Backstroke_Italics wrote: ↑03 Dec 2019 22:04
Salmoneus wrote: ↑03 Dec 2019 19:25
So, Hawai'ians cross over two thousand miles of ocean, discover both mainland california and presumably
the entire archipelago just off its coast, but then
continue on for another couple of hundred miles, into a more arid area, so that they can settle on the four barren, windscoured Coronado Islands in Mexico, islands so wretched that mankind has never bothered to inhabit them in our timeline. Why do they do this?
And given that even the largest of the Coronado Islands is one mile long and a few hundred metres wide (most of which is steep rocky slope), how large a population could they realistically support for hundreds of years?
Psst, I think they're talking about Coronado Island, not the Coronado Islands. Coronado Island has a population of around 20 thousand, a fresh water aquifer, and previously an ostrich farm. Sounds like a good place to settle to me.
I assumed they weren't talking about Coronado Island, because they seemed to be talking about an island, and Coronado Island notably
isn't an island. Although maybe it was an island a few centuries ago? I can't find anything that says one way or the other. Even so, that Coronado "Island" is still less than a mile in either dimension. [sure, you can have tens of thousands of inhabitants on any rock, in the modern world, if it's adjacent to a city...]
I guess it seemed strange to move a people thousands of miles, and then specify a new homeland only a couple of square miles in size, and then split that into two different tribes (island and mainland) separated by a stretch of water you could throw things across if you had a big catapult. I mean, out of the entire coastline of California, including the archipelago, why would they have to land specifically in the limits of modern San Diego and stay confined in such a small place? It's not impossible, if OP has a reason for it, but it seems strange.
[Since Central Coronado (in the Coronado Islands) is apparently also known as Isla Coronado, I assumed they meant there, or were confusing it with South Island.
[there's also helpfully an Isla Coronado AND an Isla Coronados on the OTHER side of Baja... the explorers in those parts clearly weren't too imaginative...]]
but I also didn't mean that DV8 should stop giving ideas.
[Personally, it would make sense to me to enlarge that scenario and move it north, and have the settlers land on all or some of the channel islands, and then have secondary expeditions to the mainland; they could well colonise the San Diego area from such a toehold, if the OP wanted that.]