer 5y ago

cestith 5y ago

There are quite a few branching subthreads talking about the spread of different diseases, different living conditions leading to different immunity levels, and all sorts of ideas around why it didn't seem to spread deadly illnesses back to Europe as much as Europeans spread deadly ones to the Americas. One I don't see much about is that in the initial exploration, settlement, and colonizing groups the traffic of Europeans was largely one way and screened for serious diseases as best they could before being allowed on a ship. If Europeans became deathly ill in the Americas, they were probably left in the Americas to die rather than being taken back to Europe. The First Peoples from the Americas were not on average traveling to Europe and staying there for months, years, or lifetimes. They were staying among people in the Americas where they could continue to spread the illnesses. Healthy young soldiers, sailors, and merchants could bring both asymptomatic and presymptomatic cases of illness across an ocean to populations who weren't traveling nearly as much in the opposite direction. When entire colonies of mixed ages, genders, professions, and social roles moved permanently from Europe to the Americas, likewise the trips back to Europe also for former Europeans were far less common and included far fewer than the number of people continuing to interact with others in the Americas. In short, it was probably easier for mass migrations of Europeans to spread one or more cases of a disease to the Americas where it then spread from more prolonged contact with the population than it was for a European to contract a serious illness in the Americas and take it back to Europe on a military or merchant ship. As to the Norse and smallpox, the Crusades of the late 11th century and the 12th century were a big part of its spread to most of Europe. There's a very good chance I think there was little risk of a Norse ship spreading it in the early 11th century. As you said, it could be a very different world if they had.

RugnirViking 5y ago
while true that infectious diseases would have been unlikely to make it back to europe, at least in the early colonialism period, surely if there were a mysterious new disease that was affecting colonists it would still be known about, and probably still be around