[Sca-cooks] OT: With all due respect

[Daniel & Elizabeth Phelps]

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