It's worth remembering this when we see accounts of settlers finding what they think are 'terra incognita' full of edible plants and animals. Often these places are only empty because disease (and pigs) got there first.
Famous case, explicitly described, of iron disrupting a whole continent is Samuel Hearne's account of his travels across Canada. Tribes on the other side of Canada had their way of life completely changed (greatly for the worse) because the British traded with iron from a few fort outposts.
@@MalcolmPL it's a great book, very readable. There were traditional Indians who sort of farmed deer and lived peacefully and prosperously. Trade in iron created bands of marauding acquisitive warriors who preyed on other groups in order to trade with the British.
All good points. I have wondered why we hear so little about the whalers. "They didn't record much" is a complete answer that is also very frustrating.
They didn't leave us much writing besides accounting information and even if they had written more it would be in Basque, which would limit it's proliferation for obvious reasons. Heck, even the Dutch sources for the early contact period are neglected due to the language barrier.
This is how I feel about French fur traders (and the later NWC) in the far Northwest/Rupertsland/western Canada between 1740 and 1800. Due to their shoddy record keeping, I have some ancestors (like Hugh “Howie” Sabbiston, Suzette McLeod dit Nipissing, and Sarah Pamereau) who appear in the historical record as fully-formed “halfbreeds” between 1780 and 1800, without any record of their lineages. Say whatever you want about the HBC, but at least they kept better records.
Interesting to think of contact as a sort of continuous transition rather than a discrete starting point. After all, Vikings were in North America centuries before Columbus, they just didn't have as great of an impact.
One thing that recently came to my attention is the fact historically Eurasians had suffered from disease at least as much as the original Americans. There had been a series of plagues in Europe over millennia which were population destroying. Regular deadly endemic diseases swept Europe over the centuries collapsing empires and eradicating cultures. Most people who died in Rome during the Roman era died early of disease. Life in premodern times was horribly unhealthy and thus precarious.
Brilliant thoughtful analysis. As Malcolm states, we will never really see or completely understand pre-contact societies. When De Soto explored from Florida to Arkansas, seeking golden cities, he was rarely out of sight of large native towns. When these areas were next visited by traders and settlers 10 to 200 years later, only a few small towns existed in woodlands where De Soto had seen endless fields. The diseases his men and swine had carried killed tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of natives living in societies more advanced than the next white visitors found. Squanto left a thriving society in New England when he returned years later his people had been wiped out by diseases the Europeans brought. The whalers may have caused similar catastrophic changes.
That's an interesting topic for sure, and a big gap to fill Here in Québec, it's common knowledge that the Vikings came, then later the Basque, Normands and Bretons (at least for people my age. That's what we were told in class, nothing beyond 'They came, trading happened, we don't know much more.') We don't know the details. There seems to be a bit of literature in both French and English on the matter. I wonder how much future research will include Indigenous perspectives--I suspect there's more to know from Mi'qmaq, Inuit, and Innu histories, among others. I once had a Mi'qmaq lecturer at university who told us about the Basque - Mi'qmaq relationships, and there certainly was a golden age. Anecdotally, when the French came, the Mi'qmaq spoke to them in Basque. I know that the whaler presence is documented in Atikamekw history as well. For instance, the word used to describe whalers isn't the same as the later French Canadians settlers (Breton and Basque whalers = kackoctowewok, lit. the bearded ones; French Canadien settlers = wemistikocicak, lit. land cleaners or wood cutters (for the record, I don't speak Atikamekw Nehiromowin, there may be mistakes in the vocabulary and/or translations)).
The Basque trade may have contributed to the decline of the Laurentians. A most intriguing hypothesis, it certainly sound plausible. Intuitively how could the contact not have caused disruptions?
Two decades later actually, the last known group of Australian aboriginals to make contact with Euro-Australian society was a group of nine Pintupi individuals in 1984. It was a group of two co-wives and their seven children. They tried to find their relatives after their husband died. The children are all still alive today.
@@MalcolmPL here's one from an unrelated set. The L’Anse aux Meadows site in Newfoundland, which researchers have now dated to 1021 C.E., was a permanent Viking settlement.
