Plagues and Peoples (30 page)

Starting from such levels, population decay was catastrophic. By 1568, less than fifty years from the time Cortez inaugurated epidemiological as well as other exchanges between Amerindian and European populations, the population
of central Mexico had shrunk to about three million, i.e., to about one tenth of what had been there when Cortez landed.
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Decay continued, though at a reduced rate, for another fifty years. Population reached a low point of about 1.6 million by 1620. Recovery did not definitely set in for another thirty years or so and remained very slow until the eighteenth century.

Similarly drastic destruction of pre-existing Amerindian societies also occurred in other parts of the Americas, continuing even into the twentieth century. Disaster is to be expected whenever some previously remote and isolated tribe comes into contact with the outside world and there encounters a series of destructive and demoralizing epidemics. A relatively recent case history will illustrate how ruthless and seemingly irresistible such process can be. In 1903 a South American tribe, the Cayapo, accepted a missionary—a single priest—who bent every effort to safeguard his flock from the evils and dangers of civilization. When he arrived the tribe was between six thousand and eight thousand strong, yet only five hundred survived in 1918. By 1927 only twenty-seven were alive and in 1950 two or three individuals tracing descent to the Cayapo still existed, but the tribe had totally disappeared—and this despite the best intentions and a deliberate attempt to shield the Indians from disease as well as other risks of outside contacts.
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Other examples of swift and irretrievable disaster abound. In 1942–43, for instance, the opening of the Alcan highway exposed a remote Indian community in Alaska to measles, German measles, dysentery, whooping cough, mumps, tonsillitis, meningitis, and catarrhal jaundice in a single year! Yet thanks to airlift into modern hospitals, only 7 of 130 individuals actually died. A little more than a century before, in 1837, the Mandan tribe of the high plains found itself cooped up in two defended camps by their Sioux enemies when epidemic broke out. As a result their numbers were reduced from about 2,000 to a mere 30–40 survivors in a matter of weeks; and
those survivors were promptly captured by enemies so that the Mandan tribe ceased to exist.
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In an age of almost world-wide population growth, it is hard for us to imagine such catastrophes. Even without total disruption of the sort that came to the Mandan and Cayapo, a 90 per cent drop in population within 120 years (i.e., across five to six human generations), as happened in Mexico and Peru, carries with it drastic psychological and cultural consequences. Faith in established institutions and beliefs cannot easily withstand such disaster; skills and knowledge disappear. This, indeed, was what allowed the Spaniards to go as far as they did in transferring their culture and language to the New World, making it normative even in regions where millions of Indians had previously lived according to standards, and customs of their own.

Labor shortage and economic retrogression was another obvious concomitant. The development of forms of compulsory labor and dispersal from cities (where disease losses concentrate) to rural estates are necessary responses if social hierarchies are to survive at all. Late Roman institutions and those of seventeenth-century Mexico have an uncanny likeness in this respect, which Spain’s heritage of the Roman law only partially explains. Landlords and tax collectors, facing a radically decaying population from which to derive support, can be counted on to react in parallel fashion; and this seems to be what happened in both the late Roman and the seventeenth-century Spanish empires.

It is not really surprising, therefore, to discover how much alike the late Roman system of compulsory labor and Mexican debt peonage were in practice, even though legal forms were different. The rise of haciendas in seventeenth-century Mexico exactly parallels the rise of villas in late Roman times. Both societies also saw a massive emptying out of older urban centers. To be sure, there were differences. Rome faced a serious problem of border defense, whereas the Spanish empire of the New World was threatened only by sea and was therefore spared the expense of trying to maintain any but the most
sketchy sort of armed forces on its landward frontiers. On the other hand, Roman encounters with epidemic disease were undoubtedly less crippling than the concentrated exposure to the Old World’s full repertory of infections proved to be for Amerindians. Consequently, Roman authorities had a less radically decaying population base upon which to draw than the labor force that remained available for the support of the Spanish imperial structure in the New World.

