Eurasian ailments are as much a part of environmental history as the epidemics themselves. This chapter includes a document offering clues to how some Indian people thought about smallpox and how to save themselves from it. Also, we will consider how modern experience of a virgin soil epidemic, the COVID-19 outbreak of 2020, offers us a chance to rethink Crosby’s history of epidemics among Native American peoples. Finally, it is important to keep in mind that not all the Eurasian biota that arrived with the Europeans were so bad for Indian peoples. The documents in this chapter suggest how Indians made use of another European organism that flourished in the Americas, the horse.
Virgin Soil Epidemics
Alfred W. Crosby
(Excerpt from Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.)
… We must examine the colonial histories of Old World pathogens, because their success provides the most spectacular example of the power of the biogeographical realities that underlay the success of European imperialists overseas. It was their germs, not these imperialists themselves, for all their brutality and callousness, that were chiefly responsible for sweeping aside the indigenes and opening the Neo-Europes to demographic takeover…
The isolation of the indigenes of the Americas and Australia from Old World germs prior to the last few hundred years was nearly absolute. Not only did very few people of any origin cross the great oceans, but those who did must have been healthy or they would have died on the way, taking their pathogens with them. The indigenes were not without their own infections, of course. The Amerindians had at least pinta, yaws, venereal syphilis, hepatitis, encephalitis, polio, some varieties of tuberculosis (not those usually associated with pulmonary disease), and intestinal parasites, but they seem to have been without any experience with such Old World maladies as smallpox, measles, diphtheria, trachoma, whooping cough, chicken pox, bubonic plague, malaria, typhoid fever, cholera, yellow fever, dengue fever, scarlet fever, amebic dysentery, influenza, and a number of helminthic infestations. The Australian Aborigines had their own infections – among them trachoma – but otherwise the list of Old World infections with which they were unfamiliar before Cook was probably similar to the list of Amerindian slaughterers. It is worth noting that as late as the 1950s it was difficult to get a staphylococcal culture from Aborigines living in the sterile environs of the central Australian desert.
Indications of the susceptibility of Amerindians and Aborigines to Old World infections appear almost immediately after the intrusion of the whites. In 1492, Columbus kidnapped a number of West Indians to train as interpreters and to show to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Several of them seem to have died on the stormy voyage to Europe, and so Columbus had only seven to display in Spain, along with some gold trinkets, Arawack finery, and a few parrots. When, less than a year later, he returned to American waters, only two of the seven were still alive. In 1495, Columbus, searching for a West Indian commodity that would sell in Europe, sent 550 Amerindian slaves, 12 to 35 years of age, more or less, off across the Atlantic. Two hundred died on the difficult voyage; 350 survived to be put to work in Spain. The majority of these soon were also dead “because the land did not suit them.”1
The British never shipped large numbers of Australian Aborigines to Europe as slaves or servants or in any other category, but in 1792, two Aborigines, Bennilong and Yemmerrawanyea, did sail to England as honored pets. Despite what we can assume was good treatment, they did no better than the first Amerindians in Spain. Bennilong pined and declined and showed indications of a pulmonary infection, but he did survive to return to his home. His companion succumbed to the same infection (perhaps tuberculosis, which was very widespread in Western Europe at the end of the eighteenth century) and was buried beneath a stone inscribed “In memory of Yemmerrawanyea, a native of New South Wales, who died 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:
