HIS 100 Theme 2: Secondary Source Analysis Worksheet

THE COLUMBIAN

EXCHANGE Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492

30th Anniversary Edition

ALFRED W. CROSBY, JR. Forewords by J. R. McNeill and Otto von Mering

PRAEGER Westport, Connecticut

London

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian exchange.

(Contributions in American studies, no. 2) Bibliography: p. 1. Indians—Diseases. 2. Indians—Agriculture. 3. Medical geography—

History. 4. Geographical distribution of animals and plants. I. Title. E98. D6C7 574.5 73-140916 ISBN 0-8371-5821-4

Chapter 2, originally entitled “Conquistador y Pestilencia: The First New World Pandemic and the Fall of the Great Indian Empires,’’ first published in Hispanic American Historical Review, XLVI1 (August 1967), 321-327. © Duke University Press.

A large part of chapter 4 first published in American Anthropologist, LXXI (April 1969), 218-27.

Copyright © 2003 by Alfred W. Crosby, Jr.

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the author and publisher.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-140916

ISBN: 0-275-98073-1 0-275-98092-8(pbk)

First published in 2003

Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).

P

In order to keep this title in print and available to the academic community, this edition was produced using digital reprint technology in a relatively short print run. This would not have been attainable using traditional methods. Although the cover has been changed from its original appearance, the text remains the same and all materials and methods used still conform to the highest book-making standards.

TO ALL THE RULEY GIRLS

Contents

List of Illustrations ix Foreword by J. R. McNeill xi Preface to the 2003 Edition xvii Foreword by Otto von Mering xxiii Preface to the 1972 Edition xxv

1 The Contrasts 3 2 Conquistador y Pestilencia 35 3 Old World Plants and Animals in the New World 64 4 The Early History of Syphilis: A Reappraisal 122 5 New World Foods and Old World Demography 165 6 The Columbian Exchange Continues 208

Bibliography 222 Bibliography to the 2003 Edition 261 Index 2T1

vii

List of Illustrations

King Ferdinand Looks Across the Atlantic 2 Distribution of Blood Group Gene A 24-25 Distribution of Blood Group Gene B 26-27 Distribution of Blood Group Gene O 28-29 The Conquest of Mexico 128 Smallpox Strikes the Indians of Mexico 128 Preparation and Use of Guaiacum 129 Treponema pallidum 129 Durer’s The Syphilitic 130 Sixteenth-century Drawing of Maize 131 Sixteenth-century Drawing of the Tomato Plant 131 Slaves on the Voyage to America 132 The Immigrants 133 Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters 134 Indians Working in the Potato Fields 134 Portrait of John Gerard 135 Irish Famine Sufferers Searching for Potatoes 136 Sixteenth-century Drawing of a Buffalo 136

ix

Foreword

In A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949, Aldo Leopold, the American naturalist, essayist, and godfather of modem envi­ ronmentalism, called for a rewriting of history from an ecological perspective. A generation of historians ignored him. In the social ferment and intellectual tumult of the 1960s, Alfred W. Crosby came, by his own path, to the same conclusion as Leopold. But he then took the further step of actually writing a book that took seriously the importance of ecological shifts in human affairs. You hold that book in your hands.

Leopold would have been pleased; Crosby’s professional col­ leagues were less than pleased. The Columbian Exchange had difficulty finding a publisher until Greenwood published it in 1972. The reviews in scholarly journals ranged from ungenerous to polite, and many journals did not bother to review it. Crosby’s colleagues at his own university expressed some skepticism as to whether this was really history or not, but the book refused to go away. It dealt in a clear, compact manner with subjects that seemed ever more important, which helped it to find its way onto reading lists at many colleges across the United States. It was also translated into Spanish and Italian.

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xii I FOREWORD

My first encounter with the book came on a rainy afternoon in 1982 when I picked it off of a shoulder-high shelf in an office I temporarily occupied. I read it in one gulp, neglecting the pos­ sibility of supper. Only rarely can I recall precisely the circum­ stances in which I read a book long ago, but The Columbian Exchange, and the sense of excitement it provoked in me, etched itself into my memory. History has never seemed quite the same for me since. Perhaps I was unusually receptive, having been steeped for many, many months in works concerning the consti­ tutional histories of the British Commonwealth.

Many others found new vistas on American, Latin American, European, African, and world history in Crosby’s book. It became one of the foundational texts for the field of environmental his­ tory, which emerged in the U.S. in the 1970s. Mainstream his­ torians gradually took notice too, and by the 1990s the notion of the Columbian Exchange had worked its way into several text­ books on American and world history.

The phrase “The Columbian Exchange” did as well. It is not often that a historian coins a new phrase that becomes standard shorthand for some complex phenomenon, but today almost every practicing historian in the U.S., and many overseas, recognize the words “The Columbian Exchange.” Most could give a fair ren­ dition of what Crosby meant by the phrase, even those who had not read the book. Whereas thirty years ago Crosby’s ideas met with indifference from most historians, neglect from many pub­ lishers, and hostility from at least some reviewers, they now fig­ ure prominently in conventional presentations of modem history.

Crosby, of course, built on the work of previous scholars. He did not poke around in archives looking for documents dealing with measles, sheep, and bluegrass. But geographers were interested in crop dispersals. Anthropologists and a few historians tried to make sense of the epidemics and the demographic catastrophe that befell the Americas after 1492. Readers will find their works in Crosby’s footnotes. No one had put these pieces together be­

FOREWORD I xiii

fore, and no one had written on these subjects with such wit and verve.1

So for historians Crosby framed a new subject. He pursued the issue of ecological factors in his 1986 book Ecological Imperi­ alism, which looked at some other parts of the world, including Australia and New Zealand, and argued for a systematic, asym­ metrical impact of biological exchange which helped Europeans dominate much of the world in recent centuries. Others have en­ riched his account by drawing attention to some of the West African components of the Columbian Exchange, such as the rice that underpinned the plantation economy of the Carolina lowlands after 1690.2

Crosby did not discuss Africa very much in The Columbian Exchange, but he had a very good reason. In the 1960s, the his­ toriography of Africa was just taking shape, and information of the sort he needed was not as easily available as it became. He explored the importance of American crops for modem Africa, but African crops, diseases, and people formed a crucial part— in some places the dominant part—of the Old World’s biotic donations to the Americas. It is well to remember that before 1880 most of the people who crossed the Atlantic to the Americas were Africans, and before 1820 four out of every five transatlantic migrants hailed from Africa. Although they came in chains, parts of their flora and fauna came with them, including African rice, okra, yams, black-eyed peas, millets, sorghum, sesame, and the pathogens that cause yellow fever and malaria. Coffee came from Africa, although not in slave ships. Africans also brought their highly effective techniques of growing rice and their not so ef­ fective means of healing yellow fever and malaria sufferers.

Crosby’s legacy lies not in the comprehensiveness of chroni­ cling the Columbian Exchange, but in the establishment of a per­ spective, a model for understanding ecological and social events. Indeed, with a little imagination one can find exchanges of the sort Crosby illuminated almost everywhere. Most of these are shrouded in the mists of time and will never be understood in

xiv I FOREWORD

the detail that Crosby was able to provide for the Columbian Exchange. Long before Columbus, mariners on the Indian Ocean learned to navigate the monsoon winds and sail between the coasts of East Africa and India. They carried crops, pests, weeds, and diseases back and forth, bringing sorghum, pearl millet, and finger millet to India. Similar exchanges on the monsoon winds took place between the archipelagoes of southeast Asia and China. Champa rice, an early-ripening variety, made southern China much more productive from the thirteenth century onwards and helped underwrite the prosperity and power of Song and Ming China. More recently, as Crosby explored in his later book, a large-scale, if rather one-sided, biological exchange took place between Pacific Islands and Australia on the one hand, and Eur­ asia on the other. This took place after the navigations of Captain James Cook in the late eighteenth century, uniting previously separate ecosystems with dramatic results that paralleled the Columbian Exchange. The antipodes had no equivalent of the potato or maize to give to the world (eucalyptus trees are perhaps their most successful biological export), but for the peoples and ecosystems of Australia, New Zealand, or Tahiti, the Cook Exchange, as it might be called, proved jarring in the extreme.

Parallels to the Columbian Exchange occurred on land as well. When caravan traffic first sustained commercial exchanges be­ tween China and the Mediterranean world at around 100 b.c.e., seeds, spores, and germs went along for the bumpy ride. Cherries, and perhaps smallpox and measles, came to the Roman world; China acquired grapes, alfalfa, donkeys, camels, and also perhaps smallpox and measles, among other items.

Something similar must have happened when caravans crossed the Sahara Desert between the Maghreb and the West African sahel. An African Columbus, whose name we will never know, inaugurated regular traffic sometime before 500 c.E. Horses came to West Africa, with revolutionary political consequences that roughly paralleled the impact of horses upon the Plains Indian of North America, although the difficulty of raising horses in West

FOREWORD I XV

Africa altered the situation somewhat. Nonetheless, the military use of horses, especially against peoples who did not have them, helped reorganize West Africa, giving rise to large empires such as Ghana, Mali, and Songhai.

Trans-Saharan caravans probably also exchanged pathogens between West Africa and the Mediterranean world. The syphilis outbreak of the 1490s, which may have resulted from an import from the Americas, could also represent a mutation of West Af­ rican yaws. In the reverse direction, some of the crowd and herd diseases of Eurasia may have entered West Africa in the tissues of camel drivers. Rats and fleas may have crossed the Sahara this way too, bringing bubonic plague to the sahel in the great pan­ demic of the fourteenth century.