@@MalcolmPL or this piece of written history from the 6th-century. An Irish monk named St. Brendan wrote the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (The Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot), a document describing a westward sea journey. Brandon Creek on the Dingle Peninsula, is the spot where St Brendan is reported to have departed from to begin what would prove a 7,200km epic journey. Tim Severin sailed it, back in 1977, to show that they could have reached North America using the technology available to them at that time. Not proof, but certainly food for thought for those who have difficulty imagining a World prior to 1492. Source: 1978 book - The Brendan Voyage: Sailing to America in a Leather Boat to Prove the Legend of the Irish Sailor Saints
I hate the saying "history is written by the victors." It just isn't true. The real problem with history, I'm fond of saying, is that it's written by historians. I'm not making a dig at historians. I'm saying that history is biased toward the accounts of literate and educated people.
There was also trade between the Graenlandingar norse and the Dorset inuit culture for over 300 years, from the year 1000, when Leif Eirikson discovered that there was really more land to the west. Archeologists have found greenland wool artifacts in dorset settlements, as well as tools made by the greenlanders. The trade only stopped when the Thule inuit culture migrated from alaska east and destroyed both the dorset and the greenland colonies. It is possible that some tribes like the innu had iron tools through trade and raiding when they faced the dorset inuit.
Also impact native whalers. Then there is the possibility that European fishermen may have fished off the coast of the North America for centuries before Columbus and may have interacted with coastal people. Just because Columbus was the first documented contact after the Norse does not mean he was the only nor that it had not been occurring for decades if not centuries. Where did the European fishing fleets go to fish? I appreciate that you stuck to what had been documented and how it fits in with archaeological evidence 😎 My post is to help your RUclips metrics as well as get people wondering what else was missed and different avenues influence can come from
First off, Great video, I am new to your channel. I think this is an Important topic to discuss on a broad level. This concept is true with so many things. As humans, we like to point to a definitive start and end point. Neatly put everything in our little partitioned boxes. The fall of the Roman Empire is a great example of this, so many interpretations all over youtube and the internet depending on the context. We want to say “These are the colors. This is Red, that is Blue, That is purple” when people throughout history defined and grouped colors differently. Celtic people called Lighter Greens and Lighter Blues as “glas” for example. How can we tell the gaps in history? This is a good question and one that needs to be asked more frequently when studying history/archeology/etc. I’ve been thinking about the story of survivorship bias a lot lately, about the WW2 bombers returning home from their missions over Germany shot full of holes. In order to better protect the bombers, they studied where the bombers were being shot at, and decided to better armor those points. It took one smart guy to go “wait a minute, these bombers were shot there and survived to return home, it’s the places where there are less holes that we need to armor. Those planes getting shot in those spots are the ones not making it home.” It is a bit of an art form to take a look at data, understand the greater context, and read between the lines to recognize there is a gap in the first place. I knew of the Basque whaling tradition, but never considered them sailing to the Americas, nor their impact on the continent. It is all new information for me. It requires a level of critical thinking to seek out and go beyond the surface level data that exists as community knowledge. If we are going to find the gaps in history, we need to look where the bullet holes are missing on our planes and start there. One topic I have been thinking about lately in relation to survivorship bias is the Indo-European language family. I am not a linguist, and I am sure there are professionals who have considered this very issue, but it is not made very public if it has been. In some ways, the whole concept of Proto-Indo-European exists from the very concept of studying a gap in history. With that said, I feel like it is still a lot of simplification in linguistics, especially with Indo-European. It’s not enough to just say “German has a non-indo-European substratum, with a indo-European superstrate” If we are ever to figure out a much clearer picture of ancient linguistics and their appropriate families, then we need to look for the bombers that never made it home. It’s not enough to put languages into a neat little box. Language is an amorphous thing with a myriad of influences, most of it dead and unrecorded, much like the history of your basque whalers. We want to say “France speaks French” but that ignores the existence of dialects like Gascon or Languedocian just to name a few examples. What is German’s non-indo-European substrate exactly? What about other indo-European substrates? What similarities can we start locating amongst other substrates using comparative linguistics of substrate data? We might just discover a long dead ghost, unrecorded language family from the past that changes our very understanding of the development of language. The answers are there, but it takes real work to find the information the slips between the gaps. It brings to mind the hunt for the neutrino in particle physics, or say the Higgs Boson. An elusive particle that should exist, but no direct observation exists. Anyways, just my long-winded thoughts for tonight that I blame you for, so Great video!
4:01 Did you mean to insert an image? Curious to see that example if you have a link. Off-topic but reminds me of the pre-contact Venetian glass beads they found in Alaska
@@WretchedRedoran Posted a link but I think it got hidden by RUclips, I'd google "Venetian glass beads Alaska". A handful of glass beads were found in old Inuit sites, the oldest European materials found in Alaska. Very interesting indeed!
