A LITTLE MORE RECENTLY

Jun 10
23 min read

Updated: Nov 1

I just wanted to say something, something vaguely accurate, about the land that is now Canada. I thought I knew something and the textbooks and encyclopedias, electronic and digital, make it look so easy. Turns out the encyclopedias and textbooks have entirely different aims. I don’t know what those are but if I had to guess I would say their guiding mission includes brevity, avoiding any interesting details, and manufacturing a weird set of narratives. Though I passed through the education system, it seems I learned effectively nothing about Canada’s origins and I was just unaware of the level of ignorance I was enjoying. In relatively recent times, I even took university-level Canadian history courses, ones covering the pre-confederation period, and read shockingly little about what follows. I would also bet that, despite most of the folks I’ve ever known being educators and plenty of those having graduate degrees (by that I mean folks required to do a ton of reading on these themes and continually undergoing professional development), those people know virtually none of this stuff.

What’s really great, and certainly part of why this material is not better taught, is that everything I find at present offers contrary details and what looks to me like untenable claims. Whatever resources I look up (Indigenous peoples atlases, encyclopedias from different continents, public school history textbooks to academic journal articles, government websites, newspaper and magazine editorials, personal blogs, and beyond, as well as summaries accessing much of the above coaxed from the Large Language Models I query) doesn’t merely omit essential details but so often disagree on the very basics like who arrived from where and when. One could appreciate how that might happen with events that took place many eons ago and scraps of information painstakingly pieced together by implication through chemical analysis or something but consternation arises when discovering that we’ve always had a diversity of primary sources literally spelling out, in ink, critical facts that no one appears to question. That’s bonkers, to me. Better still, and the reason for getting into it here, is that what I’m about to offer is effectively the opposite of almost everything I’ve read and heard and, as a result, what I think occupies the popular imagination and public discourse…

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TL;DR:

Countless resources are off by 500 years for the time of first arrival for Europeans and their first permanent settlements in the Americas. And, despite knowing better, they've been selling their silly narrative to the public for generations and are still doing so in the present. Who knows why?
Columbus didn't himself believe nor did he tell anyone he had travelled to India.
The Spanish were able to conquistadore their way across the Americas in large part because so many oppressed locals were so enthusiastic to help them destroy those who'd tyrannized their communities for so long.
For more than a century their population was so infinitesimal (amounting to one or two boatloads of people) and disbursed (over a million square kilometres or more) that it's probably more accurate to say that some Frenchmen were on a camping trip than the Kingdom of France was endeavoring to colonize present-day Canada.
Same for the English: over many generations and spread across 4.5 million km², a couple of boatloads of people struggled even to survive the winter. Eventually, more than a century after formal arrival, a few folks disbursed into the wilderness and built a handful of seasonal outposts and fur trading lodges that were entirely reliant upon friendly relations with First Nations.
The Dutch poked around a bit until they no longer did. Their main settlement, New Amsterdam, was, as it is today, home to a remarkably diverse population.
The whole time, there were transfers of ideas, trade goods, animals, plants, illness, and genes between the continents of Europe (and thus Africa and Asia) and the Americas.

Since time immemorial, after the continent-sized ice cube holding an ocean’s worth of water reaching to the clouds melted back to reveal some dry land, folks were taking up residence in the glacier-carved islands and fjords of the northwest coast of North America. Were they the kin of much earlier arrivals, maybe following the melting ice as it retreated north from their more ancestral homes in the south (established 20,000 or 41,323 years prior)? Or did they make a far more recent series of island hops, crossing from Asia sometime in the last 3,655 (or 12,000) years? Maybe some complicated version of both and more? None of the above? If these were not kin moving north from warmer, ice-free climes, did these more recent inhabitants discover unoccupied land? Did they kindly sublet that land from those there prior to them? Or was there endless conflict resulting in the original inhabitants being displaced or wiped out — as happened to the Tuniit/Dorset up north. Or did they intentionally inflict a war of conquest and extermination upon the inhabitants, as the Esowistaht experienced here on Vancouver Island? Well, is any of that even askable in any high school or undergraduate setting in this part of the world? Would it ever be possible to answer any of that in a satisfying way if such questions were permissible? I don’t know. But it does seem like there are so many obvious questions here, most never heard being asked publicly or privately, and so very much still to learn. (Could that be a reason to teach this stuff to young people?)