These biological exchanges, if indeed they occurred as I sug­ gest, helped shape the history of Eurasia and Africa as surely as the Columbian Exchange. Their impacts were perhaps smaller in scale and, at least at the moment, less well documented than the impacts that Crosby put in the spotlight. But perhaps one day they too will find their Crosby, who will write books that would both please Aldo Leopold’s ghost and change someone’s vision of history on a damp afternoon.

J. R. McNeill

NOTES

1. A predecessor of sorts was Hans Zinsser’s delightful Rats, Lice, and History (1934), a medical doctor’s irreverent biography of typhus.

2. E.g. Judith Carney, Black Rice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer­ sity Press, 2001).

Preface to the 2003 Edition

I don’t read my books after they come out because publication is a hard freeze that makes imprecisions, lapses in taste, and mis­ takes permanent and painful to the touch. However, in prepara­ tion for writing this preface I pulled The Columbian Exchange down from the shelf and did go through it. Flaws? Oh, yes; I’ll talk over a few of them with you. But it is a good book; I’ll talk some about that, too.

First, my apologies. Thirty years ago I used “man” to mean all members of the Homo sapiens species. So did most people, but it was stupid then and it is now. I used the word “race” as if I actually knew what it meant. I referred to the Maya as the most “sensitive” of all the indigenous peoples of the Americas without realizing how patronizing that is. Was I implying that Cortés might have invited the Maya for cocktails, but certainly not the Aztecs?

And so on. I invite you to make your own selection of yester­ day’s plastic blossoms pressed between the pages of my book.

I made some flat-out mistakes, some of them pretty good. All smallpox epidemics in previously uninfected populations did not produce thirty percent mortality rates. Only the worst epidemics

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xviii I PREFACE TO THE 2003 EDITION

did that. The indigenous inhabitants of the Antilles were not al­ most all extinct by the mid-sixteenth century, only those of the Greater Antilles. The Caribs hung on in the Lesser Antilles. An­ cestral wheat was not, like the ancestors of maize, markedly in­ ferior in yield to its cultivated descendents. Wild wheat was awkward to harvest but very productive, which may be one of the reasons why the peoples of southwest Asia got the jump on the rest of humanity in fanning, urbanization, etc.

x3 My biggest mistake was a matter of general ignorance at the time and I like it a lot. On page 218 I announced, ex cathedra, that there has been no extreme and permanent physical change affecting the entire globe in half a billion years. Since the pub­ lication of The Columbian Exchange, geologists and paleontolo­ gists have amassed evidence that an asteroid or some such object hit the Earth about sixty-five million years ago, killing off the dinosaurs, clearing the way for mammals, and making a fool out of me.

The chapter which has weathered the last thirty years the least successfully, though it has not been completely superseded, is number four, ‘The Early History of Syphilis: A Reappraisal.” The geographical homeland of the disease was a mystery when I wrote of it and still is, whatever the newspapers proclaim, as they do at least once every five years. Did syphilis exist in the New World before 1492? There are a good many skeletons with dis­ torted and scarred bones that seem to indicate that it did. But by “it” do we mean venereal syphilis or one of the nonvenereal “syphilises,” or are they all just manifestations of the same thing?

Did “it” exist in the Old World before 1492? There are pre- Columbian skeletons in the Old World similar to those termed syphilitic in the New World, but only a very few. Their tiny number doesn’t, of course, prove that their wretched owners did not have syphilis, but if they did the disease must have been of a different character, certainly less communicable, than sixteenth­ century Europe’s venereal pox. Either that, or before 1492 Old World people must have been close to one hundred percent cel-

PREFACE TO THE 2003 EDITION | XÍX

ibate or monogamous, an admirable, and therefore unlikely, state of affairs.

To my knowledge the oldest cadaver thus far proved syphilitic by actual evidence of the presence of Treponema pallidum in its tissues is that of Maria d’Aragona of Naples. This noblewoman died in 1568, long after Columbus sailed, so her tissues tell us no more than that the disease was circulating in Europe in her lifetime, which we knew for sure anyway.1 Unfortunately, trep­ onemal traces fade with time and any in pre-Columbian bones would probably be so faint as to defy investigators using present technology.

We don’t know where venereal syphilis started. It could have come from here or there or here and there and have leaped in deadlines when mild strains of treponemas met and crossed the Atlantic in 1492, or its increase in virulence circa 1500 may have had nothing whatsoever to do with Columbus and simply have been a coincidence.

Anyway, I should not have ennobled syphilis with a whole chapter as if it were Montezuma’s Revenge. Its Old World debut was spectacular and, like all things venereal, fascinating, but it was not a history-maker like the plague in the fourteenth century or smallpox in the sixteenth century. I cast it in a major role because I was uneasy about so many diseases crossing west over the Atlantic and none crossing east. I was like the geographers who believed for generations, before Captain Cook proved oth­ erwise, that there must be a continent, a Terra Australis, in the far, far south vast enough to balance all off of Eurasia, the bulk of Africa, and North America. Chapter four was my try for a sort of epidemiological-geographical symmetry. The aforesaid geog­ raphers were wrong, and so was I. There was little symmetry in the exchange of diseases between the Old and New Worlds, and there are few factors as influential in the history of the last half millennium as that.

I should have no more than nodded to the French Pox and included not pages but a whole chapter on the crops of the post-

XX I PREFACE TO THE 2003 EDITION

Columbian slave plantations, particularly southeast Asia’s sugar and America’s tobacco. European desire (addiction might be a better word) for the sweetener served as a motivation to transport millions of Africans across the Atlantic. Tobacco, which has killed many more than syphilis, is the true Montezuma’s Re­ venge.

But enough of my self-abasement, however noble. Let’s proceed to what is worthwhile about my book. It is about something so huge that we often overlook it, much as we tend to be uncon­ scious of the air we breathe, and that is the full story of our species since the melting back of the continental glaciers. That is to say, it is the story of the divergent evolution of the ecosystems and associated societies, isolated by rising sea levels, and when they did meet, the catastrophic and bountiful effects they had on each other. Those effects are so great as to defy containment in our usual intellectual divisions: archaeology, history, botany, medicine, demography, etc.

Thirty years ago I was so naive that I thought I could function usefully in all these disciplines. Naivité, if insisted upon, can guide you through the trees to some very interesting forests, which it did in my case.

I doubt that I would have gone hiking there but for the tumble and tumult of the 1960s (which in defiance of the decimal system lasted to the Watergate crisis of the early seventies.) I had studied for a doctorate in United States history in the starchy 1950s. I had been trained by men (always) who, most of them, were vet­ erans of the Second World War, men who rarely entertained doubts about the basic goodness of the society for which they had fought. For these men American history was political before all else and came in four-year presidential compartments occa­ sionally illuminated by wars, which the good guys always won. The good guys consisted of people who looked quite a lot like me. History was the story of people like me (Americans or, if not so blessed, at least European) and was, all and all, a record of progress, and would continue to be.

PREFACE TO THE 2003 EDITION | XXÍ

Then, just as I started teaching, along came the Civil Rights struggle and the Black Power movement, which taught me that people who didn’t look like me had been appallingly mistreated by people who did look like me. Then came the Vietnam War, which taught me that the world was much more than North Amer­ ica and Europe, that people who looked like me did not neces- ( , – sarily win all the wars, and that there were big pieces missing from the kind of history I was teaching.

The sixties “globalized” my mind a quarter century before that word entered journalistic jargon. For instance, if the Viet Cong were successful against the American armed forces, despite all the latter’s technological advantages, and if Africa had somehow repelled European imperialists for centuries before succumbing, then why were American Indians, all and all, so easily con­ quered? Did Cortes just huff and puff and blow Monctezuma’s house down or were there other factors at work?

The sixties, which made ideologues of some, drove me to bi­ ology. I had always had an interest in biological matters, though nothing that leafing through Natural History or watching Nova on TV could not satisfy. That mild interest now came to my rescue. I recommend such professionally irrelevant inclinations to young historians—linguistics, architecture, jazz, etc. They may provide you with new questions to ask when you are weary of the old questions. Good questions are harder to come by than good answers.

Tfled from ideological interpretations of history and went in search of the basics, life and death. Alive is alive and dead is dead, whatever Adam Smith or Karl Marx, Richard Nixon or Leonid Brezhnev had to say. What kept people alive long enough to reproduce, and what killed them? Perhaps food and disease?

Asking big questions like that is like replacing the standard film in your camera with infrared or ultraviolet film. You see things you have never seen before. The indigenous peoples of the Greater Antilles appear and then disappear. Chinese peasants eating com on the cob, not rice, loom up.

xxii I PREFACE TO THE 2003 EDITION

Big questions can, of course, lead to over-simplified answers. I probably did that with my telling of the arrival and first spread of smallpox in America, which, I indicated, led ipso facto to European triumph. Epidemics among immunologically unpre­ pared populations (often called virgin soil epidemics) often do produce high mortality rates, but if left alone the population will recover in numbers. -—j _> o

Europe, for instance, lost one-third of its population to the Black Death in the fourteenth century and recovered in time. If the Black Death had been accompanied by the arrival of Genghis Khan’s hordes, miraculously plague-proof, the story would have been very different. It might have been similar to what happened when European settlers followed on the heels of smallpox and other infections previously unknown to American Indians.

If, by the way, the plague and the Mongols had arrived in tandem, I think it is unlikely that I would be writing this preface in an Indo-European language.

