Two Lost Colonies

So while colonies are a popuar topic within the Hetalia fandom, the one category of colonies that gets ignored the most are failed colonies. I can’t blame people for that, there are many failed colonies and most have limited amount of information available on them. On top of that, it would be a bit wasteful to design OCs of failed colonies when you know they didn’t live for a long time. 

Well… here I go. I designed two failed colonies, one more official than the other. 

The Scottish colony Caledonia located in Panama was an honest attempt by Scotland to enter the world of empires alongside England, Spain, Portugal, France, etc. Through a mix of really bad luck, poor planning, disease, divided leadership and Spanish hostility and English indifference from the neighbouring colonies, Caledonia died after 2 years. Since so much effort and money was invested into the colony, Scotland was left almost completely bankrupt and was left with not many options other than accept England’s offer and form the United Kingdom. In a way, this colony had a massive effect on Scotland and I do feel on a personal level, Scotland was strongly affected by Caledonia’s death.

The Irish colony was less officially a colony and more an Irish settlement, similar to Y Wladfa in design. Many Irish people moved from Ireland to Argentina and formed a settlement together. There’s a problem with the name, when I first heard of this failed settlement it was claimed that the name was Napósta. When I tried finding more information on the settlement, I came across a mix of sources that talked about Napósta or La Vitícola. For now I’ll go with La Vitícola (since I found more information using that name) but I’m really not sure what the proper name of this settlement was. She sadly wasn’t any luckier than Caledonia. I think the failures with this settlement was bad weather, many people dying because the water was undrinkable and the Irish didn’t have tools or livestock to work the land. Eventually the remaining Irish either moved on to America to try their luck there or they returned to Ireland. 

Also I attempted to draw these failed colonies in clothes that would have been accurate for their time, Caledonia being mainly in a 18th century-influenced dress and La Vitícola being in a 19th century dress. I couldn’t find anything linked directly to the settlements, so I instead relied on Western European/British Isles clothing styles, I went with the assumption that it would be roughly accurate to them. Not sure La Vitícola would have been able to afford shoes or such a nice patterned dress, I just followed a ref I found. Also this isn’t very visible but Caledonia has leading strings coming down from her shoulders, she’s holding one of them in her hand. In Europe, leading strings were typically attached onto the clothes of children in the 17th and 18th century as they were seen as a good way for adults to support children who were learning to walk. (also it stopped them from wandering into unsafe places, so I wouldn’t be surprised if young Caldonia had that)