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European colonists did not arrive alone in the Americas. They brought a great deal of baggage, some of it unintentionally. Many of the most significant changes in America’s natural environments came about through autonomous workings of natural organisms that accompanied colonists and traders. These included disease-causing microbes, or pathogens, domesticated animals such as cows, sheep, and horses, and also weeds, or plants – many of them imported – that grew in conditions of disturbance brought on by plowing, grazing, or other colonial activities.

The impact of these organisms was enormous. Together, they remade much of American nature to better suit the new arrivals from Europe. While all of them had different effects, which varied from one region to the next, it is fair to say that without these small, often microscopic “co-invaders,” it is unlikely that Europeans would have conquered those vast sections of the Americas which their descendants now dominate.

In the material presented below, we see how the linking of the Americas to the rest of the world in the early colonial period (and even after) meant that the nature of the New World was suddenly attached to the nature of the Old World, often with astounding consequences. Alfred Crosby explores the impact of microscopic germs, viruses, and plasmodia on American Indians, and particularly the impact of smallpox and its role in the conquest of the Americas and Australia. This piece is taken from one of Crosby’s most famous books, but some of his terms need to be explained. Crosby refers to “Pangaea,” which is the name scholars give to the world’s single great land mass before it broke into continents millions of years ago, long before people existed. In part, Crosby argues that after the world split into separate continents, different disease environments eventually emerged in different places. To cross the ocean becomes, in Crosby’s narrative, to cross “the seams of Pangaea.”

The people who cross the ocean, sailors, he occasionally refers to by their Portuguese name, marinheiros, because many of the earliest European sailors and explorers were Portuguese. And finally, he refers to “neo-Europes,” by which he means those parts of the world outside Europe where the marinheiros and other Europeans settled and successfully transformed the natural environment into some approximation of European nature. These include the temperate zones of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of southern Africa, among others. In Crosby’s analysis, the process of making a strange new environment into a “neo-Europe” was the key to success for any European colonial regime.

In this excerpt, keep a close eye on how the diseases mentioned come to the Americas, and pay special attention to the way in which long isolation from the disease environments of Eurasia makes American Indians especially vulnerable at the time of contact. Why did Europeans bring diseases to Indians, without Indians having diseases of their own to kill Europeans? Also, you might ask why disease did not play the same role in the Europeans’ attempted conquest of Africa, where pathogens worked in the opposite direction, often undermining the power of the colonists. Does the fact that natural organisms often worked to European and Euro-American advantage mean that the conquest was “natural?” Or were settlers who took the land from dying Indians merely exploiting the environmental conditions they had created, intentionally or otherwise?

It is important to remember that as important as biological change can be, it never determines the totality of history. In other words, we must resist what is called biological or environmental determinism – the belief that nature determines history. Instead, we should try always to keep in mind that people make their histories from a range of possibilities within any environmental setting. Indian responses to the conflagration of smallpox and other Eurasian ailments are as much a part of environmental history as the epidemics themselves. This chapter includes a document offering clues to how some Indian people thought about smallpox and how to save themselves from it. Also, we will consider how modern experience of a virgin soil epidemic, the COVID-19 outbreak of 2020, offers us a chance to rethink Crosby’s history of epidemics among Native American peoples. Finally, it is important to keep in mind that not all the Eurasian biota that arrived with the Europeans were so bad for Indian peoples. The documents in this chapter suggest how Indians made use of another European organism that flourished in the Americas, the horse.

Virgin Soil Epidemics

Alfred W. Crosby

(Excerpt from Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.)

… We must examine the colonial histories of Old World pathogens, because their success provides the most spectacular example of the power of the biogeographical realities that underlay the success of European imperialists overseas. It was their germs, not these imperialists themselves, for all their brutality and callousness, that were chiefly responsible for sweeping aside the indigenes and opening the Neo-Europes to demographic takeover…

