The Inuit arrived in Greenland after the Norse. They aren’t more native than those, only more successful in managing to stay.
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Wouldn’t say fluid, but I do. Though my Old Norse is better than my modern Icelandic
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I don’t know if the Vikings were such disease-ridden plague-rats as Columbus and his crew.
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Since they did interact with local inhabitants we could find out if local mortality rates spiked at the time of the interactions. Local lore, or adjacent lore if there was a die out, would be a pointer to that. Was there a mass die out off locals with the English and French colonisations of the more southerly parts of North America? That should be documented by both sides.
Now that they have a good date indexing method, they could examine local indigenous settlements to see if there were any signs of sudden depopulation in that era.
They might have lucked out due to the route of travel: staged trips in a northern climate vs straight out of busy, more tropical, seaports.
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Interesting! Somewhat related, I learned the reason we have such broader diversity of flora in the americas as compared to the European continent is that our mountain ranges run north/south (vs. east/west) so as the climate fluctuated around the last ice age, species could migrate and stay in a similar climate versus being forced to scale mountains and end up in a bind.
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That’s also the reason the Inca empire is one of the exceptions to the “cultures spreading east/west instead of north/south” trend.
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Source? While there is no question that relations between indigenous people and European colonizing powers varied substantially, mutually beneficial trade was an enduring constant. Cases in point the monopoly British Hudson’s Bay Company established by Royal Charter in 1670 (which relied solely on native fur trappers) and its’ chief rival the Northwest Company which took over the French trading system of forts after the defeat of New France in 1763. Furthermore both sides in the ‘French and Indian War’ (aka the Seven Years War) cultivated native allies and exploited them to frightening effect in guerrilla campaigns that culminated in what was for the most part the first civil war in America, in which former neighbours, European and Amerindian, turned on, tortured and slaughtered each other indiscriminately, including massacres of women and children. The same pattern repeated itself during the American Revolution and the War of 1812. During the latter two conflicts, it was in fact the British who were ostensibly preferred as allies by the First Nations, although it was likely a case of the devil you know.
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The problem with that is the indigenous people of Newfoundland, the Beothuk, were exceedingly shy and understandingly fearful of the subsequent waves of Europeans that arrived in their land and waters. They moved inland and kept their settlements and whereabout hidden for the most part; they were rewarded for their furtiveness by being hunted to extinction. The last Beothuk, Shawnadithit, died in 1829.
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I can feel an upgrade for some old song welling up in me.
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In addition, I’m not sure that measles was around in Scandinavia by the time of the Vinland visits. Still spreading out from wherever it originally mutated.
Scandinavia ~700-1100 CE was maybe not a good time to be an infectious disease. Dispersed populations, with a lockdown every winter while people hole up in their separate farm-houses to drink beer and tell stories.
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And yet the colony lasted pretty much exactly as long as the Anglo presence in North America has to date.
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A very good point. We tend to underestimate the time depth in narratives like that
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Not close-contact interactions, though Þorvaldur Eiríksson did catch a fatal infection of Arrow.
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Artist’s rendering…
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Inventing their own novel ways of being dicks, AND stealing all the old ways of being dicks from anyone they contacted.
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An old .sig line from many years ago was along the lines of “The Vikings would have made it to the moon if they thought there was anything worth stealing or burning there.”
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And this is why Talibaners [of every stripe] will ultimately lose.
It doesn’t mean that stupid people & those that use them will ever go away, though.
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The history seems pretty sketchy, but it was identified in Persia in 910. The trouble was, Scandinavian traders were already traveling to Constantinople through Eastern Europe. Depending on how much of a novel virus it was to Europeans*, it would have burned back along their trade routes pretty quickly.
* "The disease was described by the Persian physician Rhazes in the 10th century as “more to be dreaded than smallpox.” Okay, very novel.
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https://www.amazon.com/Potawatomis-Keepers-Civilization-American-Indian/dp/080612069
Granted this book focuses on the Potawatomi and other tribes near the Great Lakes, so it doesn’t cover all tribal / colonist relations.
That’s true, the British had Native allies, and there were many tribes that didn’t get along with one another and would ally with Europeans if it helped them out against their enemies. And this went on for a long time.
That and things changed from 1763 to 1812. At that point the British may have been considered the favorable set of Europeans over the Americans.
But in the chapters pertaining to relations between the French and the British, there was a stark contrast with how they were treated. The British refused the traditional gift exchanges the French used to make allies, and the people they sent to form relations were way less diplomatic and compromising. And the trade offered became less favorable as well.
Again, not saying things would have ended up any differently if the French had won and “owned” America. But it is possible that the landscape would look a lot differently with whole native “nation-states” surviving. But, that is probably wishful thinking… an exercising in wondering “what if” the lines on the map were drawn differently.
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