Along with when, people often want to know the size of the population in this part of the world prior to the 18th century arrival of folks on sailing ships. An actual figure would be great, but weak guesses certain to be wrong? Kinda terrible. I don’t see the point. Whether you want them or not, you will be offered these figures in almost every source you look though when trying to investigate almost anything about the past. And if you seek out a variety of different sources you’ll find that in recent generations estimates for the population of what some of us now call British Columbia have landed anywhere from fewer than 100,000 to well over 1,000,000. Those are just formal written sources, though. It’s pretty easy to go off-the-record with people (as I have many times with serious people who are being serious) and find them happy to argue for a population of many millions, even more than exist here today. Of course, at different times different parties have had all sorts of reasons for proposing different numbers, many of which commonly contradict other arguments they wish to forward at other moments (while dismissing oral history, the archaeological record, biology or physics, or all of the above) which is really something to witness.

So, not unlike dates for when the first humans appeared on the continent or on the west coast, our best guesses for population don’t tend to rise to the level of good guesses. Instead of admitting we simply do not know and leaving it at that, we’ve shown a preference for offering numbers based on the total absence of information and, too, so often without any explanation of how those figures were arrived at. Like, why not add a zero or maybe three? Why not five for good measure? Why not several billion people in the Americas two thousand years ago? What I would be willing to say with confidence on population is that very few people offer estimates in the lower ranges anymore, favouring numbers at least as high as several hundred thousand for the “pre-contact” (whatever that means) population of BC. That seems reasonable and will continue to appear so right up until it’s disproved by new evidence and estimates shifting things, perhaps drastically, in one direction or another. And even then, I would happily wager, generations will pass before the record is corrected and we fix our textbooks...

Part of why better estimates are difficult is that some local populations were less obsessed than other folks with quantifying such and maintaining physical records of those. Too, undoubtedly, anyone well-traveled and knowledgeable was older and likely the very ones bringing in and being taken out by combinations of conflict and Old World illness (both resulting in mass casualty events and making transmission of this information between generations or cultures unlikely at best and, of course, eventually impossible.) It seems likely those illnesses, smallpox or scarlet fever, bubonic plague or typhoid, flu or measles, were hosted and delivered to coastal peoples here on the Pacific and in the region around Vancouver Island by people of all stripes, here and away, traversing resource-gathering, trade, warmaking, and slave raiding routes of the continent during the eight centuries preceding the more recent sailing ship-based visitations to this part of the world. (Well-documented is the Spanish arriving at Haida Gwaii, the first documented contact with Europeans [sic], only to find the locals sporting European or perhaps Asian metal goods and seeking trade for more of the same...)

This certainty around the spread of disease (and everything else) is both obvious and somehow left out of all the encyclopedias and school texts I can find. Regardless, it’s well documented in the ship’s logs and journals of early arrivals. George Vancouver, in 1792, remarked on he and his crew discovering that not only was almost everyone they encountered scarred by this most terrible illness, smallpox, but much of the region around the Strait of Georgia, particularly the Fraser River delta, was effectively a mass grave. By his account, the sheer volume of corpses, strewn across the beaches and throughout the forests, buried and unburied, slung up in trees and placed inside canoes, indicated that where these Europeans first landed must have been a burial site for the whole territory and for some time. Much of the south end of what would eventually be called Vancouver Island was also discovered to contain sites of mass burial. Even more famously, around this same time William Clark, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the first English speakers to cross through the vast expanse of land from the Mississippi River to the Pacific, journaled about encountering folks indelibly pockmarked. He also noted the pre-existing devastation of the communities he and Lewis found. Upon arriving in modern-day Oregon, Clark exclaimed in ink, "they all died with the disorder...Small Pox destroyed their nation." Though ignored or denied in popular culture, I don’t know why any doubt would exist that generations prior to the arrival of English speakers on the Pacific coast, perhaps centuries, most of those communities would have been hit, perhaps many times and from many sides, by a whole variety of exotic illnesses passed along by family, friend, foe, and foreigner alike. Seems nearly certain if you ask me.

