Finding Worth in the Wilderness: The Abandonment of France and England's Earliest North American Colonies, 1534--1590
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The earliest attempts of France and England to colonize North America were disappointments. The sixteenth century saw French attempts to colonize the St. Lawrence Valley (1541-3) and Northern Florida (1562-5) and English attempts to colonize Roanoke Island (1585-7). In all three cases, the venture's hopes of finding valuable resources or the Northwest Passage were not realized and colonization was not achieved. This dissertation will examine four major types of difficulties the French and English faced in Canada, Virginia and Florida in the sixteenth century. They are challenges of environment and adaptation; internal conflicts such as rivalry and mutiny; challenges of Amerindian relations and, finally, challenges of transportation and communication. The struggles of these abandoned colonies will be compared with those of permanent colonies such as Jamestown, Quebec, Port Royal, Hispaniola and New Spain. Particular emphasis will be placed on the early struggles of Samuel de Champlain in Canada and John Smith in Virginia. It will be demonstrated that these were standard challenges of colonization for successful and unsuccessful colonies alike and that they could be overcome eventually with enough effort, experimentation, men and materials. France and England did not stop their earliest North American colonization projects because the task was too difficult. Rather, there appeared to be no worthwhile reason to waste resources or to battle rival powers such as Spain to hold these territories at this time.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".