A Scottish New World glossary

Andalusada loves dynastic unions, so you heard it here first: before there was England-Scotland, there was... well... medieval England-Scotland. (I'm not sure how it starts or ends - although I'm thinking that Scottish Semi-Salic inheritance leads to a split in the dynasty - just that it's there.)

But after it ends, at around the dawn of the age of exploration, there's another dynastic union: Scotland-Norway. By the time it breaks up (after yet another instance of Scotland's Semi-Salic inheritance passing the throne to somebody the Norwegians wouldn't get), both of them have some holdings in the New World, with Scotland having more and better of them.

Why? Because it's the Imperial Union of England-Scotland; both of them had overseas territories at the time of the marriage. Significant ones, in fact. The problem, at least for me, has been figuring out how to pull that off; Scotland's historically been a pretty poor nation, and a dynastic union with early modern Norway really doesn't bring much to the table in that regard.

Scotland-Norway in the New World

IRL, Scotland's colonial endeavor (and probably its sovereignty, given how much money went into the attempt) collapsed in the Darien scheme. Tropical diseases, a conflict with the Spanish New World... everything that could have gone wrong basically did. My solution? Call off the Darien Disaster and have Scots-Norwegian go in a radically different direction. Specifically, north.

If the Norwegian union brings Iceland along with it, Scotland-Norway has a natural staging ground for exploration of the grim and frostbitten north. (They also have some plausible land claims to some parts of the New World already once they rediscover the sagas and connect the dots.) It's 534 miles to Iceland from Scotland, and from Iceland you can ride the Greenland Current along its coast and around it to America. Historically, this was French territory IRL, but since France is instead aggressively pushing up the Mississippi River (and starting to get involved with India instead) they've got no competition.

Scotland-Norway's solution to the challenges of the Caribbean is to not try settling the Caribbean. At the start they're probably looking for the Northwest Passage; once that burns out, and they realize that they're not going to be getting any gold or cinnamon from China this way, they settle for more prosaic resources to exploit. Beaver pelts and Newfoundland codfish are less romantic than Oriental silk and Aztec gold, but you know what? They're just as exploitable, and they sell. On this unimpressive wealth is built the sprawling, understaffed Scottish-Norwegian Empire.

Scottish-Norwegian toponyms

Scotland-Norway being the great explorers of Canada, rather than the coureurs du bois, does make some really big changes to the world as we know it. The first and biggest is a totally different set of names for places; the ones that I've established are like so.

• The Hudson Bay? That's Bruce Bay. (Chosen for no other reason than alliteration. I'm not sure about the Bruce who discovered it, but he's a notable figure on par with Henry Hudson.)
• Newfoundland? That's Vinland. The sagas were known to the Scottish-Norwegian explorers, and they had a pretty good idea about the location of this one.
• Correspondingly, the IRL Gulf of St. Lawrence is named the Vinland Firth. (There were probably several distinguished Vinland Firths early on, which got merged into the body of water they were all part of.)
• Conceivably this makes most of the Great Lakes Lochs of some form, but I've no earthly idea what they'd be called.

The second, smaller and significantly harder part of this is that aboriginal exonyms are going to be different too. Historically, most of the First Nations were named after what they were called by their neighbors; for the Scots-Norse explorers, this means that they're very likely going to get different names, simply because of how local politics plays out.