Haha this made me laugh XD
I’m sure they would’ve, if they didn’t decided to abandon colonizing here, but for some reason they just decided to”fuck it” and leave…
Right? Pretty sure the Vikings were conquerors.
Maybe the Vikings were not conquerors as popularly imagined?
lol. okay guys this is what happened.
Erik the Red got kicked out of Iceland cos he killed someone. He wandered over to Greenland and then started trying to convince people to come live with him and they set up this sad little settlement there. Later another dude got blown off course trying to get there and happened to see North America, so he told Erik’s son Leif and Leif went to go check it out, but they didn’t see any people.
A few years later Leif’s brother Thorvald went exploring to try and get some furs and stuff. He found nine indigenous people sleeping under canoes and so what does he do? Yeah he kills eight of them and the ninth one runs off and comes back with a force of very angry Inuit who then killed him. Not exactly a promising start.
Anyway long story short, the Norse did a really crappy job interacting with the indigenous people so the Inuit just beat them back to Greenland and then they were too stubborn to eat fish like the native people instead of trying to raise sheep in Greenland so they either died or moved back to Iceland.
Basically, it’s not that they were significantly nicer than Columbus, it’s mostly that they happened to piss off the Inuit before they managed to transmit diseases to them.
This is why I have issues with “American ingenuity” bullshit about how the colonists took over America. No. It was not superior weapons or ingenuity. It was that we wiped out their populations with disease.I am reblogging just because I never like to miss a chance to remind people that Natives consistently controlled and overwhelmed European forces before they were hit by epidemics. People of the northeast coast kept a very tight leash on Europeans until the early 1600s when disease hit (and Europeans commented that they couldn’t settle there because there were too many people), the Spanish got their butts kicked in Mexico until smallpox ravaged the Triple Alliance, and the majority of the middle part of the continent was entirely dependent on Native whims until the huge epidemic of 1780 (Native domination lasted longer in some areas of course, well into the 1800s, but before the epidemic Europeans didn’t even have a chance).
I feel very confident saying that if diseases had not affected indigenous Americans, then Europe would not have conquered the continents.
Reblogging because it is important for people understand the bold. it is true, the Europeans could not have won without the diseases brought to us. The argument saying that they won because they were “advanced” is invalid because not even their weaponry was enough to beat native people. It was their diseases, which they knew, that could potentially decimate our population. So no, Europeans were not more “advanced” they were just a filthy, which is the reason why they carried disease in the first place.
(via sofriel)
