Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
4
COLUMBUS AND COVID-19
Amerindian Antecedents to the Global Pandemic
[emailprotected]
W. George Lovell1 Queen’s University
Abstract
The eruption and spread of COVID-19 affords us the opportunity to look back and reflect on the role
disease has played in shaping Indigenous destinies in the Americas. Discussion illuminates problems of data,
chronology, impact, and identification in distinct settings — Hispaniola, Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru,
and Brazil — and situates regional findings, historically, in hemispheric and global context.
Key Words
Columbus – COVID-19 – Old World disease – Amerindian depopulation
1 A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, W. George Lovell is Professor of Geography at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and
Visiting Professor in Latin American history at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Seville, Spain. Central America, Guatemala in particular, has been the regional focus of much his research, the outcomes of which have earned him the Carl O. Sauer Distinguished Scholarship Award from the Conference of Latin American Geography, an association that also honoured him with its Preston E. James Eminent Latin Americanist Career Award. A former editor of Mesoamérica (1998-2008), Lovell has fifteen book titles to his credit, among them four editions of Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala (McGill-Queen’s University Press, [1985] 1992, 2005, 2015) and four editions of A Beauty That Hurts: Life and Death in Guatemala (Between the Lines and University of Texas Press, [1995] 2000, 2010, 2019).
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
5
COLÓN Y LA COVID-19
Antecedentes Amerindios de la Pandemia Global
[emailprotected]
W. George Lovell Queen’s University
Resumen
La erupción y difusión de la pandemia COVID-19 nos permite reflexionar sobre el papel de las
enfermedades en la historia latinoamericana, sobre todo su impacto en las poblaciones amerindias después
de la llegada de Colón y el inicio de la invasión europea. Nuestra discusión ilumina problemas con los datos
pertinentes, su cronología y su identificación en distintos entornos: La Española, México, Guatemala, los
Andes centrales del Ecuador y del Perú, y Brasil. Se sitúa la discusión, históricamente, en un contexto
hemisférico y global.
Palabras Clave
Colón – COVID-19 – Enfermedades del Viejo Mundo – Despoblación amerindia
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
6
Introduction
The arrival of Columbus on American shores marked not only the beginning of
globalization but possibly the greatest destruction of human lives in history. COVID-19
will not mark the end of globalization, though some of its present arrangements have
been altered as governments close borders and impose restrictions on the free
movement of people, goods, and services. What the rampage of the virus clearly
signals is the need for a better understanding of the key role disease has played in
shaping past events and predicaments. Epidemiologically, the unforeseen
consequences of Columbus bringing together the Old World and the New resonate
with an impact made palpably pertinent since the outbreak of COVID-19. What are
the parallels, what are the similarities and differences, between a fifteenth-century
intrusion and a twenty-first-century eruption?
In Latin America, the colonial experiences of Indigenous peoples allow us to
reflect on the catastrophic effects of contagion on land and life. Many factors besides
disease must be examined in order to explain autochthonous depopulation, but
foremost in comprehending its scale and rapidity are outbreaks of infection never
known before, to which Amerindians were immunologically defenseless. Europeans fell
sick and died from illness too, just as countless of those with whom they made contact
perished by fire and sword or from trauma and exploitation, reasons connected more
to ideology and the pursuit of empire than to genetics and germs. But Old World
disease ranks of primary importance when grappling with New World demography,
especially in the first century or so following initial contact. That period is crucial, for its
temporal span is one in which epidemics that originated as ‘visiting people’ (Greek
epidemos) from outside eventually became endemic, meaning that they stayed ‘in
people’ (Greek endemos) as immunity was generated and advances made that
tempered their repercussions – for most parts of Latin America at any rate.
Few contemporary observers, even those who noted its occurrence and
disruptions, were aware of the magnitude and severity of the disease factor. It befell
an American geographer, Carl O. Sauer (1935), to be among the first of modern
scholars to draw attention to its significance. Along with three of his colleagues at the
University of California at Berkeley – Woodrow Borah, Sherburne F. Cook, and Lesley B.
Simpson – Sauer not only revolutionized the way we think about the size of pre-
Columbian populations at European contact but also the ranking of causes
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
7
responsible for their dramatic decline2. All told, the findings of the ‘Berkeley School’
constitute what Thomas S. Kuhn considers a paradigm shift3, an alternate view of Latin
American history and of what happened in that history. A collision that took place
centuries ago reverberates still, in far-flung corners of the Amazon4 and elsewhere.
Just as COVID-19 has affected, and afflicted, some countries or some regions
within a country more than others, so too in colonial times did disease operate with
notable spatial variation and long-term demographic fluctuation, east to west, south
to north across the hemisphere. The extinction of Indigenous communities in the Island
Caribbean contrasts sharply with Maya peoples to this day constituting roughly half of
Guatemala’s national population. Better, then, to look at regional scenarios before
engaging continental and global evaluation. Examined, in turn, are contact and
conquest dynamics in (1) Hispaniola, today Haiti and the Dominican Republic; (2)
Mexico, its central heartland and its northern frontier; (3) Guatemala; (4) Ecuador and
Peru; and (5) Brazil.
Hispaniola
No scenario provokes such controversy, nor such disagreement about the size
of aboriginal numbers at contact, as does Hispaniola. Its notoriety involves two eminent
protagonists: first, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea himself, the Genoa-born Cristoforo
Colombo, better known in the Hispanic world as Cristóbal Colón, who governed the
island so adversely post-landfall that he was removed from office in chains; and
second, Bartolomé de las Casas, who went to Hispaniola in 1502 as an active
participant in its conquest, later mended his ways, and thereafter, as a man of the
cloth and ‘Defender of the Indians’, denounced the deeds of fellow Spaniards and
struggled relentlessly to improve the native lot.
Hispaniola’s Arawak or Taino inhabitants were the first ‘Indians’ not only to be
labelled as such but also the first whose island home was invaded and destroyed – and
them along with it. The range of contact population estimates, given that
commentators manipulate essentially the same documentary sources, is staggering –
2 Denevan, William M., “Carl Sauer and Native American Population Size”, The Geographical Review 86, 1996, 385-97. 3 Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1962. 4 Amigo, Ignacio, “For Brazil’s Indigenous Communities, Pandemic Revives Memories of Earlier Plagues”, Science, April
15, 2020; Hemming, John, People of the Rainforest: The Villas Boas Brothers, Explorers, and Humanitarians of the Amazon, C. Hurst & Company, London, 2019.
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
8
from a mere 60.0005 to a weighty 8 million6, with myriad calculations in between,
among them the 375.000 to 600.000 of Moya Pons7, the 500.000 of Córdova8 and
Lipschutz9, and the 1 million of Zambardino10. Sauer is shrewdly non-noncommital, but
makes reference to an “oft-repeated figure” of 1,100,000, the number that Las Casas
was told by Archbishop Deza of Seville as one that Columbus had mentioned to him in
conversation11. Sceptical of the entire exercise, Henige maintains that “it is futile to offer
any numerical estimates at all on the basis of the evidence”12, his dismissal at times
instructive and insightful, if also ascerbic and scathing13. Others press on, re-evaluating
extant sources for new, fresh insight and conjuring up alternative appraisals14.
Whatever estimate one opts for, however, is but a prelude to erasure: by 1519, barely
a quarter-century after Columbus came ashore, Hispaniola and its Antillean
neighbours had been reduced to what Sauer describes as “a sorry shell”15. What could
have caused such precipitous, irreversible depopulation?