Just from inferences from sources such as Champlain, how extensive do you suppose the trade with the whalers would have been, and how far inland do you suppose the iron tools would have been traded?
I see what you mean. In Australia 1960's a few western desert Aboriginals were come across that had never seen a white man, but that does not mean they had not been influenced in some way,
The oral history of the Heiltsuk Nation, an Aboriginal group based on the Central Coast of British Columbia, tells of a coastal strip of land that did not freeze during the ice age, making it a place of refuge for early inhabitants of the territory. Carbon dating shows this settlement to be 14,000 years old. You are talking about written history, my friend. Humans have been inhabiting this planet for 3 million years. Archaeological evidence of fireplaces, tent rings, and other artifacts suggest that several Indigenous groups lived at L’Anse aux Meadows before and after the Vikings occupied the site. They include peoples of the Maritime Archaic tradition from roughly 4000 to 1000 BCE, the Groswater tradition from 1000 BCE to 500 CE, and the Middle Dorset Culture from 400 to 750 CE. Historians believe there were no people present at the time of the Norse arrival, though.
@@MalcolmPL Also applies in physics as I have discovered. It seems I am not the only one who confuses the two. Notwithstanding all of that, your analysis was quite illuminating and makes me wonder how that effect has impacted any number of historical narratives. ancient and modern.
It's worth remembering this when we see accounts of settlers finding what they think are 'terra incognita' full of edible plants and animals. Often these places are only empty because disease (and pigs) got there first.
Always a pleasure to listen to more of your thoughts Malcolm.
Famous case, explicitly described, of iron disrupting a whole continent is Samuel Hearne's account of his travels across Canada. Tribes on the other side of Canada had their way of life completely changed (greatly for the worse) because the British traded with iron from a few fort outposts.
I'll have to look into that, I haven't read that one.
@@MalcolmPL it's a great book, very readable. There were traditional Indians who sort of farmed deer and lived peacefully and prosperously. Trade in iron created bands of marauding acquisitive warriors who preyed on other groups in order to trade with the British.
@@W.S238 What's the exact name of it?
@@LordVader1094 A Journey from Prince of Wales' Fort in Hudson's Bay to the Northern Ocean by Samuel hearne
All good points. I have wondered why we hear so little about the whalers. "They didn't record much" is a complete answer that is also very frustrating.
They didn't leave us much writing besides accounting information and even if they had written more it would be in Basque, which would limit it's proliferation for obvious reasons.
Heck, even the Dutch sources for the early contact period are neglected due to the language barrier.
This is how I feel about French fur traders (and the later NWC) in the far Northwest/Rupertsland/western Canada between 1740 and 1800. Due to their shoddy record keeping, I have some ancestors (like Hugh “Howie” Sabbiston, Suzette McLeod dit Nipissing, and Sarah Pamereau) who appear in the historical record as fully-formed “halfbreeds” between 1780 and 1800, without any record of their lineages. Say whatever you want about the HBC, but at least they kept better records.
Interesting to think of contact as a sort of continuous transition rather than a discrete starting point. After all, Vikings were in North America centuries before Columbus, they just didn't have as great of an impact.
and they were not the only ones.
Always appreciate your insights! You're pretty good at peeling back abstractions and preconceptions
One thing that recently came to my attention is the fact historically Eurasians had suffered from disease at least as much as the original Americans. There had been a series of plagues in Europe over millennia which were population destroying. Regular deadly endemic diseases swept Europe over the centuries collapsing empires and eradicating cultures. Most people who died in Rome during the Roman era died early of disease. Life in premodern times was horribly unhealthy and thus precarious.
At this very moment there are millions of people living unhealthy lives of precariousness
Brilliant thoughtful analysis. As Malcolm states, we will never really see or completely understand pre-contact societies. When De Soto explored from Florida to Arkansas, seeking golden cities, he was rarely out of sight of large native towns. When these areas were next visited by traders and settlers 10 to 200 years later, only a few small towns existed in woodlands where De Soto had seen endless fields. The diseases his men and swine had carried killed tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of natives living in societies more advanced than the next white visitors found. Squanto left a thriving society in New England when he returned years later his people had been wiped out by diseases the Europeans brought. The whalers may have caused similar catastrophic changes.
