Hang on…first you need to infect it with smallpox.
Or at least chicken pox.
There’s plenty of even “verbal” evidence for the Great Dying that depopulated New England – it was common knowledge among the Europeans, and was even cited as one reason for colonizing New England. Reports of depopulated villages observed that there was no one left to bury the dead – people just abandoned the villages. So much for “mass burials” – you wouldn’t find them.
I don’t have access to my books right now. I know that James Loewen cites this in his Lies my Teacher Told Me (which for some people will be reason to disbelieve it – but Loewen gives plentiful cites you can check. Jennings talks about it in the Invasion of America. and see here:
http://www.olgp.net/chs/single.items/plague1616.htm
http://abbemuseum.org/research/wabanaki/timeline/great-dying.html
A thought: do we know if any diseases spread from West to East? It’s sometimes claimed that the Chinese reached the West coast of America, and I wonder if diseases having spread from West to East might support that claim.
Just reaching the coast wouldn’t necessarily do it. I don’t know of any suggestion that the now undoubted Viking-Indian encounters circa 1000 resulted in plagues. It’s also been suggested at various times that other limited encounters took place.
There’s no good evidence here, because , even when the contact is known to have happened, there’s no good follow-up information. But I strongly suspect that sustained contact between sizeable representatives of both groups is required to produce an epidemic. Even if one particularly virulent strain managed to start illness among one tribe, the effect would be self-limiting because that particular village might get wiped out before spreading the plague elsewhere. For a big effect, you need something like trade with Europeans along a wide area of seacoast, re-infecting new villages with smallpox or whatever and ensuring a self-sustauining illness, much like getting a campfire to "catch’.
I suspect that one boatload of Chinese landing only at widely-separated points along a coast won’t do it. YMMV.
I think syphilis is a candidate for an American disease spreading to Europe because the first recorded European outbreak seems to be shortly after 1492, but I believe this is controversial.
I think Quartz meant from the West coast of NA to the East and no I don’t think there is any evidence of that. Nor do I happen to believe that there is even a scintilla of good evidence that the Chinese ever landed in pre-Colombian NA, the claims of Gavin Menzies notwithstanding.
As to syphilis, it may just have been a more virulent New World strain that traveled back to Europe, though the debate continues. But it is pretty certain that both tuberculosis and syphilis existed in the New World before European contact.
The west coast natives were nearly wiped out in most cases by diseases from coastal contact. No need for transcontinental diffusion.
Most of the Chinook tribes were obliterated in the early 1800s in the early days of fur trading. An example is the Multnomah tribe (which are mainly remembered as the source of the name of the county that most of Portland is in). Villages with large, plank houses. Some two stories with balconies that early Columbia river explorers thought looked like European homes. Thousands of people in the larger villages. Then … gone.
The Chinook, being located around the mouth and lower part of the Columbia were the first ones to have extensive contact with westerners in the region. So, they suffered the worse.
Basically, if your tribe was in an area where Europeans first liked to hang out, you were toast. Further inland or in a less accessible coastal area, and your group had some chance of only being decimated.
When you are a hunter-gatherer society, suddenly having a large percentage of the population sick all at once meant that everybody was in deep trouble. The sick could not be cared for and were more likely to die. The others couldn’t maintain their traditional regular lifestyle which was critical to surviving. Such people have centuries-old systems worked out for moving to hunting or gathering areas, when to engage is certain tasks, etc. A pandemic interferes with that and with no way to adapt to something that rapid, several years of famine results.
Note that many of the Plains nomadic natives did quite well just before official contact. The horse diffused into their area before the westerners did. This resulted in a large population explosion. But then this created a nightmare for the settled, agricultural people who suffered by comparison. Our stereotype of the northern Plains being mostly roaming, horse-riding hunters was a short-lived phenomena. For centuries before, most natives were farmers living in the river valleys who had to deal with a few, poor, nomads raiding them. So a lot of those folk died off before the diseases showed up.