The isolation of the indigenes of the Americas and Australia from Old World germs prior to the last few hundred years was nearly absolute. Not only did very few people of any origin cross the great oceans, but those who did must have been healthy or they would have died on the way, taking their pathogens with them. The indigenes were not without their own infections, of course. The Amerindians had at least pinta, yaws, venereal syphilis, hepatitis, encephalitis, polio, some varieties of tuberculosis (not those usually associated with pulmonary disease), and intestinal parasites, but they seem to have been without any experience with such Old World maladies as smallpox, measles, diphtheria, trachoma, whooping cough, chicken pox, bubonic plague, malaria, typhoid fever, cholera, yellow fever, dengue fever, scarlet fever, amebic dysentery, influenza, and a number of helminthic infestations. The Australian Aborigines had their own infections – among them trachoma – but otherwise the list of Old World infections with which they were unfamiliar before Cook was probably similar to the list of Amerindian slaughterers. It is worth noting that as late as the 1950s it was difficult to get a staphylococcal culture from Aborigines living in the sterile environs of the central Australian desert.

Indications of the susceptibility of Amerindians and Aborigines to Old World infections appear almost immediately after the intrusion of the whites. In 1492, Columbus kidnapped a number of West Indians to train as interpreters and to show to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Several of them seem to have died on the stormy voyage to Europe, and so Columbus had only seven to display in Spain, along with some gold trinkets, Arawack finery, and a few parrots. When, less than a year later, he returned to American waters, only two of the seven were still alive. In 1495, Columbus, searching for a West Indian commodity that would sell in Europe, sent 550 Amerindian slaves, 12 to 35 years of age, more or less, off across the Atlantic. Two hundred died on the difficult voyage; 350 survived to be put to work in Spain. The majority of these soon were also dead “because the land did not suit them.”¹

The British never shipped large numbers of Australian Aborigines to Europe as slaves or servants or in any other category, but in 1792, two Aborigines, Bennilong and Yemmerrawanyea, did sail to England as honored pets. Despite what we can assume was good treatment, they did no better than the first Amerindians in Spain. Bennilong pined and declined and showed indications of a pulmonary infection, but he did survive to return to his home. His companion succumbed to the same infection (perhaps tuberculosis, which was very widespread in Western Europe at the end of the eighteenth century) and was buried beneath a stone inscribed “In memory of Yemmerrawanyea, a native of New South Wales, who died on the 18th of May, 1794, in the 19th year of his age.”²

We have some idea of the source of the Aborigines’ morbidity and mortality: pulmonary infection. But what killed the Arawacks in 1493 and 1495? Maltreatment? Cold? Hunger? Overwork? Yes, and no doubt about it, but could this be the entire answer? Columbus certainly did not want to kill his interpreters, and slavers and slaveholders have no interest whatever in the outright slaughter of their property. All or almost all of these victims seem to have been young adults, usually the most resilient members of our species – except in the case of unfamiliar infections. The hale and hearty immune system of one’s prime years of life, when challenged by unprecedented invaders, can overreact and smother normal body functions with inflammation and edema. The most likely candidates for the role of exterminator of the first Amerindians in Europe were those that killed so many other Arawacks in the decades immediately following: Old World pathogens.

… Let us restrict ourselves to the peregrinations of one Old World pathogen in the colonies, the most spectacular one, the virus of smallpox. Smallpox, an infection that usually spreads from victim to victim by breath, was one of the most communicable of all diseases and one of the very deadliest.³ It was an old human infection in the Old World, but it was rarely of crucial importance in Europe until it flared up in the sixteenth century. For the next 250 to 300 years – until the advent of vaccination – it was just that, of crucial importance, reaching its apogee in the 1700s, when it accounted for 10 to 15 percent of all deaths in some of the western European nations early in the century. Characteristically, 80 percent of its victims were under ten years of age, and 70 percent under two years of age. In Europe, it was the worst of the childhood diseases. Most adults, especially in the cities and ports, had had it and were immune. In the colonies, it struck indigenes young and old and was the worst of all diseases.