If Columbus had sailed directly from the western extreme to the eastern extreme of Eurasia—if there had been no Americas— Spain and Europe would have probably been the richer for his success and perhaps the Ottoman Empire a bit poorer. There would have been major shifts of power, technologies, and pos­ sibly of religions. But even so, post-Columbian developments would have been only more of what had gone before. Columbus, however, couldn’t get to Asia—there were two continents full of biological and cultural improbabilities in his way—and life on our planet changes drastically and forever as the eastern and west­ ern hemispheres began to exchange life forms, both macro and micro.

NOTES

1. Gino Fomaciari et al, “Syphilis in a Renaissance Italian Mummy,” Lancet 2 (1989): 614.

Foreword

Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., belongs to a select company of social historians. He has devoted his special scholarly talents to re­ examine the record of the perduring interaction between man’s ways and changes in his condition since Columbus found the New World. As an exponent of what I should like to call “an­ thropomedical” historiography, he informs us succinctly about this many-faceted chain of altered conditions of life and well­ being. His retelling of it is an eloquent testimony to man’s un­ quenchable drive to explore his habitat and himself, not always wisely, sometimes too well.

The reader is taken on an engrossing intellectual voyage through the facts and interpretations of the salient cultural and bio-social consequences of 1492. He will gain a balanced view of the worldwide exchange and sociopolitical sequelae of the pro­ tean disease, syphilis, and the major communicable diseases of influenza, smallpox, measles, and pneumonia. He can also learn important historical answers to the complex connection between the international movement of disease and man, the cumulative transformation of world food suplies, and some of the noteworthy changes in world population growth.

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Professor Crosby is commendably precise in delineating the global dispersal and exchange of the leading New World culti­ gens (e.g., maize, potato, sweet potato, bean, and manioc) and the characteristic Old World plant and animal food staples (e.g., rice, wheat, barley, oat, and fruit crops; cattle, pig, sheep, goat, chicken, and horse). We are also persuaded by his argument link­ ing the progressive restructuring of national, regional, and local agricultural economies to notable historical declines in food sup­ ply and to the continuous rise in the quality, availability, and level of basic world food sources.

The author’s thoughtful consideration of the historically sig­ nificant human and ecological effects of the world exchange of cultigens and micro-organisms should appeal to all serious stu­ dents of the present human condition. He concludes his well­ paced history of the Columbian exchange with an evocative reexamination of the most recent, and, in the long run perhaps, most significant human “resultant” of 1492: the post-1800 phe­ nomenon of vast intercontinental migration.

Is it not ironic that, although worldwide population movements profoundly influence our daily lives, we know far more about the cause, meaning, and consequences of migratory behavior among animals? Should we remain as grossly uninformed about it as at present, we will soon become foolishly uncertain about its prob­ able role in the future course of man’s way with fellow man. As a provisional antidote to our lack of knowledge in this area, the reader may wish to join me in pondering over Professor Crosby’s observation that today “there are two Europes and two Africas: one on either side of the Atlantic.”

Otto von Mering October 1971

Preface

Nothing can be understood apart from its context, and man is no exception. He is a living entity, dependent on a number of other living entities for food, clothing, and often shelter. Many living things are dependent upon him for the same. Man is a biological entity before he is a Roman Catholic or a capitalist or anything else. Moreover, man’s history did not start when he first began to keep records, nor is it limited to only the aspects of his exis­ tence of interest to the literati. The first step to understanding man is to consider him as a biological entity which has existed on this globe, affecting, and in turn affected by, his fellow or­ ganisms, for many thousands of years.

Once we have placed man in this proper spatial and temporal context, we can begin to examine single aspects or events of his history with the assurance—or at least the hope—that the results will have a meaningful relationship to that context and will not merely send us off down the weedy little paths that lead from one antiquarian’s gazebo to another.

Before the historian can judge wisely the politcal skills of hu­ man groups or the strength of their economies or the meaning of their literatures, he must first know how successful their member

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human beings were at staying alive and reproducing themselves. He must have some idea of how their efforts in accomplishing these tasks affected their environments. It is to the ecologist and not to the philatelist that the historian should look for his model of scholarly virtue.

You may have been taught as children to recite: Columbus sailed the ocean blue In fourteen hundred and ninety-two …

and few of us really get beyond that kind of description of what happened in that year. We acquire more and more facts, which enable us to paint more and more elaborate pictures of that event and the sensational accomplishments of the conquistadors which followed quickly thereafter. These pictures are so hypnotically interesting that most of us never shake loose from their surface fascination to seek the real significance of the events they depict.

Tradition has limited historians in their search for the true sig­ nificance of the renewed contact between the Old and New Worlds. Even the economic historian may occasionally miss what any ecologist or geographer would find glaringly obvious after a cursory reading of the basic original sources of the sixteenth cen­ tury: the most important changes brought on by the Columbian voyages were biological in nature.

To illuminate just that point is the raison d’être of this book. It is a brief book and, I hope, an unpretentious one, but I am the first to appreciate that historians, geologists, anthropologists, zoologists, botanists, and demographers will see me as an amateur in their particular fields. I anticipate their criticism by agreeing with them in part and replying that, although the Renaissance is long past, there is great need for Renaissance-style attempts at pulling together the discoveries of the specialists to learn what we know, in general, about life on this planet.

I apologize to Native Americans for my constant use of the ambiguous and innacurate term Indian. I realize that Columbus’s use of that word was an egregious error and that there is no reason

PREFACE I xxvii

except inertia to repeat it; however, the word Amerindian offends me as jerrybuilt, and few of my prospective readers are yet using Native American. For their sake I have continued with the time- hallowed and confusing Indian.

I would like to thank Washington State University for provid­ ing a grant to support the researching and writing of this book. I must also thank the editors of The Hispanic American Historical Review and The American Anthropologist for permisssion to re­ publish those parts of Chapters 2 and 4 that first appeared in those journals. I owe a great debt to Barbara S. Crosby, for her per­ ceptive stylistic criticisms. Last of all but most of all, I thank my whole family—Barbara, Kevin, and Carolyn—who endured so many twinkling little anecdotes about maize and smallpox.

34 I THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE

38. Quoted in D. P. Mannix and Malcolm Cowley, Black Car­ goes, 5-6.

39. Cobo, Obras, 2:13; Waldseemüller, Cosmographiae Intro­ ducilo, 92.

40. Frederick S. Hulse, The Human Species, An Introduction to Physical Anthropology, 346.

41. J. V. Neel and F. M. Salzano, “A Prospectus for Genetic Studies on the American Indians,” 249.

42. A. E. Mourant, Ada Kópec, and Kazimiera Domaniewska- Sobczak, The ABO Groups, Comprehensive Tables and Maps of World Distribution, 268-270.

43. Neel and Salvano, “Genetic Studies,” 253. 44. T. D. Stewart, “A Physical Anthropologist’s View of the

Peopling of the New World,” 262. 45. W. S. Laughlin, “Human Migration and Permanent Occupa­

tion in the Bering Sea Area,” 416. 46. Charles W. Brooks, Japanese Wrecks Stranded and Picked

up Adrift in the North Pacific Ocean, 10. 47. Fredeick E. Zeuner, A History of Domesticated Animals,

436-439. 48. Stewart, “Peopling of the New World,” 265.

Conquistador y Pestilencia 2

Why were the Europeans able to conquer America so easily? In our formal histories and in our legends, we always empha­ size the ferocity and stubbornness ‘ of the resistance of the Aztec, Sioux, Apache, Tupinamba, Araucanian, and so on, but the really amazing thing about their resistance was its ineffectiveness. The Orientals held out against the Europeans much more successfully; they, of course, had the advantage of vast numbers and a technology much more advanced than that of the Indians. The Africans, however, were not “thou­ sands of years ahead” of the Indians, except in possessing iron weapons, and yet the great mass of black Africans did not succumb to European conquest until the nineteenth century.

There are many explanations for the Europeans’ success in America: the advantage of steel over stone, of cannon and firearms over bows and arrows and slings; the terrorizing effect of horses on foot soldiers who have never seen such beasts before; the lack of unity among the Indians, even within their empires; the prophecies in Indian mythology about the arrival of white gods. All these factors combined

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36 I THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE

to deal to the Indian a shock such as only H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds can suggest to us. Each factor was un­ doubtedly worth many hundreds of soldiers to Cortes and Pizarro and other great Indian-killers.

For all of that, one might have at least expected the highly organized, militaristic societies of Mexico and the Andean highlands to survive the initial contact with the European societies. Thousands of Indian warriors, even if confused and frightened and wielding only obsidian-studded war clubs, should have been able to repel the first few hundred Span­ iards to arrive. And what is the explanation for the fact that Indians were really only a little more successful in defending themselves and their lands after they learned that the in­ vaders were not gods, after they obtained their own horses and guns and developed tactics to deal with the Europeans?