Smallpox. Leaning on his medical training, Guerra had previously discounted
malaria or yellow fever in favour of typhus or influenza (in the form of swine fever) as
the likely agent of destruction16. However, scrutiny by Gil and Varela of a hitherto
unknown report of Columbus establishes the presence of smallpox, which they date as
having arrived in Hispaniola with a returning ill Taíno on the Admiral’s second voyage
5 Verlinden, Charles, Le repartimiento de Rodrigo de Alburquerque à Española en 1514, Rijksuniversiteit, Ghent, 1968. 6 Cook, Sherburne F. and Woodrow Borah, Essays in Population History, 3 vols., University of California Press, Berkeley,
1971, 1974, 1979. 7 Moya Pons, Frank, La Española en el siglo XVI, 1493-1522, Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, Santo Domingo,
1971. Moya Pons, Frank, Después de Colón: Trabajo, sociedad y política en la economía del oro, Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1987.
8 Córdova, Efrén, “La encomienda y la desaparición de los indios en las Antillas Mayores”, Caribbean Studies 8: 23-49, 1968.
9 Lipschutz, Alejandro, “La despoblación de los indios después de la conquista”, América Indígena 26: 229-47, 1966. 10 Zambardino, Rudolph A., Critique of David Henige’s “On the Contact Population of Hispaniola: History as Higher
Mathematics”, Hispanic American Historical Review 58, 700-08, 1978. 11 Sauer, Carl O., The Early Spanish Main, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1966, 65-69. 12 Henige, David, “On the Contact Population of Hispaniola: History as Higher Mathematics”, Hispanic American
Historical Review 58: 217-37, 1978, 237. 13 Henige, David, Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate, University of Oklahoma
Press, Norman, 1998; Lovell, W. George, Review of David Henige, Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate (1998), in Ethnohistory 49: 468-70, 2002.
14 Watts, D., The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture, and Environmental Change since 1492, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987; Cook, Noble David, “¿Una primera epidemia americana de viruela en 1493?”, Revista de Indias 63: 49-64, 2003; Livi Bacci, Massimo, “Return to Hispaniola: Reassessing a Demographic Catastrophe”, Hispanic American Historical Review 83, 1: 3-51, 2003; Moya Pons, Frank and Rosario Flores Paz (eds.), Los taínos en 1492: El debate demográfico, Editora Búho, Santo Domingo, 2013.
15 Sauer, Carl O., The Early Spanish Main, 294. 16 Guerra, Francisco, “La epidemia americana de influenza en 1493”, Revista de Indias 45: 325-47, 1985.
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
9
of 149317. After smallpox struck, Spaniards wanted little more to do with the ruin it
triggered and the devastation it left behind. Wealth lay on the mainland to the west,
towards which sailed an armada led by Hernán Cortés.
Mexico: The Mesoamerican Core
Spaniards under the command of Cortés landed on the Mexican coast at
Veracruz on Good Friday, 1519. They immediately became aware that they had
entered a world organized and settled very differently from the Caribbean islands they
had been so anxious to leave. We know it today as Mesoamerica, a term coined by
Paul Kirchoff to define a resource-rich region embraced by central and southern
Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, the westernmost parts of Honduras and
Nicaragua, and the Nicoya peninsula of Costa Rica18. At the time of the Cortés
invasion, Mesoamerica was home to scores of cultures capable not only of meeting
basic needs but also of attaining remarkable achievements in art and architecture,
astronomy, mathematics and the measurement of time, plant domestication,
environmental management, and the building of towns and cities.
The splendours of Mesoamerica were many, but none more spectacular than
the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. There, on November 8, 1519, Cortés was welcomed
as a guest, his manner watchful and inquisitive, his eyes taking stock. After their intent
to seize power became apparent, he and his men were driven out, seeking safe haven
in Tlaxcala, a nearby city whose people had sided with the Spaniards against their arch
enemies, the Aztecs19.
A little more than a year passed before a Tlaxcalan-Spanish alliance forced the
surrender of Tenochtitlán. Its fall on August 13, 1521, came about primarily because of
the havoc unleashed by another outbreak of smallpox. Because the Aztecs, in the
Mesoamerican tradition, had inherited a sophisticated system of writing, we have their
testimony to draw on, one mournful text running:
17 Gil, Juan and Consuelo Varela (eds.), Cristóbal Colón: Textos y documentos completos, Alianza Editorial, Madrid,
1997. 18 Kirchoff, Paul, “Mesoamérica”, Acta Americana 1: 92-107, 1943. 19 Restall, Matthew, When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History, Ecco Press,
New York, 2018.
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
10
“While the Spaniards were in Tlaxcala, a great plague broke out here in
Tenochtitlán. It lasted for seventy days, striking everywhere in the city and killing
a vast number of our people. We were covered with agonizing sores from head
to foot. The illness was so dreadful that no one could walk or move. The sick
were so utterly helpless that they could only lie on their beds like corpses. A great
many died of this plague, and many others died of hunger. They could not get
up to search for food, and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they
starved to death in their beds”.20
How many may have perished, in Tenochtitlán and the rest of the Mexican
heartland, depends on how many we think were alive to begin with. As with Hispaniola,
the range of estimates is dizzying, from a low of 4.5 million21 to a high of 25.2 million22. A
middle ground of 12 million to 15 million, for all of Mesoamerica, is staked by Sanders
and Price23, with Sanders reckoning 1 million to 1.2 million for the Basin of Mexico24.
There, roughly one-quarter to one-third were residents of the “metropolitan area and
satellite villages and towns” of Tenochtitlán, the island city proper (a sprawling twelve
square kilometres) home to some 150,000 to 200,000 inhabitants. Also for the Basin of
Mexico, Whitmore advances 1.59 million as a figure he believes conforms to the
“moderate historical estimates” of Sanders25, championing an “all-Mexico total” of 16
million26 based on a “scaling procedure” that extends his computer simulations for the
Basin of Mexico farther afield. Like Whitmore, Zambardino concerns himself more with
methodological procedure than source interpretation, offering a contact estimate of
5 million to 10 million for central Mexico, which for him “matches the evidence
gathered and presented by Borah and Cook far more accurately than their estimate
of 25 million”27. Following Sanders, Slicher van Bath lowers Borah and Cook’s ratios to
convert diverse socioeconomic categories into total population, shaving their count
20 León-Portilla, Miguel (ed.), The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. Translated by Ángel
María Garibay and Lysander Kemp, Beacon Press, Boston, [1962] 1992, 92-93. 21 Rosenblat, Ángel, La población indígena y el mestizaje en América. 2 vols., Editorial Nova, Buenos Aires, 1954. 22 Borah, Woodrow and Sherburne F. Cook, The Aboriginal Population of Central Mexico on the Eve of the Spanish
Conquest, Ibero-Americana 45, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1963. 23 Sanders, William T. and Barbara Price, Mesoamerica: The Evolution of a Civilization, Random House, New York, 1968. 24 Sanders, William T., “The Population of the Central Mexican Symbiotic Region, the Basin of Mexico, and the
Teotihuacán Valley in the Sixteenth Century.” In The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, edited by William M. Denevan, 85-150, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1976, 149.
25 Whitmore, Thomas M., “A Simulation of the Sixteenth-Century Population Collapse in the Basin of Mexico”, Annals of the Associaton of American Geographers 81: 464-87, 1991, 477.
26 Ibid., 483. 27 Zambardino, Rudolph A., “Mexico’s Population in the Sixteenth Century: Demographic Anomaly or Mathematical
Illusion?”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11:1-27, 1980, 22.
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
11
by 15 percent to arrive at 21.4 million for central Mexico28.
That region is the spatial unit for which the estimates of Cook and Borah apply,
native depopulation between 1518 and 1605, in millions, tallied in seven counts as
follows29:
1518: 25.2
1532: 16.8
1548: 6.3
1568: 2.7
1580: 1.9
1595: 1.4
1605: 1.1
Zambardino argues that, from a mathematical standpoint, each of these
estimates conceals a significant margin of error, having been calculated for an
extensive area from data which, for the most part, are indirect, incomplete, and locally
specific30, a criticism levelled also by Sanders31. Aware that debate is far from over,
Cook and Borah contend that “the Indian population of central Mexico, under the
impact of factors unleashed by the coming of the Europeans, fell by 1620-1625 to a
low of approximately 3 percent of its size at the time the Europeans first landed on the
shores of Veracruz”32. Demographic collapse in the century following conquest is
attributed primarily to pandemic outbreaks.
