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"Stolen Land" and Fake Numbers.
I stumbled across it doing research for an Old West campaign in the pre-internet days of living in Ames, Iowa (home of the Iowa State University library). I read this paper ON paper.
There was a lot of debate about how many plagues had traveled across the North American Continent and hence they had come.
Because there's evidence of Vikings hitting Canada in 1000 AD or so. What diseases did they leave behind to percolate for 492 years until Columbus showed up?
But there's also some evidence that there was massive depopulation prior to any European hitting America's shores.
Not just once, but twice. Then the post-Colombian Spanish introduction of endemic European diseases knocked a barely to not-quite recovered native population in the teeth.
I dimly recall there being record of these plagues in South American cultures, and the record may have been destroyed by the depredations of the Spanish. Catholic priests accompanying the conquistadors did make record of some of it before it was ruined in the course of trying to subjugate the native cultures, so we have something of what went on before white-folk arrived. The record is fragmented at best, and this dim recollection could very well be discredited by now (I'd remembered that the Chinese had landed in the Americas before Columbus as a fact, but it doesn't appear to have been taken seriously by nearly all historians).
Interesting questions, most of which we can't answer at this point.
ReplyDeleteBut a good reminder that the English were considerably LESS bloody than any other colonial power...
And, funny, part of the rule of law and custom that the English brought to America was from... a group of invaders.
DeleteNormans... Under William the Conqueror.
For as much bitching as the native Anglo-Saxons have about being conquered, even the worst of the bitchers had to admit that it was far safer to travel in post-Conquest England than in pre-Conquest England, and that, unlike as seen in various 'Robin Hood' versions, overall the Norman overlords were far more evenhanded than the pre-existing Anglo-Saxon overlords.
But nobody wants to talk about that....