A lengthy discussion on "Empty America"

[raharris1973]

Have you heard of the original scenario by long time (25 year + what-iffer) Doug Hoff? Here’s the summary in the AH.comwiki: timelines:empty_america [alternatehistory.com wiki]

It is a nifty old AH timeline, that I think is worthy of some renewed discussion.

First of all, although it is never spelled out in the original, but I would think that any “Empty America”, ie, no Amerindians, scenario, would have to be an ASB scenario, where basically the OTL Americas are replaced with an ISOT of a pre-human wilderness version of the Americas just prior to the arrival of old world discoverers?

Why? Because I figure that if if you do not use ASBs, and just otherwise contrive to block the main historical migrations down the Pacific coast and across the Bering land bridge, you would end up just having some alternate, somewhat later, migratory wave of northeast Asian people, porto-Aleuts, or Inuits, or Chuckchis, or Yakuts, or even Polynesians, reach out to the “Empty America”, and *POOF*, they would expand across the continents and become the new “Amerindians”. [And that is not even getting into the accumulating butterflies in the old world that would wipe out all known Eurasian cultures like Chinese, Vikings, Portuguese, and Spaniards, from a geologic/climatological PoD over 10,000 years ago as drastic as removing the Bering land bridge from history]

So, with that said, I would have to suggest that the hidden, unspoken ASB event in the original Doug Hoff timeline would have been the ISOT’ing of a pre-human Americas to a year shortly (ie within just a couple centuries) before the Viking discovery of North America , circa 1000 AD.

Now in OTL, where Vinland wasn’t “empty” of humans but had the so-called “Skraeling” people, it was marginal and not sustainable for the Norse. It was ultimately abandoned, and people have pointed out the challenges to actually get it to survive and grow. The original “Empty America” TL, at least in an indirect fashion, too the view that the Amerindians were an obstacle, because Vinland prospers in the TL and becomes permanent. I think it was not just related to the absence of mammoths, and the harvesting of mammoth tusk ivory for profit.

Do we all think this is the most likely outcome to transpire, thorough Norse colonization?

Or would a wholly untamed and uncleared wilderness be *more* difficult for the Norse, so far from home, to permanently colonize, without Amerindians to clear the land, grow suitable native crops, learn from, and trade with?

Has anyone done a timeline playing with the premise of an “Empty America” staying empty past the Viking era, until Columbus and his age of exploration? There’s Turtledove’s “A Different Flesh, but that doesn’t count, because it has hominids” and was not at all rigorously realistic.

It would be easy enough to save an “Empty America” for the Columbian era using a well-timed ISOT trick as your PoD, brining a pre-human Americas (including Caribbean) to a 1492 world.

What implications would this have?

I think it would slow interest in the New World, as gold wouldn’t be visible on the surface of the land, and land in the tropics would tend to be more difficult jungle, and there would not be people to enslave or trade with. The most interesting things to be found upon landing could be some completely strange plants and animals. Way less interesting than gold. If Columbus is lucky he will have some guys competent at taxidermy or preserving animal hides. I think keeping any wild animal specimens alive through a trip back across the Atlantic is pretty hopeless.

There would be interest over time in looking around the place to see if there is a way around it to Asia or see if there are places further on with people or interesting things.

The earliest colonial use for American land I see being viable for Europeans is fish drying, sort of a low-medium end activity not of that much interest to Kings. The second activity, of somewhat more interest to Kingdoms and great institutions like merchant houses that would be viable would using tropical islands for sugar plantations worked by prisoners or slaves.

The Americas will not provide unique edible crops or domesticated animals, because there will not have been native people to have developed them from the wild over time. Another colonial venture Europeans will eventually find useful and profitable will be fur-hunting. But that will be slower to develop than OTL, because they won’t be able to learn it from the natives or just buy pelts from natives with the needed tracking, stalking, hunting, trapping skills for the available fur-bearing game. Gardening, livestock raising, and release of pigs and cows and goats, and grain farming will start off as minor sidelights of other activities like sugar growing and fishing and logging. However eventually, don’t know exactly when, people from Europe will come to the temperate regions of the Americas to use the vast amounts of land for farming and pastoralism.

