Disease in The Americas
While technological and cultural factors played an important role in the victories of the conquistadors in the Americas, this was facilitated by old world diseases, smallpox, chicken pox, diphtheria, typhus, influenza, measles, malaria and yellow fever. The diseases were carried to distant tribes and villages. This typical path of disease transmission moved much faster than the conquistadors so that as they advanced, resistance weakened.
Epidemic disease is commonly cited as the primary reason for the population collapse. The American natives lacked immunity and resistance to these infections. Most American native peoples lived in isolated communities, with only limited trade contact and no regular communication, further reducing their ability to build up immunity. Trading was the only on-going contact between most New World cultures.
When Francisco Coronado and the Spaniards first explored the Rio Grande Valley in 1540, in modern New Mexico, some of the chieftains complained of new diseases that affected their tribes. Cabeza de Vaca reported that in 1528, when the Spanish landed in Texas, “half the natives died from a disease of the bowels and blamed us.” When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Incan empire, a large portion of the population, had already died in a smallpox epidemic. The first epidemic was recorded in 1529 and killed the emperor Huayna Capac, the father of Atahualpa. Further epidemics of smallpox broke out in 1533, 1535, 1558 and 1565, as well as typhus in 1546, influenza in 1558, diphtheria in 1614 and measles in 1618.
Recently developed tree-ring evidence shows that the illness which reduced the population in Aztec Mexico was aided by a great drought in the 16th century, and which continued through the arrival of the Spanish conquest. This has added to the body of epidemiological evidence indicating that cocoliztli epidemics (Nahuatl name for viral haemorrhagic fever) were indigenous fevers transmitted by rodents and aggravated by the drought. The cocoliztli epidemic from 1545 to 1548 killed an estimated 5 to 15 million people, or up to 80% of the native population. The cocoliztli epidemic from 1576 to 1578 killed an estimated, additional 2 to 2.5 million people, or about 50% of the remainder.
The American researcher HF Dobyns claimed that 95% of the total population of the Americas died in the first 130 years, and that 90% of the population of the Inca Empire died in epidemics. Cook and Borak of the University of California at Berkeley believe that the population in Mexico declined from 25.2 million in 1518 to 700 thousand people in 1623, less than 3% of the original population.
Read more about this topic: Spanish Conquistadors
Famous quotes containing the words disease in, disease and/or americas:
“War is in truth a disease in which the juices that serve health and maintenance are used for the sole purpose of nourishing something foreign, something at odds with nature.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“Smoking ... is downright dangerous. Most people who smoke will eventually contract a fatal disease and die. But they don’t brag about it, do they? Most people who ski, play professional football or drive race cars, will not die—at least not in the act—and yet they are the ones with the glamorous images, the expensive equipment and the mythic proportions. Why this should be I cannot say, unless it is simply that the average American does not know a daredevil when he sees one.”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1950)
“The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)