Kurlansky's "Basque History of The World" has a good treatment of this history
That's an interesting topic for sure, and a big gap to fill
Here in Québec, it's common knowledge that the Vikings came, then later the Basque, Normands and Bretons (at least for people my age. That's what we were told in class, nothing beyond 'They came, trading happened, we don't know much more.') We don't know the details. There seems to be a bit of literature in both French and English on the matter. I wonder how much future research will include Indigenous perspectives--I suspect there's more to know from Mi'qmaq, Inuit, and Innu histories, among others.
I once had a Mi'qmaq lecturer at university who told us about the Basque - Mi'qmaq relationships, and there certainly was a golden age. Anecdotally, when the French came, the Mi'qmaq spoke to them in Basque. I know that the whaler presence is documented in Atikamekw history as well. For instance, the word used to describe whalers isn't the same as the later French Canadians settlers (Breton and Basque whalers = kackoctowewok, lit. the bearded ones; French Canadien settlers = wemistikocicak, lit. land cleaners or wood cutters (for the record, I don't speak Atikamekw Nehiromowin, there may be mistakes in the vocabulary and/or translations)).
Wow. I really have not seen any other content like yours on RUclips. Keep it coming!
The Basque trade may have contributed to the decline of the Laurentians. A most intriguing hypothesis, it certainly sound plausible. Intuitively how could the contact not have caused disruptions?
Wasn't that last tribe to be met by Europeans in Australia the 1960s? Pretty crazy all that had happened without them knowing directly.
Two decades later actually, the last known group of Australian aboriginals to make contact with Euro-Australian society was a group of nine Pintupi individuals in 1984. It was a group of two co-wives and their seven children. They tried to find their relatives after their husband died. The children are all still alive today.
Excellent video sir. Well said.
You are a real wordsmith, Malcom!
Excellent video. Thanks!
History is not a disassembled puzzle but a book passed through a shredder on both axis.
More like a thrift store puzzle with half the pieces missing and a bunch thrown in from unrelated sets.
@@MalcolmPL here's one from an unrelated set. The L’Anse aux Meadows site in Newfoundland, which researchers have now dated to 1021 C.E., was a permanent Viking settlement.
@@MalcolmPL or this piece of written history from the 6th-century. An Irish monk named St. Brendan wrote the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (The Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot), a document describing a westward sea journey. Brandon Creek on the Dingle Peninsula, is the spot where St Brendan is reported to have departed from to begin what would prove a 7,200km epic journey. Tim Severin sailed it, back in 1977, to show that they could have reached North America using the technology available to them at that time. Not proof, but certainly food for thought for those who have difficulty imagining a World prior to 1492. Source: 1978 book - The Brendan Voyage: Sailing to America in a Leather Boat to Prove the Legend of the Irish Sailor Saints
I hate the saying "history is written by the victors." It just isn't true.
The real problem with history, I'm fond of saying, is that it's written by historians.
I'm not making a dig at historians. I'm saying that history is biased toward the accounts of literate and educated people.
There was also trade between the Graenlandingar norse and the Dorset inuit culture for over 300 years, from the year 1000, when Leif Eirikson discovered that there was really more land to the west. Archeologists have found greenland wool artifacts in dorset settlements, as well as tools made by the greenlanders. The trade only stopped when the Thule inuit culture migrated from alaska east and destroyed both the dorset and the greenland colonies. It is possible that some tribes like the innu had iron tools through trade and raiding when they faced the dorset inuit.
Also impact native whalers.
Then there is the possibility that European fishermen may have fished off the coast of the North America for centuries before Columbus and may have interacted with coastal people. Just because Columbus was the first documented contact after the Norse does not mean he was the only nor that it had not been occurring for decades if not centuries.
Where did the European fishing fleets go to fish?
I appreciate that you stuck to what had been documented and how it fits in with archaeological evidence 😎
My post is to help your RUclips metrics as well as get people wondering what else was missed and different avenues influence can come from
I love these thought videos
First off, Great video, I am new to your channel. I think this is an Important topic to discuss on a broad level. This concept is true with so many things. As humans, we like to point to a definitive start and end point. Neatly put everything in our little partitioned boxes. The fall of the Roman Empire is a great example of this, so many interpretations all over youtube and the internet depending on the context. We want to say “These are the colors. This is Red, that is Blue, That is purple” when people throughout history defined and grouped colors differently. Celtic people called Lighter Greens and Lighter Blues as “glas” for example.
How can we tell the gaps in history? This is a good question and one that needs to be asked more frequently when studying history/archeology/etc. I’ve been thinking about the story of survivorship bias a lot lately, about the WW2 bombers returning home from their missions over Germany shot full of holes. In order to better protect the bombers, they studied where the bombers were being shot at, and decided to better armor those points. It took one smart guy to go “wait a minute, these bombers were shot there and survived to return home, it’s the places where there are less holes that we need to armor. Those planes getting shot in those spots are the ones not making it home.”
It is a bit of an art form to take a look at data, understand the greater context, and read between the lines to recognize there is a gap in the first place. I knew of the Basque whaling tradition, but never considered them sailing to the Americas, nor their impact on the continent. It is all new information for me. It requires a level of critical thinking to seek out and go beyond the surface level data that exists as community knowledge. If we are going to find the gaps in history, we need to look where the bullet holes are missing on our planes and start there.
One topic I have been thinking about lately in relation to survivorship bias is the Indo-European language family. I am not a linguist, and I am sure there are professionals who have considered this very issue, but it is not made very public if it has been. In some ways, the whole concept of Proto-Indo-European exists from the very concept of studying a gap in history.
With that said, I feel like it is still a lot of simplification in linguistics, especially with Indo-European. It’s not enough to just say “German has a non-indo-European substratum, with a indo-European superstrate” If we are ever to figure out a much clearer picture of ancient linguistics and their appropriate families, then we need to look for the bombers that never made it home. It’s not enough to put languages into a neat little box. Language is an amorphous thing with a myriad of influences, most of it dead and unrecorded, much like the history of your basque whalers.
We want to say “France speaks French” but that ignores the existence of dialects like Gascon or Languedocian just to name a few examples. What is German’s non-indo-European substrate exactly? What about other indo-European substrates? What similarities can we start locating amongst other substrates using comparative linguistics of substrate data? We might just discover a long dead ghost, unrecorded language family from the past that changes our very understanding of the development of language.
The answers are there, but it takes real work to find the information the slips between the gaps. It brings to mind the hunt for the neutrino in particle physics, or say the Higgs Boson. An elusive particle that should exist, but no direct observation exists. Anyways, just my long-winded thoughts for tonight that I blame you for, so Great video!
4:01 Did you mean to insert an image? Curious to see that example if you have a link. Off-topic but reminds me of the pre-contact Venetian glass beads they found in Alaska
I don't have an image, it was something I read in a paper about archaeological evidence of trade routes along the great lakes water system.
Ooh, could you tell me more about those venetian beads, or tell me where I could find more information on the matter? It sounds quite interesting.
@@WretchedRedoran Posted a link but I think it got hidden by RUclips, I'd google "Venetian glass beads Alaska". A handful of glass beads were found in old Inuit sites, the oldest European materials found in Alaska. Very interesting indeed!
@@TargonStudios Thank you for the direction! Have a good day.
RUclips has been pretty persnickety with people posting links these days.
Just from inferences from sources such as Champlain, how extensive do you suppose the trade with the whalers would have been, and how far inland do you suppose the iron tools would have been traded?
I am not inclined to speculate in that manner as I don't have enough information to give a useful opinion.
Wow, thanks for sharing. Super interesting.
you have a very easy voice, good narrator!
Ah, the known unknowns of history
Could you comment on the Chinese interaction with the native americans
No, that’s not my field.
I see what you mean. In Australia 1960's a few western desert Aboriginals were come across that had never seen a white man, but that does not mean they had not been influenced in some way,
Good thoughts as always.
A European writing about contact is by definition, post contact.
20 years would make a huge difference.
The oral history of the Heiltsuk Nation, an Aboriginal group based on the Central Coast of British Columbia, tells of a coastal strip of land that did not freeze during the ice age, making it a place of refuge for early inhabitants of the territory. Carbon dating shows this settlement to be 14,000 years old. You are talking about written history, my friend. Humans have been inhabiting this planet for 3 million years. Archaeological evidence of fireplaces, tent rings, and other artifacts suggest that several Indigenous groups lived at L’Anse aux Meadows before and after the Vikings occupied the site. They include peoples of the Maritime Archaic tradition from roughly 4000 to 1000 BCE, the Groswater tradition from 1000 BCE to 500 CE, and the Middle Dorset Culture from 400 to 750 CE. Historians believe there were no people present at the time of the Norse arrival, though.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle applied to history. One of your best.
In the humanities it's called the observer effect. It's not quite the same as the Heisenberg principle.
@@MalcolmPL Also applies in physics as I have discovered. It seems I am not the only one who confuses the two. Notwithstanding all of that, your analysis was quite illuminating and makes me wonder how that effect has impacted any number of historical narratives. ancient and modern.