Smallpox first crossed the seams of Pangaea – specifically to the island of Española – at the end of 1518 or the beginning of 1519, and for the next four centuries it played as essential a role in the advance of white imperialism overseas as gunpowder – perhaps a more important role, because the indigenes did turn the musket and then rifle against the intruders, but smallpox very rarely fought on the side of the indigenes. The intruders were usually immune to it, as they were to other Old World childhood diseases, most of which were new beyond the oceans. The malady quickly exterminated a third or half of the Arawacks on Española, and almost immediately leaped the straits to Puerto Rico and the other Greater Antilles, accomplishing the same devastation there. It crossed from Cuba to Mexico and joined Cortés’s forces in the person of a sick black soldier, one of the few of the invaders not immune to the infection. The disease exterminated a large fraction of the Aztecs and cleared a path for the aliens to the heart of Tenochtitlán and to the founding of New Spain. Racing ahead of the conquistadores, it soon appeared in Peru, killing a large proportion of the subjects of the Inca, killing the Inca himself and the successor he had chosen. Civil war and chaos followed, and then Francisco Pizarro arrived. The miraculous triumphs of that conquistador, and of Cortés, whom he so successfully emulated, are in large part the triumphs of the virus of smallpox.

This first recorded pandemic in the New World may have reached as far as the American Neo-Europes. The Amerindian population was denser than it was to be again for centuries, and utterly susceptible to smallpox. Canoeists of the Calusa tribe often crossed from Florida to Cuba to trade in the early sixteenth century, and certainly could have carried smallpox home to the continent with them; and peoples in at least sporadic contact with each other ringed the Gulf of Mexico from areas where the disease was rife all the way around to the thickly populated regions of what is now the southeastern part of the United States. The Mississippi, with villages rarely so much as a day’s journey apart along its banks, at least as far north as the Ohio, would have given the disease access to the entire interior of the continent. As for the pampa, the pandemic certainly spread through the Incan Empire to present-day Bolivia, and from there settlements with easy access to each other were sprinkled across Paraguay and down along the Río de la Plata and its tributaries to the pampa. Smallpox may have ranged from the Great Lakes to the pampa in the 1520s and 1530s.

Smallpox is a disease with seven-league boots. Its effects are terrifying: the fever and pain; the swift appearance of pustules that sometimes destroy the skin and transform the victim into a gory horror; the astounding death rates, up to one-fourth, one-half, or more with the worst strains. The healthy flee, leaving the ill behind to face certain death, and often taking the disease along with them. The incubation period for smallpox is 10 to 14 days, long enough for the ephemerally healthy carrier to flee for long distances on foot, by canoe, or, later, on horseback to people who know nothing of the threat he represents, and there to infect them and inspire others newly charged with the virus to flee to infect new innocents. To give one example (a precise rather than sensational example), most of the Abipones with whom the missionary Martin Dobrizhoffer was living in mid-eighteenth-century Paraguay fled when smallpox appeared among them, some as far as 80 km. In some instances this quarantine-by-flight worked, but often it simply served to spread the disease.

The first recorded epidemic of smallpox in British or French North America erupted among the Algonkins of Massachusetts in the early 1630s: “Whole towns of them were swept away, in some not so much as one soul escaping Destruction.”⁴ William Bradford of Plymouth Plantation, a few miles south, provided a few more details on just how hard the Algonkins nearby were hit, and how the death rates could soar to such heights in these epidemics. Some of the victims, he wrote,

fell down so generally of this disease as they were in the end not able to help one another, no not to make a fire nor fetch a little water to drink, nor any to bury the dead. But would strive as long as they could, and when they could procure no other means to make fire, they would burn the wooden trays and dishes they ate their meat from, and their very bows and arrows. And some would crawl out on all fours to get a little water, and sometimes die by the way and not be able to get in again.⁵

The disease raged through New England, on west into the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes region, and from there no one knows how much farther. Smallpox whipsawed back and forth through New York and surrounding areas in the 1630s and 1640s, reducing the populations of the Huron and Iroquois confederations by an estimated 50 percent.

After that, smallpox never seemed to stay away for more than two or three decades at a time. The missionaries, Jesuit and Mennonite, the traders from Montreal and Charleston – they all had the same appalling story to tell about smallpox and the indigenes. In 1738 it destroyed half the Cherokee, in 1759 nearly half the Catawbas, in the first years of the nineteenth century two-thirds of the Omahas and perhaps half the entire population between the Missouri River and New Mexico, in 1837–8 nearly every last one of the Mandans and perhaps half the people of the high plains.⁶ Every European people to establish major settlements in North America – the English, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Russian – recorded, sometimes in gloom, sometimes in exultation, the horrors of smallpox running loose among Americans who had never known it before.

