General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Why is Columbus Day still a holiday? [View all]Scootaloo
(25,699 posts)Especially on the point of disease. See, here's how it works.
The Vinland colony was basically five times removed from Europe.
The Norse had little "lasting" contact with the rest of the Eurasian continent. Those who did have such long-term contact were usually settlers who just didn't go back to Scandinavia. Scandinavia was thus relatively isolated. It was also thinly populated; these two conditions made epidemic diseases less likely in these territories than in mainland Eurasia. Not impossible, just less likely.
Now from this pool, you send a population out to the Orkneys and the Faroes. These places are even more isolated, and the nature of ship travel at the time means anyone with a disease would likely either get over it or die en route.
from that population (and a little bit of captured population from Ireland) you start Iceland. You really don't get more isolated than Iceland's population, to be honest. There's disease still, mainly due to close living with hte livestock, but again, nothing on the scale you find in mainland Europe.
Now, from Iceland... you start the Greenland colony. The only reason it's less isolated than Iceland is that the Inupiat were already there. Now the thing with Greenalnd is that it's a shitty place to live, even back then when it was at a really warm point. The harsh conditions basically meant that the livestock went extinct, aside from goat. The pigs, the fowl, the cattle, these critters just couldn't handle it, and since they are the major reservoirs for human diseases, the Greenland colony was effectively the most disease-free population with European descent at the time.
Now, you take those people... and they sail to Labrador to start a homestead there. Again, ship travel winnows out any potential vectors, and you get a population for whom poxes, influenzas, and the like are unpleasant myths. Living next to them are some pretty sturdy, resilient people, and apparently enough of them to beat the shit out of the Vikings when the Norse went too far with their interactions.
Rather than send for reinforcements, the Vinland colony said "hey, these guys want us dead. let's go back to Greenland," and did so.
So, you filter the Norse population five times through laborious ship travel, "clean" environments, and lack of disease reservoirs... And pair it with an eminently practical worldview ("people want to kill us, maybe we should fuck off before they do that" is a fairly sensible position) and you get a very different result.
Even if through some fluke, there had been massive interaction between Scandinavia and the Americas, the outcome would not likely resemble what we have now; the lack of disease is a big deal, and frankly, the Norse technology at the time was on par with the native technology (better materials, but both sides are shooting arrows and stabbing with lances). There would not have been massive native depopulation, any more than there was massive native depopulation when Europe tried its hand in India and eastern Asia; lots of conflict and strife, but outright eradication and recolonization wouldn't have been in the cards.
Hell, frankly the whole shebang would be wildly different if the French had kept up their efforts, or if the Americans had lost the revolution, or if everybody had just ignored Spain's discovery.it's "one of those things" that can spawn a million different Alternate History fictions, all with a basis in observed fact. if only condition X were changed, who the hell knows what would have happened.
Hell, if Tecumseh's little brother hadn't been a doofus, the United States might end at the juncture of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.