1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [62]
He stopped speaking for long enough that I asked him if he was still on the line.
“I’m trying to imagine how you would do it,” he said. “If Indians in Florida let in sick people, the effects could reach all the way up to here in Connecticut. So all these different groups would have had to coordinate the blockade together. And they’d have to do it for centuries—four hundred years—until the invention of vaccines. Naturally they’d want to trade, furs for knives, that kind of thing. But the trade would have to be conducted in antiseptic conditions.”
The Abenaki sent goods to Verrazzano on a rope strung from ship to shore, I said.
“You’d have to have the entire hemisphere doing that. And the Europeans would presumably have to cooperate, or most of them, anyway. I can’t imagine that happening, actually. Any of it.”
Did that mean the epidemics were inevitable and there was nothing to be done?
The authorities, he replied, could “try to maintain isolation, as I was saying. But that ends up being paternalistic and ineffective. Or they can endorse marriage and procreation with outsiders, which risks destroying the society they supposedly are trying to preserve. I’m not sure what I’d recommend. Except getting these communities some decent health care, which they almost never have.”
Except for death, he went on, nothing in medicine is inevitable. “But I don’t see how it [waves of epidemics from European diseases] could have been prevented for very long. That’s a terrible thought. But I’ve been working with highly contagious diseases for forty years, and I can tell you that in the long run it is almost impossible to keep them out.”*12
“OUR EYES WERE APPALLED WITH TERROR”
A second reason historians believe that epidemics tore through Native American communities before Europeans arrived is that epidemics also did it after Europeans arrived. In her book Pox Americana (2001), the Duke University historian Elizabeth Fenn meticulously pieced together evidence that the Western Hemisphere was visited by two smallpox pandemics shortly before and during the Revolutionary War. The smaller of the two apparently began outside Boston in early 1774 and lurked in the area for the next several years like a sniper, picking off victims at the rate of ten to thirty a day. In Boston the Declaration of Independence was overshadowed by the previous day’s proclamation of a citywide campaign of inoculation (an early, risky form of vaccination in which people deliberately infected themselves with a mild dose of smallpox to produce immunity).
Even as it besieged Boston, the virus also spread down the eastern seaboard, laying waste as far as Georgia. It wreaked havoc on the Ani Yun Wiya (the group often called the Cherokee, which is a mildly insulting name coined by their enemies, the Creek confederation) and the Haudenosaunee (the indigenous name for the six nations that made up what Europeans called the Iroquois League). Both were important allies of the British, and after the epidemic neither was able to fight the colonists successfully. Smallpox also ruined the British plan to raise an army of slaves and indentured servants by promising them freedom after the war—the disease killed off most of the “Ethiopian regiment” even as it assembled.
An equal-opportunity killer, smallpox ravaged the rebels, too. The virus had been endemic in Europe for centuries, which meant that most Europeans were exposed to it before adulthood. But it was only an occasional, terrible visitor in the Americas, which meant that most adult colonists had not acquired childhood immunity. On an individual level, they were almost as vulnerable as Indians. On a group level, though, they were less genetically homogeneous, which conferred some relative advantage; the virus would sweep through them, but not kill quite so many. Still, so many soldiers in the Continental army fell