Wholesale demoralization and simple surrender of will to live certainly played a large part in the destruction of Amerindian communities. Numerous recorded instances of failure to tend newborn babies so that they died unnecessarily, as well as outright suicide, attest the intensity of Amerindian bewilderment and despair. European military action and harsh treatment of laborers gathered forcibly for some large-scale undertaking also had a role in uprooting and destroying old social structures. But human violence and disregard, however brutal, was not the major factor causing Amerindian populations to melt away as they did. After all, it was not in the interest of the Spaniards and other Europeans to allow potential taxpayers and the Indian work force to diminish. The main destructive role was certainly played by epidemic disease.

The first encounter came in 1518, when smallpox reached Hispaniola and attacked the Indian population so virulently that Bartoleme de Las Casas believed that only a thousand survived. From Hispaniola, smallpox traveled to Mexico, ariving in 1520. It affected Cortez’s Tlaxcalan allies on the coast as well as those who had attacked him; but exact details of its overland transmission cannot be reconstructed. All the same, the outbreak in Tenochtidán some four months after Cortez had been forced to withdraw looked very like divine punishment for those who had attacked the Spaniards. As a result, when Cortez returned to central Mexico, the peoples living around the lake decided to join him. This was important, since Cortez’s Spanish forces remained tiny, and his Indian allies from the coast were insufficiently numerous to isolate Tenochtidán from the surrounding communities that customarily
supplied the capital city with food. Hence, once their lakeside subjects abandoned them, the Aztecs’ fate was sealed, despite their brave, and indeed suicidal, resistance.

Clearly, if smallpox had not broken out when it did, Cortez’s victory would have been more difficult, and perhaps impossible. The same was true of Pizarro’s filibuster into Peru. For the smallpox epidemic in Mexico did not confine its ravages to Aztec territory. Instead, it spread to Guatemala, where it appeared in 1520, and continued southward, penetrating the Inca domain in 1525 or 1526. Consequences there were just as drastic as among the Aztecs. The reigning Inca died of the disease while away from his capital on campaign in the North. His designated heir also died, leaving no legitimate successor. Civil war ensued, and it was amid this wreckage of the Inca political structure that Pizarro and his crew of roughnecks made their way to Cuzco and plundered its treasures. He met no serious military resistance at all.

Two points seem particularly worth emphasizing here. First, Spaniards and Indians readily agreed that epidemic disease was a particularly dreadful and unambiguous form of divine punishment. Interpretation of pestilence as a sign of God’s displeasure was a part of the Spanish inheritance, enshrined in the Old Testament and in the whole Christian tradition. The Amerindians, lacking all experience of anything remotely like the initial series of lethal epidemics, concurred. Their religious doctrines recognized that superhuman power lodged in deities whose behavior toward men was often angry. It was natural, therefore, for them to assign an unexampled effect to a supernatural cause, quite apart from the Spanish missionary efforts that urged the same interpretation of the catastrophe upon dazed and demoralized converts.

Secondly, the Spaniards were nearly immune from the terrible disease that raged so mercilessly among the Indians. They had almost always been exposed in childhood and so developed effective immunity. Given the interpretation of the cause of pestilence accepted by both parties, such a manifestation of divine partiality for the invaders was conclusive. The gods of
the Aztecs as much as the God of the Christians seemed to agree that the white newcomers had divine approval for all they did. And while God thus seemed to favor the whites, regardless of their mortality and piety or lack thereof, his wrath was visited upon the Indians with an unrelenting harshness that often puzzled and distressed the Christian missionaries who soon took charge of the moral and religious life of their converts along the frontiers of Spain’s American dominions.

