"Dragoika surprised Flandry by lowering her tendrils and saying, 'No such talk. Would you upset the world?'"
-Poul Anderson, Ensign Flandry IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-192 AT Chapter Six, p. 53.
This leads to an exchange between Dragoika and Flandry which I will summarize.
Dragoika: The vaz-Siravo, like other dangerous animals, must be kept at a distance. They should leave us alone.
Flandry: You have troubled them by going to sea.
Dragoika: They can avoid our islands.
Flandry: They need the shoals for food. And you sail far out for big animals and weeds that the vaz-Siravo also need.
Natural enemies? (Shouldn't happen if there is a Creator who intends all intelligent species to live in harmony but then I do not believe that there is such a Creator.)
More fundamental is the disagreement with Ferok. I once thought that it would be very convenient if a particular adversary could be simply eliminated but, in retrospect, this would not have been a good idea. Nicholas van Rijn knows that the Polesotechnic League would not morally survive nuking the Borthudians.
19 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And the principle applied to the Borthudians was adopted by the Empire. At its best the Empire preferred the minimal use of force and to try to keep the conflict with Merseia from descending into all out war. Dragoika seems to have understood ideas like that.
Sean
All complex animals are engaged in a competition to capture the flow of energies and turn it into copies of themselves, essentially.
Hence the fact that species of predators whose prey realms overlap usually show intense hostility to each other; wolves kill coyotes (the number of coyotes dropped by more than half when wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone), lions and hyenas are always skirmishing, and so forth.
Plus of course predators (especially social ones) are intensely territorial and competitive among their own species.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Yes, but these are intelligent species, not animals, which are being discussed. My thought was (as it seems to have been of Paul), was that altho the "prey realms" of Tigeries and Sea People were overlapping, Dragoika understood that it could be very dangerous, perhaps even fatal, it the Tigeries won an overwhelmingly one sided victory. Esp. since Starkad had become a bone of contention quarreled over by far mightier prey beasts (Terra and Merseia).
Sean
Yup, humans can look beyond the instinctual drives, and presumably other intelligent species would be able to do so too, but that doesn't mean the drives have gone away.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree! Instinctual drives can be mastered or redirected, but they don't go away. Intelligent beings have to be trained or educated into mastering their instincts.
Sean
An example of human ecology: when white Americans began exploring the far West in the 19th century, they reported enormous concentrations of animals on the Great Plains.
One of the reasons they did so was that they tended to move through tribal borderlands, where the claims of various groups overlapped but nobody could unambiguously enforce them, rather than through their core territories.
Hunting in the borderlands was dangerous -- you were always at risk of running into a party of enemy warriors, whether hunting themselves or raiding or doing either as opportunity offered.
So the hunting pressure there was lower, and competition for grazing from the ever-increasing herds of domesticated horses was lower; hence, more game.
The number of large grazing animals was declining well before the whites pushed onto the Plains in any numbers; there was a lively export trade in furs (including buffalo robes), and the adoption of mounted nomadism made hunting much more efficient (and warfare, too).
I suspect that if the Plains had been left to the Indians, they'd have gone from mounted hunters to nomadic herders of domesticated stock in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, as game numbers dropped too low to sustain their populations. Horses first, and then sheep and cattle -- the Navajo did become sheep herders in that period. Possibly bison would have been interbred with cattle; that cross produces fertile hybrids.
Conversely, early Anglo-American observers in California saw heavy concentrations of wildlife for other reasons. The Spanish settlements had introduced Eurasian diseases, which much reduced the local Indian population; and they'd introduced extensive cattle raising, mostly for the exports of hide and tallow.
Fewer Indians reduced hunting pressure; it also provided more acorns for animals like grizzly bears. The local Indians had used fire to open out grasslands, and then planted lots of oak trees, since acorn bread was their staple food. The oak savanna was largely human-created, but once swept clear of oak-dependent human beings (and their spears and fire) it was a temporary grizzly bear and deer and elk paradise.
And the thousands of abandoned beef carcasses from the Spanish ranches, stripped of their hides and some of the fat and then left to rot, provided nutrient rich food for the bears as well.
So the bears multiplied as they never had before, and became so numerous that they further reduced Indian hunting and foraging -- grizzlies are -dangerous-.
What looked like a pristine paradise was the result of complex human interactions.
Mr Stirling,
As I understand it, by killing bears, Davy Crocket:
protected his family;
fed his family;
cleared the territory for more settlers to move in.
Paul.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Very fascinating, indeed! Only goes to show the Euro/Anglo/American conquest was not as simplistic and one sided as some like to claim. And some of what you wrote here reminded me of what I read in your books, such as CONQUISTADOR and the Change series. The accident of one of John Rolfe's friends having a COLD in the Earth2 of CONQUISTADOR was calamitous to the Indians. The cold was passed to the Indians and DEVASTATED them, because they didn't have the resistance built up over thousands of years by the peoples of Europe/Asia.
Sean
Sean: yes, though it may have been a mild flu. It's uncertain when rhinoviruses evolved.
Amerindians were very vulnerable to Old World diseases because of lack of previous exposure, but also because they were very genetically uniform -- a virgin-field epidemic selects for genetic variants that posses resistance, but if your population is very uniform there are less likely to be natural mutations of that sort. The settlement of the Americas was by a fairly small group, which probably "paused" in Beringia for a long time towards the end of the last glaciation. A cold dry environment with a small mobile population is ideal for getting rid of diseases. Nice at the time, unfortunate in the long run.
