Multiple Age of Exploration what-ifs:

[raharris1973]

#1 What if a branch of the English Puritans set up a colony in the Cape of South Africa instead of New England? [not a Drake scenario]

In the late 1620s as John Winthrop is setting up the Massachusetts Bay colony, a secondary effort is set up to establish a colony at the southern Cape of Africa. It is also seen as a place where the Puritans can set up a community to their liking, away from what they dislike in England and Europe. The sea routes to the Cape are known, and some thought is provided that besides being a self-sufficient community, the colony can also serve as a stopover and resupply point for ships of the English East India Company. Also, so location is not considered too dangerous as its between Portuguese rather than Spanish colonies.

This happens about 20 years before the Dutch set up the OTL Cape Colony (1652). The Puritans are able to survive and grow wheat crops and fish and herd sheep in the Mediterranean climate. The Cape colony has decent migration and population growth. The immigration of some Provencal French Calvinist Huguenots helps with adaptation of some additional Mediterranean crops and vines appropriate for the climate.

Cape Colony gives a valuable boost to India Company commerce in the 1600s, with Cape men eventually often getting involved in the India, Persia and China trades, while also expanding farming and herding inland into the lands of the Khoisan peoples. There will also be trade with the Portuguese and more inland African peoples for ship timbers, which may not be plentiful on the Cape.

I suspect that Puritan migration would slow down during the Puritan ascendancy in England, but pick up again after Restoration.

The culture and demographic base of the colony give it potential to grow more in population than the Dutch Cape Colony. It could theoretically lead to an earlier colonization/exploitation of (probably western) Australia, and it might theoretically develop separatist sentiments like America.



#2 What if the French preempted English claims to North America by following up on the Verrazano expedition?

The French in the 1520s traced the North American coast from North Carolina to New York to Nova Scotia with the Verrazano expedition, and then traced the St. Lawrence as far as Montreal with the Cartier expedition of the 1530s.

In the meantime, Henry the VIII was completely uninterested in oceanic exploration, doing plenty of spending and adventuring closer to home.

Ultimately, there's were only a few half-hearted Huguenot attempts at colonies in the Florida-South Carolina region by France that century, too close to Spain, and destroyed by them, and the French didn't follow up in Canada until the 1600s.

But what if the French Crown under Francis I, who was a rival of Charles V and known to remark he thought the Treaty of Tordesillas obnoxious, had decided to follow up the Verrazano expedition with some colonies serving as bases for further exploration, trading posts, and missions. Furthermore, let's say the first surviving French colony is situated at a more remote distance from the Spanish, at Manhattan, which Verrazano called Nouvelle Angouleme, and subsequent colonies and mission went down to about the Chesapeake.

A few of these get going before France gets bogged down in its wars of religion.

Later on the French end up setting up their Acadian and Canadian colonies, on schedule or a bit ahead of time.



#3 What if Henry VII lived ten more years? Consequences for exploration overseas, the country at home, and neighboring relations?

Henry VII died at age 52 in 1509. What if he lived until he was 62 years old, until 1519?

Domestically, he was known for being politically savvy and fiscally responsible, so the English exchequer is likely in better shape in 1519-1520 than it was in OTL. Additionally, he supported the exploratory voyages of John and Sebastian Cabot to North America, and apparently some other voyages until his death, which his son showed no interest in. With another ten years of royal patronage, perhaps some permanent English colonies get started in North America nearly a century ahead of OTL's schedule? And they start off Catholic.

 

[raharris1973]

In the case of scenario #1, I could imagine the Cape Colony revolting around the same time as the American colonies. The British have a greater chance of suppressing the revolt probably because the colony is more isolated, their Portuguese friends probably aren't helping the rebels, and they may be able to hire Bantu mercenaries to take on colonists. London will also see the area as strategic, being on the route to India.

On the other hand, the French, and later the Dutch, will have just as much incentive to break the British power monopoly there as in North America and help the Anglo-African rebels.

Win or lose for the Anglo-Africans, it could be an interesting struggle. If it's lose, they could try a 'Great Trek' like the OTL Boers. They should have the numbers for the attempt. If they win, the British could and would probably hold on to some useful southern Atlantic and southern Indian Ocean islands to be replacement stop-over points on the way to India, Malaya, and China.

