Very interesting point of view, Jimmy. I like these discussions because I learn a lot. The “what if” discussions of history are among the most interesting.
But I cannot for the life of me figure out what WAG is short for. IMHO, and others I get, but WAG?
WAG = Wild Ass Guess
Sometime you will also see
SWAG = Scientific Wild Ass Guess
I don’t think it is straight dopey unique - I see it at work all the time and I should have been more careful.
Sorry about this!
Just out of curiosity, why do you think the Portuguese would any less rapacious in their exploitation of the New World than the Spanish?
Would we all have polio if not for Jonas Salk? No. Would there be no rock music if not for Bill Haley or whoever “invented” it? No. Pretty much anything that one person did, would have been done by someone else eventually.
Cabot sailed for England, and probably reached Newfoundland-is there much written about him? His voyage was probably more dangerous than Columbus’s.
I think the Portuguese got there ahead of him, and discovered Brazil from their base in the Azores. Not only was this just a 5 day sail, they probably found the outflow of the Amazon, which can be felt far out to sea. It would have seemed like a worthless swamp, devoid of Columbus’ erroneous Riches Of India. So there would be no trade armadas such as Columbus tricked the Spanish into sending for his second, disappointing voyage.
But they would have kept it a military secret, as they did so many of their military discoveries. They were looking for bases from which to protect their south Atlantic routes.
Recall that Columbus had to go public because he was begging one prince after another for funding, before and after his discovery.
My logic is simple. Besides being probable, there is the fact that the pope divided the world so that Portugal got Brazil. He could easily have been swayed by claims that never got broadcast to the public.
Sorry. Vasco da Gama made his historic first voyage to India around the Cape of Good Hope in 1497, five years after Columbus’s expedition.
The Portugese had been searching for a way to sail around Africa to India for decades. They knew what their goal was, and they had been methodically creeping down the coast, mapping as they went and establishing bases.
Columbus’s expedition was an attempt to leap-frog past all that – a clever, short-cut that would make Portugal’s incremental approach obsolete in one grand swoop.
The route that Da Gama took to India actually involved sailing a wide loop out into the Atlantic and then turning east at precisely the right moment. This allowed the ships to make the best use of the prevailing winds and was faster than sailing straight down the coast. This is how Cabral could have been blown off course to Brazil. The standard route to India that was established by the Da Gama expedition already swung so far west that it was inevitable that someone would stumble on Brazil sooner rather than later.
However without Columbus it might have been many years before the Spanish or anyone stumbled on the Caribbean islands. And without a foothold in the Caribbean there wouldn’t have been any way for a European power to mount an expedition against the Aztecs. And if Cortez hadn’t managed to be particularly lucky and particularly vicious and stumbled on the Aztecs at a moment of particular weakness then he never would have conquered them. And if the Aztec had had a little breathing room and a chance to recover a bit from the European illnesses and the shock of European technology, then history would have turned out very different indeed. No Spanish empire in the new world. No Aztec gold shipments. A strong, centralized Native American empire with the organizational skills to mount a real defense again European expansion … .
Are you sure you mean the Azores, According to Pliny? And a 5-day trip? The Azores are 6000 km from the mouth of the Amazon as the crow flies. If the crow were captain of a 15th-century vessel that ship would have to travel an average of 1200 km per day or 50 km an hour (comparable to 30 miles an hour) 24 hours a day for 5 days to arrive that quickly.
Columbus travelled more or less the same distance of 6000 km. from the Canaries to San Salvador, and it took him from September 6 to October 12, about 36 days. In other words, he travelled an average 166 km per day.
Perhaps you mean the Cape Verde Islands which are only about 3500 km from the mouth of the Amazon? Even then, their ships would have had to travel 700 km a day to reach the Amazon in 5 days from the CV Islands. I find it hard to believe Portugese ships travelled that much faster than Spanish ones.
Your idea is interesting, but first I would like to know just what you are alleging. That the Portugese got to the New World before 1492? That would be interesting, but do you have any solid evidence?
Piffle.
Cortez’s men accidently brought Smallpox with them to the New World. There were no Human transmittable Variola viruses in the Americas, & the Native American peoples had no resistance. They were not devastated by force of arms, but by a disease Europeans couldn’t have prevented if they had wanted to.
Cortez was an opportunist, & a boastful self-promoter, but not a true military genius.
I would expect Portugal to set up small coastal fort cities and begin trading with Natives… Not invade and conquer.
Although Portugal had received “title” to Brazil with the Treaty of Todesillas in 1494, most of its efforts were directed towards Asia. Portugal’s colonies were much more like the Dutch Colonies – small trading posts on the shore with inland trading route run largely by Natives. Unlike the Spanish and later the English Colonies which tended to extend military and political control over large areas in-land. You see Portugal M.O. when they do this in East Africa, in West Africa, in Mozambique, in the Gulf, in Japan, in India, in Sri Lanka, in Indonesia, in Brazil (at first) and eventually in Macao.
Only when they start losing these Asian Colonies, (and are an appendage of Spain), do they start doing things in Brazil that look like “Hispano-English colonies” … North America was not the only game in town for Portugal like it was for everyone else - in fact they placed their efforts into Asia and not into Brazil.
