How about getting a major reality check on seriously overblown expectations? Whether it was the fabled Anian short-cut to Japan/China, the quest for 'another' Mexico or Peru, or some millenarian idea of a new Jerusalem, almost all exploratory/colonizing schemes ended in major disappointment. Whether you read early Spanish accounts of New Mexico, French accounts of Quebec/Montreal, or British accounts of the early Atlantic seaboard settlements, they are dripping with disillusionment and often despair. Not surprisingly, desertion and lack of recruitment in addition to starvation and disease did in - or very nearly did in - many colonial ventures.

Apart from those you pointed out. There was also the language barrier, remember they thought that they were going to land in Asia. So as such they must have had people who either spoke or could have written in those languages; but they had no reference to the various tongues and languages of the Americas. Another major challenge were hurricanes, Europeans had never experienced them; their housing architecture wasn't made with this in mind.

Then there problems with their crops and agriculture in general. Depending on where they were, the climate and soil would not bear them the crops to which they were accustomed in their homelands. They had nature against them; it was either too dry or flooded; in other places the climate might be perfect, but the soil was sterile.

This problem goes without saying, all European colonists had problems with the native Americans. Not surprising at all considering they were claiming their ancestral lands for themselves, and also along the way. Among the most destructive colonists were the Spanish and the English which wiped out or reduced various tribes or civilizations they found along the way. As an example the Spanish wiped out all the native indigenous populations in the Caribbean Islands.

There were other factors, but these are the most important.

thank you for your good answers.

@Pedro: I would be also very interested in the other factors you mentioned. Could you give some more examples please? - thanks a lot.

Those other problems:

As another example were the politics of colonization. Even though at first only Spain was interested in colonizing the Americas, after a while you basically had skirmishes every time you explored as to whom the land belonged to. Because then England, France, Holland and Portugal were claiming colonies and not all got along very well, in fact attacks by other nations were common during the early days.

One big problem was that they were in fact lost in these new continents. They either relaid on local guides or just gut feelings. Which was catastrophic in the sense that if they got lost; nobody could help them. Many explorers were lost on the conquest of South America. Other tragic examples were Humbolt's and Cabeza de Vaca's expedition on North America. The bottom line is that they weren't prepared or had any idea of what to expect on these new lands.

I'd say Cabeza de Vaca is actually one of the few positive examples of explorers/would-be conquerors adapting to an unknown environment, even if that adaptation came off entirely by necessity. He and his companions survived precisely because they were able to cope with the alien environment they were cast into. That Cabeza de Vaca ended up as a traveling healer who was accompanied by numerous natives from one tribe to the next is testimony to this. On the other hand, Cabeza de Vaca's original expedition, that led by Panfilo de Narvaez to La Florida, is the exact opposite of positive adaptation. Ineptly led, with no idea about local geography, climate, and population, and incapable of coping with the alien surroundings, Narvaez led hundreds of Spaniards to their deaths in the swamps of the Gulf Coast and out on the open sea.

@Johannes: Are you interested more in primary accounts like, for instance, Cabeza de Vaca's "Naufragios," or more in recent "scientific" analyses of colonial establishments?

Johannes, if you're looking for literature on eoncounters of unfamiliar environments and climates in North America check out Karen Kupperman:

Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. "Apathy and Death in Early Jamestown." The Journal of American History 66, no. 1 (1979): 24-40.

———. "Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience." William and Mary Quarterly 41, no. 2 (1984): 213-40.

———. The Jamestown Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

———. "The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period." American Historical Review 87, no. 5 (1982): 1262–89.

also:

Blanton, Dennis B. "The Weather is Fine. Wish You Were Here, Because I'm The Last One Alive. 'Learning' the Environment in the English New World Colonies." In Colonization of Unfamiliar Landscapes. The Archaeology of Adaptation, edited by Marcy Rockman and James Steele. 190-200. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Rockman, Marcy. "New World with a New Sky. Climatic Variability, Environmental Expectations, and the Historical Period Colonization of Eastern North Carolina." Historical Archaeology 44 (2010): 4-20.