After the Spanish conquest an Indian of Yucatan wrote of his people in the happier days before the advent of the European:

– There was then no sickness; they had no aching bones; they had then no high fever; they had then no smallpox; they had then no burning chest; they had then no abdominal pain; they had then no consumption; they had then no headache. At that time the course of humanity was orderly. The foreigners made it otherwise when they arrived here.*

It would be easy to attribute this statement to the nostalgia that the conquered always feel for the time before the con­ queror appeared, but the statement is probably in part true. During the millennia before the European brought together the compass and the three-masted vessel to revolutionize world history, men moved slowly, seldom over long distances and rarely across the great oceans. Men lived in the same continents where their great-grandfathers had lived and sel­ dom caused violent and rapid changes in the delicate balance

cr<>

CONQUISTADOR Y PESTILENCIA | 37

between themselves and their environments. Diseases tended to be endemic rather than epidemic. It is true that man did not achieve perfect accommodation with his microscopic parasites. Mutation, ecological changes, and migration brought the Black Death to Europe, and few men lived to the proverbial age of three-score years and ten without knowing epidemic disease. Yet ecological stability did tend to create a crude kind of mutual toleration between human host and parasite. Most Europeans, for instance, survived measles and tuberculosis, and most West Africans survived yellow fever and malaria.______________

Migration of man and his maladies is the chief cause of epidemics. And when migration takes place, those creatures who have been longest in isolation suffer most, for their ge­ netic material has been least tempered by the variety of world diseases. Among the major divisions of the species homo sapiens, with the possible exception of the Australian aborigine, the American Indian probably had the dangerous privilege of longest isolation from the rest of mankind. Medi­ cal historians guess that few of the first rank killers among the diseases are native to the Americas.2

These killers came to the New World with the explorers and the conquistadors. The fatal diseases of the Old World killed more effectively in the New, and the comparatively benign diseases of the Old World turned killer in the New. There is little exaggeration in the statement of a German mis­ sionary in 1699 that “the Indians die so easily that the bare look and smell of a Spaniard causes them to give up the ghost.”3

The most spectacular period of mortality among the American Indians occurred during the first hundred years of contact with the Europeans and Africans. Almost all the contemporary historians of the early settlements, from Bartolomé de las Casas to William Bradford of Plymouth Plantation, were awed by the ravages of epidemic disease

38 I THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE

among the native populations of America. In Mexico and Peru, where there were more Europeans and Africans—and, therefore, more contact with the Old World—and a more careful chronicle of events kept than in most other areas of America, the record shows something like fourteen epidemics in the former and perhaps as many as seventeen in the latter between 1520 and 1600.4

The annals of the early Spanish empire are filled with complaints about the catastrophic decline in the number of native American subjects. When Antonio de Herrera wrote his multivolume history of that empire at the beginning of the seventeenth century, he noted as one of the main differ­ ences between the Old and New Worlds the extreme sus­ ceptibility of the natives of the latter to diseases, especially smallpox. Indian women, he wrote, were especially quick to succumb to it, but it rarely infected anyone of European birth. The Indians became so enraged by the invulnerability of the Spaniards to epidemic disease that they kneaded in­ fected blood into their piasters’ bread and secreted corpses in their wells—to little effect.5

The victims of disease were probably greatest in number in the heavily populated highlands of New Spain (Mexico) and Peru, but, as a percentage of the resident population, were probably greatest in the hot, wet lowlands. By the 1580s disease, ably assisted by Spanish brutality, had killed off or driven away most of the peoples of the Antilles and the lowlands of New Spain, Peru, and the Caribbean littoral, “the habitation of which coasts is … so wasted and con­ demned, that of thirty parts of the people that inhabit it, there wants twenty-nine; and it is likely the rest of the In­ dians will in short time decay.”6

It has often been suggested that the high mortality rates of these post-Columbian epidemics were due more to the brutal treatment of the Indians by the Europeans than to the Indians’ lack of resistance to imported maladies. But

CONQUISTADOR Y PESTILENCIA | 39

the early chroniclers reported that the first epidemics follow­ ing the arrival of Old World peoples in a given area of the New World were the worst, or at least among the worst. European exploitation had not yet had time to destroy the Indians’ health.

The record shows that several generations of Indian con­ tact with Europeans and Africans seemed to lead not to the total destruction of the Indians, but only to a sharp diminu­ tion of numbers, which was then followed by renewed popu­ lation growth among the aborigines.7 The relationships be­ tween these phenomena are too complex to be explained by any one theory. However, their sequence is perfectly com­ patible with the theory that the Indians had little or no re­ sistance to many diseases brought from the Old World, and so first died in great numbers upon first contact with immi­ grants from Europe and Africa; and when those Indians with the weakest resistance to those maladies had died, inter­ breeding among the hardy survivors and, to some unmea­ sured extent, with the immigrants, led to the beginning of population recovery.

The record of early post-Columbian medical history of America was never kept carefully and much of it has been erased since, but it does seem to show a greater number of epidemics, characterized by a higher mortality rate, than was typical even in insalubrious Europe of that time. The very first was a pandemic which began in 1519 in the Greater Antilles and swept through Mexico, Central America, and— probably—Peru. It caused “in all likelihood the most severe single loss of aboriginal population that ever occurred,” to quote one expert who has examined its history carefully.8 It is the best documented of all of the first epidemics. We have no more than snatches of information on the others. Hans Staden, captive to the Tupinamba of Brazil in the early 1550s, was—ironically—saved from death by what may have been an epidemic. He convinced the local chief that

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the malady carrying off many of the Indians had been sent by the Christian God to punish them for their intention to eat Staden. In 1552 a respiratory disease killed many natives around Pemambucb. In the same decade epidemic broke out among the- famished Frenchmen at Rio de Janeiro, spread to the mission Indians there and killed eight hundred of them. In 1558 pleurisy and bloody flux spread along the coast from Rio to Espirito Santo. In 1558 and 1560 small­ pox arrived in Rio de la Plata and swept off thousands of Indians, without touching a single Spaniard. Smallpox came to Brazil in 1562 and 1563 and carried off tens of thousands of Indians, but left the Portuguese unscathed. In some vil­ lages no one was left who was healthy enough to tend the sick, “not even someone who could go to the fountain for a gourdfull of water.”9

The English were as efficient disease carriers as the Latins. In 1585 Sir Francis Drake led a large expedition against Spain’s overseas possessions. His men picked up some highly contagious fever—probably typhus—in the Cape Verde Is­ lands and brought it along with them to the Caribbean and Florida. The malady spread to the Indians in the environs of St. Augustine and, “The wilde people . . . died verie fast and said amongest themselves, it was the Inglisshe God that made them die so faste.”10

In 1587 the English founded a colony at Roanoke Island, a few hundred miles north of St. Augustine. The colonists’ diagnoses of their immediate and fatal effect on many of the Indians was similar in medical philosophy to that expressed by the Florida Indians. Thomas Hariot wrote that there was no Indian village where hostility, open or hidden, had been shown,

but that within a few dayes after our departure from everies such townes, that people began to die very fast, and many in short space; in some townes about twentie, in some fourtie, in some sixtie, & in one sixe score, which in trueth was very manie

CONQUISTADOR Y PESTILENCIA | 41

in respect to their numbers. . . . The disease also was so strange that they neither knew what it was, nor how to cure it; the like by report of the oldest men in the countrey never happened before, time out of mind.”

The natives of what is now the Atlantic coast of Canada had contact with Europeans—fishermen and fur traders— from very early in the sixteenth century, long before the English attempted colonization at Roanoke or any other place in America. Depopulation was already apparent among their tribes by the time of French settlement. The Jesuit Re­ lations contain a report dated 1616 from which the follow­ ing paragraph is extracted. The Indians, it states,

are astonished and often complain that, since the French mingle with and carry on trade with them, they are dying fast and the population is thinning out. For they assert that, before this association and intercourse, all their countries were very populous and they tell how one by one the different coasts, according as they have begun to traffic with us, have been more reduced by disease.”

These Indians looked south enviously to New England, where tribes were not diminishing. The turn of these Armouchiquois, as the Canadian Indians called them, came in the same year that the above report was written. In 1616 and 1617 a pestilence swept through New England, clearing the woods, in the words of Cotton Mather, “of those per­ nicious creatures, to make room for better growth.” What­ ever the sickness was, Europeans were immune to it. The handful of whites who passed the winter of 1616-1617 with the Indians of coastal Maine “lay in the cabins with those people that died, [but] not one of them ever felt their heads to ache, while they stayed there.” The Massachusetts tribe was nearly completely exterminated, depopulating the area of Plymouth Bay at just about the same time that the Pil­ grims were deciding to come to America. The same epidemic

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also swept the environs of Boston Bay. A European who lived in that area in 1622 wrote that the Indians had

died on heapes, as they lay in their houses; and the living, that were able to shift for themselves, would runne away and let them dy, and let there ‘Carkases ly above the ground without burial. . . . And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle after my coming into those partes, that, as I travailed in the Forrest nere the Massa­ chusetts, it seemed to me a new found Golgotha.”

There is no need to continue this lugubrious catalog. The records of every European people who have had prolonged contact with the native peoples of America are full of refer­ ences to the devastating impact of Old World diseases. The Russians, the last to come, had the same experience as the Spanish, Portuguese, English, and French; and thousands of Aleuts, Eskimos, and TIingits were thrust into their graves by the maladies which the promyshlenniki—as innocent of intent as the conquistadores—brought to the New World with them.14

It would take a work of many volumes to give the full history of Old World diseases and New World peoples. We will limit ourselves to a detailed study of the first recorded American epidemic, an epidemic whose influence on the his­ tory of America is as unquestionable and as spectacular as that of the Black Death on the history of the Old World.