Smallpox was just one of many extremely devastating plagues that could have run through any part of the continent unchecked anytime after the first intracontinental Pacific or Atlantic transit. Though the details could change at any moment, at present it seems that the initial conveyance occurred when the Norse arrived in Greenland and Newfoundland. That's right, not so fellow named Chris, as you were doubtless told. It looks like those "Vikings", several thousand of them, were in Greenland for centuries and encountered North America during that time (just as spelled and spoken out for centuries in their chronicles). There’s also good reason to believe they engaged in friendly trade and ferocious combat with people who were already in the area when they arrived. At the very least, we know they were in modern-day Canada more than 1,000 years ago, constructed an entire village suitable for year-round living to house maybe 100-200 people. Along with shelters and a large kitchen, the inhabitants crafted a charcoal kiln, carpentry workshop, a forge for iron-working, and more. And there’s some evidence those Norsefolk may have resided in the area, or at least popped in and out regularly, for as long as a century. And if you consider the closest distance between Greenland and this settlement site in northern Newfoundland is more than 2,200 nautical miles, it’s almost inconceivable that the Norse went straight to that site and nowhere else along the coasts of Baffin Island or Labrador, at just a fraction of the distance. And, even if they were simply blown there by a storm, it seems unlikely that, with such a robust settlement so far south, they failed to explore any further at any point over several generations. Seems far more likely, if only to me, that we just have yet to find evidence of those travels or other camping sites or settlements.

What’s important here is that all this knowledge of the Norse excursion and habitation was preserved in oral form since these events transpired and in written form relatively soon after, all existing many centuries prior to today. To this pool of knowledge a mountain of archaeological evidence was added and widely published about in the early 1960s. Canada even designated this complete 11th century Norse settlement, known as L’Anse aux Meadows, a National Historic Site in 1968. A decade later, this village gained UNESCO World Heritage Site status. Much more work and recognition has continued from then until the present. (There was also a large stone slab carved with the image of a small Norse ship and covered in what looks like proto-Norse runes discovered a few years back in Ontario. The archaeology community is being quiet about it... An 18th or 19th century forgery? Why? Would it have been impossible for some folks from a century-old village in on the north Atlantic coast to pop down the St Lawrence? Why? Who among the early European settlers or their grandchildren, jokers and fraudsters, knew of this Norse habitation here if we only confirmed as much int he 20th century? I mean, your high school history teacher, a century and a half later, doesn't seem to know. And, of those tricksters, who knew or had access to a proto-Norse text to transcribe or a dictionary for translation?...)

Despite these facts about Norse arrival and habitation being irrefutable and easily available my whole life, I only learned of any of the above on my own recently. Still, instead of this account, like everyone else seemingly, I only ever heard about some Genoan dude named Columbus, a name I still hear repeated today as if that fellow was the first European to cross the Atlantic or to make contact with the peoples of the Americas or to settle here. And in case you think I was weirdly misled by one confused teacher or I was just sleeping through school or something, and missing out on all the great scholarship on offer by educators, even today I don’t find the terms: Viking, Norse, Nordic, or Scandinavian in any BC elementary or high school Social Studies curricula. By contrast, many Asian, African, European, and American cultures (practically everyone but the Norse) appear all over the place in those same documents. Even recent texts authored by leading voices, top researchers, and official sources of all sorts seeking to gift us an accurate and verifiable exposition, even ones found in this decade in public school libraries and college reading lists, all provide the next generation things like:

