• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1946 0

finished going up, the greater part of them had lost their shoes and worn down the hoofs of all four feet” (Sancho 1917:63).

Inka military techniques: Sancho 1917:67; Hemming 2004:195 (bolas); Prescott 2000:922, 984.

Historians ignore disease: Interviews, Crosby, Denevan, Dobyns. According to Dobyns, “the published works focused on New World historic epidemiology could be counted on the fingers of one hand” at that time (Dobyns 1995). Actually, Dobyns’s own count is eighteen articles prior to 1964. Still, most researchers in the field did not “seem to be paying much attention” (ibid.), e.g., the claim that “not until 1720 did any great losses through pestilence occur in Peru” (Kubler 1946:336). Peruvian researchers noted the epidemics (Patrón 1894 [proposing that Wayna Qhapaq died of bartonellosis, not smallpox]), but others were like U.S. researchers in failing to grasp the impact of disease (Vellard 1956). I am grateful to Robert Crease for helping me obtain a copy of this last article.

Cieza de León: Cook and Cook 1998 (bio); Cieza de León 1959:52 (“great plague”).

Elite losses to smallpox: Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:144–45; Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua 1879:307 (“scabs,” “millions”); Murúa 1962–64 (vol. 1):136 (“infinite”), quoted in Crosby 2003b:53; Pizarro 1969:196–97; Cobo 1979:160; Poma de Ayala 2001:114, 141, 288; Hopkins 1983:208–11. For a dissenting view, see McCaa, Nimlos, and Hampe-Martínez 2004.

Evolution of smallpox: Baxby 1981; Gubser and Smith 2002.

“virgin soil”: Crosby 1976.

India smallpox study: Rao 1972:37, cited in Fenn 2001:21.

“may well have been halved”: Dobyns 1963:497.

Thucydides’ account of epidemic: Thucydides 1934:109–14.

Not in a European language: Crosby 2003b:xxii.

Royal mummies: Pizarro 1969:202–04, 251–54 (“the greater part,” 203); Estete, M.d., untitled narrative of journey to Pachacamac, quoted in Hemming 2004:127 (“seated”); Sancho 1917:159, 170, 195, 200; Rowe 1946:308; D’Altroy 2002:96–99, 141–42. Sarmiento de Gamboa matter-of-factly describes Inka methods of storing bodies after death, though he only uses the word “mummy” once (Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:120–23, 135–36, 145–46).

Burning of Thupa Inka: Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:121, 159; Betanzos 1996:74–79; D’Altroy 2002:108.

Atawallpa execution: Rowe 1997. I thank Patricia Lyon for sending me this article.

“win the land”: Pizarro 1969:199. See also, Sancho 1917:171–72; Wright 1992:72–75.

European failures without epidemics, factions: Restall 2003:70–72 (Mexico, Florida); Hemming 1978:69–84 (Brazil); White 1991: esp. Chap. 4 (France).

Additional smallpox epidemics: Hopkins 1983:212–13 (“They died by scores,” quoted on 213).

Typhus, flu, etc., 90 percent death toll: Dobyns 1963. Dobyns’s argument was supported almost two decades later in Noble David Cook’s book-length survey, which argued that six main epidemics hit Tawantinsuyu between 1524 and 1614, reducing the population by an estimated 93 percent (N. D. Cook 1981).

Smallpox in Hispaniola: The first evidence of smallpox’s arrival is in a letter of 10 January 1519 by the Hieronymite Fathers, then entrusted with ruling Hispaniola. At the time, the disease had killed a third of the island’s inhabitants and spread to Puerto Rico (Henige 1986:17–19). Smallpox may not have been the first Caribbean epidemic. Francisco Guerra, a medical historian at the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, in Spain, makes a strong case for a swine influenza epidemic in 1493 that “was responsible for the disappearance of the American Indians in the Antilles” (Guerra 1988:305). Noble David Cook suggests the epidemic was smallpox (N. D. Cook 2003).

Smallpox hits Mexico: The evidence is examined carefully in McCaa 1995. See also, Hopkins 1983:204–08 and the sources in Chap. 4.

“Debated since”: Denevan ed. 1976:xvii. Denevan was far from alone in his interest. At about the same time, for instance, Wilbur Jacobs, a historian at the University of California in Santa Barbara, described the puzzle of native numbers as “truly