1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [47]
In 2002 Noble David Cook, a historian at Florida International University, in Miami, published an article entitled, alarmingly, “Sickness, Starvation, and Death in Early Hispaniola,” which detailed the island’s catastrophic history after Colón’s landing. Researchers generally agree that human malaria did not exist in the Americas before 1492 (some believe a kind of monkey malaria was present). If Colón’s men contracted malaria, Cook explained, they must have brought the disease with them from Spain, which like much of Europe then was rife with the disease. It was a textbook case of the Columbian Exchange, recorded by its progenitor himself.
Remembering the cream-colored book, I hauled it from my bookshelf and turned to the relevant passage. The original Spanish, printed on the facing page, didn’t use the Spanish words for malaria or tertian fever. Instead Colón wrote that his men had contracted something called çiçiones, a term I had never encountered. Why did Cook and the translator of Colón’s letter think this meant malaria?
Çiçiones is hard to find in modern Spanish dictionaries—I consulted the dozen or so in my local library without success. Google, too, was no help. Nor was Colón himself. He provided no description of the symptoms of çiçiones, perhaps because he believed they were familiar to his readers. All he said about the disease, in fact, was to guess that it was spread by the native women around La Isabela, “who are abundant there; and since they [that is, the women] were immodest and disheveled, it is no wonder that they [that is, the men] had trouble.” To me, this sounded like the admiral thought çiçiones was some kind of venereal disease.
But that doesn’t jibe with other sources, as I learned when I contacted an expert in sixteenth-century Spanish, Scott Sessions of Amherst College. The first dictionary of the Spanish language appeared in 1611, Sessions told me. In it is an entry for çiçiones: “the fever that comes with chills, which is attributed to the cierzo [mistral wind], because it is the most acute, cold and penetrating.” The next authoritative Spanish dictionary, issued in multiple volumes by the Royal Spanish Academy between 1726 and 1739, similarly defines çiçiones as “the fever that starts with chills, which from being acute and penetrating like the mistral wind, as [the first dictionary] says, one derives the word: but it more likely refers to tertian fever”—malaria. Cook and the translator, in other words, were correct: Colón may well have been describing malaria.
The scenario isn’t implausible. Malaria can lie dormant in the body for months, only to reemerge at full strength. The disease is transmitted by mosquitoes, which take in microscopic malaria parasites when they drink blood from infected people and pass them on to the next people they bite. Colón left on his second voyage in September 1493. If one of his crew had a malaria relapse after landing in La Isabela, only one bite from the right type of mosquito would be necessary to spread the disease—and those mosquitoes are abundant on Hispaniola.
All of this is highly speculative, to say the least. Today we know that many different diseases cause chills and fevers, including influenza and pneumonia. But for centuries people couldn’t distinguish one from another; they didn’t understand that malaria was a specific disease. Sessions, the Amherst historian, told me that paludismo, the Spanish word for malaria, didn’t appear in Royal Spanish Academy dictionaries until 1914. Even then, few realized that it was caused by a mosquito-borne parasite—the 1914 dictionary defined paludismo as a “group of deadly phenomena produced by marshy emanations.” (The English word “malaria” comes from the Italian mal aria, evil or bad air.) Colón was using a word that probably indicates malaria, in other words, but he could well have been describing ordinary chills and fever. A single word is not enough to make a diagnosis.
Yet the impossibility