A lengthy discussion of "Empty America"

Have you heard of the original of the original scenario by long time what-iffer (25 years+) Doug Hoff? Here’s the summary in the AH.com wiki: timelines:empty_america [alternatehistory.com wiki]

It is a nifty old AH timeline, that I think is worthy of some renewed discussion.

First of all, although it is never spelled out in the original, but I would think that any “Empty America”, ie, no Amerindians, scenario, would have to be an ASB scenario, where basically the OTL Americas are replaced with an ISOT of a pre-human wilderness version of the Americas just prior to the arrival of old world discoverers?

Why? Because I figure that if if you do not use ASBs, and just otherwise contrive to block the main historical migrations down the Pacific coast and across the Bering land bridge, you would end up just having some alternate, somewhat later, migratory wave of northeast Asian people, porto-Aleuts, or Inuits, or Chuckchis, or Yakuts, or even Polynesians, reach out to the “Empty America”, and *POOF*, they would expand across the continents and become the new “Amerindians”. [And that is not even getting into the accumulating butterflies in the old world that would wipe out all known Eurasian cultures like Chinese, Vikings, Portuguese, and Spaniards, from a geologic/climatological PoD over 10,000 years ago as drastic as removing the Bering land bridge from history]

So, with that said, I would have to suggest that the hidden, unspoken ASB event in the original Doug Hoff timeline would have been the ISOT’ing of a pre-human Americas to a year shortly (ie within just a couple centuries) before the Viking discovery of North America , circa 1000 AD.

Now in OTL, where Vinland wasn’t “empty” of humans but had the so-called “Skraeling” people, it was marginal and not sustainable for the Norse. It was ultimately abandoned, and people have pointed out the challenges to actually get it to survive and grow. The original “Empty America” TL, at least in an indirect fashion, too the view that the Amerindians were an obstacle, because Vinland prospers in the TL and becomes permanent. I think it was not just related to the absence of mammoths, and the harvesting of mammoth tusk ivory for profit.

Do we all think this is the most likely outcome to transpire, thorough Norse colonization?

Or would a wholly untamed and uncleared wilderness be *more* difficult for the Norse, so far from home, to permanently colonize, without Amerindians to clear the land, grow suitable native crops, learn from, and trade with?

Has anyone done a timeline playing with the premise of an “Empty America” staying empty past the Viking era, until Columbus and his age of exploration? There’s Turtledove’s “A Different Flesh, but that doesn’t count, because it has hominids” and was not at all rigorously realistic.

It would be easy enough to save an “Empty America” for the Columbian era using a well-timed ISOT trick as your PoD, brining a pre-human Americas (including Caribbean) to a 1492 world.

What implications would this have?

I think it would slow interest in the New World, as gold wouldn’t be visible on the surface of the land, and land in the tropics would tend to be more difficult jungle, and there would not be people to enslave or trade with. The most interesting things to be found upon landing could be some completely strange plants and animals. Way less interesting than gold. If Columbus is lucky he will have some guys competent at taxidermy or preserving animal hides. I think keeping any wild animal specimens alive through a trip back across the Atlantic is pretty hopeless.

There would be interest over time in looking around the place to see if there is a way around it to Asia or see if there are places further on with people or interesting things.

The earliest colonial use for American land I see being viable for Europeans is fish drying, sort of a low-medium end activity not of that much interest to Kings. The second activity, of somewhat more interest to Kingdoms and great institutions like merchant houses that would be viable would using tropical islands for sugar plantations worked by prisoners or slaves.

The Americas will not provide unique edible crops or domesticated animals, because there will not have been native people to have developed them from the wild over time. Another colonial venture Europeans will eventually find useful and profitable will be fur-hunting. But that will be slower to develop than OTL, because they won’t be able to learn it from the natives or just buy pelts from natives with the needed tracking, stalking, hunting, trapping skills for the available fur-bearing game. Gardening, livestock raising, and release of pigs and cows and goats, and grain farming will start off as minor sidelights of other activities like sugar growing and fishing and logging. However eventually, don’t know exactly when, people from Europe will come to the temperate regions of the Americas to use the vast amounts of land for farming and pastoralism.

Assuming there's major religious strife and dissatisfaction in 1600s Europe and England for example, do we think by that point Europeans seeking to escape persecution will have conceived of mass permanent agricultural settlements on the Atlantic coast of North America? By 1700 would they have started any such settlements that have started to survive and grow in a serious way?