When Europeans first came into contact with Natives...

[Drox]

So what exactly happened when explorers first landed in the Carribean and North America? What happened that exact day? They anchored their ships, came to land, and did they meet the Natives right away? Did it take them a few hours/days/weeks to find the Natives?

And what happened when they first met each other? I mean, the first few seconds they saw each other, what do you think happened? Did they just stare at each other for a bit, talk amongst themselves, then try to establish communication? And how did that happen? Did they speak in their mother tongue along with hand gestures to try to explain where they came from?

Excuse me for not remembering history class, but was there a sense of hostility at first? Like the first few hours/days of them meeting each other, how was the atmoshpere like between them?

[L33tz]

The Europeans were already formulating a way to take all their resources and enslave their people.

[SHARP]

Originally Posted by Drox

So what exactly happened when explorers first landed in the Carribean and North America? What happened that exact day? They anchored their ships, came to land, and did they meet the Natives right away? Did it take them a few hours/days/weeks to find the Natives?

And what happened when they first met each other? I mean, the first few seconds they saw each other, what do you think happened? Did they just stare at each other for a bit, talk amongst themselves, then try to establish communication? And how did that happen? Did they speak in their mother tongue along with hand gestures to try to explain where they came from?

Excuse me for not remembering history class, but was there a sense of hostility at first? Like the first few hours/days of them meeting each other, how was the atmoshpere like between them?

Hard to say as there's very little documentation surviving these days, but if memory serves there's been found a Norwegian coin in a native American dig site somewhere, so there seems to have been at least some interaction going on between the natives and the Vikings.
As far as I know there hasn't been found any evidence of long term Viking settlements in North America, unlike in Greenland, where the indigenous people and the Vikings weren't too happy about each other, from what I remember.
They did stay there for several hundred years though.
[EDIT] But I doubt you could call 'em Vikings by the end of the period. [/EDIT]

[Kykeon]

Not much reliable evidence for the first few hours of contact. I bet it was probably just a stunned stupor on the natives part at seeing things which were so different from them but were also undeniably similar while the Europeans were thinking "Okay, where all the valuable things we can extort these people for". That was the original point of the mission: to get to India by sailing west and trade for as much profit as possible.

Something I wonder a little more about is the first interactions between the Inuit (are the natives of Greenland/ Iceland Inuits or something else?) and the Vikings? I bet it was just immediate hostility. These are the Vikings we're talking about after all.

EDIT: ^ Beat me to it on the viking thing. Isn't Greenland considered part of North America? I always thought so, but I can't claim to actually know.

[SHARP]

Originally Posted by George Whitfield Fitting

EDIT: ^ Beat me to it on the viking thing. Isn't Greenland considered part of North America? I always thought so, but I can't claim to actually know.

Apparently that depends on which way you look at it, being a Dane I view it as some sort of a colony or what have you (can't claim to have ever given it much thought), but according to Wiki it's geographically a part of North America.
Being a Dane by birth, but fucking pedantic by choice, I guess you're right.