[Sca-cooks] OT: With all due respect
Daniel & Elizabeth Phelps
dephelps at embarqmail.com
Sun Oct 10 16:36:58 PDT 2010
Lest you think me exceptionally Eurocentric when you read what I have to say
some of my ancestors were native American. In my personal opinion making
Columbus the whipping boy for the European colonial exploitation of North
and South America and for that matter Africa south of the Sahara is a bit
much. Columbus died thinking that he had found China or at least the far
east. Be that as it may the Norse had been to North America and the only
thing that kept them from ultimately exploiting their discoveries over time
was that the "little ice age" did for them in Greenland and shut that route
down. There is circumstantial evidence that the Chinese found the west
coast but lost it going from one emperor to another. The Basques had
already been to Red Bay and had set up shore side operations there before
Columbus. Cod fishing was already going on on the Grand Banks which is just
a short distance from the North America mainland.
Ok consider what would have happened if Columbus had not received the
sponsorship of the Spanish Crown. The Portuguese would have found Brazil
while going off course sailing around Africa. Fishing off the Grand Banks
would have resulted in discovery and exploitation. The Basque discoveries
would have become common knowledge. It was only a matter of time before
Europe recognized that the new world was out there ready to be exploited.
It was going to happen and the differences in technology and culture was
certain to make it have unfortunate consequences for the native peoples of
the New World .
What did for the peoples of the New World? In the main, european diseases
far more than colonial explotation. The european sailors that first visited
were the human equivalent of wharf rats. They had been exposed to virtually
every nasty disease circulating and survived, albeit often as the vectors of
infection to populations who had never seen such diseases. We are talking
about various and sundry social diseases, measles, typhus, typhoid,
diphtheria, small pox, and cholera to name a few. When those diseases hit
the new world in waves of infection the result was not pretty. Mortality
has been estimated to have been as high as 90% in single outbreaks of some
of these diseases. When the northern Eurpoeans began to colonize the
eastern seaboard of North America they often found deserted villages and
fields. Why was that? Disease. Even if the Europeans had come to the new
world purely as benevolent missionaries the old order in the Americas was
doomed.
Daniel
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