and you’re the hypothetical King of North America, with all the various Native American tribes loyal to you.
How do you prevent the colonization of the continent?
i’d nuke 'em from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.
If I am King of America, I attempt to negotiate with the English, but if that fails, I make sure that we exterminate or conquer every colony they attempt to land. The only caveat is that I pull a Mongol on them and order that we capture People of Skill so that they can bring those skills to my kingdom. Engineers, gunsmiths, armorers, metallurgists all being the top prizes.
Speak with a Welsh accent.
Hmmm… I have often pondered this question. Before I can answer, I have a few questions for your hypothetical.
1- How recent have I come to power? ie: do I have a few years to make some changes and get some things done before D-Day? Or is it “you’re in charge, the Brits show up tomorrow, good luck!”?
2- Is this current me, with my current knowledge, or is it me if I were a native of that time?
Do what the Japanese did - hire Europeans to teach me everything they know, and then modernize my country to successfully withstand an invasion and take my place in the global economy.
Am I allowed to introduce technology or modern concepts like the germ theory of disease? Because the first thing I do is get some people working on penicillin, a smallpox vaccine, and steel foundries, then do like the king of Siam did. Work towards a long term integration with the Europeans, on a more equal footing. Discover natural gas in Texas and the internal combustion engine and become the center of the industrial revolution with relatively clean burning fossil fuels.
Enjoy,
Steven
First, I’d come up with a cure for all the endemic European (not “English”) diseases that were wiping out huge numbers of my people.
Then I’d set my herds of invisible pink unicorns on the Europeans.
I’d have the First Thanksgiving right away and poison them with native plants. Whack them will they are sick and incapacitated. Get my minions to learn to use the captured firearms.
Meet the second boatload. "Pilgrims? No…oh, you mean those guys who went on South to Virginia! But before you take after them, come on over and have dinner. We call it “Thanksgiving.”
Total command?
Wipe them out. Fast. The Indians never lost tactically, they blew the game strategically. The let their greed for allies against other tribes form alliances that bit them in the ass in the long run.
If you need European allies, make friend with the Swedish Colonists in what is now modern NJ. They are made of mostly of the Sami people (Lapps) and will be more along the lines of being an Indian tribe with European guns.
You’ll lose quite a few to disease, but that will end.
@Tristan - 1, no. You’re taken completely by surprise. However, given the slow roll of European settlement in the early 1600s, you should have several years to rally troops.
2, from a technological perspective, you have no knowledge that the Native American’s didn’t have. No steampunk creations. However, you may use your knowledge of history and 21st century military tactics.
@Mtgman - See point 1 above. Germ theory counts as technological understanding. You’ll be surprised when smallpox shows up. I’ll allow things like “Don’t accept blankets from Europeans,” but not “Invent penicillin.”
You’re pretty much screwed.
Aggressive extermination of the first early colonies might *delay *the introduction of lethal old world diseases, but not long enough for you to discover a way to prevent the inevitable pandemics. And once those start happening you won’t have enough manpower to stop the invaders.
Well, we’re pretty much fucked then. Without the germ theory of disease there isn’t much even the united tribes could have done to withstand the Europeans. All you have to do is look at what happened to the Incan empire. They were as well organized and militarily strong as any civilization and technology of the time and place might have allowed. There is a lot that could have been done with battlefield tactics, but germs are what brought down the Incans. Remember that for every person who came down sick there were probably three or four able-bodied tribesmen who had to care for them and take up their share of the work. The defensive capabilities of a society crumble under the weight of caring for the sick.
Going back a little further you might be able to ambush the early explorers(Columbus, Vespucci, et al.) and ensure no word of the new world gets back to Europe and then developing technology from who/what you capture, for the eventual confrontation, but that’s seriously risky. The best way to extract knowledge would be to keep the germ-bags alive, but that’s also the best way to spread disease.
Tough road ahead all the way around.
Enjoy,
Steven
How would the disease situation have changed if the natives hadn’t been so initially friendly and open to trade? If they had taken on a policy of slaughtering every white person on sight, would it just have delayed the inevitable?
Invade their country and see how they like it.
North America> 1607?
I’d get my people to learn as much as they could from the Spanish to the south, especially regarding horses and guns. Not sure how good the Spanish were on disease theory at this point; maybe we’d have to quarantine the east coast or something. The only chance to survive as a people is to learn, learn, learn.
We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…
Wipe out every landing on sight. Burn everything they touch. We would have the tactical advantage every time, and with unified leadership should be able to maintain a strategic advantage as well.
I’d tweak that by adding a provision for mounting the invader’s heads on pikes, but otherwise concur.
I’m not sure this hypothetical works. The history of the conquest of the Americas IS the history of disease and it’s really only understandable through the lens of germ theory. Without that I’m not sure you could say you had any knowledge of the history at all.
That having been said, there are other things a canny time traveler could do. For instance, one of the great weaknesses of the tribes was their lack of unity. Having stipulated that weakness out in the premises, we can then exploit the same within the Europeans. Stoke the fires of European conflict by trading with England’s enemies. Build ships and navigate the pacific to fan the flames of unrest in Asia and do the same for the holdings in Africa and the middle-east. Find ways to instigate England’s disastrous attempts to pacify Afghanistan. The Dutch and the Spanish(in the middle of a financial crisis, having declared bankruptcy) were already at war(battle of Gibraltar was in 1607) and Ethiopia was in civil war. Any diseases we have need to go over there ASAP.
Or we could take a different approach. Convert to Christianity, teach everyone Latin, and then convince the Priests that Christ had come here after he left Palestine. The New World is God’s Country, full of prophets who have knowledge of the future and far away places, and the natives are the spiritual brothers of the Church. This should help confuse the fuck out of the bastards long enough to build some trading links and get some of the engineers over and follow Alessan’s plans from there. Of course this could backfire horribly if we’re all declared heretics who must be purged, but that’s the risk you take.
Enjoy,
Steven
If the Natives ensured that no man or ship ever returned to Europe, soon enough the Europeans would conclude there really is an edge of the Earth there & stop sending ships.
This would put off the inevitable exploration in force until later, say the 1800s. The Japanese encounter with the Europeans came of much better than the Native Americans did and I attribute a bunch of that to the Europeans having grown up a bit in the intervening 200 years.
They were still rapacious savages on a Mission from God, but just a bit more cosmopolitan.