To expand on that, for the sort of depopulation seen in the Americas, you need a barrage of diseases, not just one: it wasn’t just that no one had had small pox and so it was especially virulent: it’s that whoever happened to have some resistance to smallpox fell to typhus, and those resistant to both of those got hit by flu, and the few that survived all three got hit by measles. One new terrible disease leads to a mass dying and a recovery: it was the combination that was so impossible to counteract or adapt to.
Clearly, we need to get off this planet.
The idea that N America was some kind of disease-free paradise is naïve. The native Americans had plenty of native diseases to contend with the main thing was that they were so few in numbers, that they did not foul their own water supplies. this kept epidemics down.
No one is claiminmg that North nAmerica was disease-free, and while it’s true that Native Americans didn’t cause the same kind of pollution, that’s beside the point – they had no immunities to the European diseases, and the Europeans carried them not only among themselves, but harbored them in their domesticated animalsd, which the American Indians had few of. The Vikings brought cows. Christopher Columbus brought pigs, and immediately after him they brought dogs. All of these animals can carry diseases that can be transferred to humans.
The native Americans had built up no immunities to anything like these diseases, and experience shows they were easy prey to them.
In fact, 1491 references GG&S several times.
To add to this, another important point is that Native Americans were NOT few in numbers. They were very, very many, as “1491” discusses at great length and in many different ways.
nm - done better by CalMeacham.
just a nitpick, but Jamestown was 1607.
Exactly.
I saw a very good exhibit in the museum in Victoria BC years ago. I assume it’s still there, it appeared to be part of the permanent exhibits. It documents the smallpox epidemics that swept the area in IIRC the 1860s when the area was being settled. It mentioned people finding whole groups of natives that sickened and died. Some children playing in the nearby woods found a group that had left Victoria by canoe; the entire canoe load had come down sick as they left for home (those were giant canoes). They put ashore and crawled into the woods where they all died. Meanwhile villages up the coast from BC were mostly depopulated.
A review in Scientific American that I read once was about the Alaska epidemics. Same idea - isolated villages get first whiff of smallpox. The problem was not that the natives were more likely to die of the disease. In villages where a previously exposed person (i.e. missionary) was there to care for the sick, bring them water and food, keep them covered, they lived. Death rates were about 10%, same as European susceptibility. In subsistence cultures where everyone was immobilized by fever almost at the same time, dehydration, starvation and exposure likely meant more than 10% often 90% to 100% of the affected/infected people died.
Exactly. Smallpox seems to be a special killer, but there were a whole raft of disease the byproduct of interplay between domestic animals, typically kept in close proximity with their owners. Many of the poorer peasant cottages in Europe for example, had one room for the people and one for the livestock. Pigs are a special case because their body chemistry is similar, so it’s easy for us to catch the same diseases. It’s not the Americas lacked disease, it was that these were different diseases. Just like in Europe, the bigger the population centers, the more trade routes, the easier the diseases spread. It’s also the case, I suspect, that lacking any history of serious epidemics natives were less likely to conceive of quarantine measures before it was too late.
Gotta be careful, we don’t want to die off like the Martians did in the invasions of 1938 and 1953.
It’s also true that Norse contact with indigenous inhabitants of North America was, as far as I know, restricted to an island (Newfoundland), so there was a natural barrier (the Gulf of St. Lawrence) to the spread of disease.
That said, I don’t know if there was any outbreak of disease among the indigenous Newfoundlanders. I don’t recall reading about anything like that.
As any geologist will tell you, the present is the key to the past. What has happened in the last, say 300 years? Well entire Indian nations died out due to wars or displacement. A number of early European settlements died or failed to expand. There were intensity 7 earthquakes, there were the two greatest volcanic eruptions of the 20th century. And then there were two of the most powerful eruptions in pre-history.
The above cataclysms, natural or man-made, can possibly wipe out a good number of citizens still in the stone age (or early iron.)