Assuming there's major religious strife and dissatisfaction in 1600s Europe and England for example, do we think by that point Europeans seeking to escape persecution will have conceived of mass permanent agricultural settlements on the Atlantic coast of North America? By 1700 would they have started any such settlements that have started to survive and grow in a serious way?

 

[JesterBL]

First of all, although it is never spelled out in the original, but I would think that any “Empty America”, ie, no Amerindians, scenario, would have to be an ASB scenario, where basically the OTL Americas are replaced with an ISOT of a pre-human wilderness version of the Americas just prior to the arrival of old world discoverers?

Why? Because I figure that if if you do not use ASBs, and just otherwise contrive to block the main historical migrations down the Pacific coast and across the Bering land bridge, you would end up just having some alternate, somewhat later, migratory wave of northeast Asian people, porto-Aleuts, or Inuits, or Chuckchis, or Yakuts, or even Polynesians, reach out to the “Empty America”, and *POOF*, they would expand across the continents and become the new “Amerindians”

I don't think this would push it into ASB territory. It took the Maori nearly two centuries to expand across Aotearoa and the Vikings more than 60 years to expand across Iceland. Meanwhile Makassans made contact with Australia and left no lasting influence. Even assuming there are later migratory waves, there is no guarantee those societies will be large or substantial by the time of the timeline. The scant genetic evidence for Polynesians in S. America puts it at around the 1200s, so you could very well have a *different* Empty America playing out later in the TL in S. America.

[And that is not even getting into the accumulating butterflies in the old world that would wipe out all known Eurasian cultures like Chinese, Vikings, Portuguese, and Spaniards, from a geologic/climatological PoD over 10,000 years ago as drastic as removing the Bering land bridge from history]

I don't really think a butterfly trap places an AH scenario into ASB territory. We'd have to remove, well, most well-written and interesting AH out there if that was the criteria (one big example being Lands of Red and Gold).

 

[raharris1973]

I don't think this would push it into ASB territory. It took the Maori nearly two centuries to expand across Aotearoa and the Vikings more than 60 years to expand across Iceland. Meanwhile Makassans made contact with Australia and left no lasting influence. Even assuming there are later migratory waves, there is no guarantee those societies will be large or substantial by the time of the timeline. The scant genetic evidence for Polynesians in S. America puts it at around the 1200s, so you could very well have a *different* Empty America playing out later in the TL in S. America.



I don't really think a butterfly trap places an AH scenario into ASB territory. We'd have to remove, well, most well-written and interesting AH out there if that was the criteria (one big example being Lands of Red and Gold).

You cite some interesting, and important, facts about instances of very long periods of isolation, and their variable length, and also of contacts that proved to be very ephemeral in impact. But I have to respectfully, but not completely disagree with many of your positions.

I do agree that there can be a plausible "butterfly trap" that is not ASB, where a change in it would not create changes outside of it for thousands, possibly millions of year. Unfortunately, the smallest non-ASB buttterfly trap is not island sized or continent sized, but the size of the earth biosphere, of its higher crust layers, oceans, and atmosphere. Changes could propagate in there and abound but all space events could re-run exactly the same, unchanged, as could all deep sub-surface events, like the timing and severity of every major earth volcanic eruption or earthquake.

But anyway, our little back and forth so far has mainly been on the philosophy of butterflies.

So you think an Empty America scenario could be non-ASB, even a butterfly trapped one. OK. ASB or not. Columbus and the explorers of his age find an human-free America, what happen? What do you make of my speculations from that point? What would you speculate independently?