Singling out the disease factor leads logically to a discussion of what ailments
particular episodes might have featured, not at all easy to ascertain. A convergence
of diagnoses that identifies the first bout of pestilence as smallpox – we even know the
name of the black slave, Francisco de Eguía, said to have transferred infection from
ship to shore in 1520 – does not apply to the second pandemic of 1531-32, nor most
subsequent outbreaks between 1538 and the early seventeenth century. Prem
28 Slicher van Bath, B. H., “The Calculation of the Population of New Spain”, Boletín de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del
Caribe 24: 67-95, 1978. 29 Cook, Sherburne F. and Woodrow Borah, Essays in Population History, 1971, viii. 30 Zambardino, Rudolph A., “Mexico’s Population in the Sixteenth Century…”. 31 Sanders, William T., “The Population of the Central Mexican Symbiotic Region…”. 32 Cook, Sherburne F. and Woodrow Borah, Essays in Population History, 1979, 102.
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
12
addresses the issue assiduously33, his analysis of Indigenous health and welfare, like that
of López Austin34, evaluating compelling Aztec testimony that augments better-known,
though not always carefully consulted, Spanish texts. Prem dissects relevant sources
with considerable caution before venturing an opinion as to what possible contagion
matches the symptoms and characteristics recorded. Two of his conclusions are
noteworthy: (1) that the manner in which a disease presently occurs may not
correspond to how it was manifest in the past; and (2) that only the earliest outbreaks,
few in number but especially virulent, involved one specific pathogen. The greater
likelihood, Prem asserts, is that vulnerable native populations were exposed to what
Borah calls “compound epidemics”35, a combination of two or even three maladies
for which the “virgin-soil” conditions they penetrated proved lethal. Of particular note
in Prem’s sequence of disease outbreaks is the incidence of measles and typhus at
roughly thirty-year intervals. He also lobbies, as do Slicher van Bath36 and Whitmore37,
for depopulation having occurred in a series of abrupt, irregular drops rather than the
smooth, gradual progression inferred in the work of Cook and Borah38.
Mexico: The Northern Frontier
That part of Mexico lying beyond the northern perimeter of Mesoamerica, from
the Pacific lowlands of Sonora and Sinaloa up through the canyon country of
Chihuahua and on to the open plains cut by the Río Bravo or Grande, presented yet
another landscape for Spaniards to contemplate. No conouco mounds here, those
earthen, food-producing piles conspicuous on Hispaniola, nor manicured chinampas,
the ‘floating gardens’ that Cortés and his followers marvelled at in the waters
surrounding Tenochtitlán. Favourable pockets did exist, where intensive agriculture was
practised and where towns and villages flourished, but the cultural whole, with some
notable exceptions, lacked the political, social, and technological sophistication
33 Prem, Hanns J., “Disease Outbreaks in Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century.” In “Secret Judgments of God”: Old
World Disease in Colonial Spanish America, edited by Noble David Cook and W. George Lovell, 20-48, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman 1992.
34 López Austin, Alfredo, The Human Body and Ideology: Concepts of the Ancient Nahuas. 2 vols. Translated by Thelma Ortiz de Montellano and Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 1988.
35 Borah, Woodrow, Introduction to “Secret Judgements of God”: Old World Disease in Colonial Spanish America, edited by Noble David Cook and W. George Lovell, 3-19, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.
36 Slicher van Bath, B. H., “The Calculation of the Population of New Spain…”. 37 Whitmore, Thomas M., 1991. “A Simulation of the Sixteenth-Century Population...”. 38 Cook, Sherburne F. and Woodrow Borah, Essays in Population History, 1971, 80-81.
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
13
found farther south. Population levels at contact, therefore, would not have been
comparable to those of central Mexico, but even in this vast, daunting periphery,
indications are that human numbers were still impressively large.
A fundamentally different view of the meaning of conquest, and advocacy of
higher contact-period estimates of Indigenous populations than researchers had
proffered before, begins in the 1930s with the pioneering work of Sauer, for it is in the
regional setting of northwestern Mexico that prevailing scholarly notions about
aboriginal culture and demography were challenged. In their study of Aztatlán, Sauer
and Brand39 combine perusal of documentary sources with field observation to assert
that, at the time of Spanish intrusion, the area of the Pacific coast under examination
supported roughly the same numbers as those living there in the early twentieth
century, which in 1920 was 225,000. They caution that “statements we present herewith
are anything but conclusive”, instead intimating that “certain discoveries” be treated
“in terms of a tentative thesis”40. Critical though the disease factor was, other
explanations must be sought to account for native decline in Aztatlán: slave raids,
looting, and wanton destruction are recorded as having been enacted “by about as
hard a gang of killers as Spain let loose anywhere in the New World”41. Three years later,
Sauer published another monograph in which the same analytical approach was
applied to a much more extensive territory, resulting in a similar finding as at Aztalán:
“The record, as interpreted, gives an aboriginal population between Gila and
Río Grande de Santiago in excess of half a million, almost three-fourths of the
number now living in this part of Mexico. Bit by bit, the theme has obtruded itself
that aboriginal rural populations and present ones are much the same. This, I
believe, is not a sensational conclusion, but a quite natural one”42.
What struck the mind of Sauer as “quite natural” was, in fact, “a sensational
conclusion” for others not inclined to interpret the evidence as he did. Someone who
must have found Sauer’s proposition difficult to accept was another of his Berkeley
colleagues, anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber43, who had earlier estimated the contact
39 Sauer, Carl O. and Donald Brand, Aztatlán: Prehistoric Mexican Frontier on the Pacific Coast. Ibero-Americana 1,
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1932. 40 Ibid., 3. 41 Ibid., 41. 42 Sauer, Carl O., Aboriginal Population of Northwestern Mexico. Ibero-Americana 10, University of California Press,
Berkeley, 1935, 32. 43 Kroeber, Alfred L., “Native American Population”, American Anthhropologist 36: 1-35, 1934.
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
14
population of northwestern Mexico at 100,000, less than one-fifth the number
calculated tribe by tribe, region by region, by Sauer.
Following Sauer, the work of Peter Gerhard reconstructs the situation in other
parts along the northern frontier, in jurisdictions administered by Spain as Nueva Galicia
and Alta y Baja California44. Findings for Nueva Galicia conform to those of central
Mexico, with a sixteenth-century collapse, a seventeenth-century nadir, and an
eighteenth-century recovery. Alta and Baja California, on the other hand, resemble a
delayed variant of the Antilles, with aboriginal inhabitants dwindling to near extinction.
Gerhard observes that “whereas in central and southern Mexico the native population
may have dropped by 95 percent in the sixteenth century, on the northern frontier the
loss, while drastic, was less pronounced and, as might be expected, occurred later”45.
He takes pains to observe that “native populations here sometimes were fatally
infected before they came under Spanish control”, a point made too by Daniel Reff,
whose investigations traverse Sonora, Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua in Mexico and
over into Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas in the United States46.
Reff’s cross-border analyses reconstruct the events surrounding sixteen disease
episodes between 1530 and 1653. He divides his chronology into two periods that fall
before and after the arrival of Jesuit missionaries in 1591. The coming of the ‘Black
Robes’, with instructions to keep records and write annual reports, means that post-
Jesuit outbreaks can be pieced together with greater attention to detail than pre-
Jesuit occurences. Unlike Dobyns47, Reff considers trade routes not to have been so
heavily frequented as to facilitate diffusion into the region of the smallpox that caused
so much destruction in central Mexico in the 1520s48. He does contend, however, that
pestilence erupted on at least four occasions before Father Gonzalo de Tapia and
Father Martín Pérez made their way to Villa San Felipe in 1591. This leads Reff to
conclude that Jesuit missionaries “found only vestiges of once populous and
developed cultures” and that the discrepancies between their accounts and those of
early explorers can be attributed to “significant disease-induced changes” between
44 Gerhard, Peter, The North Frontier of New Spain, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1982. 45 Ibid., 23-24. 46 Reff, Daniel T., Disease, Depopulation, and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518-1764, University of
Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 1991. 47 Dobyns, Henry F., Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America,
University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1983. 48 Reff, Daniel T., Disease, Depopulation, and Culture Change…, 102.