The disease often spread far beyond the European frontier, often to people who had barely heard of the white invaders. Smallpox probably reached the Puget Sound area on the northwest Pacific coast in 1782 or 1783, a part of the world then as distant from the main centers of human population as any place on earth. When the explorer George Vancouver sailed into the Sound in 1793, he found Amerindians with pockmarked faces, and human bones scattered along the beach at Port Discovery – skulls, limbs, ribs, backbones – so many as to produce the impression that this was “a general cemetery for the whole of the surrounding country.” He judged that “at no very remote period this country had been far more populous than at present.” It was an assessment that he could accurately have extended to the entire continent.⁷

Smallpox may have reached the pampa as early as the 1520s or 1530s, as suggested earlier. In 1558 or 1560, smallpox appeared again (or for the first time) in the grasslands of the Río de la Plata and killed, says a hearsay account, “more than 100,000 Indians.”⁸ We have only one source for this, but the explosion of smallpox in Chile and Paraguay at about the same time and in Brazil from 1562 to 1565, killing masses of indigenes, provides strong support for this report of the disease afflicting the people of the lower reaches of the Río de la Plata.

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, Alabama; Etowah, Georgia) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the local Amerindian societies were relatively egalitarian, their population sparse, their arts and crafts admirable but no longer superb, their trade networks regional; these people knew nothing of the mounds and ceremonial centers, abandoned generations before. The whites credited them to Vikings, or to the lost tribes of Israel, or to prehistoric races now gone from the earth.

The builders of the mounds had been Amerindians, of course, in some cases, no doubt, the ancestors of the people who were living near the sites when the Old World settlers arrived. These ancestors had been alive in large numbers when the Europeans first approached the coasts of the Americas. They were the people through whose lands and bodies Hernando de Soto hacked a path from 1539 to 1542 in his search for wealth equal to what he had seen in Peru. His chroniclers give us a clear impression of regions of dense population and many villages in the midst of vast cultivated fields, of stratified societies ruled with an iron hand from the top, and of scores of temples resting on truncated pyramids, which, though often stubby and made of earth rather than masonry, remind one of similar structures in Teotihuacán and Chichén Itzá.

Where in the images of North American native societies that we share today is there a place for De Soto’s wily opponent, the “Señora of Cofachiqui,” a province that probably contained the present site of Augusta, Georgia. She traveled by sedan chair borne by noblemen and was accompanied by a retinue of slaves. For a distance of a hundred leagues “she was greatly obeyed, whatsoever she ordered being performed with diligence and efficacy.”¹⁰ Seeking to deflect the greed of the Spaniards away from her living subjects, she sent the former off to sack a burial house or temple that was 30 m long and 12 or so wide, with a roof decorated with marine shells and fresh-water pearls, which “made a splendid sight in the brilliance of the sun.” Inside were chests containing the dead, and for each chest a statue carved in the likeness of the deceased. The walls and ceiling were hung with art work, and the rooms filled with finely carved maces, battle-axes, pikes, bows, and arrows inlaid with fresh-water pearls. The building and its contents were, in the opinion of one of the grave robbers, Alonso de Carmona, who had lived in both Mexico and Peru, among the finest things he had ever seen in the New World.

The Amerindians of Cofachiqui and of much of what is now the southeastern United States were impressive country cousins of the civilized Mexicans, perhaps comparable to the immediate predecessors of the Sumerians in general culture, and there were a lot of them. The latest scholarly work estimates that the population of one marginal area, Florida, may have been as high as 900,000 at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Even if we skeptically subtract half from that figure, the remainder is impressively large. The southeastern United States, relative to what it had been, was vacant circa 1700 when the French came to stay.

Something eliminated or drove off most of the population of Cofachiqui by the eighteenth century, as well as a number of other areas where heavy populations of people of similar cultural achievements had lived two centuries before: along the Gulf Coast between Mobile Bay and Tampa Bay, along the Georgia coast, and on the banks of the Mississippi above the mouth of the Red River. In eastern and southern Arkansas and northeastern Louisiana, where De Soto had found 30 towns and provinces, the French found only a handful of villages. Where De Soto had been able to stand on one temple mound and see several villages with their mounds and little else but fields of maize between, there was now wilderness. Whatever had afflicted the country through which he had passed may have reached far to the north as well. The region of southern Ohio and northern Kentucky, among the richest in natural food resources on the continent, was nearly deserted when whites first penetrated from New France and Virginia.

