Quarantine
Without Aliens
Dale Speirs challenged me to come up with a way of getting the effect of Quarantine without the aliens. No can do, at least not completely. I can get some of the effect though. The point of divergence has to come before Cortes sends the first batch of Aztec gold back to Spain. After that, the New World played a major role in European finance and politics. At that point, bad luck or storms wouldn’t deter them.
Up until 1519, the right combination of events might have caused the Spanish to lose interest in the New World. The Spanish were after wealth in the form of gold, and/or people who were militarily weak enough that the Spaniards could control them and live off of their work. The West Indies initially had a certain amount of gold, and a large population of easily controllable Indians. By 1519, the Spanish had mined most of the gold, and killed off a very large part of that Indian population through overwork, starvation, disease, and brutality. The smallpox epidemic of 1519 hit the survivors hard. Within a few years of the Conquest of Mexico, the West Indies colonies were poor backwaters, getting much of their meager living by supplying the richer colonies on the mainland. The West Indies of the period after 1519 were simply not very attractive to Spaniards anymore.
We could just delay the discovery of Mexico by a few years. It was accidental in our time-line, the result of a hurricane, I believe. With the Indians dying in droves in the West Indies, the Spanish started importing black slaves from West Africa. That made the plight of the Indians worse. The slaves apparently brought the first smallpox epidemic with them. They also brought malaria, which promptly adapted to spread by local mosquitoes and made large parts of the West Indies extremely unhealthy for both Spaniards and Indians.
If the discovery of Mexico was delayed, the Spanish colonies in the West Indies would fall into a steep decline as Indian populations went into free fall. Spaniards were almost as susceptible to malaria as Indians, and would lose a significant amount of their population to that, or to people who gave up and went back to Spain rather than staying and dying. Both Smallpox and Malaria would eventually spread to the Spanish colony in Panama, destroying what was left of the Indian population there, then gradually working its way up the coast. The weakened West Indies colonies would be easy prey to raids by Spain’s European rivals, primarily France. Slaves would take advantage of the weakness to revolt or run away to parts of the islands that were unhealthy for Spaniards.
Okay, that eventually makes the West Indies an unimportant, forgettable backwater. It doesn’t put Spaniards in Aztec country, which is a major part of my time-line. On the other hand, I suppose that I could have the Panama colony break up and have part of the survivors wander north in search of more Indians to live off of. The Spaniards at Panama were sniffing around along the West Coast, gradually moving north in our time-line. Given a few more years they could have ended up on the West Coast of Aztec country. I’ve actually toyed with a scenario where an expedition from Panama arrives on the West Coast of Mexico before Cortes finishes conquering the Aztecs, and causes all sorts of complications. In this time-line they could simply play somewhat the same role Cortes and company did in our time-line, but a few years later. They would be spreading malaria as they went, and smallpox would jump ahead of them, so they would find a diminished and destabilized Aztec empire to attempt to conquer.
How do I keep them from getting back in contact with West Indies or Panama and Spain? Make them rebels fleeing from the tyranny of Panama’s governor? (He was a real tyrant) Within a decade or so, a malaria belt would form in the lowlands. (Remember my ‘early malaria’ scenario) That would deter explorers who weren’t aware of the potential behind that disease-ridden coast. Indian populations in that malaria belt would become very small and probably regress to a more primitive state. The Spaniards in highland Mexico might just settle down and devote themselves to having lots of half-breed kids. What’s left of the Panama colony is raided by a French force that is looting the remnants of Spanish settlements around the Gulf of Mexico, and breaks up, with a few survivors eventually making it to Inca country.
That sort of works and does a lot of what Quarantine does. I like the idea of having something relatively familiar like our time-line’s conquest of Mexico involved though. Can we manage that?
How’s this: In our time-line, the governor of Cuba tried to prevent Cortes and his people from sailing at the last minute because he became aware that Cortes would probably try to cut his Cuban partners out of the deal once he got to Mexico. In our time-line, Cortes managed to sneak away and eventually conquer Mexico. Let’s say Cortes gets arrested and after a certain amount of time replaced in Cuba. The expedition to conquer Mexico is delayed a bit and eventually goes off under a different commander, probably Narvaez, about a year later in 1520. Or possibly Cortes manages to talk his way back into the good graces of the governor of Cuba. In any case, as a result the first shipment of gold from Mexico to Spain is delayed.
