Dr. Robert Owens Chronicles the History of the Future

The Greatest Ocean of All April 23, 2025

While the British and the French battled for hegemony in the woods of eastern America, another series of adventures and struggles shaped America along its Pacific coast.

Once again, it was more disinformation than information which caused some things to happen.  The Spanish, ever wary of any threat to the jewel of their empire, Mexico heard rumors of Russian settlers coming down the West coast and of British fur traders tramping out of the wilds and they immediately thought of encirclement.

Russia had moved as Far East across the vastness of Asia as the western European powers had moved west across the Atlantic.  They had built the largest empire in the world by conquering one tribe after another until they stood on the shores of the north Pacific.  Then they took the jump across the short Bering Sea and landed in Alaska beginning their own colonization efforts.

It was a cold and barren land with few inhabitants but with a wealth of furs and fish.  They soon established forts and trading posts and began to claim a large section of the northwest corner of the North American continent.  The Russians came primarily seeking furs and built an empire in the north by exploiting the land and brutalizing the inhabitants.  The history of Russian America was one of slow growth and slower assimilation.  The Russians never seemed to befriend the Indians as the French had done, evangelize them like the Spanish or move them out of the way like the British; they merely seemed to impoverish and terrorize them.

North to California

It was in response to the Russian boasts that they would move down the West coast to California that the Spanish after centuries of neglect finally began to colonize Alta California in earnest.  They had claimed the area since the fifteenth century, and they had outposts there almost as long but it was only in the eighteenth century that they began to apply the power needed to make their far-flung claims a reality.

The size and diversity of California is a wonder to behold.  It stretches more than eleven hundred miles and includes more than a hundred million acres.  Its climate ranges from cool and foggy to alpine mountains to broiling desert to the lowest spot on earth.  And before it was forever changed by the arrival of Europeans it had the greatest cultural diversity of any place in the Americas.  Hundreds of distinct language groups and cultures fit into every niche in this vast landscape.

Into this world Spain intruded and proceeded to shape the land and the people to fit their view of what a colony should look like.  The land was parceled out to grand lords who kept slaves and built dynasties.  The mission system was set up and soon the wild diversity of the Indians was dissolving into the Hispanic sameness found throughout the Spanish Empire.

The Last Place on Earth

The Pacific Ocean was the last place on earth that the Europeans took as their own.  It took many years of sailing this broad expanse to find all the many islands that had long been settled but had also long been isolated, including the continent of Australia and New Zealand.  The French and the British were once again rivals as they sent expedition after expedition to find and exploit new lands.  The most famous Pacific explorer was Captain Cook who would eventually give his life in his quest to find and explore these vast expanses of ocean.

The addition of the Europeans in the Pacific basin had the same effect it had in North America, cultures had to adapt to new realities and economies changed as new sources and new technologies were introduced.  The eighteenth century saw Europeans reaching the most isolated islands (Hawaii) and finally learning that there was no Northwest Passage through the North American continent.

The great centuries of discovery came to a close and the world which had been circumnavigated in the fifteenth century was by the eighteenth century being circled on a regular basis by European ships establishing and maintaining European Empires.   And just as the cultures of the indigenous peoples encountered along the way had changed, so too the cultures of Europe had been indelibly changed by their contact with the rest of the world.  The great Columbian Exchange had brought new foods to Europe which remain to this day mainstays of the population to this day.  The gold and silver of the Americas changed the balance of power and fueled wars on land and on the seas for generations.

The colonies were planted by the Europeans, they grew until they were ready to stand on their own, then they did, from sea to shining sea.