Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

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My main lack of trust for this is the over leaning on "incompetence" as the explanation. I'm fully ok with the idea that they made mistakes and were not ready for the vastly different climate. I'm even comfortable with the idea that they may have thought to get more in trade than they were able to get.

That said, I think this vastly overstates how much people got their food from trade. Spices and some goods were, of course, big in trade. Mainline food? Not so much. Most people were not able to stockpile large quantities of food. Some cities maybe could. But it would have been grains/seeds or actual live stock. Not meats or anything that needed refrigeration. For... well, obvious reasons. Even cured meats typically have a very short timeline. So, fishing and hunting and basic gardening would have remained something that people had to do. Pretty much everywhere.

And indeed, this is inline with your edited in article. What were they trying to trade for? Corn. Why did they need to get it by trade, because their crop was bad. Why was the trade not working well? Because nobody had excess corn to trade. Long term stockpiles just couldn't exist to the scale that we think of today. And a lack of rain meant everyone was having a bad crop.

Finally, I want to be clear that I'm perfectly comfortable with the idea that I'm just flat out wrong here. I've just grown super doubtful of a lot of the "these morons were able to sail across the atlantic, but were too stupid to do anything that would have resembled living off the land." Despite most living at the time looking like what we would call that.

Two things… one, they didn’t sail across the Atlantic. They hired ships and professional sailors to sail them across. They were passengers. That crossing wasn’t necessarily an easy one, but it was much more like what happens today with wealthy people who pay sherpas to help them climb Everest. The climbers have to have some knowledge and experience, but they aren’t the experts, and without the sherpas they'd be pretty lost.

Second, the point of this whole thread is that even at home, these were not people who were living off the land. They were wealthy Londoners. They lived in the city. They weren’t even raising their own kitchen gardens, they had people for that.

Wealthy Londoners bought their food just like you and I do. They had food markets. They used currency to buy grain, vegetables, and meat.

FYI, salted meat and fish will last for years and, if stored in a reasonably cool place like a root cellar, for decades. I personally have had Virginia hams that were over ten years old. Dried corn will last for centuries if stored properly.

The reason the settlers made so many diplomatic mistakes with the natives was because their leadership was primarily former military, and they saw the natives as a military problem. This made some sense because when they set out, they thought their primary challenge was going to be fending off military attacks from the Spanish. But that assumption turned out to be tragically wrong.

I'm not saying these people were all incompetent buffoons. Some of them were trained military officers. Some were craftsmen — there’s ample evidence of metal work and glassmaking at Jamestown. They were all experienced horsemen, and they were comfortable with firearms and bladed weapons. But what they weren’t was outdoorsmen, or even farmers, and in hindsight that’s what they needed to be. Once they got actual farmers on site, their immediate problems started to clear up.

On this, I would have to see much stronger proof.

I can grant that very dense cities such as London had food markets necessary to supply the city. With the huge caveat that those markets had to have fairly rapid turnover for all of their offerings. Don't forget that most city dwellers had maybe a single shared room with others that they could call home. Such that they likely consumed the food on purchase, with nowhere else to really take it. Even "wealthy" dwellers that did have a place to take food likely couldn't take much. Where do you think they would be able to store it?

And passenger ships in the 1600s were very very different than any sort of passenger ship today. Sure, they were not responsible for ship duties. But they were likely on their own for basic survival on the ship.

Salted meat and fish can last for years if stored in modern containment techniques, sure. With what they would have had in the 1600s, I have serious doubts that you'd get such results. Especially without the resources of a full city at your disposal.

Again, I'm comfortable that I can be wrong on all of this. I would have to see much stronger proof, though. Most of what we call "living off the land" today was largely "typical rural life" for a long long time.

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