Rockman, Marcy, and James Steele, eds. Colonization of Unfamiliar Landscapes. The Archaeology of Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2003.

If you're interested in a climatological perspective (dendrochronology) see:

Stahle, David W., Malcolm K. Cleaveland, Dennis B. Blanton, Matthew D. Therrell, and David A. Gay. "The Lost Colony and Jamestown Droughts." Science 280, no. 5363 (1998): 564-67.

Also, I have just finished my dissertation on the adaptation to the hurricane hazard in New Orleans (1718-1965) and have worked extensively on the issue of environmental knowledge and learning, adaptation and the initial subsistence crises and hardship the French colonials were facing on the Louisiana Gulf Coast. If you need more info please don't hesitate to ask.

Best Regards

Eleonora

I see - very interesting indeed. Can one of you point me to some good literature/publications about this topic?

thanks again.

@Michael: I'm more interested in recent historical analysis of this topic.

Alright, Johannes, some references that may be of interest to you:

Rodolfo R. Carrera et al., De hombres, tierras y derechos: la agricultura y la cuestión agraria por los caminos del descubrimiento; Instituto Iberoamericano de Derecho Agrario y Reforma Agraria, Universidad de los Andes, Caracas, 1997.

Salvador B. Albert et al., La indianización : cautivos, renegados, "hommes libres" y misioneros en los confines americanos (s. XVI-XIX); École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 2012.

Christophe Giudicelli (ed.), Fronteras movedizas: clasificaciones coloniales y dinámicas socioculturales en las fronteras americanas. Zamora, Mich.: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2010.

Timothy Silver, A new face on the countryside: Indians, colonists, and slaves in South Atlantic forests, 1500-1800. New York : Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Kathleen DuVal, The native ground: Indians and colonists in the heart of the continent; Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Rebecca Earle, The body of the conquistador : food, race, and the colonial experience in Spanish America, 1492-1700; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington (eds.), Studies in settler colonialism: politics, identity and culture; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

(This last one has more recent (up to very recent) case studies, all quite interesting from a global comparative perspective).

Hope any of this helps. Michael.

Johannes

One very important problem faced by the European colonists is, as suggested by Pedro Silva, the language barrier but there was also the cultural and religious barriers. The Native Americans who greeted the first Europeans were diverse peoples. They spoke between 300 and 350 distinct languages, and their societies and ways of living varied tremendously.

What is also interesting to consider is the problems faced by native Americans caused by the European colonists:

"American history began in a biological and cultural collision of Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans. Europeans initiated this contact and often dictated its terms. For Native Americans and Africans, American history began in disaster.

Native Americans suffered heavily because of their isolation from the rest of the world. Europe, Africa, and Asia had been trading knowledge and technologies for centuries. Societies on all three continents had learned to use iron and kept herds of domestic animals. Europeans had acquired gunpowder, paper, and navigational equipment from the Chinese. Native Americans, on the other hand, had none of these. They were often helpless against European conquerors with horses, firearms, and—especially—armor and weapons.

The most disastrous consequence of the long-term isolation of the Americas was biological. Asians, Africans, and Europeans had been exposed to one another’s diseases for millennia; by 1500 they had developed an Old World immune system that partially protected them from most diseases. On average, Native Americans were bigger and healthier than the Europeans who first encountered them. But they were helpless against European and African diseases. Smallpox was the biggest killer, but illnesses such as measles and influenza also killed millions of people. The indigenous population of Mexico, for example, was more than 17 million when Cortés landed in 1519. By 1630 it had dropped to 750,000, largely as a result of disease. Scholars estimate that on average the population of a Native American people dropped 90 percent in the first century of contact. The worst wave of epidemics in human history cleared the way for European conquest.