 

[JesterBL]

I think your analysis is undervaluing timber and ivory and fish-drying. These were all huge industries. Timber was the primary fuel source of Europe and an Empty America would represent a fresh source of virgin forest as the European continent struggled with its own pre-Black Death deforestation (to say nothing of secondary products like pine tar). Ivory was the plastic of its day, useful for utilitarian items and luxury goods, and walrus ivory was itself something Northern Europeans were familiar with and the only thing which sustained Greenland. Fish-drying was not something of little interest to Kings, it was the foundation of prosperity in the North Sea and would, IOTL, play its own role in feeding the satanic mills of the Caribbean. Where you are likely getting well ahead of yourself is sugar- it wasn't even known to Europeans by and large at the time of European discovery of *Empty America and the Caribbean Islands without humans will likely be tough to turn over to any kind of cultivation (they were tough enough to turn over to plantation agriculture IOTL).

 

[raharris1973]

Timber was the primary fuel source of Europe and an Empty America would represent a fresh source of virgin forest as the European continent struggled with its own pre-Black Death deforestation (to say nothing of secondary products like pine tar).

Wouldn't cutting down old growth trees in virgin forests be very, very hard to do with the tools of the day though?

Fish-drying was not something of little interest to Kings, it was the foundation of prosperity in the North Sea and would, IOTL, play its own role in feeding the satanic mills of the Caribbean

The Caribbean? I always envisioned fishermen's operations as centering more on the New England and maritimes coast. Would the Caribbean be particularly useful for fishing and fish-salting/drying?

Where you are likely getting well ahead of yourself is sugar- it wasn't even known to Europeans by and large at the time of European discovery of *Empty America

Wait a minute - not true - cane sugar was known to Europeans, grown and refined in the Levant for a few centuries by then, bought, marketed and sold by Italian merchants, cultivated on a small scale on some east Mediterranean islands, and cultivated again in the 1400s by Iberians in places like the Canary Islands and Madeira and Cape Verde.

Caribbean Islands without humans will likely be tough to turn over to any kind of cultivation (they were tough enough to turn over to plantation agriculture IOTL).

Tough to turn over I presume because moisture patterns will mean think jungle most of the time. Although, I suppose in dry season some significant clearance could be accomplished by deliberate setting of forest fires.

Not saying you're wrong on all these, just bringing up possible counterpoints.

 

[JesterBL]

Wouldn't cutting down old growth trees in virgin forests be very, very hard to do with the tools of the day though?

There's evidence that Greenlanders still visited Labrador for timber IOTL well after the failure of Vinland. Like IOTL's Americas, they likely couldn't clear-cut the old growth forests (it was common in the Midwest and New England to just leave larger trees where they were and clear-cut everything around them) but they could still harvest plenty of timber.

The Caribbean? I always envisioned fishermen's operations as centering more on the New England and maritimes coast. Would the Caribbean be particularly useful for fishing and fish-salting/drying?

The Caribbean was a huge market for the fisheries of Northern Europe and the North Atlantic- saltfish is actually still an important part of most Caribbean cuisines for exactly this reason. It was an effective way of feeding the enslaved populations of the Caribbean. This is why France kept St. Pierre and Miquelon and fishing rights in the Grand Banks while abandoning the rest of New France in the Treaty of Paris 1763- the fishery was important to maintaining their sugar plantations elsewhere. In a Europe still living under a fasting regimen of the medieval era, stockfish would have the same importance.

Wait a minute - not true - cane sugar was known to Europeans, grown and refined in the Levant for a few centuries by then, bought, marketed and sold by Italian merchants, cultivated on a small scale on some east Mediterranean islands, and cultivated again in the 1400s by Iberians in places like the Canary Islands and Madeira and Cape Verde.

Sugar wasn't really known to Europeans till the Crusades and wasn't cultivated by Europeans till at least the 1200s and not really in a big way till at least the 1400s. Leif Erikson's journey was likely around 1000 AD.

