From the last decades of the sixteenth century and into the second half of the nineteenth century, smallpox swept the southern steppes and adjacent areas again and again, seemingly arising whenever enough susceptibles had been born since the last epidemic to support a new one. The seventeenth century opened with the government at Buenos Aires asking the Spanish crown for permission to import more black slaves, because smallpox had struck down so many of the Amerindians. That city alone had at least four epidemics of smallpox in less than a hundred years (1627, 1638, 1687, and 1700), and many others followed in the next two centuries. The first solid reference to the disease in Rio Grande do Sul did not appear until 1695, but this firestorm of a disease must have swept that province, contiguous to both Portuguese and Spanish areas where epidemics blazed up again and again, long before the end of the seventeenth century.
The death rates could be very high. In 1729, two churchmen, Miguel Ximénez and a priest named Cattaneo, started out from Buenos Aires for the missions in Paraguay accompanied by 340 Guaraní. Eight days up the Río de la Plata, smallpox appeared among the latter. All but 40 contracted the infection, and for two months the disease raged, at the end of which 121 were convalescing and 179 were dead. The Jesuits, a group more given to numerical precision than most, reckoned that 50,000 had died in the Paraguayan missions in the 1718 smallpox, 30,000 in the Guaraní villages in 1734, and 12,000 in 1765. Out of how many at risk? We shall have to leave that to the demographic historians.
We shall never know how many died among the tribes roaming the pampa. Their ability to flee at short notice must have saved them from some epidemics, but the longer they avoided the infection, the more pulverizing its impact when it did strike. For instance, there is the case of the Chechehets, in 1700 one of the more numerous of the peoples of the grasslands, and therefore probably a tribe that had dodged the worst epidemics. When this tribe acquired smallpox near Buenos Aires early in the eighteenth century, it suffered near obliteration. The Chechehets tried to fly from this danger, which this time only increased their losses: “During the journey they daily left behind them their sick friends and relations, forsaken and alone, with no other assistance than a hide reared up against the wind, and a pitcher of water.” They even killed their own shamans “to see if by this means the distemper would cease.” The Chechehets never recovered as an autonomous people. By the end of the century, even their language was gone. Today we have 15 of their words and some place names, barely as much as we have of the language of the Guanches.9
This disease continued to periodically ravage the pampean tribes, terminating only with the spread of vaccination and the destruction, incarceration, or expulsion of the last peoples of the Argentine steppe. Doctor Eliseo Cantón, physician, scientist, and medical historian of Argentina, stated flatly that the extermination of the Amerindians as an effective force on the pampa was due not to the Argentinian army and its Remingtons, but to smallpox ….
The impact of smallpox on the indigenes of Australia and the Americas was more deadly, more bewildering, more devastating than we, who live in a world from which the smallpox virus has been scientifically exterminated, can ever fully realize. The statistics of demographic decline are cold, the eyewitness accounts at first moving, but eventually only macabre. The impact was so awesome that only a writer with the capabilities of a Milton at the height of his powers could have been equal to the subject, and there was no one like him on Española in 1519 or in New South Wales in 1789…
Smallpox was only one of the diseases the marinheiros let loose on the native peoples overseas – perhaps the most destructive, certainly the most spectacular – but only one. We have not dealt at all with respiratory infections, the “hectic” fevers so often prevalent among the indigenes after contact with the strangers from over the horizon. To cite one piece of evidence, in the 1960s, 50 to 80 percent of central Australian Aborigines examined in one study had coughs and abnormal breath sounds, the higher percentages being among those most recently come in from the desert. We have said nothing of enteric infections, which unquestionably have killed more humans in the last few millennia than any other class of diseases, and still are doing so. Cabeza de Vaca, staggering lost and desperate across Texas circa 1530, unintentionally presented his Amerindian masters with some sort of dysenteric disease that killed half of them and elevated him and his comrades to the status of priestly physicians, ironically saving their lives. We have said nothing of the insect-borne diseases, though in the nineteenth century, malaria was the most important sickness in the entire Mississippi Valley. We have said nothing of the venereal infections, which depressed the indigenes’ birth rates as they raised death rates from Labrador to Perth in western Australia. Old World pathogens in their dismal variety spread widely beyond the seams of Pangaea and weakened, crippled, or killed millions of the geographical vanguard of the human race. The world’s greatest demographic disaster was initiated by Columbus and Cook and the other marinheiros, and Europe’s overseas colonies were, in the first stage of their modern development, charnel houses. Afterward, mixed European, African, and indigene societies quite unlike any that had ever existed before grew up in the colonies in the torrid zone, with the single major exception of northern Australia. The temperate-zone colonies developed less distinctively; they became Neo-European, with only minorities of non-whites.
We accept that Mexico and Peru were full of indigenous peoples prior to European arrival, because their ancient monuments of stone are too huge to ignore and because their descendants still live in these lands in large numbers. But to imagine the Neo-Europes, now chock-full of Neo-Europeans and other Old World peoples, as once having had large native populations that were wiped out by imported diseases calls for a long leap of historical imagination. Let us examine one specific case of depopulation of a Neo-Europe.
Let us select a Neo-European region where indigenous agriculturalists of an advanced culture lived: the portion of the eastern United States between the Atlantic and the Great Plains, the Ohio Valley and the Gulf of Mexico. By the time Europeans had quartered that region, had traversed it up and down, back and forth, often enough in search of new Aztec Empires, routes to Cathay, and gold and furs to have acquainted themselves with its major features – by 1700 or so – the native inhabitants were the familiar Amerindians of the United States history textbooks: Cherokee, Creek, Shawnee, Choctaw, and so forth. These and all the others, with only one or two exceptions, were peoples without pronounced social stratification, without the advanced arts and crafts that aristocracies and priesthoods elicit, and without great public works comparable to the temples and pyramids of Meso-America. Their populations were no greater than one would expect of part-time farmers and hunters and gatherers, and in many areas less. Very few tribes numbered in the tens of thousands, and most were much smaller.
The scene in this part of North America had been very different in 1492. The Mound Builders (a general title for a hundred different peoples of a dozen different cultures spread over thousands of square kilometers and most of a millennium) had raised and were raising up multitudes of burial and temple mounds, many no more than knee or hip high, but some among the largest earthen structures ever created by humans anywhere. The largest, Monks Mound, one of 120 at Cahokia, Illinois, is 623,000 cubic meters in volume and covers six and a half hectares. Every particle of this enormous mass was carried and put into place by human beings without the help of any domesticated animals. The only pre-Columbian structures in the Americas that are larger are the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán and the great pyramid at Cholula. Cahokia, in its heyday, about 1200 A.D., was one of the great ceremonial centers of the world, served by a village with a population estimated by some archeologists as upward of 40,000. (The largest city in the United States in 1790 was Philadelphia, with a population of 42,000.) Graves at Cahokia and other such sites contain copper from Lake Superior, chert from Arkansas and Oklahoma, sheets of mica probably from North Carolina, and many art objects of superb quality. They also contain, in addition to the skeletons of the honored dead, those of men and women apparently sacrificed at the time of burial. One burial pit at Cahokia contains the remains of four men, all with heads and hands missing, and about 50 women, all between 18 and 23 years of age. Surely this assemblage is evidence for a grim religion and a severely hierarchical class structure – this last a key factor in the origins of civilization everywhere.
When whites and blacks settled near the site of Cahokia and similar centers (Moundsville,