Native Societies and Disease Numerous Reports From Essay

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Native Societies and Disease

Numerous reports from European traders, missionaries, soldiers and explorers in the 16th and 17th Centuries reveal the same information about the devastating effect smallpox and other epidemic diseases had on the aboriginal populations of the Americas. Europeans were colonizing Africa and Asia at the same time, but "on no other continent in historic times has a combined disease and Construct phenomenon led to the collapse of an entire indigenous population."[footnoteRef:1] In 1492, Native Americans were one-fifth to one-sixth of the global population, but their numbers never came close to equaling that again after all the great epidemics that struck them in waves. Unlike China and India, where smallpox, plague, typhus, measles and influenza already existed, and therefore the local populations had more immunity and greatly outnumbered the European colonizers, aboriginal American societies routinely suffered mortality rates of 80 or 90%. Some forms of smallpox, such as the 'black smallpox' strain, caused massive internal bleeding and destruction of the skin and organs, and other diseases like measles, typhus and influenza all occurred simultaneously, so that "even medically informed Europeans were at a loss to know what was going on."[footnoteRef:2] [1: Sheldon Watts. Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism. Yale University Press, 1997, p. 89.] [2: Watts, p. 89.]

No one will ever really know what the native population of the Americas was in 1492, or the true extent of the epidemic diseases that devastated these populations. Certainly, there exists a great deal of documentation about how these populations simply tended to 'disappear' in epidemics, with losses of 50-90%, and sometimes 100%. Epidemics reduced the population of Mexico from at least 25 million to 1518 to 1.1 million in 1605. From Mexico, smallpox spread as far south as Argentina and Peru, where it devastated the Inca Empire in 1524-25 before the Spanish even arrived. In 1524-1630, the Andean population declined by 93%. In 1539, Hernando de Soto reported a thriving and populous Mississippi Culture in the southern parts of North America, but "none of the flourishing cities, towns and temple complexes" he observed still existed a century later.

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When Jacques Cartier was exploring the St. Lawrence in 1534, he found many "heavily populated townscapes," but soon noted that the natives "began to die off of some strange disease to which our own men were immune."[footnoteRef:3] When Samuel de Champlain explored these areas in the early-17th Century, he found them still depopulated and abandoned. [3: Watts, p. 92.]

Estimating the pre-contact population of North America depends on whether the pandemics of the 16th Century were very extensive or localized, which is why they range from two million to over 18 million, although they fell to a low point of just 546,000 by 1890. On the one hand, "some scholars believe that much of Native America experienced sixteenth-century pandemics of European disease far in advance of face-to-face contact with Europeans and support high pre-European population estimates, while other insist that only local epidemics occurred after direct contact with Europeans.[footnoteRef:4] French observers in the early-17th Century like Champlain in 1615-16 and the Jesuit missionaries in 1634-50 all provided "descriptions of daily life, census data, and eyewitness accounts of epidemic disease," while archaeologists have excavated dozens of Huron villages and burial grounds from the years 1100-1650. In 1634, when the first recorded epidemic occurred, most estimates agree that the population of this Huron group was around 30-35,000 and that "the French remarked on the robust health of the Wendat."[footnoteRef:5] By 1640, when this first epidemic wave ended, the Wendat population had fallen to about 12,000. In 1634, an epidemic of measles brought to Quebec by children from France, followed by measles and influenza, carried off 10-20% of the population. Another epidemic, possibly scarlet fever, spread to the north from Virginia in 1637 and killed at least 10% of the surviving Huron. Worst of all was a ship the brought smallpox to Boston in 1638 and then spread rapidly in all directions, causing a 60-70% mortality rate among the Wendat.[footnoteRef:6] [4: Garry A. Warrick, "European Infections, Disease and Depopulation of the Wendat-Tionotate (Huron-Petun)" in Jordan F. Kerber (ed) Archaeology.....

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