Historical Colonization versus Historical Navies and Future Spaceships

[Nyrath]

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/12/historical-colonization-versus.html

In terms of the scale of the effort for colonizing North America, I think it is useful to compare the size of the naval fleets of the time and other historical benchmarks. We know how large the military is today and the share of the total economy that it has. It will be more useful to approximate how large the interplanetary space travel industry will need to be before an interstellar colonization expedition would be a reasonably sustainable activity.

 

For future history builders who want some rules of thumb about how many spaceships there are

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Historical Colonization versus Historical Navies and Future Spaceships

 

Two problems here: first, interstellar colonisation will look very different from the colonisation of the Americas, unless we find human beings on t'other side. A very large helping of the genetic material in the Americas today still comes from people who walked across the Bering Strait. (Or possibly not via Beringia. But probably.)

Second, a great deal of the tonnage involved came from the Atlantic fishing fleets. Fisheries are staple industries rather than commerce. If we could visualise some reason for fleets to ship off for Alpha Centauri every season to go get something we need there, then this would be analogous, but the size of the fleet would be determined by factors apart from the overall logistic demands of the interplanetary economy.

[Clonus]

Re: Historical Colonization versus Historical Navies and Future Spaceships

 

Well you know, the Vinlanders did go to North America in longships. And their colonization attempt probably would have succeeded had there been nobody already there.

[Markdoc]

Re: Historical Colonization versus Historical Navies and Future Spaceships

 

Two problems here: first, interstellar colonisation will look very different from the colonisation of the Americas, unless we find human beings on t'other side. A very large helping of the genetic material in the Americas today still comes from people who walked across the Bering Strait. (Or possibly not via Beringia. But probably.)

Second, a great deal of the tonnage involved came from the Atlantic fishing fleets. Fisheries are staple industries rather than commerce. If we could visualise some reason for fleets to ship off for Alpha Centauri every season to go get something we need there, then this would be analogous, but the size of the fleet would be determined by factors apart from the overall logistic demands of the interplanetary economy.

 

In the 1500's though, the European fishing fleets were primarily littoral: they weren't fishing the rich beds just off the cast of North America. They weren't even fishing far down the coast of Africa. A better analogy would be if we had lots of space ships in-system.

 

cheers, Mark

[LoresLost]

Re: Historical Colonization versus Historical Navies and Future Spaceships

 

In the 1500's though, the European fishing fleets were primarily littoral: they weren't fishing the rich beds just off the cast of North America. They weren't even fishing far down the coast of Africa. A better analogy would be if we had lots of space ships in-system.

 

cheers, Mark

 

Well as you may know there is some argument if the Basque where Whaling in North America before Columbus (They differently where here(North America) in 1514, when French found them in Newfoundland.) The Commercial Drive brought Europeans here then when it was established you could safely sail from Europe, then came the Political and Religious Refugees to the various settlements along the costs.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Historical Colonization versus Historical Navies and Future Spaceships

 

The Basque story is a little problematic. An Azores entrepeneur discovered a "new land of Cod-fish" in 1474, and various corroborations were worked up by old-time lawyers, who were very used to, and very good at, concocting tales like this out of archival traces, and not above forging supporting evidence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%A3o_Vaz_Corte-Real

On the other hand, there are some questions about just how transatlantic any exploitation of "Markland" for lumber might have been. Some Greenlanders carrying loads of Markland timber are recorded in 15th century Icelandic sources. (The Wiki article is pretty well worked up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norse_colonization_of_the_Americas)

On the other hand, "Vinland," "Markland," and especially "Helluland" were mythopoeic places by that time and we shouldn't completely rule out the possibility that this particular Markland might have been Norway or such. I can't remember off hand where I got that little factoid, but some recent genetic work in the Shetlands is raising the possibility that a significant number of North Atlantic islanders have Native American ancestors. We're waiting on further results on this, because the tests done so far don't distinguish between Central Asian and uniquely American genetic material.

We do know for sure that a Bristol entrepeneur brought the first recorded paying cargo of cod back from the Newfoundland in 1505. We have explorers' reports of finding 20 or more sail in Saint John's harbour in the 1520s. This was about the time that the Basque whaling station at Red Bay Labrador was getting under way. http://www.heritage.nf.ca/exploration/basque.html

According to the most recent work, there is no reason to doubt that fleets of hundreds of ships were crossing the Atlantic to the Grand Banks each season, and that the British, who dominated the Newfoundland inshore fishery, shipping 5000 seasonal workers across the Atlantic each year --an effort that dwarfs all other English-speaking colonisation efforts even if only one percent of these "leaked" into permanent North American settlements. (Archaeological work confirms that early Newfoundland settlement was much more extensive than the written record suggests, although most of these Newfie settlers didn't stay for the long haul.)

Other national fisheries had different trajectories. Looking at a map, you will see that getting on from Newfoundland to the mainland requires as much or more westing as southing, and the argument for doing so was pretty weak for fisheries captains. But there were those whales, and they did bring French subjects far into the Bay of the Saint Lawrence. Remember: Jacques Cartier's Montreal colony was established in the 1541--2. This fact seems a little too mind-blowing to get the attention that it deserves. He was only able to do this because there were already French Basque in the area. Even apart from the people Cartier (and many others) left behind, the Basques may have operated according to the same "leaky pump" theory of labour management as the British, in which labour had to pay its fare, and could easily be left behind in the Western hemisphere if it couldn't.

I continue to believe that the establishment of permanent colonies on the Eastern Seaboard was the culmination of more than 100 years of effort that had one crucial advantage over all of the plantation speculators: they crossed the Atlantic to make money.