“When non-native people first came to this continent some 500 years ago…”
“After Europeans arrived in North America, a new period began lasting from 1492 C.E. until 1650 C.E.”
“The arrival of Europeans, starting with the Spanish in the West Indies in 1492…”
An introduction to first-contact between Europeans and First Nations and first settlement in the Americas: “Spanish: Columbus's first settlement in the New World, 1493.”
“In 1492 the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean islands—a momentous event in world history.”
“In 1497, when Anglo-Italian navigator and explorer John Cabot landed on Newfoundland’s rocky shores and kicked off the European invasion of North America…”
“1500s: The fur trade brings the first Europeans to North America.”
First mention of people from elsewhere on a timeline going back 14,000 years: “1500s-1600s saw European whalers and traders begin arriving in the North.”
“Non-indigenous plant species have been introduced since the first Europeans arrived in North America in the 15th century.”

Make of this what you will. How do the above facts land with me? They certainly quash the assertion I've heard from Western anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and educators my whole life: that their own fields always had a kind of weird bias against non-Europeans which could be best seen in their privileging of written history over oral and that this bias was so very obviously due to their unwitting or uncontrollable racism or xenophobia. How does that narrative look to you in light of 30 generations of “European” scholars, including those authoring textbooks today, totally rejecting the Norse Sagas in both oral and written forms as well as a sea of modern scholarship relating to those texts? Looks to me like this bias hypothesis is total nonsense. It also seems pretty obvious that this whole deal about firsts and who has been here for how long is more real and interesting than almost anyone will allow it to be…

What we all do appear to agree upon is that contact across the Atlantic picked up significantly at the end of the 1400s. So, if it hadn’t yet happened, Asian, African, and European disease introduction was now inevitable. As the monuments and textbooks tell, Spanish and Portuguese empires sent out explorers to claim the Americas for themselves in the 1490s. The Portuguese visited and charted the area around modern-day Canada, specifically Newfoundland and Nova Scotia by 1502 at the latest, establishing fishing outposts around the islands in the 1520s. Though our concern here is Canada theirs was not. The Portuguese were far more interested in the Atlantic coast of South America and established settlements all over what is today Brazil. Meanwhile, the Spanish were busy just about everywhere else in the Americas.

About two decades after founding settlements in the Caribbean starting in 1493, in what some of us now call Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the Spanish continued expanding into what is today Cuba and Venezuela. You can find plenty of accounts and entire books about all the horrors that unfolded in these places and beyond around this time, if you’re into that sort of thing. Though the Spanish were brutal, the local empires were no better and had made themselves so many enemies by their own domineering that taking them out was made far simpler than otherwise. Cavalry, swords and armour, muskets, and cannons also helped, of course. By the end of 1519, the Spanish, or rather Hernan Cortés (the clerk and notary with effectively no military experience and operating against the will of Spanish authorities), had taken 500 men and 13 horses and landed on the Yucatán Peninsula in Maya territory. With essential aid from the noble-born Nahuatl- and Maya-speaking translator and consort Malintzin, Cortés and his crew and thousands of Tlaxcalan, Totonacs, and Nahuas allies sacked the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, likely one of the largest cities on the planet at that time. Within just two years of landing on the mainland of the continent, Cortés was building a new Spanish capital, Mexico City, upon the ruins of Tenochtitlan (not unlike Axayacatl, Aztec leader of Tenochtitlan, did to the city of Tlatelolco some years earlier.)

By 1532, Francisco Pizarro (the illiterate peasant, Cortés’ second cousin, founder of the city of Lima) was leading the Spanish and other Indigenous allies to conquer the Inca empire in present-day Peru. It took four decades but, in 1572, Túpac Amaru, the last Inca Emperor, was captured and executed at Cuzco (in a move remarkably similar to what generations of Inca leaders did to the Cañari, Caranqui, Lupaqa, and many others). After these conquests, there was little resistance to landing millions of Spanish colonists in the Americas. And that they did. Those folks erected many settlements and churches and also founded dozens of universities up and down the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, from what is now southern Chile to central Mexico and throughout the Caribbean, with construction dates ranging from 1538 to 1792.

