A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe's Encounter with North America by Sam White (review)

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.¹ 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.

A Cold Welcome is a model for interdisciplinary and vast early American environmental history. White synthesizes archival research, colonial histories, reports, and travel literature with archaeology and climate science to create interwoven narratives tracing Spanish, English, and French colonizing expeditions that stretched across the entirety of the North American continent. He spends considerable time on Spanish colonial designs, a welcome emphasis that reinforces his conclusion that "there was nothing inevitable, or even probable, about the Spanish Empire's failure to colonize eastern North America before England" (251). Although his story focuses on European "learning and adaptation" (254), he details the specific stresses and vulnerabilities that Native peoples faced and how they adapted to them. Pushing back against the tendency to paint Native peoples' subsistence strategies in broad strokes, White details a range of responses to the changing climate. For example, the Little Ice Age brought scarcity, conflict, and novel political arrangements to the increasingly centralized, hierarchical, and maize-dependent Virginia Algonquian peoples under Wahunsenacawh (also known as Powhatan), while Iroquoian-speaking peoples of the Saint Lawrence Valley migrated south amid conflict with Huron peoples that "could have arisen from competition over hunting grounds and other natural resources made scarce by a changing climate" (206).

The Little Ice Age described in A Cold Welcome is enriched by integration of an outpouring of new research, particularly in paleoclimatology and archaeology, and defined by the intersection of human events and the changing climate. This new scientific research shows, White argues, "that the Little Ice Age was in reality more than one phenomenon, with more than one cause" (21). He details these phenomena—which extended well beyond plunging temperatures—and causes in clear and accessible terms. Throughout the book, for example, he lucidly explains how tree rings, pollen, or other proxy data show that a drought occurred, that a particular year or decade was unusually cold, or that "the mid-1500s to early 1600s actually witnessed the highest average levels of hurricane activity for at least the past 500 years" (236), while outlining points of uncertainty and the uses and limitations of these proxies. Yet he also makes clear that the Little Ice Age was "as much a human event as an atmospheric one" (22). Vulnerabilities in human societies created through social, religious, political, and economic decisions exacerbated the disastrous impacts of drought or cold. The multiple intersections between climate and human action allow White to construct a new puzzle for the North American climate.

White uses this new characterization of the Little Ice Age to argue that the changing climate was central to shaping European contact and colonization in North America...