A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America

by Sam White

During the late 1500s global temperatures fell to new lows, and around 1600 they reached the coldest point for centuries or even millennia.

The second and related theme is the many and often indirect ways that climate and weather influenced colonial history.

Above all, climate and weather had complicated and consequential impacts on early contacts between Europeans and Native Americans,

Fourth and finally, climate history highlights the role of chance and contingency in North America’s early colonial history.

Three main factors lay behind its persistence: the key role of latitude in efforts to explore and colonize the Americas, the challenges of explaining American climates based on the science of the times, and the climatic changes and extremes brought by the Little Ice Age.

The fundamental problem was that people of the time had no way to measure longitude.

Third, and most important, from 1257 to 1815 there happened to be an unusual number of large tropical volcanic eruptions.

What made the mid-1500s to early 1600s the epitome of the Little Ice Age—what the celebrated French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie dubbed the “hyper-LIA”—was not just the strength of its climatic anomalies but the vulnerability of populations.

According to Ruddiman, the spectacular invasion of Old World empires and diseases into the New World after 1492 momentarily reversed that trend. As most of the population of the Americas died, land fell into disuse, clearing and burning stopped, and forests grew back. For a time during the late 1500s, this loss of people and livestock and the regrowth of vegetation actually drew down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, causing global cooling.

Friar Bartolomé de las Casas, the conscience of the Spanish conquest, summed it all up in his history of Hispaniola: “We should remember that we found the island full of people, whom we erased from the face of the earth, filling it with dogs and beasts.”

Recent research demonstrates another, equally powerful reason for Spain’s imperial retrenchment: the Little Ice Age. Both physical and written sources give clear evidence of a catastrophic shift in climate during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first years of the seventeenth. A series of large volcanic eruptions, in addition to a long-term cooling trend, brought some of the coldest global temperatures in thousands of years. A shift in atmospheric circulation contributed year upon year of unseasonable weather, floods, and droughts.