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
15
the time of penetration by the first contingent of Spaniards and the arrival on the scene
of the second49.
Discussion of the demographic consequences of disease outbreaks
complements without duplicating Gerhard’s treatment of the matter. Reff estimates
that “most native populations were reduced by 30 percent to over 50 percent prior to
sustained contact with the Jesuits”50. Their missionization program, which gathered
together in one fixed location formerly dispersed, mobile groups, resulted in the
reduction of Christian converts “by upwards of 90 percent”. Depopulation was the
outcome of “a complex set of demographic factors, but particularly an exceedingly
high infant mortality rate”. While cognizant of the devastating impact of disease, Reff
acknowledges (like Sauer and Brand) that certain objectives and policies promoted
by the colonial regime accelerated the process of decline. Mining operations in
Chihuahua and Durango forged “routes of contagion” south to north from about 1546
on, and missionization, by nucleating native families and thereby increasing the
likelihood of greater mortality when disease broke out, in fact killed the very people
whose souls it was supposed to save. The latter circumstance, not surprisingly, resulted
in widespread mission abandonment and the terrifying correlation of sickness with
outside, foreign presence.
A backlash was inevitable. Father Gonzalo de Tapia met his martyr’s death – a
severed head, a dismembered arm – after a group of stricken parishioners who
believed that it was he who had infected their communities took revenge during the
Jesuit’s pastoral visit to Tovorapa on July 11, 1594. After setting the church on fire, they
stuck Father Gonzalo’s head on a pole and paraded it on a circuit of neighbouring
settlements, possibly only spreading more sickness in their gory trek from town to town.
Guatemala
Compared to Mexico, better documented by both Indigenous and Spanish
sources, Guatemala is a more challenging terrain to scrutinize. Studies of the contact
population vary from 300,00051 to 2 million52. The latter estimate is a composite pieced
49 Ibid., 15 50 Ibid., 16 51 Solano, Francisco de, Los mayas del siglo XVIII, Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, Madrid, 1974. 52 Lovell, W. George and William R. Swezey, “The Population of Southern Guatemala at Spanish Contact”, Canadian
Journal of Anthropology, 3, 1:71-84, 1982; Lovell, W. George and Christopher H. Lutz, with Wendy Kramer and
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
16
together from the tally of a dozen or so smaller territorial units, all meticulously
examined, rather than a blanket calculation for the region as a whole.
Post-contact depopulation conforms to the trajectory for central Mexico, a
collapse of 93.4 percent between 1520 and 1624-1628, during which time native
reduction can be correlated with no fewer that eight pandemics53. It is not possible in
most instances to determine what the bouts of sickness actually were, because
ambiguous, contradictory, or inadequate descriptions defy accurate diagnosis. Such
is the case with the first great outbreak, a disease recorded in a Maya text as having
struck Guatemala between August 1519 and October 1520, four to five years before
Spaniards led by Pedro de Alvarado themselves arrived54. In the memorable words of
Murdo MacLeod, pathogens that mowed down susceptible populations were “the
shock troops of the conquest”55, an example of what nowadays we would consider
community transmission. The Annals of the Cakchiquels – like the Aztecs, Mayas knew
how to write and so recorded their own history – grieves and laments:
“It was in truth terrible, the number of dead among the people. The people
could not in any way control the sickness. First they became ill [with] a cough.
They suffered from nosebleeds and illness of the bladder. It was truly terrible the
number of dead there were in that period. Little by little heavy shadows and
black night enveloped our fathers and grandfathers and us also, oh, my sons!
Great was the strench of the dead. After our fathers and grandfathers
succumbed, half of the people fled to the fields. The dogs and the 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. We
were born to die!”56
While we must be grateful that a Kaqchikel scribe has left us with such a
William R. Swezey, “Strange Lands and Different Peoples”: Spaniards and Indians in Colonial Guatemala, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2013.
53 Lovell, W. George, “‘Heavy Shadows and Black Night’: Disease and Depopulation in Colonial Spanish America”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 82, 3:426-43, 1992.
54 Lovell, W. George, Christopher H. Lutz and Wendy Kramer, Strike Fear in the Land: Pedro de Alvarado and the Conquest of Guatemala, 1520-1541, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2020.
55 MacLeod, Murdo J., Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520-1720, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1973, 40.
56 Recinos, Adrián and Delia Goetz (eds. and trans.), The Annals of the Cakchiquels, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1953, 115-16.
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
17
poignant and graphic description, difficulties abound when it comes to identifying
what disease or combination of diseases the extract might refer to. The balance of
opinion favours smallpox, but not unanimously so. Alternative designations suggest
influenza, measles, pulmonary plague, and exanthematic typhus. Commentators with
a medical background are more inclined to opt for a diagnosis of measles than
smallpox.
If identification is equivocal, not so is the grim reality described – high mortality,
social disruption, fear and panic, a breakdown (as with COVID-19) of all semblance of
normality. The source also distinguishes between a time (August 1519 to October 1520)
when “the plague raged” and a period thereafter (October 1520 to March 1521) when
“the plague spread”57. In terms of origin and chronology, where the sickness came
from and when, Prem correlates it with the smallpox that devastated Mexico in 1520
and 152158. This correlation, however, fails to account for notice of the disease showing
up in 1519. The problem is resolved if the source of infection is sought in the Yucatán,
where indications of smallpox date to 151759. A halcyon, pre-European milieu is
recorded in another Maya text, The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel:
“There was then no sickness; they had then 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 pains; 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. They brought shameful things when
they came”60.
The advance guard that cut down Maya peoples in Guatemala played a
similar role in the campaign launched by Francisco Pizarro to conquer the Inca Empire.
Ecuador and Peru
In terms of aboriginal accomplishments, comparisons are inevitably made
between Mesoamerica and Tawantinsuyu, the latter the name bestowed by the Incas
57 Ibid., 115 58 Prem, Hanns J., “Disease Outbreaks in Central Mexico…”, 26-27. 59 Roys, Ralph L., The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, Carnegie Institution, Washington D.C., 1933, 138; Clendinnen,
Inga, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1987.
60 Roys, Ralph L., The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, 1933, 34.
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
18
on their Andean empire stretching from southern Colombia through Ecuador, Peru,
and Bolivia to northern Chile and northwestern Argentina61. These two teeming realms
were the ones that attracted Spaniards most, for their resources were varied and
plentiful. Present-day scholarship exhibits the same bias, but not quite in equal
measure. We tend to know more about Mesoamerican peoples than we do about
their Andean counterparts because the Aztecs, Mayas, and neighbouring societies
had developed a strong written tradition by the time of conquest, which enabled them
to record their version of events as they were actually happening, or soon after
subjugation. The Incas and their predecessors kept track by means of quipus or khipus,
knotted-string cords previously thought to be devices that registered numerical or
statistical data but whose narrative and phonetic qualities are now being championed
and will reveal welcome insights into the Andean world62. Lack of full-fledged writing
systems, however, means that much information about the Spanish invasion from an
Indigenous perspective was never recorded, or was put down on paper many years
after initial contact, with inevitable shortcomings. This is apparent when it comes to
documenting the swath cut early on by disease, for few Andean texts exist to
complement Spanish sources.
Available evidence, nonetheless, indicates that (as in Central America) sickness
preceded the physical presence of Spaniards by several years, diffusing ahead of
them to weaken Inca opposition. According to Newson63, an outbreak of what may
have been hemorrhagic smallpox, whereby a strain of smallpox infects the blood,
causing a rash on the skin similar to that produced by measles, hence the possiblity of
misidentification, had entered the Ecuadorian Andes by 1524. There it resulted in heavy
mortality. Among its victims was the Inca ruler Huayna Capac, who was then in Quito
to consolidate Inca power over northern territories recently brought to heel.
