The first recorded epidemics in New England killed many Indians more than a century before the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock:
In what is now Canada and Maine, contact with Europeans began at least in 1504 with the first documented French vessel on the Grand Banks. By 1519, more than 300 European ships made round trips to Newfoundland in the summer. All came to fish.
The European visitors brought with them diseases to which the Indians had no immunity, including smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, cholera and bubonic plague.
In 1586, a typhus epidemic devastated Maine’s Passamaquoddy Indians, among the first to make contact with Europeans.
In 1616, a terrible plaque swept the Massachusetts coast – perhaps smallpox, perhaps yellow fever, perhaps bubonic plague. It killed as many as 90 percent of the Massachusetts people and devastated the Pennacooks in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. It also felled the Agawam in Ipswich and the Naumkeag in Salem. And it cleared nearly all the Wampanoag along the coast from Plymouth to Boston.
Then a smallpox epidemic in 1633 killed many more Massachusetts and Narragansetts in Rhode Island.
And after the Pequot War, smallpox, diphtheria, flu and measles killed two-thirds of the Pequot-Mohegans in Connecticut.
Much further south too, beyond New England. When the first settlers moved west from the coast, they learned of the names of tribes that had been there prior to the arrival of Columbus but had disappeared because of epidemics, as had been the case further north.
Without the disease factor, it is highly unlikely that the Europeans would have been able to colonize the Americas. Numbers would have overwhelmed them, the same way those numbers worked out against the Norse settlers.
It’s an odd idea, but it is extremely likely that what enabled the success of it all boiled down to the Europeans having come out of the Dung Ages with shiite public sanitation or hygiene, which enabled the spread of endemic disease. Plus, the Amerindians were not big on animal-based agriculture, so what happened was that a set of immune systems tuned to dealing with endemic zoonotic diseases trundled up to the coastline where there were no such things, and bam… No more Amerindians.
It would be interesting to know just what the real population numbers were, before Columbus. The evidence from early Spanish explorations in the Amazon river basin were so high that the second wave of exploration decided that the first had been smoking crack, because they found no such settlements. However, recent work in archaeology has shown that much of the Amazon was not only settled, but that the forests were actually the product of human intervention, with islands of highly fertile loma prieta soils being present throughout the region.
There’s a lot we simply don’t know. The Midwestern Mound-Builder cultures had complex societies which collapsed during the immediate pre-Columbian era, and we’re not too damn sure why. It’s possible that there were contacts with Bretons and Basque cod fishermen.
Of course, there’s also the question of whether there was contact even earlier. There are signs that Mansa Musa might have actually made it across the Atlantic and made at least some contact with South America. Not to mention all that stuff in New England that looks suspiciously Phoenician, the copper mines in the Michigan area that were dug out during the Bronze Age with zero impact on the Americas… Whole thing is ‘effing highly questionable. I don’t think we even know what we don’t know about much of the supposed “contact dates” here in the Americas. I keep running across little inconsistencies in the stories, and you have to just wonder at what we don’t know because we’ve never found the evidence. Most of which is almost certainly out between today’s beachfront property and the edge of the continental shelf…
Here’s what bother me about blaming the fate of Amerinds on European cooties: this sort of thing happens all the time but it doesn’t wipe cultures out. It doesn’t even make everybody helpless to invasion.
Basis of comparison: the Black Plague was plenty bad, but it didn’t lead to Europeans being toppled from dominance in Europe.
At most, the plagues were a precipitating factor in the collapse of Amerind cultures.
Harry Jones,
The “green fields” nature of the Americas, along with the fact that New World immune systems were not “tuned” for disease (Amerindians are supposedly better at resisting parasites than European stock), and that they had zero real experience with zoonotic diseases, not having much in the way of domesticated animals…? All those factors were what played into the virtual destruction of the population base here in the Americas. Europe did not experience anywhere near the death rates because they simply didn’t suffer the same death rates from the Black Plague. By comparison, things like the influenzas and colds that colonialist populations shrugged off were deadly to the locals here.