We know that the most deadly of the early epidemics in America were those of the eruptive fevers—smallpox, measles, typhus, and so on. The first to arrive and the deadli­ est, said contemporaries, was smallpox. Even today, how­ ever, smallpox is occasionally misdiagnosed as influenza, pneumonia, measles, scarlet fever, syphilis, or chicken pox.15 Four hundred years ago such mistakes were even more com­

CONQUISTADOR Y PESTILENCIA | 43

mon, and writers of the accounts upon which we must base our examination of the early history of smallpox in America did not have any special interest in accurate diagnosis. The early historians were much more likely to cast their eyes sky­ ward and comment on the sinfulness that had called down such epidemics as obvious evidence of God’s wrath than to describe in any detail the diseases involved. It should also be noted that conditions which facilitate the spread of one disease will usually encourage the spread of others, and that “very rarely is there a pure epidemic of a single malady.” Pneumonia and pleurisy, for instance, often follow after smallpox, smothering those whom it has weakened.16

Furthermore, although the Spanish word viruelas, which appears again and again in the chronicles of the sixteenth century, is almost invariably translated as “smallpox,” it specifically means not the disease but the pimpled, pustuled appearance which is the most obvious symptom of the dis­ ease. Thus the generation of the conquistadores may have used “viruelas” to refer to measles, chicken pox, or typhus. One must remember that people of the sixteenth century were not statistically minded, so their estimates of the num­ bers killed by epidemic disease may be a more accurate mea­ surement of their emotions than of the numbers who really died.

When the sixteenth-century Spaniard pointed and said “viruelas,” what he meant and what he saw was usually smallpox. On occasion he was perfectly capable of distin­ guishing among diseases: for instance, he called the epidemic of 1531 in Central America sarampión—measles—and not viruelas.17 We may proceed on the assumption that small­ pox was the most important disease of the first pandemic in the recorded history of the Americas.

Smallpox has been so successfully controlled by vaccina­ tion and quarantine in the industrialized nations of the twen­ tieth century that few North Americans or Europeans have

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ever seen it. But it is an old companion of humanity, and for most of the last millennium it was one of the commonest diseases in Europe. It was long thought, with reason, to be one of the most infectious maladies. Smallpox is usually communicated through the air by means of droplets or dust particles; its virus enters the new host through the respiratory tract. There are many cases of hospital visitors who have contracted the disease simply by breathing the air of a room in which someone lies ill with the disease.18

Because it is extremely communicable, before the eigh­ teenth century it was usually thought of as a necessary evil of childhood, such as measles is today. Sometimes the only large group untouched by it was also that which had been relatively unexposed to it—the young. Yet even among Span­ ish children of the sixteenth century, smallpox was so com­ mon that Ruy Díaz de Isla, a medical writer, recorded that he had once seen a man of twenty years sick with the disease, “and he had never had it before.”19

Where smallpox has been endemic, it has been a steady, dependable killer, taking every year from 3 to 10 percent of those who die. Where it has struck isolated groups, the death rate has been awesome. Analysis of figures for some twenty outbreaks shows that the case mortality among an unvaccinated population is about 30 percent. Presumably, in people who have had no contact whatever with smallpox, the disease will infect nearly every single individual it touches. When in 1707 smallpox first appeared in Iceland, in two years 18,000 out of the island’s 50,000 inhabitants died of it.20

The first people of the New World to meet the white and black races and their diseases were Arawaks of the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas. On the very first day of landfall in 1492 Columbus noted that they “are very unskilled with arms . . . [and] could all be subjected and made to do all that one wished.”21 These Arawaks lived long enough to pro­

CONQUISTADOR Y PESTILENCIA | 45

vide the Spaniards with their first generation of slaves in America and Old World diseases with their first beachhead in the New World.

Oviedo, one of the earliest historians of the Americas, estimated that a million Indians lived on Santo Domingo when the Europeans arrived to plant their first permanent colony in the New World. “Of all those,” Oviedo wrote, “and of all those bom afterwards, there are not now believed to be at the present time in this year of 1548 five hundred per­ sons, children and adults, who are natives and are the progeny or lineage of those first.”22

The destruction of the Arawaks has been largely blamed on the Spanish cruelty, not only by the later Protestant his­ torians of the “Black Legend” school but also by such con­ temporary Spanish writers as Oviedo and Bartolomé de Las Casas. Without doubt the early Spaniards brutally exploited the Indians. But it was obviously not in order to kill them off, for the early colonists had to deal with a chronic labor shortage and needed the Indians. Disease would seem to be a more logical explanation for the disappearance of the Arawaks, because they, like other Indians, had little im­ munity to Old World diseases. At the same time, one may concedethat the effects of Spanish exploitation undoubtedly weakened their resistance to disease.

Yet it is interesting to note that there is no record of any massive smallpox epidemic among the Indians of the Antilles for a quarter of a century after the first voyage of Columbus. Indians apparently suffered a steady decline in numbers, which was probably due to extreme overwork, other diseases, and a general lack of will to live after their whole culture had been shattered by alien invasion.23 How can the absence of smallpox be explained, if the American Indian was so sus­ ceptible and if ships carrying Europeans and Africans from the pestilential Old World were constantly arriving in Santo Domingo? The answer lies in the nature of the disease. It

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is a deadly malady, but it lasts only a brief time in each pa­ tient. After an incubation period of twelve days or so, the patient suffers from high fever and vomiting followed three or four days later by the characteristic skin eruptions. For those who do not die, these pustules dry up in a week or ten days and form scabs which soon fall off, leaving the dis­ figuring pocks that give the disease its name. The whole pro­ cess takes a month or less, and after that time the patient is either dead or immune, at least for a period of years. Also there is no nonhuman carrier of smallpox, such as the flea of typhus or the mosquito of malaria; it must pass from man to man. Nor are there any long-term human carriers of small­ pox, as, for instance, with typhoid and syphilis. It is not an over-simplification to say that one either has smallpox and can transmit it, or one has not and cannot transmit it.

Except for children, most Europeans and their slaves had had smallpox and were at least partially immune, and few but adults sailed from Europe to America in the first decades after discovery. The voyage was one of several weeks, so that, even if an immigrant or sailor contracted smallpox on the day of embarkation, he would most likely be dead or rid of its virus before he arrived in Santo Domingo. Moist heat and strong sunlight, characteristic of a tropical sea voy­ age, are particularly deadly to the smallpox virus. The lack of any rapid means of crossing the Atlantic in the sixteenth century delayed the delivery of the Old World’s worst gift to the New.

It was delayed; that was all. An especially fast passage from Spain to the New World; the presence on a vessel of several nonimmune persons who could transmit the disease from one to the other until arrival in the Indies; the presence of smallpox scabs, in which the virus can live for weeks, acci­ dentally packed into a bale of textiles—by any of these means smallpox could have been brought to Spanish America.24

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In December 1518 or January 1519 a disease identified as smallpox appeared among the Indians of Santo Domingo, brought, said Las Casas, from Castile. It touched few Span­ iards, and none of them died, but it devastated the Indians. The Spaniards reported that it killed one-third to one-half of the Indians. Las Casas, never one to understate the ap­ palling, said that it left no more than one thousand alive “of that immensity of people that was on this island and which we have seen with our own eyes.”25

Undoubtedly one must question these statistics, but they are not too far out of line with mortality rates in other small­ pox epidemics, and with C. W. Dixon’s judgment that popu­ lations untouched by smallpox for generations tend to resist the disease less successfully than those populations in at least occasional contact with it. Furthermore, Santo Domingo’s epidemic was not an atypically pure epidemic. Smallpox seems to have been accompanied by respiratory ailments (romadizo’), possibly measles, and other Indian-killers. Star­ vation probably also took a toll, because of the lack of hands to work the fields. Although no twentieth-century epidemiol­ ogist or demographer would find these sixteenth-century sta­ tistics completely satisfactory, they probably are crudely accurate.26

In a matter of days after smallpox appeared in Santo Domingo, it appeared in Puerto Rico. Before long, the Arawaks were dying a hideous and unfamiliar death through­ out the islands of the Greater Antilles.27 Crushed by a quar­ ter-century of exploitation, they now performed their last function on earth: to act as a reserve of pestilence in the New World from which the conquistador drew invisible bio­ logical allies for his assault on the mainland.

Smallpox seems to have traveled quickly from the Antilles to Yucatán. Bishop Diego de Landa, the chief sixteenth-cen­ tury Spanish informant on the people of Yucatán, recorded that sometime late in the second decade of that century “a

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pestilence seized them,* characterized by great pustules, which rotted their bodies with a great stench, so that the limbs fell to pieces in four or five days.” The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, written in the Mayan language with European script after the Spanish settlement of Yucatán, also records that some time in the second decade “was when the eruption of pustules occurred. It was smallpox.” It has been specu­ lated that the malady came with Spaniards shipwrecked on the Yucatán coast in 1511 or with the soldiers and sailors of Hernández de Cordoba’s expedition which coasted along Yucatan in 1517. Both these explanations seem unlikely, be­ cause smallpox had not appeared in the Greater Antilles, the likeliest source of any smallpox epidemic on the continent, until the end of 1518 or the beginning of 1519. Be that as it may, there is evidence that the Santo Domingan epidemic could have spread to the continent before Cortes’s invasion of Mexico. Therefore, the epidemic raging there at that time may have come in two ways—north and west from Yucatan and directly from Cuba to central Mexico, brought by Cortés’s troops.28

The melodrama of Cortés and the conquest of Mexico needs no retelling. After occupying Tenochtitlán and defeat­ ing the army of his rival, Narvaez, he and his troops had to fight their way out of the city to sanctuary in Tlaxcala. Even as the Spanish withdrew, an ally more formidable than Tlaxcala appeared. Years later Francisco de Aguilar, a former follower of Cortés who had become a Dominician friar, recalled the terrible retreat of the Noche Triste. “When the Christians were exhausted from war, God saw fit to send the Indians smallpox, and there was a great pestilence in the city. . . .”29