The Spanish were also in North America, of course, planting crosses and establishing missions all across the Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific coasts of what is today the southern United States. They travelled pretty far inland as well, far up the Mississippi, Pecos, and Colorado rivers all throughout the first half of the 16th century. But the Spanish were dominant and still busy in those areas long after that. Mission San Francisco Solano, established in 1823 in Sonoma, California, for example, was their northernmost and final mission, established to convert the Native population to Roman Catholicism and oppose Russian encroachment from the north (who arrived in North America a century earlier and by this time had built Fort Ross in what is today northern California.)

Was disease introduced over all these centuries, perhaps many times? Likely. Were the Spanish and Russians interacting with everyone all up and down the Pacific coast? Of course. And were the nations of the northwest coast having the most intimate possible interactions with folks as far north as Alaska and as far south as California at this same time, just as they’d been doing regularly for eons? Certainly. So, who else was getting in on this trade, settlement, and disease dispersal?

FRANCE

In 1534, a generation after the Spanish and Portuguese first spotted, charted, and landed on the north Atlantic coast of North America (five centuries after the Norse, it must be repeated), the French joined in and started landing, planting crosses of their own, and laying claim to large swathes of North America. Eventually they would claim almost everything from the present-day St Lawrence River and Hudson Bay in the north to Florida and the Gulf in the south; basically everything north of Spanish claims. But all that took time. Even surviving one winter in the north of the continent took time to achieve. Just think about it. How shocking would it be to know you had not travelled any farther north than Bordeaux or Lyon, Milan or Venice, basically the northern Mediterranean and at sea level, with no real mountains to be seen never mind having been scaled, and to have a totally normal summer and then get an early fall cold snap that lasts four months, drives down to -30, and includes a hundred days or more of heavy snow? Yikes. Despite being allied with and relying upon the locals (namely the Algonquin, Montagnais, and Huron) and even with a fortress built at what is now Québec City, the French were few in numbers and their project relatively fragile as a result. They were continually beaten back by climate, illness, and regular conflicts with non-allied locals and eventually other European empires, mostly the English. This meant, like others, it took nearly a century to establish a more permanent settlement and build up a population in the territory they’d christened New France. In the meantime, the famed coureur des bois (independent entrepreneurial souls) and voyageurs (the officially licensed counterparts to the coureur des bois) — who were encouraged to improve their poor survivability, trading capacity, and lowly social status by marrying into local communities — probed deep into the interior of the continent in search of valuable pelts, especially beaver (Castor canadensis).

By 1650, more than a century after their first ship’s arrival, what is today Montreal was a settlement of just a few dozen settlers and Québec City was home to around 100. Something like 700 French inhabitants are estimated to have resided across the entire region. (That said, seemingly every source offers different dates and figures, as ever. So these numbers are just my own best guess.) For scale, a single large ship from that period, like Jacques Cartier’s Grande Hermine, which explored the St Lawrence River in 1541, held 200-300 crew. A larger carrack, the multi-masted workhorse of the 16th century, used for long-distance trade and exploration, could carry up to 450 people, including crew and passengers, as seen with the Nossa Senhora dos Mártires. The Soleil Royal, built in 1669, held up to 1,200 men. Translation: many generations after their first attempted settlements, the extremely dispersed “European” population of a place already home to many hundreds of thousands (or many millions, or maybe a billion if you prefer) had exploded to numbers equivalent to one large or perhaps two small boatloads of people disbursed and huddling along the St Lawrence. So this appears to be what the aforementioned and oh so popular “European invasion” of Canada looked like in reality. For a better sense of the interest and concern the Kingdom of France gave to its “colony” in New France during this period, we might notice they committed maybe 180,000 to the French Wars of Religion (1562 to 1598), more than 250,000 to the Franco-Dutch War (1672–1678), and 400,000 troops to the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). So, from where I sit, all of this makes the notion that the French were trying to invade, colonize, or even really sustain any permanent settlements in what is today Canada, rather than just trying to survive the winter and acquire a few furs with the least investment of people and treasure possible, look pretty obscene.