For scenario #2 - French dominated North America, I imagine settlement and migration will be less intensive overall than in OTL's Anglo North America, although healthy conditions will eventually cause exponential population growth. However, there will be more cultural blending with and gradual cultural assimilation with Amerindian cultures. Plus in plantation colonies where the French practice African slavery, there will be a racial color spectrum rather than one-drop rule. Going by the OTL Quebec and Cajun model, overall, with a more predominant Catholic influence, I would expect it to be more rural, less industrial, mercantile, and academic than Anglo-America. There will be pockets of Protestant, statist, and Jesuit educational excellence built up over time however.


In scenario # 3, assuming this leads to an early Anglo-America, there are some significant consequences. A century's head-start in pre-industrial times probably leads to 200 million more North Americans in the present day. If Henry VIII's and Catherine's reproductive problems are butterflied away, England may remain Catholic. If we want to exercise a potential extreme knock-on effect, the retention of the Church and monasteries leaves 16th century English education and parish social services a bit less disrupted. In the monasteries, the iron-mongering work of the Cistercian bell-casters continues uninterrupted, possibly leading to an earlier industrial revolution. The availability and attraction of North American colonies to Englishmen, including borderers down the line, and maybe Scotsmen, may dry up the pool of potential colonists who would have been planted in Ulster, leaving fewer sources of both ethnic and religious tension between Ireland and the nations of Britain.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

1. I don't think an African colony is going to have much impact in the grand scheme of things. North America is where the big prizes are at and it won't take long for people to notice. Europe's forests had been decimated, but America had vast swathes of forests. Britain's navy was only able to swell as huge as it became because of lumber harvested from America and exported back to England. If you have an axe and a saw then you can make a great living just chopping down trees. There were far, far more wildlife in the US back then there are today. It was very easy to just waltz out into the woods with your gun and come back by evening with a bunch of pelts you can sell for a lot of money. Vast swathes of land in America makes it ripe for people with little prospects in Europe to come over, become relatively prosperous growing tobacco, and have big families. Why would a colonist choose to go to Africa over America?

A Puritan colony in South Africa would be an obscure footnote in history, Just like the Boers.



2. A few extra colonies in France won't matter unless France really pushes for a large scale immigration effort. The Brits didn't just send Brits over to the Americas, but Dutch, Germans, Swedes, you name it. That's one of the reasons why the 13 colonies became populated so fast (along with the high population growth of living there at the time). If France doesn't populate the Americas just as quickly then they won't be able to draw upon the same resources and manpower for later on when they really need it to compete against the other empires, and will likely lose the Americas just like in OTL.

If France is actually able to pull this off, then this could dramatically change the timeline. France could be far better off in a war with Britain and not come out of it bankrupt, which means that the power hungry nobles will find it difficult to usurp the king and the French Revolution doesn't happen, which means communism never takes off. The effects of this change are too far reaching to predict.

 

[raharris1973]

If you have an axe and a saw then you can make a great living just chopping down trees. There were far, far more wildlife in the US back then there are today. It was very easy to just waltz out into the woods with your gun and come back by evening with a bunch of pelts you can sell for a lot of money.

The flipside of reduced tree cover on the Cape coast is that there is less hard work moving big trees, tree trunks, and rocks to clear fields for planting grain and vineyards in the local Mediterranean style climate. The climate will remind Puritans of what they read about in the Bible, great for grain-growing, olive trees, vines, and grazing animals like sheep and cattle with native game and buffalo varieties to go after. With a milder climate, sure, less of a bounty of fur, although fur-bearing species like the Cape Foxes and African Clawless Otters would be about.

For a few decades at least, there's a good bit of room to spread out before you hit any outright desert or hill country. Since it's not overly moist, the disease burden should be a bit less than the American southeast, even if the lack of cold winters makes it not as light as New England and Canada. The temperatures should be hot enough for tobacco (but seed would need to be brought it), but I don't know if the moisture profile is right.

The European influenced South Africa under the Dutch certainly wasn't an America but it was more than a mere footnote even in the long run, and that was with a Dutch East India Company policy that in most decades deliberately kept immigration low. If the more populous England, with more native poor ruled it, and authorities on the receiving end of the Cape were good to receive newcomers, it could easily get many thousands more colonial white immigrants that the Dutch Cape.