There had even been a major ecological change in the regions adjacent to the Gulf of Mexico and for tens of kilometers back from the coast, a change paralleling and probably associated with the decline in Amerindian numbers. In the sixteenth century, De Soto’s chroniclers saw no buffalo along their route from Florida to Tennessee and back to the coast, or if they did see these wonderful beasts, they did not mention them – which seems highly improbable. Archeological evidence and examination of Amerindian place names also indicate that there were no buffalo along the De Soto route, nor between it and salt water. A century and a half later, when the French and English arrived, they found the shaggy animals present in at least scattered herds from the mountains almost to the Gulf and even to the Atlantic. What had happened in the interim is easy to explain in the abstract: An econiche opened up, and the buffalo moved into it. Something had kept these animals out of the expanses of parklike clearings in the forest that periodic Amerindian use of fire and hoe had created. That something declined or disappeared after 1540. That something was, in all likelihood, the Amerindians themselves, who naturally would have killed the buffalo for food and to protect their crops.

The cause of that decline and disappearance was probably epidemic disease. No other factor seems capable of having exterminated so many people over such a large part of North America. The dismal genocidal process had already begun before De Soto arrived in Cofachiqui. A year or two before, a pestilence had threshed through that province, killing many. Talomeco, where the Spanish raided the burial temple mentioned earlier, was one of several towns without inhabitants because an epidemic had killed and driven off so many. The intruders found four large houses there filled with the bodies of people who had perished of the pestilence. The Spanish judged Cofachiqui heavily populated, but its citizens said their number had been much greater before the epidemic. De Soto entered Cofachiqui on the heels of a medical disaster, just as he had with Pizarro in Peru….

The epidemics continued to arrive and to do their work of extermination, as they did in every part of the Americas we know anything about in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To cite but one, in 1585–6, Sir Francis Drake led a large fleet to the Cape Verdes, where his men picked up a dangerous communicable disease, and then sailed off to raid the Spanish Main, but so many of the English were sick and dying that the venture failed miserably. Seeking redress, he attacked the Spanish colony at St. Augustine, Florida, infecting the local people with the Cape Verde epidemic. The Amerindians, “at first coming of our men died very fast, and said amongst themselves, it was the English god that made them die so fast.” Presumably the disease proceeded on into the interior.¹¹

When the French penetrated into the hinterlands behind the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, where De Soto had fought so many battles with so many peoples, they found few to oppose their intrusion. And the decline in Amerindian numbers continued; indeed, it probably accelerated. In six years, the last of the Mound Builders, the Natchez, with their pyramid-top temples and their supreme leader, the Great Sun, diminished by a third. One of the Frenchmen wrote, unintentionally echoing the Protestant, John Winthrop, “Touching these savages, there is a thing that I cannot omit to remark to you, it is that it appears visibly that God wishes that they yield their place to new peoples.”¹²

The exchange of infectious diseases – that is, of germs, of living things having geographical points of origin just like visible creatures – between the Old World and its American and Australasian colonies has been wondrously one-sided, as one-sided and one-way as the exchanges of people, weeds, and animals. Australasia, as far as science can tell us, has exported not one of its human diseases to the outside world, presuming that it has any uniquely its own. The Americas do have their own distinctive pathogens, those of at least Carrion’s disease and Chagas’ disease. Oddly, these very unpleasant and sometimes fatal diseases do not travel well and have never established themselves in the Old World… Niguas, as Fernándo de Oviedo called the tropical American chigger causing barefoot Spaniards so much trouble in the sixteenth century, reached Africa in 1872 and spread across the continent as an epidemic of lost toes and fatal secondary infections of tetanus, but it has since retreated to the nuisance category and has never changed the Old World’s demographic history. Europe was magnanimous in the quantity and quality of the torments it sent across the seams of Pangaea. In contrast, its colonies, epidemiologically impecunious to begin with, were hesitant to export even the pathogens they did have. The unevenness of the exchange … operated to the overwhelming advantage of the European invaders, and to the crushing disadvantage of the peoples whose ancestral homes were on the losing side of the seams of Pangaea.