As well as Huayna Capac, the epidemic also claimed the life of his designated
heir, Ninan Cuyuchi, igniting a divisive civil war between two of the Inca’s sons, the
61 Murra, John, “Andean Societies before 1532”. In The Cambridge History of Latin America, edited by Leslie Bethell,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, vol. 1, 59-90, 1984. 62 Urton, Gary, “From Knots to Narratives: Reconstructing the Art of Historical Record Keeping in the Andes from
Spanish Transcriptions of Inka Khipus”, Ethnohistory 45, 5: 409-38, 1998. Urton, Gary, Inka History in Knots, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2017; Salomon, Frank, The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village, Duke University Press, Durham, 2004; Hyland, Sabine, “Writing with Twisted Cords: The Inscriptive Capacity of Andean Khipus”, Current Anthropology, 58: 412–419, 2017.
63 Newson, Linda A., “Old World Epidemics in Early Colonial Ecuador”. In ‘Secret Judgments of God’: Old World Disease in Colonial Spanish America, edited by Noble David Cook and W. George Lovell, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 89, 84-112, 1992.
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
19
half-brothers Atahualpa and Huascar, rival contenders for their father’s throne64. By the
time Pizarro followed up his coastal reconnaissance of the 1520s with an inland foray
in the 1530s, relying for his advance (as Cortés had done in Mexico) on native
cooperation, the chaos caused by severe sickness facilitated Spanish victory. Like
Aztec Tenochtitlán, the Inca capital Cuzco was taken as much because of contagion
as by the might of Pizarro, a fact the Spaniards acknowledged65.
If the disease that paved the way for Spanish victory indeed was smallpox, how
did it reach the Andes? Passage from Central America is the most likely trajectory,
given the importance of Panama as the point of departure for expeditions of discovery
and conquest. Borah, however, suggests the Río de la Plata basin, pointing out that
outbreaks of sickness are recorded as having occurred from south to north66. Newson
mediates by contending that Inca troops stationed in Túmbez may have fallen ill and
carried smallpox south to Cuzco, from where it radiated back towards it source of
origin67. She also argues that the Incas could have been exposed to other diseases
before the arrival of Pizarro, possibly measles or plague, emanating from Central
America.
Andean epidemic history has been studied by Polo68, Lastres69, Dobyns70, N. D.
Cook71, Alchon72, and Newson73. Their contributions document, after the first outbreak
of smallpox, more than twenty episodes of chronic sickness having occurred between
1530 and 1635, the cumulative impact of which was to decrease native numbers by
the early seventeenth century to a fraction their size at contact. Newson records
eighteen epidemics in Ecuador alone between 1531-1533 and 161874. She estimates
the contact population to have been 1.6 million, about half of which lived in the sierra
region, one-third on the coast, and the remainder (15 percent) in the Amazonian
64 Hemming, John, The Conquest of the Incas, Abacus Sphere Books, London, 28-29, [1970] 1972. 65 Wright, Ronald, Stolen Continents: The Americas through Indian Eyes since 1492, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston,
72-75, 1992. 66 Borah, Woodrow, Introduction to “Secret Judgements of God”: Old World Disease in Colonial Spanish America, 15. 67 Newson, Linda A., “Old World Epidemics in Early Colonial Ecuador”, 91. 68 Polo, J. T., “Apuntes sobre las epidemias del Perú,” Revista Histórica 5: 50-109, 1913. 69 Lastres, Juan. B., Historia de la medicina peruana, 3 vols., Universidad de San Marcos, Lima, 1951. 70 Dobyns, Henry F., “An Outline of Andean Epidemic History to 1720”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 37: 493-515,
1963. 71 Cook, Noble David, Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 1520-1620, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981. 72 Alchon, Suzanne A., Native Society and Disease in Early Colonial Ecuador, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
1991. 73 Newson, Linda A., Life and Death in Early Colonial Ecuador, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1995. 74 Newson, Linda A., “Old World Epidemics in Early Colonial Ecuador”, 111, 1992.
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
20
lowlands east of the Andes. The native population of the sierra dropped from 838.600
to 164.529 during the sixteenth century, a fall of 80.4 percent. Newson computes a
decline of 95.3 percent for the coast, from between 546.828 and 571.828 to 26.49175.
As with the etiology of COVID-19, her findings, like those of Cook76, stress regional
differences as well as variations within a region, reflecting cultural and environmental
conditions that are area-specific or place-specific, factors not taken into enough
consideration before.
The seminal work of N. D. Cook warrants close attention77. He deploys six
different methods to estimate what the contact population of “Indian Peru” may have
been. An ecological model based on “carrying capacity” produces a figure of 13.3
million. Archaeological data, reflecting the less-developed state of the field compared
to Mexico, Cook considers too deficient for any kind of calculation beyond those that
are site-specific – and even those, he notes, should be treated cautiously: excavations
at Chan Chan, for instance, yield estimates of a range of occupants from 25.000 to
200.000. Depopulation ratio models, which Cook believes to be unreliable because of
problems of statistical sampling78, produce a wide range of estimates: Rowe calculates
6 million79, Wachtel 10 million80, Smith 12 million81, and Dobyns 37.5 million82, all of which
encompass the central Andes (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia). Models pertaining to political
and social structure83, an “idealized concept” with “little basis in fact”, furnish a range
of 16 million to 32 million. Census projection models, described by Cook as “one of the
most promising avenues of approach”84, give a minimum estimate of 3.9 million and a
maximum of 14.2 million, upper and lower limits he asserts “to be valid”. His enthusiasm
for this procedure, however, does not extend to Shea85, whose estimate of 2 million to
75 Newson, Linda A., Life and Death in Early Colonial Ecuador, 338-40, 1995. 76 Cook, Noble David, Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 1520-1620, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., 109. 79 Rowe, John H. 1946, “Inca Culture at the Time of the Spanish Conquest”. In Handbook of South American Indians,
edited by Julian H. Steward, Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, vol. 2, 183-330, 1946. 80 Wachtel, Nathan, Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru through Indian Eyes, 1530-1570.
Translated by Ben and Siân Reynolds, Sussex: Harvester Press, Sussex, 1977. 81 Smith, Clifford T., “Depopulation of the Central Andes in the Sixteenth Century”, Current Anthropology, 11: 453-64,
1970. 82 Dobyns, Henry F., “Estimating Aboriginal American Populations: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric
Estimate”, Current Anthropology, 7: 395-449, 1966. 83 Means, Philip A., Ancient Civilizations of the Andes, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1931; Means, Philip A., Fall of
the Inca Empire and Spanish Rule in Peru, 1530-1720, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1932. 84 Cook, Noble David, Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 109-10, 1981. 85 Shea, Daniel E., “A Defense of Small Population Estimates for the Central Andes in 1520”. In The Native Population
of the Americas in 1492, edited by William M. Denevan, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 157-80, 1976.
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
21
2.9 million he rejects on the grounds of insufficient data and the erroneous supposition
“that the rate of decline prior to 1581 paralleled the rate following that date”86.
Methodologically, perhaps the most novel of Cook’s six procedures is his
deployment of disease mortality models, whereby death rates known to have
occurred during certain epidemics are applied, with appropriate modification,
outbreak by outbreak to the disease chronology established for Peru. Working from a
“calculated base” of 671.505 in 1620, Cook reckons the “maximal population” a
century before at 3.243.985. His calculations are episode-specific: 30 to 50 percent
mortality during the first outbreak of smallpox; 25 to 30 percent mortality when smallpox
and measles appear jointly, as they did in the murderous epidemic of 1585 to 1591,
along with mumps, influenza and typhus. The model overlooks key variables –
differential mortality, age-specific mortality, physiological adaptation – but offers
reasonable ground for estimation, provided (of course) that diagnoses have been
made with some degree of confidence.
