Note: this topic is from 10/10/2011. Thanks PJ-Comix.
Posted on 10/10/2011 3:36:57 PM PDT by PJ-Comix
Okay, today is Columbus Day observed (real Columbus Day comes in 2 days) and normally I just look at it as a low level holiday in which banks and post offices are closed. However, today I got to thinking: What if Columbus had not discovered America? I don't mean if he tried and failed. What if he never bothered in the first place? He could quite easily have given up on attempting to put together such an expedition. It would have been quite easy to have given up the attempt. One interesting thing is that 1492 was the very first year that Columbus could have even made the attempt. Had he gone to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand a year earlier he would have been told that it would be impossible as long as the Muslims were still in Granada. 1492 was the year that the Muslims, after centuries, were driven out of Spain.
However, let us start from the assumption that Columbus didn't make the attempt. Then WHO would have been the first to reach the New World and how would that have impacted history? My guess is that it would have been Pedro Alvarez Cabral of Portugal who in 1500 discovered Brazil while performing a "volta do mar" (a turn to the West to catch the westerly winds) in order to cross the southern tip of Africa. Had that happened then instead of South and Central America currently being mostly Spanish speaking countries with the exception of Brazil, that whole area would have been primarily Portuguese speaking today. Yes, even Mexicans would be speaking Portuguese today.
How else do you think history would have been affected if Columbus was like those lazy OWP protestors and decided to just sit on his keister instead of organizing and expedition to sail West?
they were fishing off of Canada at the time, so the history of North America would probably not be much different.
South America’s history would have been a bit different.
And the real question is if a slower settlement from England would have spread smallpox and other diseases as fast in the North American tribes of the NE continent to South America.
Maybe, maybe not. When the Pilgrims arrived, the area was already depopulated by smallpox...but did the smallpox come from fishermen or from the Spanish, up the trading routes of the eastern coast?
the Vikings made little impact on the Americas, but there is (female) DNA from the Amerindians in a small number of Icelanders/Norwegians, suggesting that they might have brought some slaves back with them...
Wenn Columbus nicht Amerika entdeckt hatte, dann wir wahrscheinlich Freeping auf Deutsch wären.
Oh, and the “little” fact that over 90% of the Indians got wiped out by Yellow Fever.
PJ - keep in mind that nearly all of the history books used in US schools came from Protestant related writers with a heavily negative slant against anything Catholic -— Broaden your reading a little.
Thought the Vikings discovered America.
At all events, someone else would have done it, with comparable results.
And since then their culture has declined so precipitously that now they can't even find the End Zone.
Don’t get fooled by that “except Brazil.” Although the famous division of the world among the Spanish and Portuguese, and a count of nations both made it seem like Portugal got the short end of the stick, in reality more than half of South America went to the Portguese.
The difference is that Spain treated its Latin American lands as mere possessions, where Portugal incorporated them more into Portugal. So while American and British-aligned free masons were able to piece-by-piece dissemble Spain’s oversees holding, Brazil actually became the Empire of Portugal. (Look it up! The emperor left Europe for the New World!)
Today, there are 192 million Portuguese-speaking South Americans, covering 3.3 million square miles. There are 190 million Spanish-speaking South Americans, covering 3.4 million square miles. (French Guiana, Guyana and Suriname are French, British and Suriname, respectively.)
How would the world be different if San Salvador was settled by the Portuguese? The respective colonies of the Spanish and Portuguese may have ended up very similar, since San Salvador is barely West of the Spanish-Portuguese dividing line.
One important difference which may the opposite of what you learn in your public screwl text books: The British simply did their best to kill off the natives; the Portuguese supplanted them; the Spanish converted them, treating them far better than the Portuguese and British. The black legends of Spain’s genocide of the natives is just that: black propaganda by the British.
Columbus’ treatment of the natives was bad enough to horrify the court of Spain, although even he just adopted the un-Christian governing methods of the “Indians” he encountered. The genocide of Mexico simply never took place. Mexico City was already in collapse (possibly through the spread of European disease from San Salvador); and it erupted in an orgy of human sacrifice to appease Quetzlcoatl. By the time the Spanish arrived, there was little left to conquer. Muskets were hardly so superior to bows and arrows that a tiny little invasion force of a few boatloads of men could have killed millions of Mexicans.
The biggest potential difference: The dominant nation of the Western World might have spoken French. The “United States” might be comprised of Eastern (”Lower”) Canada and the Eastern, Central and Northwestern United States, which probably would have taken advantage of the French Revolution to establish independence. And if anyone thinks we’d be a worse country for it, I’d suggest visiting a French Canadian historical reconstruction, and comparing it to Mount Vernon. As you do, keep in mind, Washington was revolutionary in his reasonableness with his slaves and white employees.
American Democracy is not a British invention. Although British common law was once central to American Freedoms, our states are modelled after the French’s Indian allies. One thing which seemed for 200 years like it was particular brilliance was the sparseness of the Constitution, defaulting to common law. I now wonder whether that was a good idea, since common law has been pretty much completely vanquished in its most significant ideas. I wonder whether a French-speakers’ attempt to establish freedoms would have been clutzier, yet more resilient. (I presume it would be clutzier, since enunciating freedom might have been more difficult than inheriting it. Then again, DeToqueville, having seen American freedom, did one bang-up job of understanding what made it so wonderful.)
Why would America be French? The Spanish Armada was never the glistening conquerers that Americans have learned it was. It was a “rag-tag fleet” that preserved Europe from Islamic invasion through absolute divine intervention at the battle of Lepanto. After the defeat of the Armada, the British, jealous of Spain’s new-world holdings led an absolutely evil war of black-ops terrorism to undermine Spain. Neither France nor Portugal represented the existential threat to England that Spain had, however, nor had the interest in fighting England that Spain had (being the Netherlands). In fact, France had sided with the Protestants in the 30-year war, which ABSOLUTELY was the papacy v. its political rivals. It’s quite likely, therefore, that without the Spanish aggression towards England, England might never have been inspired to fight such a dirty war to claim the New World, or if it did, it would have inspired a united front of Spain, Portugal, France, and possibly even a Holy Roman alliance against itself, instead of fighting separate wars against Spain and France.
Actually, the Vikings DID discover America.. and it STAYED discovered. As his recently translated journal makes clear, Columbus was inspired by Spanish Franciscan monks, who told him of lands far to the west. The Catholic Church had established a diocese of Vinland in North America, which it maintained contact with (or at least records of) throughout the 14th century. Only the plagues of the 15th century led the Catholic Church to “lose” Vinland. THe Franciscans told Columbus this, who probably presumed Vinland must be somehow related to Asia, since all the known lands at that time were actually one connected (Africa, Asia, and Europe) or thought to be connected (as the straits which separate Austalia from Asia were not yet discovered.)
Note: this topic is from 10/10/2011. Thanks PJ-Comix.
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