With the men of Narvaez had come a black man suffering from smallpox, “and he infected the household in Cempoala where he was quartered; and it spread from one Indian to another, and they, being so numerous and eating and sleep-

CONQUISTADOR Y PESTILENCIA | 49

ing together, quickly infected the whole country.” The Mexi­ cans had never seen smallpox before and did not have even the European’s meager knowledge of how to deal with it. The old soldier-chronicler, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, called the Negro “a very black dose [for Mexico] for it was because of him that the whole country was stricken, with a great many deaths.”30

Probably, several diseases were at work. Shortly after the retreat from Tenochtitlán Bernal Diaz, immune to smallpox like most of the Spaniards, “was very sick with fever and was vomiting blood.” The Aztec sources mention the racking cough of those who had smallpox, which suggests a respira­ tory complication such as pneumonia or a streptococcal in­ fection, both common among smallpox victims. Great num­ bers of the Cakchiquel people of Guatemala were felled by a devastating epidemic in 1520 and 1521, having as its most prominent symptom fearsome nosebleeds. Whatever this dis­ ease was, it may have been present in central Mexico along with smallpox.31

The triumphant Aztecs had not expected the Spaniards to return after their expulsion from Tenochtitlán. The sixty days during which the epidemic lasted in the city, however, gave Cortés and his troops a desperately needed respite to reorganize and prepare a counterattack. When the epidemic subsided, the siege of the Aztec capital began. Had there been no epidemic, the Aztecs, their war-making potential un­ impaired and their warriors fired with victory, could have pursued the Spaniards, and Cortés might have ended his life spread-eagled beneath the obsidian blade of a priest of Huitzilopochtli. Clearly the epidemic sapped the endurance of Tenochtitlán. As it was, the siege went on for seventy-five days, until the deaths within the city from combat, starvation, and disease—probably not smallpox now—numbered many thousands. When the city fell “the streets, squares, houses, and courts were filled with bodies, so that it was almost im­

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possible to pass. Even Cortes was sick from the stench in his nostrils.”32

Peru and the Andean highlands were also hit by an early epidemic, and if it was smallpox it most probably had to pass through the Isthmus of Panama, as did Francisco Pizarro himself. The documentation of the history of Panama in the first years after the conquest is not as extensive as that of Mexico or the Incan areas, because the Isthmus had fewer riches and no civilized indigenous population to learn Euro­ pean script from the friars and write its own history. We do know that in the first decades of the sixteenth century the same appalling mortality took place among the Indians in Central America as in the Antilles and Mexico. The recorded medical history of the Isthmus began in 1514 with the death, in one month, of seven hundred Darien settlers, victims of hunger and an unidentified disease. Oviedo, who was in Panama at the time of greatest mortality, judged that up­ wards of two million Indians died there between 1514 and 1530, and Antonio de Herrera tells us that forty thousand died of disease in Panama City and Nombre de Dios alone in a twenty-eight year period during the century. Others wrote of the depopulation of “four hundred leagues” of land that had “swarmed” with people when the Spanish first arrived.33

What killed the Indians? Contemporaries and many his­ torians blame the carnage on Pedrarias Davila, who executed Balboa and ruled Spain’s first Central American settlements with such an iron hand that he was hated by all the chief chroniclers of the age. It can be effectively argued, however, that he was no more a berserk butcher of Indians than Pizarro, for the mortality among Indians of the Isthmus dur­ ing his years of power is parallel to the high death rates among the Indians wherever the Spaniards went.34 When charges against Pedrarias were investigated in 1527, his de­ fenders maintained that the greatest Indian-killer had been

CONQUISTADOR Y PESTILENCIA | 51

an epidemic of smallpox. This testimony is hard to reject, for another document of 1527 mentions the necessity of im­ porting aboriginal slaves into Panama City, Nata, and the port of Honduras, because smallpox had carried off all the Indians in those areas.35

The Spaniards could never do much to improve the state of public health in Panama. In 1660 those who governed Panama City listed as resident killers and discomforters smallpox, measles, pneumonia, suppurating abscesses, typhus, fevers, diarrhea, catarrh, boils, and hives—and blamed them all on the importation of Peruvian wine!36 Of all the killers operating in early Panama, however, smallpox was undoubtedly the most deadly to the Indians.

If we attempt to describe the first coming of Old World disease to the areas south of Panama, we shall have to deal with ambiguity, equivocation, and simple guesswork, for eruptive fever, now operating from continental bases, ap­ parently outstripped the Spaniards and sped south from the Isthmus into the Incan Empire before Pizarro’s invasion. Long before the invasion, the Inca Huayna Capac was aware that the Spaniards—“monstrous marine animals, bearded men who moved upon the sea in large houses”—were push­ ing down the coast from Panama. Such is the communicabil­ ity of smallpox and the other eruptive fevers that any Indian who received news of the Spaniards could also have easily received the infection of the European diseases. The biologi­ cally defenseless Indians made vastly more efficient carriers of such pestilence than the Spaniards.37

Our evidence for the first post-Columbian epidemic in Incan lands is entirely hearsay, because the Incan people had no system of writing. Therefore, we must depend on sec­ ondary accounts by Spaniards and by Indians born after the conquest, accounts based on Indian memory and written down years and even decades after the epidemic of the 1520s. The few accounts we have of the great epidemic are

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associated with the death of Huayna Capac. He spent the last years of his life campaigning against the people of what is today northern Peru and Ecuador. There, in the province of Quito, he first received news of an epidemic raging in his empire, and there he himself was stricken. Huayna Capac and his captains died with shocking rapidity, “their faces being covered with scabs.”

Of what did the Inca and his captains die? One of the most generally reliable of our sources, Garcilaso de la Vega, describes Huayna Capac’s death as the result of “a trembling chill . . . , which the Indians call chucchu, and a fever, called by the Indians rupu. . . .” We dare not, four hundred years later, state unequivocally that the disease was not one native to the Americas. Most accounts call it smallpox, or suggest that it was either smallpox or measles. Smallpox seems the best guess because the epidemic struck in that pe­ riod when the Spaniards, operating from bases where small­ pox was killing multitudes, were first coasting along the shores of Incan lands.38

The impact of the smallpox pandemic on the Aztec and Incan Empires is easy for the twentieth-century reader to underestimate. We have so long been hypnotized by the dar­ ing of the conquistador that we have overlooked the im­ portance of his biological allies. Because of the achievements of modern medical science we find it hard to accept state­ ments from the conquest period that the pandemic killed one-third to one-half of the populations struck by it. Toribio Motolinia claimed that in most provinces of Mexico “more than one half of the population died; in others the proportion was little less. . . . They died in heaps, like bedbugs.”

The proportion may be exaggerated, but perhaps not as much as we might think. The Mexicans had no natural re­ sistance to the disease at all. Other diseases were probably operating quietly and efficiently behind the screen of small­ pox. Add the factors of food shortage and the lack of even

CONQUISTADOR Y PESTILENCIA | 53

minimal care for the sick. Motolinia wrote, “Many others died of starvation, because as they were all taken sick at once, they could not care for each other, nor was there any­ one to give them bread or anything else.” We shall never be certain what the death rate was, but from all evidence, it must have been immense. Sherburne F. Cook and Wood­ row Borah estimate that, for one cause and another, the population of central Mexico dropped from about 25 million on the eve of conquest to 16.8 million a decade later. This estimate strengthens confidence in Motolinia’s general veracity.39

South of Panama, in the empire of the Incas, our only means of estimating the mortality of the epidemic of the 1520s is by an educated guess. The population there was thick, and it provided a rich medium for the transmission and cultivation of communicable diseases. If the malady which struck in the 1520s was smallpox, as it seems to have been, then it must have taken many victims, for these Indians probably had no more knowledge of or immunity to smallpox than the Mexicans. Most of our sources tell us only that many died. Cieza de León gives a figure of 200,000, and Martín de Murúa, throwing up his hands, says, “infinite thousands.”40

We are reduced to guesswork. Jehan Vellard, student of the effect of disease on the American Indian, states that the epidemics in Peru and Bolivia after the Spanish conquest killed fewer than those in Mexico and suggests the climatic conditions of the Andean highlands as the reason. But small­ pox generally thrives under dry, cool conditions. Possibly his­ torians have omitted an account of the first and, therefore, probably the worst post-Columbian epidemic in the Incan areas because it preceded the Spanish conquest.41 A half cen­ tury or so after the conquest, Indians in the vicinity of Lima maintained that the Spanish could not have conquered them if, a few years before Pizarro’s invasion, respiratory disease

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had not “consumed the greater part of them.”42 Was this the great killer of the 1520s in the Incan Empire? Perhaps future archaeological discoveries will give us more definite information.

The pandemic not only killed great numbers in the Indian empires, but it also affected their power structures, striking down the leaders and disrupting the processes by which they were normally replaced. When Montezuma died, his nephew, Cuitláhuac, was elected lord of Mexico. It was he who di­ rected the attacks on the Spaniards during the disastrous re­ treat from Tenochtitlán, attacks which nearly ended the story of Cortes and his soldiers. Then Cuitláhuac died of smallpox. Probably many others wielding decisive power in the ranks of the Aztecs and their allies died in the same period, break­ ing dozens of links in the chain of command. Bernal Diaz tells of an occasion not long after Tenochtitlán when the In­ dians did not attack “because between the Mexicans and the Texcocans there were differences and factions”43 and, of equal importance, because they had been weakened by smallpox.

Outside Tenochtitlán the deaths due to smallpox among the Indian ruling classes permitted Cortes to cultivate the loyalty of several men in important positions and to promote his own supporters. Cortês wrote to Charles V about the city of Cholula: “The natives had asked me to go there, since many of their chief men had died of the smallpox, which rages in these lands as it does in the islands, and they wished me with their approval and consent to appoint other rulers in their place.” Similar requests, quickly complied with, came from Tlaxcala, Chalco, and other cities. “Cortes had gained so much authority,” the old soldier Bernal Diaz remembered, “that Indians came before him from distant lands, especially over matters of who would be chief or lord, as at the time smallpox had come to New Spain and many chiefs died.”44

Similarly in Peru the epidemic of the 1520s was a stunning

CONQUISTADOR Y PESTILENCIA | 55

blow to the very nerve center of Incan society, throwing that society into a self-destructive convulsion. The government of the Incan Empire was an absolute autocracy with a demi­ god, the Child of the Sun, as its emperor. The loss of the emperor could do enormous damage to the whole society, as Pizarro proved by his capture of Atahualpa. Presumably the damage was greater if the Inca were much esteemed, as was Huayna Capac. When he died, said Cieza de León, the mourning “was such that the lamentation and shrieks rose to the skies, causing the birds to fall to the ground. The news traveled far and wide, and nowhere did it not evoke great sorrow.” Pedro Pizarro, one of the first to record what the Indians told of the last days before the conquest, judged that had “this Huayna Capac been alive when we Spaniards en­ tered this land, it would have been impossible for us to win it, for he was much beloved by all his vassals.”45

Not only the Inca but many others in key positions in Incan society died in the epidemic. The general Mihcnaca Mayta and many other military leaders, the governors Apu Hilaquito and Auqui Tupac (uncle and brother to the Inca), the Inca’s sister, Mama Coca, and many others of the royal family all perished of the disease. The deaths of these impor­ tant persons must have robbed the empire of much resiliency. The most ominous loss of all was the Inca’s son and heir Ninan Cuyochc.46

In an autocracy no problem is more dangerous or more chronic than that of succession. One crude but workable solution is to have the autocrat himself choose his successor. The Inca named one of his sons, Ninan Cuyoche, as next wearer of “the fringe” or crown, on the condition that the calpa, a ceremony of divination, show this to be an auspi­ cious choice. The first calpa indicated that the gods did not favor Ninan Cuyoche, the second that Huascar was no better a candidate. The high nobles returned to the Inca for another choice, and found him dead. Suddenly a terrible gap had

56 I THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE

opened in Incan society: the autocrat had died, and there was no one to take his place. One of the nobles moved to close the gap. “Take care of the body,” he said, “for I go to Tumipampa to give the fringe to Ninan Cuyoche.” But it was too late. When he arrived at Tumipampa, he found that Ninan Cuyoche had also succumbed to the smallpox pestilence.47

Among the several varying accounts of the Inca’s death the one just related best fits the thesis of this chapter. And while these accounts may differ on many points, they all agree that confusion over the succession followed the unex­ pected death of Huayna Capac. War broke out between Huascar and Atahualpa, a war which devastated the empire and prepared the way for a quick Spanish conquest. “Had the land not been divided between Huascar and Atahualpa,” Pedro Pizarro wrote, “we would not have been able to enter or win the land unless we could gather a thousand Spaniards for the task, and at that time it was impossible to get together even five hundred Spaniards.”48

The psychological effect of epidemic disease is enormous, especially^., an unknown disfiguring disease which strikes swiftly. Within a few days smallpox can transform a healthy man into a pustuled, oozing horror, whom his closest rela­ tives can barely recognize. The impact can be sensed in the following terse, stoic account, drawn from Indian testimony, of Tenochtitlán during the epidemic.

It was [the month of] Tepeilhuitl when it began, and it spread over the people as great destruction. Some it quite covered [with pustules] on all parts—their faces, their heads, their breasts, etc. There was a great havoc. Very many died of it. They could not walk; they only lay in their resting places and beds. They could not move; they could not stir; they could not change posi­ tion, nor lie on one side; nor face down, nor on their backs. And if they stirred, much did they cry out. Great was its [small­ pox] destruction. Covered, mantled with pustules, very many people died of them.’”

CONQUISTADOR Y PESTILENCIA | 57

In some places in Mexico the mortality was so great that, as Motolinia recorded, the Indians found it impossible to bury the great number of dead. “They pulled down the houses over them in order to check the stench that rose from the dead bodies,” he wrote, “so that their homes became their tombs.” In Tenochtitlán the dead were cast into the water, “and there was a great, foul odor; the smell issued forth from the dead.”30

For those who survived, the horror was only diminished, for smallpox is a disease which marks its victims for the rest of their lives. The Spanish recalled that the Indians who sur­ vived, having scratched themselves, “were left in such a con­ dition that they frightened the others with the many deep pits on their faces, hand, and bodies.” “And on some,” an Indian said, “the pustules were widely separated; they suffered not greatly, neither did many [of them] die. Yet many people were marred by them on their faces; one’s face or nose was pitted.” Some lost their sight—a fairly common aftereffect of smallpox.51

The contrast between the Indians’ extreme susceptibility to the new disease and the Spaniards’ almost universal im­ munity, acquired in Spain and reinforced in pestilential Cuba, must have deeply impressed the native Americans. The Indians, of course, soon realized that there was little relationship between Cortés and Quetzalcoatl, and that the Spaniards had all the vices and weaknesses of ordinary men, but they must have kept a lingering suspicion that the Span­ iards were some kind of supermen. Their steel swords and arquebuses, their marvelously agile galleys, and, above all, their horses could only be the tools and servants of super­ men. And their invulnerability to smallpox—surely this was a shield of the gods themselves!

One can only imagine the psychological impact of small­ pox on the Incans. It must have been less than in Mexico, because the disease and the Spaniards did not arrive simul­

58 I THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE

taneously, but epidemic disease is terrifying under any cir­ cumstances and must have shaken the confidence of the In­ cans that they still enjoyed the esteem of their gods. Then came the long, ferocious civil war, confusing a people ac­ customed to the autocracy of the true Child of the Sun. And then the final disaster, the coming of the Spaniards.

The Mayan peoples, probably the most sensitive and bril­ liant of all American aborigines, expressed more poignantly than any other Indians the overwhelming effect of epidemic. Some disease struck into Guatemala in 1520 and 1521, clearing the way for the invasion shortly thereafter by Pedro de Alvarado, one of Cortés’s captains. It was apparently not smallpox, for the accounts do not mention pustules but em­ phasize nosebleeds, coughs, and illness of the bladder as the prominent symptoms. It may have been influenza;52 whatever it was, the Cakchiquel Mayas, who kept a chronicle of the tragedy for their posterity, were helpless to deal with it. Their words speak for all the Indians touched by Old World dis­ ease in the sixteenth century.

Great was the stench of the dead. After our fathers and grand­ fathers succumbed, half of the people fled to the fields. The dogs and vultures devoured the bodies. The mortality was terrible. Your grandfathers died, and with them died the son of the king and his brothers and kinsmen. 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!“

NOTES

1. The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, trans. Ralph L. Roy, 83.

2. P. M. Ashburn, The Ranks of Death. A Medical History of the Conquest of America, passim; Henry H. Scott, A History of Tropical Medicine, 1:128, 283; Sherburne F. Cook, “The Incidence and Significance of Disease Among the Aztecs and Related Tribes,”

CONQUISTADOR Y PESTILENCIA | 59

321, 335; Jehan Vellard, “Causas Biológicas de la Desparición de los Indios Americanos,” 77-93; Woodrow Borah, “America as Model: The Demographic Impact of European Expansion upon the Non­ European World,” 379-387.

3. Quoted in E. Wagner Stern and Allen E. Stearn, The Effect of Smallpox on the Destiny of the Amerindian, 17.

4. Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, 448-451; Henry F. Dobyns, “An Outline of Andean Epidemic History to 1720,” 494.

5. Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, Historia General, 2:35; Charles Gibson, Spain in America, 141—142.

6. Joseph de Acosta, The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, 1:160. For specific references on depopulation see Antonio Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description of the West Indies, paragraphs 98, 102, 115, 271, 279, 334, 339, 695, 699, 934, 945, 1025, 1075, 1079, 1081, 1102, 1147, 1189, 1217, 1332, 1342, 1384, 1480, 1643, 1652, 1685, 1852, 1864, 1894, 1945, 1992, and 2050. An interesting comparison can be made between Spanish America and the Spanish Philippines. The aborigines of each suffered exploitation, but there were fewer epidemics and much less depopula­ tion in the Philippines. Contact between these islands and the main­ land of Asia had existed for many generations, and the Filipinos had acquired mainland immunities. See John L. Phelan, The His- panization of the Philippines, 105-107; Emma H. Blair and James A. Robertson, eds., Philippine Islands, 12:311; 13:71; 30:309; 32:93-94; 34:292.

7. Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, The Indian Popula­ tion of Central Mexico, 1531-1610; Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, The Aboriginal Population of Central Mexico on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest.

8. Dobyns, “Andean Epidemic History,” 514. 9. Hans Staden, The True History of His Captivity, trans. Mal­

colm Letts, 85-89; Alexander Marchant, From Barter to Slavery: The Economic Relations of the Portuguese and Indians in the Settle­ ment of Brazil, 1500-1580, 116-117; Claude Lévi-Strauss, A World on the Wane, 87; Juan López de Velasco, Geografía y Descripción Universidad de las Indias, 552.

10. David B. Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, 1:378. 11. Ibid. 12. Quoted in Alfred G. Bailey, The Conflict of European and

Eastern Algonkian Cultures, 1504-1700: A Study in Canadian Civilization, 13.

60 I THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE

13. Charles Francis Adams, Three Episodes of Massachusetts History, 1:1-12.

14. Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of Alaska, 1730-1885, 350, 560-563.

15. C. W. Dixon, Smallpox, 68. 16. Franklin H. Top et al., Communicable and Infectious Dis­

eases, 515; Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History, 87-88. 17. Donald B. Cooper, Epidemic Disease in Mexico City,

1761-1813, 87-88; Raúl Porras Barrenechea, ed., Cartas del Perú, 1524-1543, 22, 24, 33, 46.

18. Dixon, Smallpox, 171, 299-301. 19. Ashburn, Ranks of Death, 86. 20. Dixon, Smallpox, 325; John Duffy, Epidemics in Colonial

America, 20, 22; Stearn and Stearn, Effect of Smallpox, 14. 21. Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, A Life

of Christopher Columbus, 1:304-305. 22. Gonzalo Fernández Oviedo y Valdes, Historia General y

Natural de las Indias, 2d ed., 1:66-67. 23. Ibid.; Colección de Documentos Inéditos Relativos al

Descubrimiento, Conquista y Colonización de las Posesiones Es­ pañolas en América y Oceania, 1:428.

24. S. P. Bedson et al-, Virus and Rickettsial Diseases, 151-152, 157; Dixon, Smallpox, 174, 189, 296-297, 304, 359; Jacques M. May, ed., Studies in Disease Ecology, 1, 8.

25. Colección de Documentos Inéditos, 1:367, 369-370, 429; Colección de Varios Documentos para la Historia de la Florida y Tierras Adyzacentes, 1:44; Fray Bartoloméde Las Casas, Obras Escogidas de Bartolomé de Las Casas, 2:484.

26. Colección de Documentos Inéditos, 1:368, 397-398, 428-429; Dixon, Smallpox, 317-318, 325.

27. Pablo Alvarez Rubiano, Pedrarias Dâvila, 608; Colección de Varios Documentos para la Historia de la Florida, 1:45.

28. Diego de Landa, Landa’s Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, trans. Alfred M. Tozzer, 42; Book of Chilam Balam, 138.

29. Patricia de Fuentes, ed. and trans., The Conquistadors. First- Person Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico, 159. For the argument that this was measles, not smallpox, see Horacio Figueroa Marroquin, Enfermedades de los Conquistadores, 49-67.

30. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Bernal Diaz Chronicles: The True Story of the Conquest of Mexico, trans. Albert Idell, 250; Diego Duran, The Aztecs: The History of the Indies in New Spain, trans. Doris Heyden and Fernando Horcasitas, 323; Francisco López

CONQUISTADOR Y PESTILENCIA ] 61

de Gómara, Cortés, the Life of the Conqueror by His Secretary, trans. Lesley Byrd Simpson, 204-205; Toribio Motolinia, Motolinia’s History of the Indians of New Spain, trans. Elizabeth A. Foster, 38; Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, 9:4.

31. Anales de Tlatelolco, Unos Anales Históricos de la Nación Mexicana y Códice de Tlatelolco, 64. The Annals of the Cakchiquels and Title of the Lords of Totonicapan, trans. Adrian Recinos, Dioniscio José Chonay and Delia Goetz, 115-116; Bedson, Virus, 155; Diaz del Castillo, Chronicles, 289; Miguel Léon-Portilla, ed., The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, 132; Top, Diseases, 515.

32. Hernando Cortes, Five Letters, trans. J. Bayard Morris, 226; Diaz del Castillo, Chronicles, 405-406; López de Gómara, Cortés, 285, 293; León-Portilla, Broken Spears, 92; Sahagún, Florentine Codex, 13:81.

33. Colección de Documentos Inéditos, 37:200; Oviedo, Historia General, 2d ed., 3:353. For corroboration see M. M. Alba C., Etnología y Población Historica, passim; Porras Barrenechea, Cartas del Perú, 24; López de Velasco, Geografía, 341; Relaciones Históricas y Geográficas de America Central, 216-218.

34. Herrera, Historia General, 5:350; Relaciones Históricas y Geográficas, 200.

35. Alvarez, Pedrarias Dâvila, 608, 619, 621, 623; Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica, 4:8.

36. Pascual de Andagoya, Narrative of the Proceedings of Pedrarias Dâvila, trans. Clements R. Markham, 6; Colección de Documentos Inéditos, 17:219-222; Herrera, Historia General, 4:217; Scott, Tropical Medicine, 1:192, 288.

37. Garcilaso de la Vega, First Part of the Royal Commentaries of the Yncas, trans. Clements R. Markham, 2:456-457. Fernando Montesinos, Memorias Antiguas Historiales del Perú, trans. Philip A. Means, 126. Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, History of the Incas, trans. Clements R. Markham, 187. It has been suggested that the source of the great epidemic in question was two men, Alonso de Molina and Ginés, left behind by Pizarro at Tumbez on the reconnaissance voyage of 1527. Pedro de Cieza de León, The Incas of Pedro Cieza de León, ed. Victor W. von Hagen, trans. Harriet de Onis, n. 51. If the epidemic was smallpox or measles, this explana­ tion is unlikely, because these diseases are of short duration and have no carrier state. The expedition of which these men were

62 I THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE

members had had no contact with pestilential Panama for some time before it returned there from Tumbez. If these two men caught smallpox or measles, it must have been already present among the Indians.

38. Felipe Guarnan Poma Ayala, Nueva Corànica y Buen Govierno, 85-86. Cieza de León, Incas, 52, 253; Bernabé Cobo, Obras, 2:93. Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries, 2:461; Martín de Murúa, Historia General del Perú, Origen y Descendencia de los Incas, 1:103-104; Clements R. Markham, ed. and trans., Narratives of the Rites and Laws of the Incas, 110; Pedro Pizarro, Relation of the Discovery and Conquest of the Kingdoms of Peru, trans. Philip A. Means, 1:196-198; Sarmiento de Gamboa, History of the Incas, 167-168; Miguel Cabello Valboa, Miscelánea Antartica, una Historia del Perú Antiguo, 393-394;’ Marcos Jiménez de la Espada, ed., Relaciones Geográficas de Indias-Perú, 2:267.

Did smallpox exist in the Incan lands before the 1520s? Fernando Montesinos, writing in the seventeenth century, claimed that Capac Titu Yupanqui, a pre-Columbian Peruvian, died of smallpox in a general epidemic of that disease. Also, some examples of the famous naturalistic Mochica pottery show Indians with pustules and pocks which bear a ,very close resemblance to those of smallpox. But Montesinos is regarded as one of the least reliable historians of Incan times, and there are several other diseases native to the north­ western section of South America, such as the dreadful verrugas, which have a superficial dermatological similarity to smallpox. Fur­ thermore, the aborigines of the Incan Empire told Pedro Pizarro that they had had no acquaintance with smallpox in pre-Columbian times. Montesinos, Memorias Antiguas, 54; Pizarro, Relation, 1:196; Victor W. von Hagen, Realm of the Incas, 106; Myron G. Schultz, “A History of Bartonellosis (Carrion’s Disease),” 503-515; see also Raoul and Marie D’Harcourt, La Medicine dans ¡’Ancien Pérou. passim.

39. Cook and Borah, Aboriginal Population, 4, 89; Motolinia, History, 38; Sahagún, Florentine Codex, 13:81.

40. Ashburn, Ranks of Death, 20; Cieza de León, Incas, 52; Murúa, Historia General, 1:104; Pizarro, Relation, 1:196.

41. Vellard, “Causas Biológicas,” 85; Bedson, Virus, 157, 167; Dixon, Smallpox, 313.

42. Reginaldo ^de Lizárrago, Descripción Colonial por Fr. Reginaldo de Lizárrago, 1:136.

43. Díaz del Castillo, Chronicles, 282, 301; López de Gómara, Cortés, 238-239.

CONQUISTADOR Y PESTILENCIA | 63

44. Cortés, Five Letters, 136; Díaz del Castillo, Chronicles, 289, 311.

45. Cieza de León, Incas, 53; Pizarro, Relation, 1:198-199. 46. Ayala, Nueva Coránica, 86; Cobo, Obras, 2:93; Sarmiento

de Gamboa, History of the Incas, 167-168; Valboa, Miscelánea Antartica, 393.

47. Sarmiento de Gamboa, History of the Incas, 167-168, 197-199; for corroboration see Cieza de León, Incas, 253; Valboa, Miscelánea Antartica, 394.

48. Pizarro, Relation, 1:199. 49. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, 13:81. 50. Motolinia, History, 38; Sahagún, Florentine Codex, 9:4. 51. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, vol. 13:81; López de Gómara,

Cortés, 204-205; Dixon, Smallpox, 94; A. J. Rhodes and C. E. van Rooyen, Textbook of Virology, 2d. ed., 319.

52. F. Webster McBryde, “Influenza in America During the Six­ teenth Century,” 296-297.

53. Annals of the Cakchiquels, trans. Recinos, Chonay, Goetz, 116.