Both the flus and the corona-virus caused colds were things that the Amerindians simply had zero experience with. No pigs, no domesticated birds, no domestic herd animals. All they had were the dogs they brought over with them, and canines are not noted disease reservoirs for human beings. The Europeans and Asians, however? LOL… Southeast Asia, then as now, was a hotbed of that sort of thing, and you can trace out the effects going west over the Silk Road. Bubonic plague probably flowed into Rome and Persia along that route, during the time of Justinian, just as it did later. Same probable vectors, as well–Steppe marmots, which were a delicacy then, and now. There was a recent incident where a couple in one of the old Silk Road nations decided to eat a marmot that was a plague carrier, for “medicinal purposes”, and bam… Both died of the plague. Given that there must have been some residual immunity or they weeded the susceptible out before the Black Plague came out of that port on the Black Sea, well… Yeah. Europeans had some experience with that stuff, Amerindians, not so much.
Kirk, you are acting like hunter-gatherer tribes straight out of the Stone Age would be able to go toe-to-toe with Late Preindustrial farming peoples armed with steel and gunpowder and plus-two standard deviations of intelligence.
This is obviously nonsense. It is almost too stupid to take seriously.
The Old World had its regional variations, but it was close to one huge common disease pool. Many things circulated back and forth all the time.
Not every horrid tropical African ailment reached Europe, but malaria sure did. Endemic for a couple of thousand years all over the Mediterranean.
The major farm animal disease, except measles, probably emerged with the first Mesopotamian or Egyptian civilizations. Measles I gather is only about a thousand years old, a newcomer.
China has been sending disease westward for about 2-3 millennia at this point. Even plague might have come from there. India and Central Asia are other contenders, in which case they moved westward the first time with Turco Mongol peoples fleeing the Chinese. AFAIK, the first definite case of Plague was that of Justinian in the 6th c. The Antonine Plague might have been, but is often considered to have been something else. Ditto that of Athens centuries earlier.
There wouldn’t have been too many of the major killers Europeans hadn’t been exposed to repeatedly, if they already existed.
Hence repeated encounters with Black Death could kill 1/3 to 1/2 the population of Europe a couple of times and bring an empire almost to its knees, crash the economic systems & distort the cultures of medieval Europe, but not actually kill them all off or even enough to make them defenceless.
Of course, geography helped- Sub-Saharan Africa was way less populated, less state-organized on the whole, & with limited northward mobility or intel, or interest. I think the only time an African army was a threat in Europe was when MAuritanians were the basis of the Almohads. And even that was both confined largely to Spain and more about Islam than Africa. The Middle East was actually often less populous than Europe at the time, and of course also suffered hard from Black Death, certainly in the 14th century plague. So no one with ocean going ships, guns, & surplus population was in any position to show up in Europe in numbers, & there were too many Europeans and their states still around.
I think Kirk is right that numbers would have told.
Even the most advanced societies we know of could be considered a bit behind the times by Old World standards- nothing I ever read about the mound-builders suggests technology or capacity beyond the neolithic, maybe there were some hints of copper age, which would be something noteworthy. So their skill set, equipment, building, organization, wouldn’t look out of place in early Mesopotamia or the Levant, or even Gaul circa the day before the Hallstatt or Latene cultures started working metals. Quite a ways earlier in time.
But- they had large scale organization, and they had numbers. Maybe, even, almost as advanced culture as the MesoAmericans. The latter could have massacred Europeans even with inferior weapons, absent disease and the lack of any context in which to see the invaders beyond religious fears. If the Mississipians could have deployed similar capabilities, they might have done the same.
Take away the numbers, the large scale social organization decays away, and your left with the survivors trying to get by at lower levels and little choice but to integrate the settlers into their inter-tribal diplomacy and war, bartering for European tools and guns, and not really realizing that this status quo was going to be untenable once Euros showed up in numbers. Or, really, any idea about what Europe was like or how many there were.
To have the aboriginal America survive, they’d need to have immune systems to Euro disease, giving them a chance of larger numbers, ever bigger forms of social organization, and the capacity to figure out metalworking and independent arms making, among other things. All at least possible w/o the diseases.
I sometimes wonder how much the Eastern Woodlands and coastal political and cultural worlds Europeans encountered were characterizable as the post-apocalyptic remains of moundbuilder society and its greater geographic environs. Were those tribes and cultures built up only in a few preceding centuries from the remnants, or did they have longer continuity? Is any of this behind things like the Iroquoian myth of the great wars and great peace, the southward movements of peoples like the Navajo, which I forget when that was but might as well add it.
All rich stuff, some of which I assume we know but much we likely never will.
CVLR,
That’s in some ways my reaction, too.
Guns, steel armour and weapons, horses, ocean-going ships, and so on. And there’s something in it. And the Europeans of earl modern times could send far more people over at once and had better weapons than the Vikings ever could have. So the Europeans would have been less exposed to Indian pushback than the Vikings almost, not quite, from the start of settlement.
