Plagues in World History (17 page)

Smallpox y 79

Much debate still exists as to the exact numbers of victims who succumbed at this time: mainly the issue centers around pre-Columbian estimates of population, which must rely on inexact measures such as anecdotal testimonial evidence, archaeological artifacts, and educated guesses as to the “carrying capacity”

of the land. Mexico, for example, may have had a total native population in 1519

ranging from three to fifty-eight million, which would put its decline by 1605

at anywhere from 67 to 98 percent; the Andes region in South America may have numbered from two to thirty-seven million in 1532, making its decline by 1620

somewhere between 70 and 98 percent.10 But even when opting for the lowest estimates of population loss, the Native American die-off was enormous, prompting one historian, David Noble Cook, to dub it the “greatest human catastrophe in history.”11

For an older generation of historians, led initially by John Duffy, Alfred Crosby, and William McNeill, disease was assigned an almost monocausal role in the American Holocaust, even when other factors besides the introduction of germs, such as the importation from Europe of new plants and animals to the Americas, were invoked to explain how disease was able to wreak its havoc.12

Disease was able to reach such tragic proportions in the Americas supposedly because it took root in the “virgin soil” of a population that had no prior exposure to Europe’s epidemics, even though Native Americans did have their own, pre-Columbian illnesses, including dysentery and other gastrointestinal diseases, tuberculosis, fungal and streptococcal infections, bacterial pneumonia, and possibly malaria, yellow fever, typhus, and influenza. They also had some form of venereal disease, such as syphilis, that may have been their “gift” back the other way to the Europeans. Yet, the successive waves of ever-changing epidemic disease crashing in on American shores with each new generation of settlers or slaves arriving from Europe and Africa never gave natives a chance to recover their numbers from any single outbreak; even in the case of those who survived a bout with smallpox or measles and thus developed immunity to it, there was always the specter of some new illness on the horizon to claim its share of victims. For example, after Mexico’s disastrous encounter with smallpox during the 1520s, measles struck Mexico and Central America during the 1530s, then it was the turn of typhus and possibly pneumonic plague in the 1540s, followed by a lethal combination of smallpox, influenza, and measles in Guatemala and the Andes during the 1550s and 1560s, with typhus added to the mix during the 1570s, 1580s, and early 1590s.13

For some scholars, no other explanation aside from disease need be considered in order to account for the precipitous decline in numbers and, by implication, in cultural vitality, of Native American populations during the century or more following Columbus’s first contact in 1492. Thomas Whitmore, for instance, 80 y Chapter 2

declares that the “presumption of disease mortality as the overwhelming cause of Amerindian population decline throughout the New World seems virtually ir-refutable,” since “the principle of Occam’s razor [that the simplest explanation is best] suggests that it is not necessary to assume that there were other important causes of death.”14 Others, drawing on the older positions of disease historians like Hans Zinnser and Henry Sigerist, also place some emphasis on the mercurial nature of disease to mow down the “great actors” of history, such as the Aztec leader Cuitláhuac and the Inca emperor Huayna Capac, both of whom succumbed to smallpox, in sealing the fate of American civilizations.15 But did disease really act alone to deal out all this damage? More recent scholars of the New World Holocaust seem not so satisfied with this answer.