Cook then steps back from the preponderance of numbers to propose a figure
of 9 million for the population of Peru on the eve of Spanish conquest87, a figure that
straddles a range of estimates from 4 million to 15 million. “Although [a] choice of 9
million may appear to be arbitrary”, he muses, “it is made after careful weighing of the
evidence, rather than being purely an act of faith”. For the Inca Empire as a whole,
Roberts reports Cook as favouring a contact estimate of 14 million88, which means he
reckons that some 5 million lived under Inca rule in Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia,
Argentina, and Chile. A century later the heirs of the Incas in Peru are thought to have
numbered 600.000. An overall decline of 93 percent “almost completely wiped out”
those living along the Pacific coast, as was also the case in Ecuador, leaving the high
Andes the redoubt of Indigenous survival in both countries.
Brazil
Pedro Álvares Cabral is the Portuguese equivalent of Columbus. Allegedly, the
fleet he captained was blown off course as it sailed from Lisbon to round the Cape of
Good Hope, at the southern tip of Africa, en route to India. Landfall on the coast of
86 Cook, Noble David, Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 95, 1981. 87 Cook, Noble David, Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 113-14, 1981. 88 Roberts, Leslie, “Disease and Death in the New World”, Science 246: 1245-47, 1989.
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
22
Brazil on April 22, 1500, inadvertent or otherwise, thereafter meant that Portugal would
penetrate South America from an Atlantic seaboard while Spain moved into the heart
of the continent from the opposite direction, that of the Pacific. The two imperial
powers disputed territorial ownership even before either had any sense of the enormity
of the Amazon interior, which the Portuguese laid claim to in forays from the east
despite a Spaniard, Francisco de Orellana, being the first to navigate the mighty river
downstream from the west in 1542.
Prior to the European invasion, as many as 8 million to 10 million people may
have inhabited Greater Amazonia, a figure some scholars would reduce by half or
more89. The nature of Indigenous societies and their response to foreign sorties was a
decisive factor in determining survival. Sedentary populations under Spanish
domination adapted to the advent of strangers by having epidemics that
accompanied or arrived ahead of them become endemic, meaning that introduced
infections (the lethal likes of smallpox and measles but also mumps, typhus, influenza,
and whooping cough) over time became part of the Amerindian disease pool,
affording the benefits of some kind of immunity. This was not the case in Portuguese
domains, where less sedentary groups fled assault and enslavement for the refuge of
the forest. There, in remote reaches of what would eventually be Brazil, native
communities were sheltered from sickness until the frontier of European expansion
caught up with them. In 2020, the remaining relatives of entire peoples wiped out in
the sixteenth through twentieth centuries – today fewer than 1 million of Brazil’s
population of 210 million is Indigenous – are faced with the same threat from COVID-
19 as their ancestors were in 1500.
Continental and Global Perspectives
Hemispheric estimates of Amerindian numbers at European contact, not
surpringly, are as disparate as the sub-continental components alluded to above.
89 Denevan (Denevan, Willam M., “Estimating Amazonian Indian Numbers in 1492”, Journal of Latin American
Geography, 13, 2: 207-221, 215, 2014) advances the estimate of 8 million to 10 million. Newson (Newson, Linda A., “The Population of the Amazon Basin in 1492: A View from the Ecuadorian Headwaters”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 21: 5-26, 1996) favours 5.46 million, Hemming (Hemming, John, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians, 1500-1760, Macmillan, London, 1995) 3.24 million, and Meggers (Meggers, Betty J., “Prehistoric Population Density in the Amazon Basin”, Disease and Demography in the Americas, edited by John W. Verano and Douglas H. Ubelaker, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C., 197-205, 1992) 1.5 million to 2 million.
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
23
Borah champions upwards of 100 million90, an estimate that echoes the 90 million to
113 million of Dobyns91, both in stark contrast to the 8.4 million of Kroeber92, the 13.4
million of Rosenblat93, and the 15.5 million of Steward94. Perhaps the most judicious
assessment to date has been made by Denevan95, who considers his estimate of 53.9
million “conservative” (personal communication). Koch, Brierley, Maslin, and Lewis
propose 60.5 million, mid-way between their range of 44.8 million to 78.2 million96. The
great French scholar Pierre Chaunu believed that an Amerindian population that
constituted 20 percent of all humankind in 1490 within a century had been levelled to
3 percent97.
We will never know how many Native Americans died in the aftermath of
Columbus, but fatalities of 55 million to 60 million or more cannot be ruled out98. While
the turmoil of war and post-conquest exploitation abhorrent in the extreme took an
immense toll, disease outbreaks are the most plausible explanation for the extent and
severity of Indigenous demise. In terms of historical parallels, the Black Death (bubonic
plague) that stalked Europe between 1346 and 1353 is reckoned to have killed an
estimated 50 million99, the Spanish Flu (H1N1 virus) between August 1918 and March
1919 upwards of 25 million100. World War I eliminated an estimated 40 million, World War
II an estimated 60 million101.
COVID-19 caught the world off-guard, and we are paying a high price for our
negligence and complacency. Its speed of diffusion, literally, is breathtaking. That an
90 Borah, Woodrow, “Renaissance Europe and the Population of America”, Revista de Historia, 105: 47-61, 1976. 91 Dobyns, Henry F., “Estimating Aboriginal American Populations…”, 1966. 92 Kroeber, Alfred L., Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America, University of California Publications in
American Archaeology and Ethnology, University of California Press, Berkeley, 38, 1939. 93 Rosenblat, Ángel, La población indígena y el mestizaje en América, 2 vols., Editorial Nova, Buenos Aires, 1954. 94 Steward, Julian H., “The Native Population of South America”, Handbook of South American Indians, Bureau of Indian
Ethnology, Washington, vol. 5: 655-68, 1949. 95 Denevan, William M., ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, Second Edition, University of Wisconsin
Press, Madison, [1976] 1992. 96 Koch, Alexander, Chris Brierley, Mark M. Maslin, and Simon L. Lewis, “Earth System Impacts of the European Arrival
and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492”, Quaternary Science Reviews, 207: 13-36, 2019. 97 Chaunu, Pierre, Conquête et Exploitation des Nouveaux Mondes (XVI Siècle), Presses Universitaires de France, Paris,
1969. 98 Denevan (personal communication, 10 April 2020) concurs. So too do Koch et al. (Koch, Alexander, Chris Brierley,
Mark M. Maslin, and Simon L. Lewis, “Earth System Impacts…”, 2019), whose “great dying” estimate of 54.5 million is the mid-point between a low of 39 million and a high of 72.4 million.
99 Benedictow, Ole J., The Black Death, 1346-1353: The Complete History, The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2004.
100 Crosby, Alfred W., America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Infuenza of 1918, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989.
101 (Internet Archive n. d.)
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
24
outbreak of disease could cause such calamity, and so endanger the human
condition, after we have deluded ourselves for so long that Homo sapiens controls all,
shakes us to our foundations. The incredulity of Las Casas, contemplating the
destruction of the Indies in the early sixteenth century, resembles ours, half a millennium
on. “Who, among those born in the centuries to come”, the bishop asked, “will believe
this?” He then allowed himself: “Even to me, who is writing it down, who saw it, and
who knows most of it, it now seems to me that it was not possible”102.
We are much better placed to survive now than we were in 1492. Our improved
knowledge of the scourge of disease, how it flares up and spreads, how best to
combat it, will see us prevail. Ironically, though, just as divine ruling was thought to be
the cause back then – “secret judgments of God”103, according to one cleric in 1582 –
so throughout Latin America the call to heaven above is still voiced for solace if not
salvation: Easter Sunday 2020 was celebrated by prayers to Our Lady of Guadalupe,
asking her for health and intervention to end to the pandemic104. The ravages of
COVID-19 are of alarming concern, increasingly so as the pandemic racks Latin
America and its most vulnerable, Indigenous peoples among them. With applied
medical advances and humanitarian efforts, however, after the disease has run its
course it is unlikely that mortality related to it will approximate that of the Amerindian
holocaust of five centuries ago.