From the Amerindian point of view, stunned acquiescence in Spanish superiority was the only possible response. No matter how few their numbers or how brutal and squalid their behavior, the Spaniards prevailed. Native authority structures crumbled; the old gods seemed to have abdicated. The situation was ripe for the mass conversions recorded so proudly by Christian missionaries. Docility to the commands of priests, viceroys, landowners, mining entrepreneurs, tax collectors, and anyone else who spoke with a loud voice and had a white skin was another inevitable consequence. When the divine and natural orders were both unambiguous in declaring against native tradition and belief, what ground for resistance remained? The extraordinary ease of Spanish conquests and the success a few hundred men had in securing control of vast areas and millions of persons is unintelligible on any other basis.

Even after the initial ravages of smallpox had passed, having killed something like one third of the total population, nothing approaching epidemiological stability prevailed. Measles followed hard upon the heels of smallpox, spreading through Mexico and Peru in 1530–31. Deaths were frequent, as is to be expected when such a disease encounters a virgin population dense enough to keep the chain of infection going. Still another epidemic came fifteen years later, in 1546, whose character is unclear. Perhaps it was typhus.
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Probably typhus was a new disease among Europeans, too; at least the medical men who first described it clearly enough to make diagnosis
possible thought it was new when it broke out among troops fighting in Spain, in 1490.
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Hence if the pestilence of 1546 in the Americas was in fact typhus, the Amerindians were beginning to participate in epidemic diseases that also affected the populations of the Old World. This becomes unambiguous in course of the next American disease disaster: an influenza epidemic that raged in 1558–59. This epidemic, which broke out in Europe in 1556 and lasted on and off till 1560, had serious demographic consequences on both sides of the Atiantic. One estimate places die-off in England from the influenza at no less than 20 per cent of the entire population, for instance; and comparable losses occurred elsewhere in Europe.
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Whether the influenza outbreak of the 1550s was a genuinely global phenomenon, like its more recent parallel, 1918–19, cannot be said for sure, but Japanese records also mention an outbreak of “coughing violence” in 1556 from which “very many died.”
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The incorporation of Amerindian populations into the circle of epidemic disease that happened to be current in Eurasia in the sixteenth century did not relieve them of special exposure to still other infections coming across the ocean. Relatively trifling endemic afflictions of the Old World regularly became death-dealing epidemics among New World populations that were totally lacking in acquired resistances. Thus diphtheria, mumps, and recurrent outbreaks of the first two great killers, smallpox and measles, appeared at intervals throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Whenever a new region or hitherto isolated Amerindian population came into regular contact with the outside world, the cycle of repeated infections picked up renewed force, mowing down the helpless inhabitants. The peninsula of Lower California, for instance, began to experience drastic depopulation at the very end of the seventeenth century, when a first recorded epidemic broke out there. Eighty years later the population had been reduced by more than 90 per cent, despite well-intentioned efforts by Spanish missionaries to protect and cherish the Indians assigned to their charge.
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Obviously, where European records are lacking, it is difficult to follow the course of disease and depopulation.
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There is no doubt that epidemics often ran ahead of direct contact with Europeans, even in the thinly occupied lands north and south. Thus, because the French had already established a post at Port Royal in what is now Nova Scotia, we happen to know that in 1616–17 a great pestilence of some sort swept through the Massachusetts Bay area. Thus God prepared the way, as Englishmen and Indians agreed, for the arrival of the Pilgrims just three years later. A subsequent outbreak of smallpox, starting in 1633, convinced the colonists (if they needed convincing) that Divine Providence was indeed on their side in conflicts with the Indians.
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Similar experiences abound in Jesuit missionary records from Canada and Paraguay. The smaller and more isolated populations of North and South America were just as vulnerable to European infections as the denser populations of Mexico and Peru, even though their numbers were insufficient to maintain a chain of infection on the spot for very long at a time. The judgment a German missionary expressed in 1699 is worth repeating: “The Indians die so easily that the bare look and smell of a Spaniard causes them to give up the ghost.”
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If he had said “breath” instead of “smell” he would have been right.