Now in 1519, Spain was in an unstable condition. The new king, Charles, had been raised in the Habsburgs’ Flemish territories, didn’t speak Spanish well, and brought a pack of Flemish advisers with him when he became king. The Spanish nobility was so unimpressed that they took up arms in the Communeros revolt against him. In our time-line the revolt was a serious threat to Charles for a while, then fizzled when the lower classes got too enthusiastic about it and the nobility got scared and switched sides.
The gold Cortes sent did actually play at least a minor role in the Comuneros revolt in our time-line. If things played out just right, Narvaez (or Cortez) might have found out about the chaos in Spain and decided that it was time to become independent of both Cuba and Spain, or at least keep the king’s fifth of the gold until things settled down. Cortez and company appear to have thought about doing that, but didn’t. In that case, the gold stays in Mexico and a Spain in civil war doesn’t have time to worry about Mexico and rumors of fabulous riches. I haven’t found a detailed account of the Comuneros revolt yet, but the huge amounts of gold Cortes sent had to have had some impact on it’s course in our time-line. It is perfectly possible that the absence of the gold causes the revolt to go on longer.
France jumped into the Communeros revolt in our time-line It probably would have also in both of these time-lines. If the revolt had gone on a bit longer, or the colonies had appeared a bit weaker, France might have decided to attack the Spanish colonies in the West Indies, and go after Spanish shipping in a big way. They actually did do both of those things in later wars against Spain. In one year in the 1550’s they were so effective that only 3 ships made it from Spain to the New World.
So France attacks the colonies of a weakened Spain, and makes communication between those colonies and Spain difficult. In both time-lines, the smallpox epidemic then kills off a large number of the remaining Indians of the West Indies islands. In both time-lines, the Indians of Cuba revolt, but in this time-line that revolt comes in conjunction with a French attack. The West Indies colonies are thrown upon their own resources. Those resources are meager. Even before smallpox and malaria, as I pointed out earlier, the Spanish had worked to death or simply killed the majority of the Indians of the West Indies. After the smallpox and the French raids, the Spanish find themselves with no help from home, most of what they had built destroyed, and few Indians left to work for them. Given Spanish weakness, black slaves could take the opportunity to revolt, adding to the woes of the surviving Spaniards.
Historically, France and Spain were at war off-and-on for most of the period between 1500 and 1559. France was larger and economically stronger, but generally not as effective militarily. In our time-line, Mexican and Peruvian gold allowed Spain to maintain an army large enough to continue challenging France until both sides went bankrupt in 1559. Without the gold, and devastated by a longer civil war, Spain would have found that much more difficult.
So Spain emerges from the Communeros revolt/war against France devastated and bankrupt after six or seven years of wars fought on its territory. By that time, the surviving Spaniards in the West Indies would have been forced to revert to something approaching savagery. They would be very poor. The small amounts of gold in the islands had already been mined. The large number of Indians that initially attracted Spaniards would be mostly gone. Without gold, and without many Indians to rule, the islands would have little attraction to Spaniards. Most survivors would return to Spain if they got a chance. Rumors of fabulous kingdoms filled with gold would circulate, but would be met with skepticism in a nearly bankrupt Spain which had heard it all before about the West Indies.
Spain becomes preoccupied with continuing the Reconquista in North Africa once it gets back on its feet, assuming that it does. France has seen the West Indies and is unimpressed. England has been acting as an ally of Spain, which they did in our time-line until the French wars of religion temporarily removed France from the European great power equation. Now France and England go at it, occupying the energies of both nations. Portugal respects the Papal Division of the world and doesn’t go into the portion allotted to Spain in a major way.
<Shrug> How’s that? I could see a fairly long delay before the continents come into major contact again-- maybe 50 or 100 years. I can’t see the hiatus lasting longer than that, but who knows? Maybe the Turks conquer Central Europe and/or Italy without a united Hapsburg empire to counter them. Maybe the devastating disease (probably a killer flu) that hit Spain and killed 2 million or so Spaniards in the late 1500’s spreads Europe-wide and triggers a major decades-long depression. Maybe without the many new crops from the Americas and the outlet for surplus population, Europe becomes stuck in a Malthusian world. Maybe the Hapsburgs use the Turkish threat to consolidate the Holy Roman Empire into a real empire, then start expanding it into a European Universal Empire, which then stagnates ala China.
The New World of 50 to 100 years later would be somewhat less desirable to Europeans than the one Columbus found. Malaria would be endemic along most of the coastlines of the Gulf of Mexico by then. Indian populations would be considerably smaller, but militarily tougher and probably considerably more advanced technologically. This wouldn’t be the world of Quarantine, but it comes reasonably close without invoking aliens.
I may explore this a bit more in later issues.
The
Cross-Time Garage Sale
My engineer friend and I have been toying with a just-for-grins scenario that we nicknamed "The Cross-Time Garage Sale", where someone goes into a garage sale in the late 1930’s (assuming they had such a thing) and sees something labeled "The Commodore 64 computer". He thinks it’s some kind of elaborate calculator and asks to buy it. The owner tosses in the monitor, the disk drive, the user’s manual, maybe a modem, and a couple of disks worth of software. What happens then? When the gummit gets their hands on it, what do they think when they find that the incredibly sophisticated (by 1938 standards) pseudo-television (monitor) is labeled "Made in Japan"? What do they make of the plastic of the casing? Of the intricate machining of the disk drive? I think that the owners manual would give them enough clues to get the concept of a programmable computer, which took years to develop even once tube computers were in use. I suspect that it would stimulate a lot of paranoia. If any country on earth was far enough ahead of the US to build this thing, they could conquer the world. The US would put every scientific resource they had into matching the capability, or coming as close as they could with late 1930’s technology. The advantage of a C64 rather than a Furby is that more of the potential is accessible. How would a late 1930’s engineer approach a C64? How much could they learn about it? Fun stuff, huh?
A
World Dominated By Marsupials
This was inspired by Andrew Goldstein. I see two ways that a world dominated by Marsupials could happen, at least partly, but they require going back a long ways. The key is that the larger the area occupied, the more likely a group of animals is to dominate when two continents come into contact. North American animals had a slight edge over South American ones when the two continents made contact, mainly because the continent of origin was bigger. Asian animals had a slight advantage over North American ones whenever the Bering Strait became dry because the continent of origin was bigger. Asian and European animals have a major advantage over Australian ones because their continent of origin is several times as large (I’m considering Eurasia as a single continent here.) Asian and African animals are fairly close to an even match because their continent of origins are close to the same size. Asia probably does have a slight edge. I’ve never tried to prove any of this statistically, but based on a very extensive reading on the subject it seems to hold true. So how do you make Marsupials dominant? Make the continents they dominate larger, or make the usable area of them larger. How do you do that? First, what if the southern continents of late dinosaur times, or at least Australia, South America, Antarctica, and India had remained in the same area and had off and on contact with one another throughout the Age of Mammals? That would have helped. If they had continued intermittent contact with each other, but had no contact with the northern hemisphere, then Marsupials would have certainly played a much more major role than they do in our time-line. In our time-line, the Southern Continents where Marsupials dominated moved away from one another, and became dead-ends, with their only potential for contact being through the northern continents. Antarctica didn’t freeze over until the last land-bridge to South America broke down somewhere around 20 million years ago. Until then it had a cold country version of the South American range of mammals—Opossums, relatives of the armadillos and sloths, and some distant relatives of horses and cows which have no living relatives. So add together a usable Antarctica, Australia (hopefully a more mammal friendly version) a South America more dominated by Marsupials (Monkeys and Rodents don’t make it across a water gap in the Oligocene), and India. That gives us the equivalent of a big continent. Would it be big enough? From ten year old memory (ie I could be wrong by a million square miles on a few figures) In millions of square miles:
Australia 3
Antarctica 5
South America 6
India 2
-----------------------------
Total 16
That makes a continent in the Africa/Asia class, but it doesn’t make one capable of making Marsupials the dominant mammals. That would still be an interesting scenario—a huge set of inter-connected southern continents with a whole different set of dominant animals. Of course there almost certainly wouldn’t be any Europeans around to see it in the 1500’s or 1600’s, but it’s fun to imagine how they would react if they did find it. Marsupials would probably take over the bulk of the monkey/ape type ecological niches. Would they be able to develop monkey and ape class intelligence? South American monkeys did in less space, but with a different heredity. The bottom line: An interesting scenario but it doesn’t make Marsupials dominant.
