What would you do?

P

pottsy

Active member
Take yourself back to 1789, try and imagine you're captain arthur phillip, head of the invasion force that landed a year earlier on the east coast of whats now called Australia.. You've set up camp, been operating a year, your soldiers and convicts have been commiting crimes aginst the sovrign owners(mainly thier women) and interfearing with thier governance. They rightfully work out that your destroying thier culture, thier ability to procure food, practice religon and arts ect. They ask you to leave.

But you can't leave, a commercial merchant navy supplied you, have mostly left. coupled with ship wrecks and others looking for food and water, you have no way of leaving.You don't have the ships, the food or the water to leave.

What do you do? you have orders to build a colony, you have been supplied with germ warfare, that you know will decimate your enemy. You can't use rifles because your supply of ammo and rifles is very low, you'll never win hand to hand combat, you have no way of living off the land, you're totally dependant on supply from london. You know that if you don't use germ warfare, they will decimate you in a battle of attrition.You have no contact with your superiors, have no idea when they'll resupply you, even if they ever will. .

Do you do what Phillip did? A veteran of the american war of independance, of the wars with spain. Do you use germ warfare, a tactic first used by the british in america against indians a decade earlier?

Or do you leave with as many as you can, leaving those you have no room or food for behind?
 
You get control of your group and figure out a way to work with the locals for food etc.
 
Yossarian said:
Giving them whiskey and stealing their gold.

Enslaving the young and destroying the old.
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Yeah that doesnt sound as the chivlarous soldier should do, more like a small time bandit,...trade with them, establish co-exisitng civilizations.
 
pottsy said:
Do you do what Phillip did? A veteran of the american war of independance, of the wars with spain. Do you use germ warfare, a tactic first used by the british in america against indians a decade earlier?
Click to expand...
Hardly.
Germ warfare is as old as warfare itself and the British were no strangers to it way before they went to the Americas. In the medieval period, like everybody else in Europe, they'd hurl dead animals over the walls of besieged cities to induce sickness in the defenders. In the times before that they'd dump dead animals in the water upstream of the enemy to try and make them sick or as some of my own ancestors from the British Isles did, they'd dump dead enemies in the water.
And so on and so on...
 
Fortunately the much more deadly and refined modern form of germ warfare has been keep under wraps. They could likely create something like a nuclear holocaust.
 
I don't know how Captain Phillip would control germ warfare. His own men were probably just as susceptible. The natives has no immunity to the illnesses that white men carried. I live in the U.S. state of Oregon. Indians in this area were only exposed to limited contact with whites prior to about 1830 and even the casual encounter with European sailers and traders decimated the tribes. Small pox was the big killer, but even one of the influenza stains would wipe out whole villages. When missionaries came to Oregon to covert the natives they didn't find many to convert.
 
Have you ever tried to bury horses and a large number of people in hard soil. Well you just chuck them in the river if you have one handy and wave goodbye to them. This is what had been done quite a lot over the years. It should be remembered that the causes of how sickness was spread or what caused it was known about to much later in the 19th Century
 
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