European settlers expected paradise — plump fruits, lush grasses, and clean, crisp waters. It seemed obvious the New World would come with all the riches of Eden, cultivated by a perpetually mild climate. After all, the land was roughly the same latitude as Europe.

The logic was flawed. Not only did America’s first colonists encounter dense, dark wilderness in the Northeast, their winters were freezing and summers dripped with humidity. Frequent, strong storms rolled in at a moment’s notice. They were shocked, disappointed, and dangerously unprepared.

Rather than adapt, a collection of scientists, doctors, and writers campaigned to deforest the land. In their minds, cutting down thousands of acres at a time would improve the weather. Whether they were “successful” or not really isn’t the point. The fact that American colonists and preeminent thinkers actually advocated climate change by mass deforestation is a stormy stain in scientific history.

It’s not like they didn’t have a little warning. Some of the earliest settlers wrote back to Europe disappointed with the “climate” — a term they used mostly to describe temperature and precipitation on a micro scale — and warned prospective colonists away.

According to 2005’s Historical Perspectives on Climate Change, Rhode Island missionary James MacSparran spent many of his 36 years in the New World warning colonists against emigrating. Before his death in 1757, he called the climate “intemperate,” with unpredictable swings in weather extremes, and terrifying thunderstorms. To him, it was “destructive to human bodies.” Science writer John Evelyn wrote in 1664 that forest moisture was contributing to disease. One Dr. Alexander Hewett maintained that “no European, without hazard, can endure the fatigues of laboring in the open air.”

But still they came, and thousands died from exposure and hunger, the terrain and seasons unforgiving to European farming. Soon, mastering the American climate became not only a matter of survival but a form of political propaganda. Unless the settlers could prove that the land and weather were manageable, they wouldn’t be able to attract more colonists. And without more colonists, they could not completely conquer the land. It was a colonial catch-22.

Ironically, Columbus was one of the first explorers who offered proof that deforestation “worked.” In the 2003 study Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis, we learn that Columbus observed “from experience” that clearing forests in the Madeira, Canary, and Azores archipelagos appeared to have reduced rain and mist.

In North America, where Columbus never set foot, settlers took his prophecy to heart. A collection of scientific thinkers and propagandists used loose observations and anecdotal evidence to insist that mass deforestation could work in constructing milder weather. (And hey, they needed to clear a bunch of ancestral Native American lands for agriculture anyway.)

Their theories, by today’s standards, are simple-minded. Then, the concept of climate was almost entirely thought to correlate to latitude, and scientific minds mainly accounted for only temperature and wind movement, which they believed was largely determined by the amount of sunlight an area received. Why the American Northeast, with similar latitude to the Mediterranean, was not more arid, they struggled to square. Some believed the continent was brand new and had just emerged from the ocean or an ice cap. Either way, they believed exposing more of the land to circulating air and sunlight would reduce the region’s nonsensical humidity and, actually, lead to less frequent rainfall.

Plus, beginning the task would surely attract more of their European brethren.