In the 1500s and 1600s, Britain and France, as well as the rest of Europe, possessed rich farmland, large forests, functioning legal systems and relatively stable societies. Why would people seek to leave this environment and risk a hazardous sea journey in small wooden ships lasting months and then face annual mortality rates approaching 50%?
Was it the attraction of the adventure to be found in the New World or was there something fundamentally wrong with the Old World? British and French colonists heading for the New World left behind mild climates, magnificent forests and some of the most fertile soils on the planet. The average January temperature in what is now Quebec City was 19C colder than that of London or Paris. Why did they decide to pull up stakes, leave behind all that they knew and move to an unknown and harsh new land?
Because in the 1600s, that rich resource base had been degraded and over-worked by a large and growing population. Abundant and rich for centuries, the resources became depleted as human numbers swelled dramatically reducing the per capita resource base and increasing the cost per unit of those resources. In other words, the result was what we would call today “inflation” of real costs which pushed large numbers of people into poverty and desperate circumstances.
Population cycles, which are a very predictable feature of human history, were very much in play. The superb work of Geoffrey Parker details the process of social decline and collapse in his book “Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century”.
During periods of unfavourable climate, not only could growth not be sustained but just maintaining the current population became impossible. Soil and fisheries depletion were exacerbated by climate variations and where once there was abundance, there was now famine. People didn’t just want to leave because of political strife (also driven by resource decline) but they had to leave or watch their children starve.
Humans have always migrated as the math of climate and resource accessibility moved against them.
For example, between 1850 and 1930, roughly 1.2 million to 1.5 million Swedes emigrated, and tens of thousands starved during the catastrophic famine of 1867–1869. Roughly 25% to 30% of the Swedish population ultimately left the country or perished from starvation-related hardships over the mid to late 1800s.
Also, maybe the hardships of migration was better understood by those people than we might think today but there was lure of potential; the possibility to have one’s future in one’s own hands rather than dictated to you by social convention and the grinding down of the oppression of numbers on a depleted resource base.
What is the difference between the New World of huge abundance and the Old World of famine and decline? Maybe not so much as 500 years of rapid growth featuring unsustainable exploitation where virtually every resource has effectively been mined past its limits and is in decline which has lowered abundance and raised real costs.
With its endless forests, incredibly rich fisheries, virgin soils and untapped mineral resources Canada, and the Americas in general, were seen by nearly destitute migrants as “an endless treasure chest of natural resources”. Over the centuries of rapid exploitation, “endless” in the eyes of a thousands of colonists with rudimentary hand tools, has ceased to be an accurate description for the current population of millions of consumers. Now equipped with massive mechanized machinery bigger than churches, which can operate 24/7 to move mountains and strip the landscape of its riches at an incredible pace, the end of the treasure chest is very clearly in view.
It took humans thousands of years to deplete the resource base of Europe. It has taken only hundreds of years to do a similar level of damage to the Americas and our societies maintain themselves only at the pleasure of currently abundant fossil fuels and a still favourable but changing climate.
A 17th century colonist time transported to the modern day New World, once over their techno-shock, would see a great many similarities with the world they were desperate to leave.
We now live in a world with no virgin resource bases left. Would those colonists still risk life and limb to make their journey?