caffeine_fubar said:
What were the pirates and the colonies of the new world (north america) like?
To appreciate the qualities of the colonies of the New World, you need to see them from the point of view of the colonists.
Europe, in particular England, the source of most of the early settlers of North America, was really crowded. Even by contemporary standards, cities like London were stinking, horrible places. The absolute stagnation of progress that was the legacy of the millennium of Christian theocracy known as the Dark Ages meant that the most basic trivial joys of living, such as bathing and street cleaning, were unknown in Europe. Once a year they'd run a herd of pigs through the streets of the cities, merely converting garbage into feces, while human excrement flowed untreated through the gutters.
Life wasn't quite so sullied by the ignorance of public health measures out in the country, but it was vapid and hopeless. Feudalism was the norm, farmers could not hope to keep much of the proceeds of their labor to enrich the lives of their huge, contraceptive-deprived families. "Nasty, brutish, and short" was an apt contemporary description of European life for all but the most fortunate aristocrats who managed not to die of simple ailments like influenza.
It's been argued in all seriousness that the lives of the people of 16th Century Europe were by most measures
worse than those of their distant Neolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors. They worked harder and for longer hours. They had a less nutritious diet. Due to crowding, poor sanitation, and the execution of "witches" who remembered the herbal remedies and other common-sense medical care of the Stone Age, their health was no better, infant mortality was possibly worse, and their life expectancy was arguably about the same as it was in 25,000BCE, considerably shorter than that of the early civilized peoples.
So from that perspective, imagine what it was like for Europeans to set foot on a continent that was still in the Stone Age. The resources had not been depleted. The ground was clean. Human habitations were not crowded together for as far as the eye could see. The air didn't stink and the water was transparent. Game animals ran free, some in giant herds. There were plenty of trees to cut down to build sturdy houses, and more to burn to keep warm. The natives were, by European standards, funny looking and really odd, but at least they were not lords of the manor and did not expect to be obeyed.
Add to that the religious "freedom" of coming to a place where you could make your own version of Christianity the law, instead of having to sneak around hiding it from someone else who had already made theirs the law.
The New World was a paradise. It had little to do with the actual politics and logistics of establishing the colonies that are discussed to death in history books. It was a state of mind.
Mind you, this was the part of the New World that eventually became the USA. The Spaniards had a totally different experience in Central and South America. Civilizations had already been established there, the Aztec/Maya and Inca. Populations had swollen. Resources were strained; the downfall of the Mayas was in fact due to their stupidly cutting down all the trees and then wondering where to get more wood. The natives did not take kindly to being overrun by European technology and theology -- even less so than their Neolithic cousins north of the Rio Grande. They fought back and made the Spanish colonization a long, ghastly period of bloodshed -- perhaps no worse per capita than what was going on in the English and French colonies, but with a bit more dying on the European side and generally more natives to kill off before declaring the land conquered. In fact, if you ask the people of southern Mexico, the Spaniards have not yet conquered every last square kilometer of their part of the New World.