So if alt-time comes, they have a few secret charts –I can see them saying “Don’t bother, we have this” and the energy for decades be Portugal vs. Europe rather than Europe vs. the New World & I can see Portugal stymieing things for a while. Not saying “It would be so” just saying ”I can see how…”
[In a nutshell from 1580-1640 there was no difference Spain and Portugal were united. So I am really talking about the period ~1488ish (if the Portuguese had gone with along Columbus like he first asked them to) to 1580. After that all bets are off]
One thing I’m not hearing about here is that there was a hell of a European fishery going on in the North Atlantic, and particularly by the Basques for for at least 100 years before Columbus . It isn’t really much of a stretch to expect that they spotted Newfoundland or Nova Scotia off the Grand Banks, the motherlode of fishing grounds in the world. In fact, 5 years after Columbus returned, John Cabot spotted many Basque fishing vessels on the Grand Banks. It would be quite a stretch to say that the Basques only started fishing in the northern new world after hearing about a land mass a thousand miles to the south. Furthermore given the secrecy expected of fishermen, and the uniqueness of the Basque language it makes a lot of sense that news of the new world never reached the public domain.
I once heard about speculation that the secret leaked to Columbus who most likely felt that therefore the earths circumference had to be around the minimum estimate.
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If it weren’t for internal conflicts, the Chinese would probably have found North America first, probably decades before Columbus. Their navigation and timekeeping technology was at least a century ahead of Europe’s in the 14th and 15th century and they’d sent out a few exploratory fleets that reached quite far to the west. All it would have taken is either a probe out past Africa to hit South America or an eastern journey across the north Pacific to run into Alaska/Canada and there could have been a quite different unfolding of history.
The Chinese and European colonies would have run into each other at some point, even if information gathered through regular trade hadn’t already made their respective settlements common knowledge. There are a few tidbits in Guns, Germs, and Steel and Lies My Teacher Told Me about the Chinese explorations and why they were suppressed by internal politics.
There are some controversial claims that at least one of the fleets sent out in the early 1400s actually did reach both North and South America, but the supporting evidence is weak. Nice flash presentation on this site and an article on a map that supposedly pre-dates European forays into the world.
So, how necessary was Columbus? Not very. Just about everyone in Eurasia was doing stuff that would have led to similar results within a century, plus or minus, of his “discoveries.”
The Chinese certainly had the ability to have discovered America (and they were doing it from the difficult side) but, aside from one brief period, they never had the desire to sail that far. The point I was making in my previous post was that the same situation could have arisen in Europe - explorers could have decided that all the interesting action was due south and there was nothing exciting due west. It’s possible that the Americas might have gone undiscovered for another century or two just because nobody was looking for it. It might seem unlikely, but keep in mind that no European discovered Australia until 1606 and they had been traveling a lot closer to it than anyone would have been to the Americas.
Did I say Cortez was a military genius? No. I said he was lucky and vicious. :rolleyes:
O don’t buy this. The reason Columbus was able to sail west was for the prospect of financial gain for Isabel,Spain, himself and his crew. Discussion as to the feasibility of the endeavour was intense.
The Chinese on the other hand had no reason to sail far to the north or straight across the Pacific. What for ? To draw a map ?
Long after Europeans circumnavigated the globe and spread their knowledge of the globe worldwide, Cook or anyone else never saw any evidence of the Chinese on the west coast of the Americas well into the 18th century, before the construction of railroads.
One interesting part of the picture is that each of the maritime powers of the 15th/16th centuries had a colonization/conquest program going before the discovery of the new world. The English were colonizing Ireland and Scotland. The Spanish were colonizing Andulusia and the Canaries. The Portoguese were colonizing the Azores, Maideira, and the African coast. Each of the countries were looking for ways to expand, and the discovery of the New World allowed them to continue the colonization programs past their usual limits.
But China had no such program. There was no desire to set up trading posts or colonies in faraway barbarian lands, the Zheng Ho voyages weren’t trading voyages but national prestige voyages, like the moon landings.
Europe was desparate to trade with the east because the east was more prosperous and technologically advanced than Europe. Europe didn’t have any such attraction for Chinese or Indian or Turkish traders. Remember at this time Turkish armies and navies routinely defeated European armies. The plundered gold and silver of the new world flowed east, it was used to buy eastern goods that were superior to what Europe could manufacture.
Yeah, the Chinese expeditions were along established routes to known places. They weren’t exploring or seeking a new route anywhere, nor were they trying to bypass the Arab middlemen like the Europeans wanted to do. They certainly could have reached the New World if they wanted, but they had little reason to want to. Perhaps if they had known about the civilizations flourishing there they would have!
But of course! Otherwise I’d have to learn Portuguese!
Well, it appearst that Columbus was “necessary” afterall! 
Glad we agree 
But beyond my language difficulties, Columbus is credited with a great bar trick as well:
In Spanish folklore it is said that Columbus was the first man to make…an egg stand on its end. (“Colón fué el primer hombre que puso un huevo de pie”)
It may be legend but the story goes way back.
So there, I wasn’t just being selfish. But any money you make off of the aforementioned trick I get…hmmm…how’s about 25%?