Dr. Sam White, the author of A Cold Welcome: The Little Ica Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America is a history professor at The Ohio State University, where he teaches courses on environmental history (in global and American contexts). White received his M.A. in middle East Studies and Modern History from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland before going on to gain his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2008. His first book on the Ottoman Empire during the “Little Ice Age” was very well received, winning prizes from Associations focused on the region much like A Cold Welcome, which has received awards from the Sixteenth-Century society in addition to many other accolades detailed on his university website[1]. To overly simplify things, Dr. White is very knowledgeable and highly regarded for his contributions to environmental history. This book is about how climate affected the initial European colonies in the Americas with special emphasis on how preconceptions and misconceptions about the New World’s climate negatively affected attempts to settle these areas as it colored the interactions between settlers and natives during a time of climate change known as the “Little Ice Age”.
The book is divided along geographical lines in that it focuses on each of the major Colonial Empires of the New World (Spanish, French and English) in turn and their efforts at colonization over the centuries. Within each of the subsections, the book maintains a chronological narrative as Dr. White seeks to demonstrate how chance and contingency played a massive role in the initial settlement of North America, especially on the matter of which settlements succeeded and failed.
Aside from the introduction which briefly discusses the Viking settlements in Greenland and ‘Vinland’ (modern day Newfoundland) Dr. White’s book begins with the Spanish and their first colonies in the Caribbean, followed by their efforts in Mexico and first settlements in Florida. Dr. White makes heavy use of both primary and secondary sources in his detailing of the many misconceptions that caused the Spanish colonists no end of difficulties in adapting to the environments they encountered. Indeed, the very first ‘story’ for lack of a better term that White tells us about the preconceptions held by European colonists was their belief in the old Greco-Roman idea that climate zones were effectively rings around the world and that the climate of the Old World at one latitude would be equivalently transposed to that of the New. Indeed, Dr. White points out in most European languages there was no word for ‘climate’ as we use it today, with instead the word latitude fulfilling the same role. I found the small narratives that Dr. White wove throughout his work to be very interesting and helpful in connecting with the otherwise seemingly disconnected source material, allowing for more ‘continuity’ between expeditions to the same region by the same state over the 16th and 17th centuries. As Dr. White states in his chapters on Spanish and French colonial efforts, expeditions to less inhabitable regions like Florida were often separated by years or decades, preventing colonists from ‘acclimating’ to the region’s climate or gaining a good sense of what to expect from the lands to their North.
As the book continues, Dr. White details how the preconceptions carried from Europe, combined with the often incredibly short-lived efforts by the initial colonies (not to mention the generally catastrophic climatic changes brought about by the Little Ice Age) led to the Spanish abdicating their claims to all the New World granted to them by the Pope in the Treaty of Tordesillas. These chance failures, Dr. White argues, directly led to the French and English colonial efforts along the Eastern Seaboard of the modern U.S. and Canada. The difficulties the French and English had in establishing their own permanent settlements led to Spain, under the leadership of Philip the II, to vacillate between destroying their rivals’ colonies as they did with the French in the Carolinas or ignoring their efforts, as exemplified by the English in Roanoke and later, Jamestown. Dr. White goes on to connect the effects of the Little Ice Age in Europe to these colonial expeditions, as the environmental turmoil on the continent made the objectively horrific experiences at Jamestown (starvation, disease, cannibalism) seem much less hazardous or at least bearable when compared to the tensions in Europe.
The book culminates in an in-depth discussion of the trials and tribulations of the Jamestown Colony, such as its overly optimistic plannings by the Virginia Company in London, its difficulties in establishing basic subsistence farming and its growing hostilities with the natives, with Dr. White closing off the ‘story’ of the Jamestown colony with a description of how the surviving settlers decided to abandon the colony and sail away only to run into their reinforcements arriving in the mouth of the Chesapeake, whose combined efforts allowed the colony to persist despite its perennial lack of food and hostile neighbors.
All-in-all, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and will be honestly adding it to the list of books I would like to personally have a copy of. I would say that Dr. White does an excellent job of showing how the experiences of these initial colonists shaped the approaches of their respective nations and how relatively simple misunderstandings and preconceptions led to immense suffering on the part of colonists and lasting negative impressions regarding the viability of settlement in North America. This book, I believe, would be a good read for anyone interested in understanding how the environment has and can have a massive impact on the course of history and how the initial settlement of the Americas by Europeans was dictated by far more than economic, geographic, or political realities.
[1] https://history.osu.edu/people/white.2426