Acknowledgments
Grappling with the issues raised here has been formative ever since my years as a graduate student
at the University of Alberta in the 1970s. Postdoctoral trajectories in the 1980s saw me expand my
spatial interest in the subject beyond Mexico and Guatemala, including a research foray to Brazil.
Residency as a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) during fall term 1985
102 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, Obras escogidas de Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Ediciones Atlas, Madrid,
vol. 2: 106, 1957-61. 103 Writing to the Council of the Indies on November 5, 1582 – see Lovell, W. George. [1992], “Disease and Depopulation
in Early Colonial Guatemala”, in “Secret Judgments of God”: Old World Disease in Colonial Spanish America, edited by Noble David Cook and W. George Lovell, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 49-83, 75-78, 2001 for elaboration and archival provenance – the Dean of the Cathedral of Guatemala, Pedro de Liévano, reflected: “What causes the Indians to die and to diminish in number are secret judgments of God beyond the reach of man. But what this witness has observed during the time he has spent in these parts is that from the province of Mexico have come three or four pestilences, on account of which the country has been greatly depopulated.”
104 Ironically, too, because of fears that COVID-19 would be spread by their continuing to be undertaken, Roberts (2020) reports that mass vaccination drives against a host of diseases, including cholera, measles, meningitis, polio, and yellow fever, have been suspended in many countries alas still plagued by them. “A devil's choice” is how Seth Berkley, the head of Vaccine Alliance, a global health organization, deemed the dilemma.
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
25
was a pivotal experience. There, where the great Carl Sauer (1889-1975) shook things up after his
arrival in 1923, I benefited from association with three of his distinguished Berkeley colleagues –
Woodrow Borah (1912-1999), James J. Parsons (1915-1997), and John H. Rowe (1918-2004). I also
profited from sitting in on a seminar on historical demography offered by Massimo Livi Bacci, himself
then also at UCB as a visiting scholar. An invitation to participate in a conference at the Newberry
Library in Chicago, organized by the inimitable Henry F. Dobyns (1925-2009), allowed me not only to
interact with a pioneer in the field but also to strike a partnership with Noble David Cook, with whom
I have co-edited two books dealing with the ravages of Old World disease on Indigenous peoples in
colonial Spanish America (Cook and Lovell [1992] 2001; Cook and Lovell 2000). My research has been
funded over the years by several agencies, sustained most of all by the financial assistance of the
Killam Program of the Canada Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada. Teaching for forty years at Queen’s University in Canada, and for a quarter-century in Spain
either at the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía in La Rábida or the Universidad Pablo de
Olavide (UPO) in Seville, have been immensely rewarding. Affiliation with both institutions has enabled
me to distil research findings into the courses I teach, at undergraduate and graduate level, to
generations of students, from whom I learn immensely.
“Columbus and COVID-19” had a previous iteration, long before the global pandemic was ever
imagined, as “Heavy Shadows and Black Night,” a piece solicited by Karl W. Butzer (1934-2016) for
an edition of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (1992) to mark the Columbus
quincentenary. Its enhanced present form I owe to the prodding of my UPO colleagues, Juan
Marchena Fernández and Tristan Platt, and the critical eye of William M. Denevan. The equally critical
eye and copy-editing prowess of Maureen McCallum Garvie run throughout. To those four, and a
litany of unnamed but much-appreciated others, I extend my most grateful thanks.
Aceptado para publicación: 18/04/20
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
26
Referencias bibliográficas
Alchon, Suzanne A., Native Society and Disease in Early Colonial Ecuador, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1991.
Amigo, Ignacio, “For Brazil’s Indigenous Communities, Pandemic Revives Memories of
Earlier Plagues”, Science, April 15, 2020.
Benedictow, Ole J., The Black Death, 1346-1353: The Complete History, The Boydell
Press, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2004.
Borah, Woodrow, “Renaissance Europe and the Population of America”, Revista de
Historia, 105: 47-61, 1976.
Borah, Woodrow, Introduction to “Secret Judgments of God”: Old World Disease in
Colonial Spanish America, edited by Noble David Cook and W. George Lovell,
University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 3-19, 1992.
Borah, Woodrow and Sherburne F. Cook, “The Aboriginal Population of Central Mexico
on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest”, Ibero-Americana, University of California Press,
Berkeley, 45, 1963.
Chaunu, Pierre, Conquête et Exploitation des Nouveaux Mondes (XVI Siècle), Presses
Universitaires de France, Paris, 1969.
Clendinnen, Inga, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570,
Cambridge University Press, New York, 1987.
Cook, Noble David, Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 1520-1620, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1981.
Cook, Noble David and W. George Lovell, eds. [1992], “Secret Judgments of God”: Old
World Disease in Colonial Spanish America, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman,
2001.
Cook, Noble David, “¿Una primera epidemia americana de viruela en 1493?”, Revista de
Indias, 63: 49-64, 2003.
Cook, Sherburne F. and Woodrow Borah, Essays in Population History. 3 vols., University
of California Press, Berkeley, 1971, 1974, 1979.
Córdova, Efrén, “La encomienda y la desaparición de los indios en las Antillas Mayores”,
Caribbean Studies, 8: 23-49, 1968.
Crosby, Alfred W., America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Infuenza of 1918, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1989.
Denevan, William M., ed. [1976], The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, Second
Edition, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1992.
Denevan, William M., “Carl Sauer and Native American Population Size”,
The Geographical Review, 86: 385-97, 1996.
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
27
Denevan, Willam M., “Estimating Amazonian Indian Numbers in 1492”, Journal of Latin
American Geography, 13, 2: 207-221, 2014.
Dobyns, Henry F., “An Outline of Andean Epidemic History to 1720”, Bulletin of the
History of Medicine, 37: 493-515, 1963.
Dobyns, Henry F., “Estimating Aboriginal American Populations: An Appraisal of
Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate”, Current Anthropology, 7: 395-449,
1966.
Dobyns, Henry F., Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics
in Eastern North America, University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1983.
Gerhard, Peter, The North Frontier of New Spain, Princeton University Press, Princeton,
1982.
Gil, Juan and Consuelo Varela (eds.), Cristóbal Colón: Textos y documentos completos,
Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1997.
Guerra, Francisco, “La epidemia americana de influenza en 1493”, Revista de Indias,
45: 325-47, 1985.
Hemming, John [1970], The Conquest of the Incas, Abacus Sphere Books, London, 1972.
Hemming, John, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians, 1500-1760, Macmillan,
London, 1995.
Hemming, John, People of the Rainforest: The Villas Boas Brothers, Explorers, and
Humanitarians of the Amazon, Hurst & Company, London, 2019.
Henige, David, “On the Contact Population of Hispaniola: History as Higher Mathematics”,
Hispanic American Historical Review, 58: 217-37, 1978.
Henige, David, Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate,
University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1998.
Hyland, Sabine, “Writing with Twisted Cords: The Inscriptive Capacity of Andean
Khipus”, Current Anthropology, 58: 412–419, 2017.
Internet Archive. (n.d.). https://archive.org/.
Kirchoff, Paul, “Mesoamérica”, Acta Americana, 1: 92-107, 1943.
Koch, Alexander, Chris Brierley, Mark M. Maslin, and Simon L. Lewis, “Earth System
Impacts of the European Arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492”,
Quaternary Science Reviews, 207: 13-36, 2019.
Kroeber, Alfred L., “Native American Population”, American Anthropologist, 36: 1-35,
1934.
Kroeber, Alfred L., “Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America”, University of
California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology. University of
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
28
California Press, Berkeley, 38, 1939.
Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 1962.