If I were writing this history for modern audiences I would equate the first (or, rather, sixth) European century in Canada as more closely approximating an extended, poorly informed and equipped camping trip than anything typically presented: as attempts at business ventures, settlement-building, engaging in colonization or conquest. Sorry, the math just don’t math on that.

ENGLAND

A generation after the French, the English had a similar go. Though King Henry VII commissioned Giovanni Caboto (aka “John Cabot”), the Venetian, to explore and chart the Americas in 1496, the English only first attempted any settlements close to century later. They started with a few failed settlements, as was the trend, in 1585 and 1607, Roanoke and Popham. (Again, it has to be said, this is what textbooks, educators, and others call the “European invasion of North America [or Canada]”: no one for five hundred years; then a boat or two shows up and does some mapping but no one returns for another century; and then a two dozen people arrive, all of whom die of starvation and exposure nine weeks into the first winter; then that is tried again, with the same result, a generation later… This whole narrative doesn't look absurd to you?) Another settlement, James Fort, was established in 1607 in what is now Virginia. Though it was abandoned several times and nearly failed it did manage to stick around. To that, the English added Cupids in Newfoundland in 1610 and Saint George in Bermuda in 1612. Altogether, from the Caribbean to the Maritimes, about 100 people survived their first winter in these initial three “successful” English “settlements” in the New World. Sometime after 1630 a permanent settlement, only seasonally populated by maybe 50 to 100 people, was built up at Saint John's, Newfoundland, which to that point had been nothing more than a shelter for Portuguese, French, and English fishing vessels there in the land of cod.

To procure lucrative furs from the New World, in 1670, nearly two centuries after their first visit-by-proxy to present-day Canada, and almost a century after their first attempted settlements, the English established the Hudson’s Bay Company. (HBC: a business that was captured, starved, and eventually strangled to death by a private equity firm at the time of writing in 2025). Unlike with the French, HBC company policy until the early 19th century prohibited employees from settling in the region after their work term. Along with that, families were rarely brought to the New World nor were wives and children from the New permitted to return to the Old. This meant that, over the entire next century, England and the company would only build a handful of outposts. And, from what I can tell, those were typically a single, one-room structure for storing essentials and trade goods. Less commonly what they built was a fortified outpost accommodating between 10 and 40 people.

I was always given the impression, and believed (like an idiot), that what happened was everywhere they could possibly reach, an unimaginably wealthy and expansive empire funded and constructed a substantial militarized fort, built and manned with soldiers and workers for the purpose of maximum resource control and continental conquest. Nothing of the sort took place. And no one was so motivated. To give an even better sense of this, it wasn’t until 1749, two-and-a-half centuries after Cabot and more than a century after founding Saint John’s, the English added just their second serious settlement, at Halifax, Nova Scotia. By this time, as best I can tell, the HBC had dropped one trading post, a building, in what is today the province of Quebec, on the southeast corner of James Bay, near the mouth of the Rupert River on the lands of the Cree Nation. They also constructed three such posts in present-day Ontario (separated by about 400km, or twelve days by canoe under ideal conditions) and two more in present-day Manitoba (about 250km apart, or a week’s travel if you were quick and had no run-ins with any polar bears) — all hugging James and Hudson Bays. To this they eventually added their first inland posts, Henley House (literally a house), in 1743, followed by Split Lake House and Nelson House, completed by 1760.

In present-day Canada (or rather, less than half of today’s Canada; what they labelled Rupert’s Land, eventually Upper and Lower Canada, and the Maritimes — a land mass maybe 3,200 km [or 2,000 miles] across, with an area of something like 4.5 million km² [1.5 million mi²]) there were shockingly few company men or English loyalists. Between the years of 1500 to 1650 what existed was half of one boatload of men (effectively no women) and a handful of seasonal outposts, all persisting only by maintenance of friendly relations with the locals and the French (who they occasionally lost everything to.) A whole century later, with little more permanent infrastructure built up, the English (as well as Scottish and Irish) settler population across that same landmass looks to have been around one person per 500km² or something like:

250 in Rupert’s Land
250 in Upper and Lower Canada
8,000 in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland

