When the * conquistadors * arrived, they brought new diseases to the Native American populations, and basically decimated them with smallpox and the like. My question is this: was a member of the party actaully ill with smallpox when Cortez and his ilk arrived? Or did the explorers somehow carry the germs around on their person, unknowingly infecting the natives like Typhoid Mary?
I don’t think that Cortez’s original plan included infectious diseases. However, his men were well outnumbered, and he needed to exploit any advantages he had.
Once the Spaniards discovered that New World cultures didn’t have immunity to European illnesses, they intentionally exposed the natives.
I’m not an expert on infectious dieseases, I’d guess that small pox was present in the Europeans, but they didn’t notice because they were immune. Then again, I’m probably wrong.
Thanks, but that didn’t really answer my question. How were they first exposed to the disease? Did the newcomers have to be currently sick themselves to pass the disease on, or did they some how carry it with them unknowingly?
According to the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond:
“In 1519 Cortes landed on the coast of Mexico with 600 Spainards, to conquer the firecely militaristic Aztec empire with a population of many millions. That Cortes reached the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, escaped with the loss of ‘only’ two-thirds of his force, and managed to fight his way back to the coast demonstrates both Spanish military advantages and the initial naivete of the Aztecs. But when Cortes’s next onslaught came, the Aztecs were no longer naive and fought street by street with the utmost tenacity. What gave the Spaniards a decisive advantage was smallpox, which reached Mexico in 1520 with one infected slave arriving from Spanish Cuba.”
(end quote)
Smallpox is derived from a disease that livestock get (like cowpox), and made the transition to humans, and it devastated European populations for centuries, until the people left were the ones best suited to fend off the disease. American natives, without domesticated animals, had no immunity to it or several other diseases such as measles and tuberculosis, which jumped from domesticated animals to humans.
If you wonder questions like this, you should definitely read the book.
Yes, some of the explorers had to be infectious when they arrived. Illness on board a ship was not at all uncommon, and with the crowded living conditions it was likely that they could pass a disease around long enough to survive an ocean crossing.
Europeans had been exposed to a lot of infectious diseases that were unknown in the New World and they had developed a certain level of immunity, even for really nasty diseases like smallpox. So there could be sailors on board who were carriers without even knowing, or they were sick, but not too bad off.
The native Americans had essentially no resistance. Even to what we consider childhood diseases, like measles. Until recently, at least, almost everyone got them, they were sick for a while and they recovered, with rare exceptions. When these “nuisance” diseases were introduced in the unprepared American population they spread like wildfire with staggering mortality rates.
Jared Diamond, in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel contends that the original European resistance to these germs arose from association with farm animals. We had our epidemics when we first started herding cattle and sheep. By the time we were ready to sail to new lands we had become unwitting biological weapons.
“pluto … a seriously demented but oddly addictive presence here.” – TVeblen
I finished second, but we both recommended the same book. It’s a fairly new book – I still see it in bookstores regularly. Oh, and there are libraries, I guess.
“pluto … a seriously demented but oddly addictive presence here.” – TVeblen
Cecil didn’t answer this specific question, but he did write a column last year about diseases moving into Native Americans from Europeans (and why there weren’t as many traveling the other direction, I think).
Domestication of animals is only the first half of the equation. Farm animals and good crops allowed for much higher population densities. Lots of people grouped together led to epidemics, ensuring that just about everyone came into contact with nasty diseases.
Malaria comes to mind as a New World disease that continues to cause problems for non natives.
I have wondered if native Americans returned the favor, transmitting disease to Europeans to which they had no immunity. And, when the African slaves came to America, did they have the same problem as the native Americans?
There has always been enough traffic among Asia, Europe, and Africa that most diseases of that sort had made it into most populations of those three regions. The Americas were isolated (as was the central Pacific and Australia–Hawaii was horribly depopulated by measles when the whites showed up).
Since the Americas had few domestic animals (dogs, llamas, alpacas are about it), there were not the same sort of conditions for breeding trans-species diseases. There is a persistent, but little attested, belief that syphilis came to Europe from the Americas. The evidence is rather scant: it first broke out in Europe after the Spaniards started making the trip on a regular basis; it was, initially, extremely virulent, leaving open sores on much of the body and killing many of its victims in the first infection. (The point behind its virulence is that infectious diseases do not survive if they kill off all their hosts before they can spread. Several diseases that have begun as “instant killers” have mutated to become slightly less lethal so as to leave more survivors to spread them. Since syphilis underwent that sort of transformation, the supposition is that it was a “new” disease in the 1500’s.)
On the other hand, there is no firm evidence that syphilis existed in the Americas prior to the Spanish incursion, so the issue is still unresolved.
Tom~
Here’s the column that Jill mentioned: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/940729.html
One more side note:
Miss Mallon knew she was infectious. She changed her name a few times and continued to work as a cook after being identified as the source of one of the many mini-epidemics she caused. Eventually she had to be incarcerated.
She may not have understood the microbiology behind it, but she must have known that she was a carrier for this disease and she was capable of passing it along.
I used to rock and roll all night and party every day. Then it was every other day. Now I’m lucky if I can find a half an hour a week in which to get funky.