Hurr durr

[sliefoxx.livejournal.com]

Happy Thanksgiving to all the USAmericans!

So Spain shows up in South America and does many terrible things in search of gold. It's not until missionaries start showing up and being like "THIS IS NOT GOD'S WORK" does the Spanish monarchy say "Oh this might not be such a good idea to act this way maybe we should ban slavery". It took a while. A long while.

Then France is like "Well shit, Spain has all the fertile land and there's still no passage to Asia" so France goes north. Lo! There's Canada in the way of Asia but there's some natives that France decides to trade with (Because the slavery thing wasn't very diplomatic). While the natives still think Europeans are idiots, ugly, and dirty, a profitable fur trade is started as well as a fisheries in Nova Scotia. Cod is sort of a big thing. And beavers.

So England is once again religiously bipolar and its the Protestants' turn to be persecuted. They've heard by now of France's success in fishing and think they're going to go to the New World as fishers and trade with the Netherlands and everything's gonna be awesome. Except they travel without proper fishing supplies, most of the immigrants have trades like metal-working and banking, and they arrive damn close to winter.

So they all starve. Ironically the ocean was full of shell fish which would have been more than enough but the English were grossed out by those suspicious creepy crawlies all over the beaches.

The natives take notice of the starving English when the English start raiding their villages for food. The English are so pathetic that a number of the villages don't bother to raid them back but show them how to make it through the winter and later how to farm (A year later the first Thanksgiving was had to celebrate being settled for a year. They wouldn't have done it without the natives' help but I'm sure it was all very self-gratifying and without tribute).

The English are so few in number, they don't initially destroy the natives intentionally but with disease. The natives figure out they're being made sick by the people they helped and there's a long and bloody history that the English were helpless against (despite their firearms, which were useless against the far more accurate... arrows. You heard me). At least until the English simply had more numbers and more disease.

And that's why Americans celebrate Thanksgiving!

Actually, Thanksgiving is about celebrating our bounty and spending time with family. We give thanks for all the blessings that keep us alive and well. That's our excuse now anyway.

:)