A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe's Encounter with North America [Book Review]

Abstract

In a foundational 1982 article, Karen Ordahl Kupperman set forth the “puzzle of the American climate.” English propagandists, drawing heavily on classical geographies that equated temperature with latitude, promised colonists temperate climes yielding citrus, spices, silk, and mineral wealth. Instead, colonists faced harsh winters. As expectations clashed with experience, contemporary commentators often clung to their initial promises. They blamed colonists’ or Native peoples’ moral and agricultural failings and hoped that felled forests and tilled fields, which exposed the land to direct sunlight, would improve the climate and the landscape. Kupperman noted that the period of early contact coincided with colder temperatures as the result of the “little ice age,” which at the time of her writing was defined largely as a period of glacial advance and colder temperatures. But in her account the “puzzle” that confounded early colonists mostly emerged from the longer-term contrast between Europe’s maritime and North America’s continental climates, not early modern cooling. Sam White’s essential new book, A Cold Welcome, reshapes our sense of the puzzle and its pieces, arguing that the dynamic, unstable climate of the Little Ice Age hampered European attempts to adapt to unfamiliar North American environments and made the encounters between European and Native peoples more violent and deadly.