• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, this pattern occurred again and again in the Americas. It was a kind of master narrative of postcontact history. In fact, Europeans routinely lost when they could not take advantage of disease and political fragmentation. Conquistadors tried to take Florida half a dozen times between 1510 and 1560—and failed each time. In 1532 King João III of Portugal divided the coast of Brazil into fourteen provinces and dispatched colonists to each one. By 1550 only two settlements survived. The French were barely able to sustain trading posts in the St. Lawrence and didn’t even try to plant their flag in pre-epidemic New England. European microorganisms were slow to penetrate the Yucatán Peninsula, where most of the Maya polities were too small to readily play off against each other. In consequence, Spain never fully subdued the Maya. The Zapatista rebellion that convulsed southern Mexico in the 1990s was merely the most recent battle in an episodic colonial war that began in the sixteenth century.

All of this was important, the stuff of historians’ arguments and doctoral dissertations, but Dobyns was thinking of something else. If Pizarro had been amazed by the size of Tawantinsuyu after the terrible epidemic and war, how many people had been living there to begin with? Beyond that, what was the population of the Western Hemisphere in 1491?

AN ARITHMETICAL PROGRESSION

Wayna Qhapaq died in the first smallpox epidemic. The virus struck Tawantinsuyu again in 1533, 1535, 1558, and 1565. Each time the consequences were beyond the imagination of our fortunate age. “They died by scores and hundreds,” recalled one eyewitness to the 1565 outbreak. “Villages were depopulated. Corpses were scattered over the fields or piled up in the houses or huts…. The fields were uncultivated; the herds were untended [and] the price of food rose to such an extent that many persons found it beyond their reach. They escaped the foul disease, but only to be wasted by famine.” In addition, Tawantinsuyu was invaded by other European pestilences, to which the Indians were equally susceptible. Typhus (probably) in 1546, influenza in 1558 (together with smallpox), diphtheria in 1614, measles in 1618—all flensed the remains of Inka culture. Taken as a whole, Dobyns thought, the epidemics must have killed nine out of ten of the inhabitants of Tawantinsuyu.

Dobyns was not the first to arrive at this horrific conclusion. But he was the first to put it together with the fact that smallpox visited before anyone in South America had even seen Europeans. The most likely source of the virus, Dobyns realized, was the Caribbean. Smallpox was recorded to have appeared on the island of Hispaniola in November or December 1518. It killed a third of the native population before jumping to Puerto Rico and Cuba. Spaniards, exposed in childhood to the virus, were mostly immune. During Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico, an expedition led by Pánfilo de Narváez landed on April 23, 1520, near what is today the city of Veracruz. According to several Spanish accounts, the force included an African slave named Francisco Eguía or Baguía who had smallpox. Other reports say that the carriers were Cuban Indians whom Narváez had brought as auxiliaries. In any case, someone brought the virus—and infected a hemisphere.

The disease raced to Tenochtitlan, leading city of the Mexica (Aztecs), where it laid waste to the metropolis and then the rest of the empire. From there, Dobyns discovered, colonial accounts show smallpox hopscotching through Central America to Panama. At that point it was only a few hundred miles from the Inka frontier. The virus seemingly crossed the gap, with catastrophic consequences.

Then Dobyns went further. When microbes arrived in the Western Hemisphere, he argued, they must have swept from the coastlines first visited by Europeans to inland areas populated by Indians who had never seen a white person. Colonial writers knew that disease