on the 18th of May, 1794, in the 19th year of his age.”2
We have some idea of the source of the Aborigines’ morbidity and mortality: pulmonary infection. But what killed the Arawacks in 1493 and 1495? Maltreatment? Cold? Hunger? Overwork? Yes, and no doubt about it, but could this be the entire answer? Columbus certainly did not want to kill his interpreters, and slavers and slaveholders have no interest whatever in the outright slaughter of their property. All or almost all of these victims seem to have been young adults, usually the most resilient members of our species – except in the case of unfamiliar infections. The hale and hearty immune system of one’s prime years of life, when challenged by unprecedented invaders, can overreact and smother normal body functions with inflammation and edema. The most likely candidates for the role of exterminator of the first Amerindians in Europe were those that killed so many other Arawacks in the decades immediately following: Old World pathogens.
… Let us restrict ourselves to the peregrinations of one Old World pathogen in the colonies, the most spectacular one, the virus of smallpox. Smallpox, an infection that usually spreads from victim to victim by breath, was one of the most communicable of all diseases and one of the very deadliest.3 It was an old human infection in the Old World, but it was rarely of crucial importance in Europe until it flared up in the sixteenth century. For the next 250 to 300 years – until the advent of vaccination – it was just that, of crucial importance, reaching its apogee in the 1700s, when it accounted for 10 to 15 percent of all deaths in some of the western European nations early in the century. Characteristically, 80 percent of its victims were under ten years of age, and 70 percent under two years of age. In Europe, it was the worst of the childhood diseases. Most adults, especially in the cities and ports, had had it and were immune. In the colonies, it struck indigenes young and old and was the worst of all diseases.
Smallpox first crossed the seams of Pangaea – specifically to the island of Española – at the end of 1518 or the beginning of 1519, and for the next four centuries it played as essential a role in the advance of white imperialism overseas as gunpowder – perhaps a more important role, because the indigenes did turn the musket and then rifle against the intruders, but smallpox very rarely fought on the side of the indigenes. The intruders were usually immune to it, as they were to other Old World childhood diseases, most of which were new beyond the oceans. The malady quickly exterminated a third or half of the Arawacks on Española, and almost immediately leaped the straits to Puerto Rico and the other Greater Antilles, accomplishing the same devastation there. It crossed from Cuba to Mexico and joined Cortés’s forces in the person of a sick black soldier, one of the few of the invaders not immune to the infection. The disease exterminated a large fraction of the Aztecs and cleared a path for the aliens to the heart of Tenochtitlán and to the founding of New Spain. Racing ahead of the conquistadores, it soon appeared in Peru, killing a large proportion of the subjects of the Inca, killing the Inca himself and the successor he had chosen. Civil war and chaos followed, and then Francisco Pizarro arrived. The miraculous triumphs of that conquistador, and of Cortés, whom he so successfully emulated, are in large part the triumphs of the virus of smallpox.
This first recorded pandemic in the New World may have reached as far as the American Neo-Europes. The Amerindian population was denser than it was to be again for centuries, and utterly susceptible to smallpox. Canoeists of the Calusa tribe often crossed from Florida to Cuba to trade in the early sixteenth century, and certainly could have carried smallpox home to the continent with them; and peoples in at least sporadic contact with each other ringed the Gulf of Mexico from areas where the disease was rife all the way around to the thickly populated regions of what is now the southeastern part of the United States. The Mississippi, with villages rarely so much as a day’s journey apart along its banks, at least as far north as the Ohio, would have given the disease access to the entire interior of the continent. As for the pampa, the pandemic certainly spread through the Incan Empire to present-day Bolivia, and from there settlements with easy access to each other were sprinkled across Paraguay and down along the Río de la Plata and its tributaries to the pampa. Smallpox may have ranged from the Great Lakes to the pampa in the 1520s and 1530s.
Smallpox is a disease with seven-league boots. Its effects are terrifying: the fever and pain; the swift appearance of pustules that sometimes destroy the skin and transform the victim into a gory horror; the astounding death rates, up to one-fourth, one-half, or more with the worst strains. The healthy flee, leaving the ill behind to face certain death, and often taking the disease along with them. The incubation period for smallpox is 10 to 14 days, long enough for the ephemerally healthy carrier to flee for long distances on foot, by canoe, or, later, on horseback to people who know nothing of the threat he represents, and there to infect them and inspire others newly charged with the virus to flee to infect new innocents. To give one example (a precise rather than sensational example), most of the Abipones with whom the missionary Martin Dobrizhoffer was living in mid-eighteenth-century Paraguay fled when smallpox appeared among them, some as far as 80 km. In some instances this quarantine-by-flight worked, but often it simply served to spread the disease.
The first recorded epidemic of smallpox in British or French North America erupted among the Algonkins of Massachusetts in the early 1630s: “Whole towns of them were swept away, in some not so much as one soul escaping Destruction.”4 William Bradford of Plymouth Plantation, a few miles south, provided a few more details on just how hard the Algonkins nearby were hit, and how the death rates could soar to such heights in these epidemics. Some of the victims, he wrote,
fell down so generally of this disease as they were in the end not able to help one another, no not to make a fire nor fetch a little water to drink, nor any to bury the dead. But would strive as long as they could, and when they could procure no other means to make fire, they would burn the wooden trays and dishes they ate their meat from, and their very bows and arrows. And some would crawl out on all fours to get a little water, and sometimes die by the way and not be able to get in again.5
The disease raged through New England, on west into the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes region, and from there no one knows how much farther. Smallpox whipsawed back and forth through New York and surrounding areas in the 1630s and 1640s, reducing the populations of the Huron and Iroquois confederations by an estimated 50 percent.
After that, smallpox never seemed to stay away for more than two or three decades at a time. The missionaries, Jesuit and Mennonite, the traders from Montreal and Charleston – they all had the same appalling story to tell about smallpox and the indigenes. In 1738 it destroyed half the Cherokee, in 1759 nearly half the Catawbas, in the first years of the nineteenth century two-thirds of the Omahas and perhaps half the entire population between the Missouri River and New Mexico, in 1837–8 nearly every last one of the Mandans and perhaps half the people of the high plains.6 Every European people to establish major settlements in North America – the English, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Russian – recorded, sometimes in gloom, sometimes in exultation, the horrors of smallpox running loose among Americans who had never known it before.
The disease often spread far beyond the European frontier, often to people who had barely heard of the white invaders. Smallpox probably reached the Puget Sound area on the northwest Pacific coast in 1782 or 1783, a part of the world then as distant from the main centers of human population as any place on earth. When the explorer George Vancouver sailed into the Sound in 1793, he found Amerindians with pockmarked faces, and human bones scattered along the beach at Port Discovery – skulls, limbs, ribs, backbones – so many as to produce the impression that this was “a general cemetery for the whole of the surrounding country.” He judged that “at no very remote period this country had been far more populous than at present.” It was an assessment that he could accurately have extended to the entire continent.7
Smallpox may have reached the pampa as early as the 1520s or 1530s, as suggested earlier. In 1558 or 1560, smallpox appeared again (or for the first time) in the grasslands of the Río de la Plata and killed, says a hearsay account, “more than 100,000 Indians.”8 We have only one source for this, but the explosion of smallpox in Chile and Paraguay at about the same time and in Brazil from 1562 to 1565, killing masses of indigenes, provides strong support for this report of the disease afflicting