 

[JesterBL]

So to weigh in on the second part of your question- I do think Norse settlement is the most likely event to transpire in an Empty America scenario- I think it is very possible for Vinland to remain on the fringes of the European consciousness, possibly for centuries and not hugely impact the course of human events in the Old World during that time, but I think it would be the obvious entry point for Europeans to the New World.

I think the world that follows will be poorer and less agriculturally productive- no corn and no potatoes are huge constraints on OTL's economic and demographic growth. No tomatoes and no peppers make plenty of OTL cuisines unrecognizable.

Now let's say Vinland flat out fails and fades from European's consciousness- Christopher Columbus is going to have a harder time wringing any kind of success out of his visits to the Caribbean assuming he even makes it back. I think you'd be more likely to spur real interest in *Empty America from Basque fishermen in the Grand Banks, but it will certainly all proceed more slowly than OTL.

 

[Jackson Lennock]

If Leif Erikson accidentally triggered hemisphere-wide social collapse the way the Spanish did by introducing diseases the Indigenous people had no resistance to, my guess is it'd burn through within a century and there'd be population recovery by the time somebody else shows up.

 

[JesterBL]

If Leif Erikson accidentally triggered hemisphere-wide social collapse the way the Spanish did by introducing diseases the Indigenous people had no resistance to, my guess is it'd burn through within a century and there'd be population recovery by the time somebody else shows up.

Different scenario than Empty America but it should be noted that North Atlantic islands were themselves prone to mass die-offs with novel infectious diseases so inoculation by way of Vinland may not be terribly effective.

 

[raharris1973]

Different scenario than Empty America but it should be noted that North Atlantic islands were themselves prone to mass die-offs with novel infectious diseases so inoculation by way of Vinland may not be terribly effective.

Heartily agreed here.

 

[raharris1973]

Now let's say Vinland flat out fails and fades from European's consciousness- Christopher Columbus is going to have a harder time wringing any kind of success out of his visits to the Caribbean assuming he even makes it back. I think you'd be more likely to spur real interest in *Empty America from Basque fishermen in the Grand Banks, but it will certainly all proceed more slowly than OTL.

But of the two scenarios, the one that happens only in the Columbian age is actually the one that I am more interested in. And all my assertions by the way about sugar, were meant to be applicable to the Columbian era, not the earlier Viking age.

 

[Jackson Lennock]

Many people did remain isolated from the Europeans and their descendants in the Americas until the 19th Century (Mapuche, California Tribes, Pacific Northwest Tribes, etc.). I could imagine the Vikings wiping out some populations in the arctic and setting up settlements that exist sort of in isolation from groups further south and west (because their presence in Vinland is so heavily oriented towards supporting Greenland, and because peoples further away are deemed too hostile to engage with). There's some theory that Vikings sailed as far south as North Carolina's coast, but the peoples along the coast were so hostile that they didn't bother to land, so it isn't a crazy idea that a Vinland settlement could exist in isolated from the rest of the continent.

Then, maybe a couple of centuries down the line, some Vinlanders try to explore further and thus when the Columbian age comes along the Americas are pretty empty before Columbus's equivalent sails over. Why don't Continental Europeans come to the Americas sooner if they're aware of Vinland? Maybe they just view Vinland as the outermost island and don't think much else of it (akin to how Europeans didn't really said to Asia before the Age of Exploration) and only figure out there's a whole other continent until ~1492. The Norse meanwhile are content to keep quiet about it just as (entering into the realm of speculation here) Basque fisherman off the Grand Banks might have been. Continentals just figure stories of skraelings are just stories - no more and no less.

 

[raharris1973]

In an America empty of humans until the voyage of Columbus, where would Spanish voyagers find the first *natural* open grasslands? Areas where good ole Castillian sheep could graze?

Would the terrain of all Caribbean islands and coastal lands in their pre-human state be all thickly overgrown with thick rainforest, or would their be significant patches of cleared land, with some passing resemblance to places the Castilians knew, like the Canary islands? The Castilians first gained experience with sugar growing in the Canaries in the decades before Columbus.