Let’s try again. What if Marsupials became dominant in the big northern continents? That might have happened if the asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaurs had hit at a slightly different place. When the age of dinosaurs ended, the blocks of continents were each dominated by a different set of small mammals. The ancestors of most modern mammals dominated in Asia, with Marsupials playing a minor, almost invisible role. Europe was an island with it’s own bizarre set of mammals. Africa had it’s own set of mammals, ancestors of Elephants and some of the more unique African animals like Hyraxes and Elephant Shrews. North America had a mixture of Marsupials and modern mammals, with Marsupials playing a very major role, especially among small carnivores. Marsupials played a major role in South America and Antarctica, and a dominant one in Australia (though a few modern mammals were there early on and eventually died out).
Marsupials and modern animals were actually very closely related at that time, because they hadn’t had much time to diverge since they split. They were also very close in terms of competitiveness. The type in a position to get a jump on an ecological niche grabbed that niche and held onto it for millions of years. For example, Marsupials grabbed the carnivore role in South America, and none of South America’s many more modern mammals ever challenged them for that role, though some giant birds did, as did modern mammals from North America.
North America may have gotten hit the hardest of any continent by the dinosaur-killer. One theory says that the asteroid hit at a shallow angle and a major part of it became a ball of super-heated gas that blow-torched it’s way across North America, burning essentially every plant in its path, which was continent-wide. The North American Marsupials got hit very hard, and the largest, most specialized ones went extinct. The modern North American mammals may have gotten hit equally hard, but they were replaced by very similar animals from Asia. Move the asteroid strike around a bit so that it blowtorches Eastern Asia instead of North America. North American mammals end up in better shape than Asian ones and colonize Asia once things settle down a bit, rather than the other way around. Marsupials take over the carnivore and primate roles in North America and Asia, just like they did for the first several tens of millions of years in South America. You end up with a South American-style mixed fauna, with Marsupials holding the Carnivore, Primate, and part of the Rodent niches, while modern mammals take over the large plant-eater roles. That doesn’t make Marsupials totally dominant, but it does come close.
Now with several huge continents to develop on, Marsupials might have developed into forms very unlike the ones that developed in our time-line. They might have even lost the Marsupial means of reproduction. One type of Australian Marsupial, the Bandicoots, have developed the equivalent of a true placenta, very much like normal mammals. That lets them develop their young much faster, though it does take away from the ferocity of the normal Marsupial immune system because they have to keep the immune system from killing the fetus for a longer time. Bandicoot young are born early, and still spend part of their life in a pouch, but that time is shortened. On the huge continents of the Northern Hemisphere, something like the Bandicoots might well lose the pouch entirely.
When
Did The Mississippian Mound Builders
Disappear?
I am finding that there are actually two schools of thought on what kind of shape the Mississippians were in by 1540 (the time of the DeSoto expedition), but both of those schools agree on two things:
1. Some formerly Mississippian areas had become deserted or gone back to simpler ways of life by 1540.
2. Some Mississippian areas were still flourishing in 1540, with large towns, mounds and powerful nobility.
The issue that divides the two schools is how much of the Mississippian area fell into those two opposing categories. One school says that much of it fell into category one by 1540. The book I reviewed last POD, "Choctaw Genesis" by Patricia Galloway gives this point of view. It says that in many areas of the southeast, Mississippian cultures tended to be unstable. Populations would rise. The culture would become more complex. Then, corn farming would exhaust the soil of an area and populations would crash.
Galloway says: "…the principal crop supporting the development of chiefdoms in the Southeast, maize, is the staple crop that most quickly depletes the fertility of the land. Thus Mississippian chiefdoms in the Southeast could exhaust their options in several ways. Despite the benefits of annual flooding on soil fertility, and despite possible fertilization(..)exhaustion of the narrowly circumscribed soils most suitable for maize cultivation with stone technology would have been a major problem in many places, probably only partially solved by the late introduction of beans as a companion planting. And even if the soil were not exhausted, the depletion of forest resources-- both wood and game—in the vicinity of settlements would likely become a serious problem in a few generations(…)All of these problems could make a mature chiefdom unmanageable. Population pressures would lead inevitably to environmental stress, which at some point would be more than a chiefdom with limited technology and without coercive powers could handle. When this vicious cycle had intensified to the extent that food production failed to meet the requirements of the labor force, the system would collapse completely."