Europeans conquered virtually everywhere in the 400 years or so after Columbus; a British army marched to the capital of Tibet at one point.
The places where they really made it stick, however, were the ones where they had the bacteria and viruses on their side -- the Americas, Australia, parts of Polynesia, and a few outliers like the area around Cape Town. Disease slaughtered on a scale that soldiers could dream of only in nightmares.
It was much harder in areas that had about the same disease environment, like the Middle East or North Africa, or worse ones, like most of Africa.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Thanks for these fascinating comments. It was because of writers like you that I more clearly came to realize how simple things like colds/minor flus could be so devastating to the Indians, even with no one TRYING to infect them. I've read of how smallpox and measles were devastating for the Indians. Again, even tho no one was trying to infect them. I've read in Prescott's HISTORY OF THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO of how, when a ship with a crew infected by smallpox arrived at Veracruz, Hernando Cortez immediately ordered it to be isolated and the crew forbidden to leave. But, too late, smallpox was spread to the Indians.
I've even wondered a time or two why, when most of Europe was devastated by the Black Plague in the mid 1300s, conquering armies of fanatical jihadists hadn't swept in to overrun the European nations. Then I read of how the Plague had been just as bad in Egypt and the Middle East. Hence, no invasions to easily overrun Europe.
Sean
I have read a few times my copy of "Plagues and Peoples" by William H. McNeill, one of the first books to do a fairly thorough study of the effects of infectious disease on human history.
BTW McNeill states that reading about Cortez in Mexico started his interest in that influence.
IIRC when discussing bubonic plague epidemics he mentions that fatalistic attitudes in Islam led Muslim states to dismiss such ideas as quarantine, so in the longer run bubonic plague hit Islam more than Christendom.
Mr Stirling:
When I read "Conquistador" I thought that Rolfe and Co. should have been trading with the local Indians, manufactured goods for gold they showed the Indians how to pan for, and would have thought of it if they had known anything about the fur trade in the more northerly bits of N. America.
However, did the diseases kill the Indians off too quickly for that idea to have done Rolfe etc. any good?
Kaor, Jim!
That was interesting, how, despite blunders and false starts, the Europeans were at least fumblingly moving in the right direction in how to handle plagues and epidemics. Such as using isolation and quarantines. I also read of a French physician who, during the great plague of 1346-48, was strong and determined enough to use his own case of the bubonic plague to give a scientific description of the progress of the disease.
I have read of how Muslim fatalism has been seriously hindering medical and scientific developments withing Islam.
As for Stirling's novel CONQUISTADOR, the problem was the Indians were devastated by things like the common cold, measles, smallpox, etc. And this despite John Rolfe's efforts to prevent such epidemics.
After so many thousands of years of isolation from the rest of mankind, I think it's very unlikely the Indians of N/S America could have been spared being devastated by diseases introduced by either the Chinese or Europeans.
Merry Christmas! Sean
Note that Cortez wasn't being purely humanitarian when he tried to isolate that smallpox ship. He regarded the population of Mexico as an asset for labor and tribute.
Mexicans today are about 64% European genetically in terms of total DNA, and that's almost entirely due to the repeated waves of disease. There were 15,000,000 or so people in Mexico in 1516, a peak reached again only in about 1914.
By the 1650's, it was down to 1,500,000 -- no more than a tenth of the total in 1516. And a lot of those were Spaniards, the descendants of Spaniards, and mestizo mixtures of Spaniards and Indians. Plus some imported Africans.
After the first generation, Spanish immigrants preferentially married mestizo women when they couldn't get Spanish ones, for cultural reasons, a frequent occurrence given the sex-biased migration.
So mestizo women were more likely to have living descendants than pure Indian women, though not as likely as Spanish women, and those children were more likely than not to be fathered by Spanish or Spanish-descended men. Mestizo men were more likely to 'marry down' into the Indian population, which spread European genes further.
That was a common pattern throughout Latin America. The percentage of Spanish Y-chromosome (male) lines in Mexico is much higher than the overall DNA mix.
There was never a massive tide of migration from Spain, but it was steady (around 1-2000 a year, most of the time) and in the Mexican highlands Spaniards were much more likely to successfully reproduce.
That was partly because of their genetic resistance to the imported diseases, and partly to social factors (they tended to be richer).
But without the plagues, they'd never have been significant genetically -- witness the Philippines, for example.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, like all of us, Cortez had mixed motives for what he did. Still, simple humanity was not wholly absent for why he acted as he did.
Yes, those plagues and epidemics devastating the Indians opened up wide lands for European and mixed European/Indian settlers to move into.
Happy New Year! Sean
Might it not have worked the other way: Europeans lacking immunity to North or South American diseases?
What I recall of my reading on the subject is that most of the epidemic diseases the Eruopeans had got into humans from the herd animals they domesticated, cattle sheep pigs etc. Those were essentially all Eurasian animals and the Americans didn't have the domesticable animals and so didn't have the diseases to pass on to the Europeans.
There is some suspicion that syphilis was brought to Europe by the returning crew of Columbus' ships, but this is far from confirmed.
Mr Stirling, do you have more information on this than I do?
Kaor, Paul and Jim!
Paul: I don't know, but maybe. Syphilis is the only nasty, major disease I know of which apparently originated in the Americas. It spread worldwide and became as feared and dreaded as smallpox and other diseases.
Jim: I agree that happened, diseases spreading from domesticated animals to humans.
Happy New Year! Sean
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