Instead, the latest consensus has coalesced around the idea that disease must interact with other cultural factors, in this case primarily colonial or imperialistic oppression, in order to satisfactorily explain the collapse of Native American societies. Perhaps the most persuasive argument to be made for this position is a comparative one, in which the smallpox epidemic in the Americas is analyzed alongside the outbreak of plague in Europe during the late Middle Ages, which we just explored in the previous chapter. Why did Europe recover, both culturally and in demographic terms, from its bout with deadly epidemic disease at the dawn of the Early Modern period whereas at this very same time American civilizations were about to embark on a completely different trajectory with the arrival of their own plagues? Keep in mind that the Black Death, no less than smallpox in the Americas, behaved as if it were rampaging on virgin soil in Europe, given the extremely high mortalities achieved in just a few years. Also remember that plague kept coming back to decimate European populations in successive waves in succeeding decades, just as smal pox did in the New World, and that it likewise did so in conjunction with other illnesses, albeit ones perhaps not as deadly as each new disease was in the Americas.16 One study based on the obituary lists for Christ Church Priory in Kent throughout the fifteenth century reveals that plague, a kil er in a third of al disease outbreaks among the monks, was accompanied by tuberculosis, the “sweat” (a mysterious deadly disease characterized by chills, fever, and profuse sweating that first broke out in England in 1485), dropsy or edema, and strangury (a painful inability to urinate).17 A doctor writing from Avignon in 1382, Raymond Chalin de Vi-nario, also pointed to the “great variety of epidemic diseases” that were appearing in his time, including ulcerous scabies (a skin itch or rash), intestinal worms, and “semi-tertian fevers” (malaria).18

The obvious answer to this comparative conundrum seems to be that Europe hadn’t had to face an invasion by another civilization bent on its conquest at the same time that it was being conquered by disease, a civilization that was not only Smallpox y 81

ruthless and in some ways technologically superior but also, most significantly, seemingly immune to the very diseases before which the natives were so helpless.

Imagine if, during the Black Death, Europe also faced a massive onslaught from the Mongol Empire, in which the invading Mongol armies were indifferent to the plague, rather than being just as susceptible to it as the Europeans, and indeed seemed to use the disease as their ally. Would Europe as we know it have survived? This scenario is not so very far-fetched as it might seem; just a century earlier the armies of the Great Khan had reached the gates of Vienna before the death of their leader called them back east, and we have already seen how in 1346 the Mongols at Caffa communicated the plague to some Genoese merchants through a form a biological warfare, even as their own ranks were falling to the Black Death.

It has recently been argued that the Mesoamerican experience with disease during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in many ways mirrored that of the Europeans and other cultures during their own epidemic crises, such as the Black Death. This similarity extends to the severity of each disease outbreak, which in both Europe and the Americas supposedly averaged between 25 and 50

percent; the circumstances surrounding epidemics in both regions were likewise comparable, being caused and spread primarily by trade contacts and networks and accompanied by exacerbating factors such as warfare. Human responses to disease among Native Americans could also strike similar chords in other cultures, such as their attribution of outbreaks to a combination of divine or supernatural causes and natural ones, and their explanation of the occurrence of disease in humans as owing to an imbalance that needed to be corrected if prevention or cure was to be effected. For example, Andean healers believed in the three fluids of life of air, blood, and fat that correspond to the Indian Ayurvedic
dosas
or the Greek humoral system, while the Aztecs subscribed to a cosmic dualism that has parallels with the yin-yang concept in China.19 As in Europe and the Middle East, the Aztecs also usually attributed disease to a higher power such as their gods, whom they believed they had offended in some fashion, and they treated illnesses through a familiar combination of prayer, blood-letting, diet (expressed in opposites of hot and cold), and herbal remedies, in which they were known to be particularly expert.20

The disease Holocaust in the New World should therefore not be taken as the exception to the human experience with epidemics that it has traditionally been thought but rather needs to be ful y integrated into the overal history of disease.

At the same time, however, even the proponents of this view will admit there are some aspects of the American experience with disease that are uniquely tragic and catastrophic. One difference is the confluence of “virgin soil” diseases that struck the Americas almost simultaneously compared to the rest of the world, especially 82 y Chapter 2

since Europe, Africa, China, and India were al interconnected epidemical y by ancient trade patterns that made them part of one “disease pool,” with the result that European colonialism within this pool did not enjoy the same demographic advantages as it did in the New World. Of far greater impact, however, was the simultaneous occurrence of colonial oppression, popularly known as the “Black Legend,” that was chronicled by propagandists even among the Spanish themselves, such as the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, which augmented and sometimes exacerbated the massive population losses to disease. Here, untold thousands succumbed to a combination of outright military conquest, slavery, and forced labor and migration. Although these losses have long been known to scholars, and indeed have lately been discounted somewhat as the product of propaganda exaggeration, until now the implications of their interconnectedness with the concurrent die-offs due to disease have not been fully realized.21