Europeans used the new lands as sources of precious metals and plantation agriculture. Both were complex operations that required labor in large, closely supervised groups. Attempts to enslave indigenous peoples failed, and attempts to force them into other forms of bound labor were slightly more successful but also failed because workers died of disease. Europeans turned to the African slave trade as a source of labor for the Americas. During the colonial periods of North and South America and the Caribbean, far more Africans than Europeans came to the New World. The slave trade brought wealth to some Europeans and some Africans, but the growth of the slave trade disrupted African political systems, turned slave raiding into full–scale war, and robbed many African societies of their young men. The European success story in the Americas was achieved at horrendous expense for the millions of Native Americans who died and for the millions of Africans who were enslaved."

To read more see the reference below:

The United States Of America, by Various Authors, Edited By: R. A. Guisepi.

This is the story of how the American Republic developed from colonial beginnings in the 16th century, when the first European explorers arrived, until modern times.

http://history-world.org/united_states_of_america.htm

Johannes, here is a reference that I forgot to include in my earlier list:

Nan A. Rothschild, Colonial Encounters in a Native Landscape: The. Spanish and Dutch in North America; Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003.

This is a great overview that includes discussions on issues such as settlement systems, material culture, socio-politicial organization, and so on.

It was already occupied by another people ( as many subsequent colonists have also discovered around the world)

I think the first problem was the ignorance.

And it's a repeated problem, because when, for example, the Spanish went from the Caribe to Mesoamérica, it was a new reality again, and the same when Cortes went form Yucatán to Mexico (changing a maya environment for an aztec), and the same ten years later, when they went to Perú, and thus more.

(Excuse for my english)

A very enlightening example of overblown expectations (partly based on prior experiences in Central Mexico) and ensuing disappointments shaping Spanish decisions as to where NOT to settle is the large corpus of testimonies related to the 1540-42 Coronado expedition to Tierra Nueva (New Mexico and adjacent areas).

Dear Johannes.

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Apart from a small criticism I'll make your question. Your question was generic as if there was a homogeneous colonization on both the colonizer and the colonized side, will make a major criticism to all who responded so far.

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Everyone here by chastity tangenciaram the only problem besides hunger and disease (and the indians resistance ), the only problem that was common in all countries and all types of colonization.

The absence of women!

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It seems very clear that the absence of women in America, "white" women, not the native or African slaves caused revolts, wars, abandoned the country and punishments of the ecclesiastical authorities.

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The official historiography ignores this absence in the first decades of colonization, and worst, current historians continue to ignore. The majority of the early decades of colonization was made by deportees, leaving the European prisons directly to America. Certainly these settlers were not much less celibates gentlemans , and until today when it involves relationships between men and women, the problems generated are serious, you can imagine the problems that arose at that time.

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Brazilian historiography is extremely pudica about these problems, and only when there is no way to avoid it is romanticized as some famous cases of links between early settlers and indigenous or slaves women . This romanticization often accepted and rigorous academics even though the facts described by primary documents to prove otherwise.

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Perhaps for a modern researcher this is an excellent and little explored research issue. Is there anything from the entrance to the Inquisition in America, but about sexuality and conflict in the early colonization of America do not know if there is much.

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It is extremely interesting that someone like me, an engineer by training and curious story that has raised this group we have many historians, the issue of sexuality in the early colonization and the problem generated. But it seems clear that in addition to the dangers of crossing the ocean, famine, wars and revolts and the diseases to lack of company generated far more tension than other problems.

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Dear Rogerio,

thank you for your very good answer - as you see, I posted this question quite a while ago. Meanwhile I have also read some further publications and in one of them I found also that there were very few women in the early colonies which lead to things like "child marriage" where very young girls were married to much older men.

Johannes.

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Not only is child marriage, which remained for a long time in colonial America. There was the issue of polygamy and perhaps the worst and not reported, the problems were the lack of partners. This last problem is simply hard to be reported, because most incidents are attributed to other factors.

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During the first century there were in Brazil invasions of other countries, raids that were done by more or less regular troops. There is the case of the enigmatic French invasion in 1955 in Rio de Janeiroit becomes clear in official historiography that the main factor that led the failure of this invasion was the undisciplined soldiers who sought the company native. There are also hundreds of cases of defections of troops to join the natives.

