Smallpox

A potentially deadly disease that caused so-called virgin soil epidemics to wreak havoc on the populations of the Americas as a result of the Columbian Exchange.

The extremely infectious disease of smallpox turned out to give Europeans a major (if unintentional) biological advantage in their invasion and colonization of the Western Hemisphere, where American Indian populations had never in recent memory encountered this virus or many other epidemic diseases. Smallpox is communicated through the air, usually entering each host through the respiratory tract. Sufferers can contract the disease not only by breathing infected air exhaled by the victims but also by contact with the fluids from exploding pustules and open sores. The early symptoms of smallpox include headaches and nausea as well as skin eruptions that leave disfiguring scars. In survivors smallpox can also cause blindness and infertility. While many forms of the virus are extremely deadly, it only lives a short time in each host, an average of 12 to 18 days. Death by smallpox takes the form of massive vomiting of blood, either through intestinal or uterine hemorrhage.

In Europe and Africa smallpox was known as a childhood disease in the 15th century. Strains of smallpox could vary greatly in their virulence. In Europe and Africa smallpox was common but not always deadly, and most of the population contracted the disease as children and either died or gained immunities. However, around 1500 the virus in Europe evolved into a strain that killed most of its hosts, and some claimed it was now as deadly as the plague. This deadly form of smallpox did not come to the Americas for almost two decades. When it did, it arrived either by means of smallpox scabs left in a bale of cloth or from a few infected African slaves from Castile who had been born in slavery outside of Africa and thus isolated from contact with a milder form of the disease while children. Smallpox also played an important role in the establishment of the

SLAVE TRADE. Most Africans were already immune to the disease as a result of childhood exposure. Based on these early slaves’ high survival rate during the smallpox epidemics decimating the indigenous populations of the Americas, Europeans concluded that Africans made a better labor force in reaping the resources of the New World.

According to sources from the 16th century, smallpox was one of the first and most deadly European diseases to ravage the indigenous peoples of the Americas, although it is necessary for historians to be cautious in accepting diagnoses of smallpox in the historical records because smallpox is misdiagnosed even today. In addition, smallpox often traveled with other epidemic diseases that could complicate both its diagnosis and its effects. Historians often translate the Spanish word viruelas, for example, as “smallpox,” but in fact the word means pustule—a skin blister that also occurs in measles, chicken pox, and typhus. Still, because smallpox was a familiar (if usually less devastating) epidemic in European populations, it is likely that, on the whole, most 16th-century Europeans recognized smallpox when they saw it in the indigenous populations of the Americas.

Smallpox accompanied the CONQUiSTADORes on their journeys through the Caribbean, South America, and present-day Mexico and the United States, and the smallpox deaths of Indians in Spanish territories eventually numbered into the millions. In 1518 BARTOLOME DE Las CASAS wrote of the first major smallpox epidemic to sweep the island of HiSPANlOLA. Few Spaniards died, but between one-third and one-half of the local TAiNO Indian population perished. Las Casas also blamed the severity of the epidemic on the famine and overwork that the Spaniards forced upon the indigenous peoples. By 1550, as a result of invasion, slavery, and especially smallpox and other diseases, the Taino were extinct.

From the islands smallpox moved quickly to the YUCATAN PENINSULA. In 1519 Hernan CORTES and his army inadvertently brought the virus to central Mexico, where it devastated the AzTECS, along with other diseases, including an unidentified one that resulted in massive nosebleeds. After these diseases swept through, the Spaniards laid siege to the Aztec capital for 75 days, after which the weakened population could finally no longer resist the Spanish. As with all of these epidemics, shortage of food and lack of medical care exacerbated the effects of the viruses. A smallpox epidemic is also the major suspect in the devastation of millions of indigenous peoples in the region of the Isthmus of Panama. In 1527 smallpox also killed many in the INCA Empire of the Andean highlands in Peru. From 1562 to 1563 the Portuguese in Brazil saw approximately 30,000 Indians dying from smallpox in their missions and slave labor camps, while the Portuguese themselves remained relatively unscathed. The Portuguese interpreted their own survival as a sign that they had earned the grace of God, although modern scholars now attribute their health to the acquired immunities they carried in their bloodstreams.

Once introduced, smallpox became the most lethal killer in the Americas. Epidemics continued for generations, forever altering the nature of life in indigenous communities. Yet even though the prime cause for the extraordinary mortality lay with the lethal nature of the smallpox pathogen, it is impossible to dismiss the role that European colonization played in the severity of epidemics. New advances in analysis of infectious diseases now make it clear that epidemics became more deadly if they were associated with other changes in indigenous communities. The threats that Europeans posed to Native American communities, particularly those that reduced the amount of food available (caused by the spread of European ungulates into Americans’ unfenced fields, for example) or forced people to migrate made individuals who suffered from those new pressures more likely to succumb to opportunistic diseases such as smallpox.

Further reading: Alfred W. Crosby, “Conquistador y pes-tilencia: The First New World Pandemic and the Fall of the Great Indian Empires,” in Kenneth F. Kiple and Stephen V. Beck, eds., Biological Consequences of the European Expansion, 1450-1800, An Expanding World, vol. 6 (Aldershot, U. K.: Ashgate Publishing, 1997), 91-107; ———, Germs, Seeds, & Animals: Studies in Ecological History (London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994); David S. Jones, Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Kenneth F. Kiple and Stephen V. Beck, eds., Biological Consequences of the European Expansion, 1450-1800, An Expanding World, vol. 6 (Aldershot, U. K.: Ashgate Publishing, 1997); Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power, and Imperialism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997).

—Maril Hazlett