It is true that in Europe, too, disease often coincided with warfare, sometimes with deliberate timing, as when Florence launched attacks on its rivals on the Italian peninsula to coincide with outbreaks of plague during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.22 But there is probably nothing to compare with the concerted assault from European colonial powers upon the disease-ridden New World, an assault that, unlike the wars in Europe, came from an entirely alien culture that, as already mentioned, was largely immune to the epidemics decimating its rival civilizations. In the territories administered by Spain, Portu-gal, and France, it can confidently be asserted that the native die-off from disease was unintentional, since these countries relied on indigenous labor and contacts in order to exploit their colonies for their benefit. In the English colonies of North America, however, the settlers’ hunger for land was entirely inimical to the natives’ presence, and so the latter’s epidemiological misfortunes were actually celebrated or even deliberately planned, as in the famous incident of Jeffrey Amherst, British commander at Fort Pitt in present-day Pennsylvania, ordering the distribution of smallpox-infected blankets among the Ottawa tribe during the Pontiac rebellion of 1763 as a form of biological warfare. But even among those whose treatment of the natives could be said to be the least detrimental to their survival, such as the Catholic missionaries in New Spain and New France, their policies of resettlement or
reducciónes
of Native American populations, whereby whole tribes were herded together into missions for the purposes of conversion, unwittingly helped spread crowd diseases like smallpox much faster and more effectively than if their charges were simply left alone.

I also believe that, aside from the numbers directly killed by its impact, European colonialism interacted in a synergistic way with disease to greatly augment population losses during epidemics, in that colonial policies helped to drastically lower native cultural abilities to resist and recover from epidemio-Smallpox y 83

logical setbacks. Whereas Europe was able to weather and eventual y overcome the long demographic stagnation imposed by the Black Death from 1348 until at least 1450, Native Americans by contrast were at a severe cultural disadvantage for doing so, quite aside from the sheer number, severity, and timing of the epidemics themselves. For example, it has been asserted that both European and Native American societies responded to major disease outbreaks with terror, fear, and despair; I have argued elsewhere, however, that such a characterization has been grossly exaggerated when describing the European response to the Black Death in the late Middle Ages. An assortment of humanists, doctors, artists, mystics, and even clergymen began formulating alternatives to the obses-sively morbid “guilt culture” that supposedly imbued late medieval Europe in the aftermath of the Black Death.23

On the other hand, such fatalistic attitudes are more believable in the New World in the context of the intersection between the Black Legend and disease.

Contemporary reports, mostly from European observers, do testify to natives who succumbed to suicide, self-inflicted abortions, reluctance to reproduce, and other symptoms of a demoralized and defeated mentality. The mood seems cap-tured by the Yucatan
Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel
, which bemoans, “Great was the stench of the dead. After our fathers and grandfathers succumbed, half of the people fled to the fields. The dogs and vultures devoured the bodies. The mortality was terrible. . . . So it was that we became orphans, oh my sons! So we became when we were young. All of us were thus. We were born to die!”24 Smallpox was very conducive to this depressed outlook among survivors because of the disfigurement it produced, to which some Native American cultures that apparently prized the beauty of their complexions were particularly sensitive. Studies of the impact of “virgin soil” epidemics in the Hawaiian islands during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where smallpox was perhaps the most feared of all diseases that also included measles, mumps, whooping cough, chickenpox, influenza, and tuberculosis, nonetheless conclude that declining birth and fertility rates and high male-to-female ratios were primarily responsible for the drastic population declines in the region. Sterility caused by venereal diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea are largely held to blame, but a collective cultural suicidal impulse brought on by racial oppression from white
haole
colonists and missionaries—expressed in the form of abortions and suicides induced either deliberately or through simple neglect or “anomie”—are also believed to have played a role, particularly in skewing the relative proportions of the sexes. Venereal diseases may likewise have been facilitated by cultural attitudes such as the reputed open sexual mores of the Hawaiians.25