Everard says that the Mongols who have entered North America:
"'...aren't going to get home! We know that!'" (p. 146)
If they know that, then why have been sent to interfere? Everard's thinking is particularly confused.
Sandoval speculates about how the Mongols might civilize North America better than the white men ever did, leading to:
"'The Sachem Khan of the strongest nation on earth!'" (p. 149)
When he has finished:
"Everard listened to the gallows creak of branches in the wind." (ibid.)
The wind comments yet again. The gallows creak for the Danellian timeline? Everard and Sandoval might bring this about if they merely:
"'...stay in this century till the crucial point was past.'" (ibid.)
However, they accept that this is:
"'...just a yarn...'" (p. 150)
5 comments:
Oddly enough, I initially read this as "just a yam", and was rather puzzled for a moment...
Though as for the "Sachem Khan" thing, any sustained contact with Eurasia -- the Pacific coast just as much as the Atlantic fringe -- was going to bring catastrophic plagues.
The longer voyage would slow it down a bit, but it would still happen.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
It was just dumb luck for the Indians that the plagues came about two centuries later, rather than earlier, in Kublai Khan's time.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: the European conquest and the Eurasian plagues were sort of complementary. The plagues had an enabling element -- smallpox was crucial to Cortez' victory over the Mexica, for instance.
And the subsequent development of New Spain (or Brazil, etc.) was deeply affected by them too.
When Cortez arrived, there were 15-20 million people in what's now Mexico. At first the Spanish were an extremely thin layer of overlords, a few thousands among millions, like the British in India.
But the population crashed to only about a million Indians by the 1650's. It was analogous to a lot of post-apocalyptic SF. By then Spaniards and part-Spaniards were already a significant demographic presence, not just because there were more of them but because there were so few of the natives left. That also let the Spaniards set up ranches and estates on vacant land and build new towns.
That in turn let a fairly modest Spanish immigration (no more than a few thousands a year at most) have a massive impact over time. Mexico is about 64% Spanish genetically, for example, and more than that culturally. Nearly everybody speaks Spanish as their native language, and is a Catholic Christian at least nominally. A native Spaniard like Antonio Banderas (he's from Andalusia) can play a Mexican in movies and TV shows and it's perfectly convincing -- there are plenty of people in Mexico who look just like him.
(And here in New Mexico too; you can't reliably tell a Hispanic from an Anglo in many cases.)
The plagues also provided a weakness that Europeans could take advantage of to occupy vacant territory and supplant the former population entirely which would have been much more "labor-intensive" otherwise.
In 1620 the Pilgrims landed in areas that had had relatively dense Indian populations in 1600, but they'd nearly all died -- the English settlers could even dig up the stored corn from abandoned villages, and use already-cleared land to plant their crops. They attributed it to God being on their side... 8-).
That was a recurrent theme on the American frontier. Most pioneers moved into genuinely vacant land, but a lot of it hadn't been vacant years or generations before. Pushing the remnants out was also much easier than getting rid of much larger and denser populations would have been.
Compare accounts of de Soto's expedition across the American Southeast in 1539-41 with what the Anglo pioneers met 150 years later.
He found lots of villages, large tilled fields, many fair-sized towns, elaborate political organizations with monarchs and elites, etc.
The Anglos found a few clumps of small villages separated by huge tracts of wilderness where there were more descendants of de Soto's escaped razorback pigs than people.
And the Indian political organizations were much lower-level, and their economy had regressed towards hunter-gatherer supplemented by shifting cultivation rather than the agricultural-based cultures de Soto interacted with.
A large part of that interaction was infectious -- he spread a number of diseases as he traveled, and fresh waves hit right down to the 19th century.
The "tribes" British and then American settlers met were patched together, little groups of survivors amalgamating into new entities.
I once asked Mr Stirling if he would write a post for this blog. He was too busy at the time. Now I am not going to ask because he already writes such long mini-articles in the combox.
Post a Comment