Colonists’ Jarring climate surprise

The yellow and green have been moving north.

From The Colonial Society of Massachusetts

“Of all the preconceptions English people brought with them to New England, perhaps none was so important or so mistaken as that about the American climate.

Colonists came with the common sense idea that climate would be constant in any given latitude around the world. New England, whose latitude is the low forties, was expected to have the climate of Spain or southern France. The debilitating effect of excessive summer heat on English character was the promoters’ main fear in the early years.

What they found, of course, was that New England was in fact very hot in summer but that it was also extremely cold, much colder than England, in winter. Colonists were forced to make sense of their actual experience of America’s climate, explaining why New England deviated from the ‘normal’ European climate, as well as trying to understand what would grow and how life should be constituted here.’’