Las Casas, Bartolomé de, Obras escogidas de Fray Bartolomé de las Casas. 5 vols.,
Ediciones Atlas, Madrid, 1957-61.
Lastres, Juan. B., Historia de la medicina peruana, 3 vols., Universidad de San Marcos,
Lima, 1951.
León-Portilla, Miguel [1962], ed. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest
of Mexico, translated by Ángel María Garibay and Lysander Kemp, Beacon Press,
Boston, 1992.
Lipschutz, Alejandro, “La despoblación de los indios después de la conquista”,
América Indígena, 26: 229-47, 1966.
Livi Bacci, Massimo, “Return to Hispaniola: Reassessing a Demographic Catastrophe”,
Hispanic American Historical Review, 83, 1: 3-51, 2003.
López Austin, Alfredo, The Human Body and Ideology: Concepts of the Ancient Nahuas, 2
vols., translated by Thelma Ortiz de Montellano and Bernard Ortiz de Montellano,
University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 1988.
Lovell, W. George, “‘Heavy Shadows and Black Night’: Disease and Depopulation in
Colonial Spanish America”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 82, 3:
426-43, 1992.
Lovell, W. George [1992], “Disease and Depopulation in Early Colonial Guatemala”,
“Secret Judgments of God”: Old World Disease in Colonial Spanish America, edited by
Noble David Cook and W. George Lovell, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman,
49-83, 2001.
Lovell, W. George, Review of David Henige, Numbers from Nowhere: The American
Indian Contact Population Debate (1998), in Ethnohistory, 49: 468-70, 2002.
Lovell, W. George and Christopher H. Lutz, with Wendy Kramer and William R. Swezey,
“Strange Lands and Different Peoples”: Spaniards and Indians in Colonial Guatemala,
University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2013.
Lovell, W. George, Christopher H. Lutz and Wendy Kramer, Strike Fear in the Land: Pedro
de Alvarado and the Conquest of Guatemala, 1520-1541, University of Oklahoma Press,
Norman, 2020.
Lovell, W. George and William R. Swezey, “The Population of Southern Guatemala at
Spanish Contact”, Canadian Journal of Anthropology, 3, 1: 71-84, 1982.
MacLeod, Murdo J., Spanish Central America : A Socioeconomic History, 1520-1720,
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1973.
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
29
Means, Philip A., Ancient Civilizations of the Andes, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York,
1931.
Means, Philip A., Fall of the Inca Empire and Spanish Rule in Peru, 1530-1720, Charles
Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1932.
Meggers, Betty J., “Prehistoric Population Density in the Amazon Basin”, Disease and
Demography in the Americas, edited by John W. Verano and Douglas H. Ubelaker,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C., 197-205, 1992.
Moya Pons, Frank, La Española en el siglo XVI, 1493-1522, Universidad Católica Madre y
Maestra, Santo Domingo, 1971.
Moya Pons, Frank, Después de Colón: Trabajo, sociedad y política en la economía del oro,
Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1987.
Moya Pons, Frank and Rosario Flores Paz (eds.), Los taínos en 1492: El debate
demográfico, Editora Búho, Santo Domingo, 2013.
Murra, John, “Andean Societies before 1532”, The Cambridge History of Latin America,
vol. 1, edited by Leslie Bethell, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 59-90, 1984.
Newson, Linda A., “Old World Epidemics in Early Colonial Ecuador”, “Secret Judgments
of God”: Old World Disease in Colonial Spanish America, edited by Noble David Cook
and W. George Lovell, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 84-112, 1992.
Newson, Linda A., Life and Death in Early Colonial Ecuador, University of Oklahoma
Press, Norman, 1995.
Newson, Linda A., “The Population of the Amazon Basin in 1492: A View from the
Ecuadorian Headwaters”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers,
New Series 21: 5-26, 1996.
Prem, Hanns J., “Disease Outbreaks in Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century”, “Secret
Judgments of God”: Old World Disease in Colonial Spanish America, edited by Noble
David Cook and W. George Lovell, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 20-48,
1992.
Recinos, Adrián and Delia Goetz (eds. and trans.), The Annals of the Cakchiquels,
University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1953.
Reff, Daniel T., Disease, Depopulation, and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain,
1518-1764, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 1991.
Restall, Matthew, When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that
Changed History, Ecco Press, New York, 2018.
Roberts, Leslie, “Disease and Death in the New World”, Science, 246: 1245-47, 1989.
Roberts, Leslie, “Pandemic Brings Mass Vaccinations to a Halt”, Science, 368: 116-17,
2020.
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
30
Rosenblat, Ángel, La población indígena y el mestizaje en América, 2 vols., Editorial Nova,
Buenos Aires, 1954
Rowe, John H., “Inca Culture at the Time of the Spanish Conquest”, Handbook of South
American Indians, edited by Julian H. Steward, vol. 2, 183-330. Washington: Bureau of
American Ethnology, 1946.
Roys, Ralph L., The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, Carnegie Institution,
Washington D. C., 1933.
Salomon, Frank, The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village, Duke
University Press, Durham, 2004.
Sanders, William T., “The Population of the Central Mexican Symbiotic Region, the Basin
of Mexico, and the Teotihuacán Valley in the Sixteenth Century”, The Native Population
of the Americas in 1492, edited by William M. Denevan, University of Wisconsin Press,
Madison, 85-150, 1976.
Sanders, William T and Barbara Price, Mesoamerica: The Evolution of a Civilization,
Random House, New York, 1968.
Sauer, Carl O. and Donald Brand, “Aztatlán: Prehistoric Mexican Frontier on the Pacific
Coast”, Ibero-Americana, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1, 1932.
Sauer, Carl O., “Aboriginal Population of Northwestern Mexico”, Ibero-Americana,
University of California Press, Berkeley, 10, 1935.
Sauer, Carl O., The Early Spanish Main, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1966.
Shea, Daniel E., “A Defense of Small Population Estimates for the Central Andes in 1520”,
The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, edited by William M. Denevan,
University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 157-80, 1976.
Slicher van Bath, B. H., “The Calculation of the Population of New Spain”, Boletín de
Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe, 24: 67-95, 1978.
Smith, Clifford T., “Depopulation of the Central Andes in the Sixteenth Century”, Current
Anthropology, 11: 453-64, 1970.
Solano, Francisco de, Los mayas del siglo XVIII, Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, Madrid,
1974.
Steward, Julian H., “The Native Population of South America”, Handbook of South
American Indians, Bureau of Indian Ethnology, Washington D. C., vol. 5: 655-68, 1949.
Verlinden, Charles, Le repartimiento de Rodrigo de Alburquerque à Española en 1514,
Rijksuniversiteit, Ghent, 1968.
Urton, Gary, “From Knots to Narratives: Reconstructing the Art of Historical Record
Keeping in the Andes from Spanish Transcriptions of Inka Khipus”, Ethnohistory, 45, 5:
409-38, 1998.
Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época (Sevilla), n. 11, p. 4-31, ene-jun, 2020
31
Urton, Gary, Inka History in Knots, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2017.
Verano, John W. and Douglas H. Ubelaker (eds.), Disease and Demography in the
Americas, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C., 1992.
Wachtel, Nathan, Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru through Indian
Eyes, 1530-1570, translated by Ben and Siân Reynolds. Hassocks, Harvester Press,
Sussex, 1977.
Watts, D., The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture, and Environmental Change
since 1492, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987.
Whitmore, Thomas M., “A Simulation of the Sixteenth-Century Population Collapse in the
Basin of Mexico”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 81: 464-87,
1991.
Wright, Ronald, Stolen Continents: The Americas through Indian Eyes since 1492,
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1992.
Zambardino, Rudolph A., Critique of David Henige’s “On the Contact Population of
Hispaniola: History as Higher Mathematics”, Hispanic American Historical Review, 58,
700-08, 1978.
Zambardino, Rudolph A., “Mexico’s Population in the Sixteenth Century: Demographic
Anomaly or Mathematical Illusion?”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 11:1-27,
1980.