Even so, the Vikings were pushed out by a not very advanced Indian people on the fringes of North Ameria. The more numerous and better equipped European colonists would have been facing somewhat more settled peoples, so possibly more numerous, in richer lands like Mass and Virginia. Or even the St Lawrence.
Give them back likely higher pre-disease populations, lands under heavier cultivation supporting more people, probably less disrupted social structures, maybe they push those first colonies into the sea.
Or maybe they don’t. Maybe they trade with them and war with them as they did, but from a stronger position, and with the kind of numbers that buy time.
If their populations are high, how much time does that buy? How does it shape their ability to manage diplomacy both with the Euros and among Indians? How does it affect their ability to play Euros against one another for advantage, goods, arms, technology?
They showed some skill in all those areas even as they were.
I don’t think they’d develop societies to copy Europe overnight or send ships to raid England or France. I don’t even think they’d prove as durable as the societies of Asia, which only fell behind late in the day, were colonized ultimately briefly and superficially, and survived in more recognizable forms. They certainly would not be the Middle East, colonized at the last minute and quickly abandoned and mainly just getting a taste of its own medicine.
But based on what Indian peoples did show they could do in North America, for that matter how much they could demographically survive in Latin America, they could at least have done as well as Africans. Colonized, sure, traumatized, maybe, but ultimately still the population of the continent.
The Africans had some advantages- many even below the Sahara had metal technology , there had been large polities all over, and a worse disease package in some ways that kept Europeans out of the interior until the last minute.
Are we talking about the Greenland settlement? My understanding is that they were literally frozen out. The topsoil became tundra, and that was that.
Look, I’m not even saying that the Puritans mightn’t have been rebuffed — initially. But once they had established themselves — say, a decade or two in — the die was cast. The Amerinds were finished, they just didn’t know it yet.
There’s also the whole disease load argument, but it is unpersuasive. The Boers in Africa (95% N. Euro) were pushing across Africa until they were stabbed in the back by Communists. If they had been left alone, there would be several tens of millions of them by now, many in Botswana, perhaps as far north as Zambia or Angola.
Of all of the founding peoples of all of the European colonies between 1500 and 1800, only the Puritans succeeded at completely repopulating their territory. Even Canada and Australia were incomplete and (I would argue) mostly accidents of history.
That is not to say that the Puritans were capable of keeping their winnings — by 1900 their capital city had been repopulated by foreigners.
It’s also worth noting that there’s a point beyond which identity can become too stable, I.
Graham,
Up until the early industrial age, say about the level of 18th Century England, the numbers and distances involved would have meant that European attempts to dominate the Americas would have likely gone very badly, much as they did for the Norse.
Yeah, it’s stone-age tech vs. steel and the arquebus, but the problem is that the Europeans weren’t exactly going to be able to transport entire regiments of Swiss halberdiers and Spanish tercios to North America, land them, and support them effectively. There was no damn infrastructure, and the same thing would have happened to them that happened to the Norse–Nibbled to death by ducks, so to speak. And, to what benefit? Would any of what eventually became the New England colonies have paid off, sufficiently, to make it worthwhile?
Absent the ineptitude of the Aztec rulers and disease, how likely would the conquest of Mexico have been? Cortez had advantages, certainly, but they’d have been drowned out in a sea of Amerindian warriors that could overwhelm him. Once he’d lost the advantage of novelty, the Aztec fairly rapidly figured out how to deal with him, and without the European diseases coming along to wipe out the indigenous populations, they’d have had his number in short order.
At any point up to where the Europeans could effectively transport large numbers of troops and be able to effectively support them, colonizing the Americas was an unlikely thing. You can’t drop a regiment into a howling wilderness and make it pay against any real resistance like the Norse found. You have to also remember that the Norse weren’t exactly going up against the main territories of the Amerindians, either–The areas they got thrown the hell out of were out on the periphery of it all, and they still got hammered by numerical superiority. The sort of military technology that was around during the Jamestown period was insufficient to what they’d have needed in order to deal with the severe numerical disadvantage that they would have been at, and no amount of “superior weapons” would have helped them.
Absent the disease factor, I think that the Americas would have likely sucked in the Europeans, figured out the technology or traded for it, and we’d be living in a much different world than we are. The Europeans would have certainly hacked out trade enclaves, but moving in and taking over the entire continent? Not ‘effing likely. It would have wound up looking more like China or India than what we actually had, which was a total replacement of the indigenous population.
