What if Iberia & Macaronesia were ISOT from 582 to 1492 ?

Which will be yielding fish, but no bonanzas of gold or agricultural land or native labor, so could it easily just lead to a slow expansion of the European understanding of the size of the "islands" to the west in the Atlantic.

So Europe could get well into the ubiquitous spread of printed works, the Reformation, religious warfare, the Counter-Reformation, Habsburg-Valois wars, the waxing Ottoman threat to Central Europe, and scientific (astronomical, anatomical, optical, medical, mathematical) developments of the 1500s and (the first half of the) 1600s before the full extent of the American continents are mapped out by Europeans, the Indian Ocean routes to the far east are mapped by the Europeans, and trades by those oceanic routes become commonplace.

In America Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia can host small fishing camps in the early 1500s, turning into year round settlements by mid-century, with some fishermen or traders going further up or down the west coast, but nobody finding fabulous wealth to spur yet further exploration or royal conquests, expeditions or land claims. In the 1600s, opportunity and market demand may be enough for some people at some of these coastal settlements to try out trading for furs and selling them at a mark-up, which will attract more European participants to northeast North America.

Perhaps by the 1620s or 1630s, enough fishermen and fur-trappers good at drawing or writing will have passed through the eastern seaboard and northeast North America to note the utility of the land, its suitability for living, and the drastic emptying of natives, just as religious eccentrics in England and Europe may be getting dissatisfied enough to be contemplate building a "city on a hill" in the wilderness, away from more 'corrupt' environments. In this manner, something like New England colonies comes into being *before* Mexican mining colonies or Caribbean slave colonies, or tidewater tobacco tobacco colonies, even as the American tropics are mysterious and obscure.

By the later 1600s, improvements in ship technology and scientific curiosity and commercial development, end up making curiosity insatiable for further mapping out the American coasts, leading to the discoveries of Mesoamerica, the Caribbean, Peru, the African Cape and Indian Ocean trade, the first circumnavigation by the early 1700s. The English starting from New England may have an early lead but the French and others may end up taking part in conquests at more southern latitudes, which will only then introduce great quantities of gold and silver to Europe, and crops like the tomato, cacao bean, maize and potato. This will be around the same time Russia reaches the Pacific and borders China.

The delay in this has a huge global economic, epidemiological, and nutritional, and balance of power effect however. Delay of increased sugar intake in Europe and Eurasia. Delay of rum consumption globally. Delay of the spread of tomatoes and potatoes, even more than maize - this will make the religious wars in northern Europe in Germany and Ireland less survivable. Maize *might* get imported from northeast USA. But these New World crops won't get exported to the Far East and as much of Africa, resulting in less population growth there*, as well as Europe, while untouched parts of the western hemisphere have less population loss during the delay. Spain is cash poorer short-term, as is Europe as a whole, and even China, but this also puts off any inflationary hangovers in the Old World.

Chocolate and tobacco are introduced later to western palates.

*although for Africa, lesser population growth is being offset by lesser population loss from slave trade for one to two centuries.