Before that happened, sometimes pieces of the chiefdom would break off and create simpler chiefdoms. Even a fairly devastating collapse wouldn’t necessarily be the end of Mississippian culture in an area though. Galloway goes on to say, "…this cycle could repeat itself many times, serving as a feedback system to restore ecological equilibrium. If the structure were held stable long enough at an excessive level of population density, however, or if it returned to this level often enough over time(…) ecological degradation would become serious enough that changes in social structure and environment would become irreversible and would settle at the "devolved" end of the continuum."
So, what does that all mean? Most Mississippian sites are located in the flood plains of a river, which gives their land an annual fertility boost, but Galloway claims that in many areas that boost was not enough to overcome the soil-depleting effects of corn farming over the centuries. As a result, Mississippian chiefdoms tended to crash after a couple of hundred years, then rebuild after the land had a chance to build back up. Only really large rivers like the Mississippi provided an annual fertility boost large enough to sustain a Mississipian life-style indefinitely. Galloway sees southeastern Indians in 1540 as a mosaic of groups in various stages of this cycle, with full-blown flourishing Mississippian along the Mississippi river (appropriately enough) and in some other areas where the local Indians happened to be at the high end of the cycle. In other areas, simpler cultures prevailed, or areas that had flourished earlier had been abandoned. For example, according to Galloway a big Mississippian chiefdom at Moundsville appears to have collapsed between 1450 and 1500 after a 500-year run. She says that Cahokia, probably the oldest and largest of the Mississippian Chiefdoms, began to decline around 1350.
Galloway does point out that Mississippian cultures became much more sustainable around 1300 AD, when those cultures began widespread use of beans as a supplementary crop. Beans fix nitrogen. Plant beans alongside corn and the corn doesn’t deplete the soil anywhere near as fast.
DeSoto did undoubtedly meet flourishing Mississippian cultures near the Mississippi river, especially in parts of what is now Arkansas. Perspectives on the Southeast: Linguistics, Archaeology, and Ethnohistory edited by Patricia Kwachka has several articles describing what he saw, and what archaeology shows. In terms of the date at which Mississippian ended, one of the essays, "Ethnic Identities and Cultural Change in the Protohistoric Period of Eastern Arkansas" by Michael Hoffman, talks about late Mississippian cultures: "A number of Mississippian phases existed in northeastern Arkansas at least until the middle of the sixteenth century. (…)In east central Arkansas there is an archaeological manifestation called the Menard Complex(…) The Menard Complex, which dates to perhaps AD 1450-1700, extends along the lower Arkansas River from above Little Rock to the vicinity of the mouths of the Arkansas and White rivers. These archaeological manifestations belong to the general late Mississippian culture and shows substantial maize agriculture, town/mound centers…" So, in parts of Arkansas, Mississippian survived until close to 1700.
In the same book, David Dye wrote an article called "The Art of War in the Sixteenth Century Central Mississippi Valley". It says that the DeSoto expedition described fleets of hundreds of huge war canoes, with up to 25 paddlers on a side and up to 75 to 80 warriors in the largest canoes. These fleets used several different types of canoes and elaborate tactics. That expedition describes armies of up to 7000 Indians from some of the chiefdoms.
Mississippian lasted long past 1250 AD. As I noted earlier, the main issue between the two schools of thought is the area still covered by Missisippian by the time of DeSoto. Some of the stuff I’ve read claims that DeSoto saw complex, flourishing Mississippian chiefdoms over most the American Southeast, and cites accounts of the DeSoto expedition to prove it. The author of "Choctaw Genesis" looks at those same accounts and comes up with the mosaic image. I’m not an expert on the area, so I can’t know which interpretation is correct. Both interpretations see flourishing Mississippian societies in some parts of the southeast in 1540, and both see those societies continuing to function into the 1600’s.
What do you think of these scenarios and essays? Do you like this sort of thing, or do you prefer more in-depth scenarios? Comments are very welcome.
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Copyright 1999 By Dale R. Cozort