Do note that the South African experience was a much different thing–The locals had the disease advantage, there, and the Europeans were never able to really overmatch them until late in the game with the Maxim gun. Even then, they still couldn’t make it work without going to a “manual genocide” rather than an accidental one. The European settlers in South Africa could have made it work, were they sufficiently ruthless to do for themselves what disease did in the Americas. They weren’t, so South Africa is what it is.
Per Kirk above,
This is one of the things Jared Diamond got right in his “Guns Germs and Steel”. He was right about “germs”.
What Kirk rightly points out is that the “germs” work both ways.
Everyone knows that in the new world, the “germs” favored the invaders, whereas in Africa, it was the other way around.
“Beware and take heed of the Bight of Benin. Where few come out but many go in”
Anyone want to guess which was worse for AmerIndians – diseases or alcohol?
Felix,
Diseases.
Alcohol hurts to be sure, but doesn’t destroy whole civilizations and cultures and kill more than three quarters of a given population
I would say that a large component of the alcohol problem stems from another lack of inherited response to the encounter–European stocks had their exposure to alcohol back in their stone age, and I think you could make the case that one of the things that ended said stone age was the lure of beer-making that possibly drove early agriculture.
Central America had their mescal and pulques; North America had some experience with weak beers in the Southwest, but limited to no use outside of ceremonial functions in the rest of the continent. Certainly, it was not done on the scale you found in stone age Europe, which was why the majority of the North American tribes experienced “green field” issues with alcohol when it was introduced to them. We Europeans had already culled the susceptible from the gene pool, mostly.
From the diary of Ulysses Grant:
“The Indians, along the lower Columbia as far as the Cascades and on the lower Willamette, died off very fast during the year I spent in that section; for besides acquiring the vices of the white people they had acquired also their diseases. The measles and the small-pox were both amazingly fatal. In their wild state, before the appearance of the white man among them, the principal complaints they were subject to were those produced by long involuntary fasting, violent exercise in pursuit of game, and over-eating. Instinct more than reason had taught them a remedy for these ills. It was the steam bath. Something like a bake-oven was built, large enough to admit a man lying down. Bushes were stuck in the ground in two rows, about six feet long and some two or three feet apart; other bushes connected the rows at one end. The tops of the bushes were drawn together to interlace, and confined in that position; the whole was then plastered over with wet clay until every opening was filled. Just inside the open end of the oven the floor was scooped out so as to make a hole that would hold a bucket or two of water. These ovens were always built on the banks of a stream, a big spring, or pool of water. When a patient required a bath, a fire was built near the oven and a pile of stones put upon it. The cavity at the front was then filled with water. When the stones were sufficiently heated, the patient would draw himself into the oven; a blanket would be thrown over the open end, and hot stones put into the water until the patient could stand it no longer. He was then withdrawn from his steam bath and doused into the cold stream near by. This treatment may have answered with the early ailments of the Indians. With the measles or small-pox it would kill every time.
During my year on the Columbia River, the small-pox exterminated one small remnant of a band of Indians entirely, and reduced others materially. I do not think there was a case of recovery among them, until the doctor with the Hudson Bay Company took the matter in hand and established a hospital. Nearly every case he treated recovered. I never, myself, saw the treatment described in the preceding paragraph, but have heard it described by persons who have witnessed it. The decimation among the Indians I knew of personally, and the hospital, established for their benefit, was a Hudson’s Bay building not a stone’s throw from my own quarters.”
This story raises the question of whether the response to new diseases may have been as killing as genetics. Further, might the people who died have been the more settled of the tribe? For instance, given an airborne disease, I’d bet on hunters surviving over those in farm huts.
Another striking thing about this story from the early 1850′s is that smallpox had been in the Americas for over 300 years. And apparently neither the disease nor word about it had spread 3000 miles.
Why did the Eastern hemisphere people walk over the Western? Alcohol? Disease? Horses? Sure. But I’d put as #1: The easterners were a larger, more tightly integrated, cooperative group.
“…Preindustrial farming peoples armed with steel and gunpowder and plus-two standard deviations of intelligence…”
You forgot “and bows”. I suspect with enough people with bows gunpowder offered no advantage with the limited supplies, the crappy firearms and Man power they had. Disease did them in. I also suspect that psychic shock had a lot to do with it. It was like the world was ending. All these people die and White Men come with firearms. Bad mojo. What to do…drink!