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I think that historians have not yet done a serious research not only on this isolated incident, but for thousands of others that occurred in the first century of colonization.

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Even the Inquisition had to loosen their moral standards because no one would be left to close the doors of the chains. There are reports of nobles, court staff and other influential people across America who "amancebavam" with native and slaves.

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European historiography, "prudish" and Eurocentric, never took it seriously, treating it as something peripheral and personal, but it was a problem that causes mass in later centuries reflected in the cleavage of society between the "European" and the mestizos of the colony.

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There is a lot to research and write about it, looking at it in a more modern view incorporating psychological and social aspects created by this problem.

Another point to be explored is that of the coastal tribes who were allies of the colonists and just disappear without having been massacres. Few come to account for this "missing" with the process quick and real mixing and incorporation into colonial society. In this regard there is even a joke in some Spanish-speaking countries who say the country's population is distributed as follows, 40% are descendants of Indians and 60% think they are not.

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I'll even do a little provocation about your answer. You wrote:

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“....in one of them I found also that there were very few women in the early colonies which lead to things like "child marriage" where very young girls were married to much older men.”

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I reject this claim of "child marriage" as a problem in the colony because this fact was a universal characteristic of the era, both in "civilized Europe" as in "Wild America."

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Dear Rogerio,

firstly, I never said, that the marriage of very young girls was an isolated occurence of the colonies - I just stated, that I am now aware of the fact it happened in the colonies at that time due to a small number of women. - I am quite aware of the fact, that in England, for example, the minimum legal age of marriage was around 12 years for girls in the 17th century.

Secondly, the book where I got this information was written by an US american author, so "eurocentricy" as you call it, is also not an issue here.

Thirdly the habit of early marriage was just one example of measures which the early colonists took to compensate the discrepancy between the number of men and women in the colonies (but, you are right - I just read about the north american colonies so far). There were also the examples you mentioned as well as marriages between rather young men and older women (here I mean women of an age in which childbirth can already be a serios health risk, so women over 40, 50 or even 60).

I am also no professional historian, I am a physicist by trade and I was just interested in this question.

Dear Johannes.

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First my apologies for charging someone like me has a background in the "hard sciences" and is more concerned one and not a professional in history.

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Second, because of their status as "amateur historian" as I will remove my text some of the interventions that read through again seem rough. Unfortunately I am no longer a young man tolerant and happy as young people should be. I'm an old surly man that does not tolerate improper professional interventions, and taking you as a historian or student of history resulted in some intemperate interventions.

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Dear Rogerio,

no problem :)

Tax on tea imports apparently.

Culture shock, negotiations to stabilize the flow of resources and support from Europe, and one would also assume that they struggled with each other (cannibalism at Jamestown, and skeletal evidence of conflict documented by Owsley and others), as well as some indigenous conflict but also having the cultural misunderstandings that occur even during collaborative ventures which Richard White has really shown are worth our examination (his controversial Middle Ground). Hope this helps!

Dear Johannes,

Do you mean the Viking colonisation and the adventure of Red Eric?

@ András: I intendet this question mainly for the European settlers from the 16th century on, but if you know something about the viking colonisation also here answers are most welcome.

Dear Sir, May be Malaria. Of-course you have excluded diseases even than it was Malaria. regards

The biggest problems they had to face were themselves. They had to face the fear of being in a new place, the fear of failure which could result in their deaths. They faced their other characteristics as well, when they finally were able to settle and became confident they then faced their ego. In truth they faced their humanity.

From my research i would suggest the lack of early female settlers; especially for the Spanish and the French colonists.  Puritans tended to arrive in family units but for the other British colonies this was also a problem.  You cannot create a stable population without the opportunity to create new family units.  By the time of the French Indian wars in the 18th century, the French settlers were overwhelmed by the size of the British colonists 

Xenophobia