For scale, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge each had enrollments of around 30,000, with annual graduating classes of between 250-500 across the 17th century. Or, to think of this another way, to contrast with HBC, the Starbucks coffee company was founded in 1971, built its first store in Canada in 1987, in Vancouver, and had more than 23,000 employees across 1,500 stores (commonly not paying any rent) in every corner of the country, sometimes on opposing corners of individual intersections, all within a single generation. Based on the timing and numbers alone, or people’s perfect ignorance of those, one of these commercial ventures (HBC) is interpreted as a critical and particularly aggressive part of a rapid foreign invasion and the other (Starbucks) a perfectly tepid and benign thing. To my eye, the most significant difference between these cases is that in order for Starbucks to drop a cafe in Vancouver, Prince George, and Kelowna it was not required to first declare war on neighbouring communities and nations and its staff wasn’t daily engaging in mortal combat with employees of Tim Hortons or Dunkin Donuts.

NETHERLANDS

The Dutch, like the Portuguese, were not really interested in Canada but they did have a significant, though small presence nearby that’s worth mentioning for anyone who doesn’t know it. (You could also listen to Constantinople, by They Might Be Giants.) For their part, the Dutch first landed in Guyana in the 1590s and eventually built and sustained a small colony there. By 1614 they were up the Atlantic coast building a fort on what is now the Hudson River, Fort Nassau, and laying claim to everything between the French colony in the north and the English colony around James Fort to the south. Just four years later the fort was destroyed in a flood and it took another six years to return and constructed a new one, Fort Orange, just a few kilometres up the river in what is modern-day Albany, New York. Shortly after that they established Fort Amsterdam and the surrounding settlement of New Amsterdam at the confluence of the Hudson and East rivers on what is now Manhattan Island. By 1664 the English took over New Amsterdam (which at its height was home to about 2,000 people) and all Dutch operations throughout their North American endeavour of New Netherland (with a total population of maybe 8,500, mostly Dutch but also many others, including Indigenous, French, Germans, Scandinavians, Sephardic Jews, West Africans, and more.)

INCONCLUSION

This whole discussion of Europeans arriving from across the Atlantic is to point out that whatever violence, transfers of knowledge and resources, and intermarriages that undoubtedly accompanied all of this commercial activity and claiming of land, it’s doubtless that the foreign population, and even folks born here with ancestors recently from abroad, was as infinitesimal as they were geographically and temporally disbursed. That was true throughout the Americas but especially true in Canada. Also certain is that illnesses from the Old World(s) were seeded into the New far earlier than and far beyond any direct points of contact. Among many other things (including horses, goats, pigs, and sheep), the Spanish and others traded flu, smallpox, and typhus for syphilis and tuberculosis (as well as corn, squash, potatoes, tomatoes and more) — in what is now known as the Columbian Exchange. I would be shocked to learn that you were educated on this far differently than I. All I know is that the picture I was always given is pretty hard to swallow with the slightest (seemingly always omitted) context.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Canadian Geographic, 2018 - Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada

https://indigenouspeoplesatlasofcanada.ca

The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2023 - Dorset culture

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/dorset-culture

Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism, 2025 - L’Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site

https://www.newfoundlandlabrador.com/destinations/lanse-aux-meadows

Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 2019 - New horizons at L’Anse aux Meadows

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1907986116

Duke University Press, 2012 - In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery

https://www.dukeupress.edu/in-search-of-first-contact

Curious Canadian History, 2023 - Columbus who? The Norse in Newfoundland

https://shows.acast.com/cool-canadian-history/episodes/s8e15-columbus-who-the-norse-in-newfoundland

US National Park Service, 2023 - History of Native Americans in the Lower New River Region

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https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2745.13968

World History Encyclopedia, 2022 - Spanish Conquest & Exploration in North America in the 16th century

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You're Dead To Me, 2020 - The Aztecs

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07pjcw5

You're Dead To Me, 2025 - Hernán Cortés and Malintzin: the Spanish conquest of Mexico

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00282py

You're Dead To Me, 2024 - The Inca Empire

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001wydq