Age of discovery

Oda Nobunaga said:

A comparable time frame up north to Columbus/Orellano would be the first visit of John Cabot to the third visit of Cartier - the coastal natives were still alive and well by Cartier's time. It's with the fur trade really picking up mid-XVIth century that thing really got bad, and most sources place the great die-off of eastern seaboard natives around the very late XVIth and early XVIIth century - the Laurentian Iroquoians around late XVIth (and some of that may have been war with their neighbors), and the New England algonquins in the XVIIth, some sources say as late as the 1610s...by which time French and English colonies on the seaboard were in full swing.

The thing is, whiel history tend to talk about the first contact (Cabot/Verazzano/Cartier...and the later two are already 20-30 years after the first) and then immediately move on to Quebec and Plymouth (or Jamestown if you're lucky and not hearing from someone obsessed with Pilgrims), that's just not true. You had several colonization efforts (La Caroline; Roanoke), you had the whole set of Spanish Florida missions (which at points stretched as far north as the Carolinas) appearing with missions and missionaries and exploration inland, you had de Soto's entire inland expedition; you had constant visit by fishermen of the Great Banks who wanted to trade for fur with North-East natives to improve their profit margins, you had kidnapped natives being brought back to Europe then back to their land...essentially, prolonged and repeated contact, exactly as I described.

It was decidedly not a case of "Europeans show up, forget about it, show back up again a few decades later gasp they're all gone".

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I do think this is all true. Fur traders and fishermen created a lot of interactions with natives that increased the chance to spread disease. Either way, we know there were massively depopulated villages by 1620 in New England. I think we're on the same page here (that disease hit before European settlement in this area). The quibbles seem to be two. Both are related to the spread of disease as a whole. One is whether simple one-off contact could have spread the disease. The other is whether or not there was sufficient contact between Caribbean populations and mainland populations to facilitate the spread of disease that way. There hasn't been much discussion of the latter and I would suggest we simply don't have enough information to truly know.

As for whether limited contact could cause this massive pandemic or whether it was caused by somewhat later events (usually trading and frequent visits but, of course, settlement as well). Rather than directly talk about the subject, I'm going to suggest an argument by analogy. The story of the Genoese Sailors arriving in Messina is said to be the trigger of the plague in Europe. That was actually a fairly brief encounter before they were expelled, but it was too late and the plague quickly spread to all of Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia (then presumably Pisa from there, but there were likely separate ports of entry for the disease by this point from Venice). Do people accept this account as true? If so, that would suggest that one simple contact is really all that's needed.

The main difference would supposedly be population density -- easier to spread through a densely populated area than a light one. But recent studies have cast a lot of doubt on low population figures for the Americas.

Domen said:

95% mortality in a single, first plague was not the case. 60% is closer to reality. So the fact that when Orellana travelled there were still many people left doesn't mean that there had been no smallpox there before. What killed the natives was not one plague but multiple ones (for example epidemies of smallpox could occur every 15 - 25 years or so - of course each subsequent plague was much less devastating than previous ones due to increasing immunity). And later, after smallpox, came measles and other diseases. That said, 60% population decline in the first hit of the virus is enough to destroy a civilization.

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This is simply an unsubstantiated claim. No one actually knows the mortality rate of smallpox in a true virgin-soil epidemic, because all the recorded numbers come from places where there was at least some basic genetic immunity.

More to the point, there was more than one disease, though smallpox is the most obvious one.

Pretty much all the recent scholarship agrees on a roughly 90-98% mortality rate in the first 20 or so years after contact.

Louis XXIV said:

I do think this is all true. Fur traders and fishermen created a lot of interactions with natives that increased the chance to spread disease. Either way, we know there were massively depopulated villages by 1620 in New England. I think we're on the same page here (that disease hit before European settlement in this area). The quibbles seem to be two. Both are related to the spread of disease as a whole. One is whether simple one-off contact could have spread the disease. The other is whether or not there was sufficient contact between Caribbean populations and mainland populations to facilitate the spread of disease that way. There hasn't been much discussion of the latter and I would suggest we simply don't have enough information to truly know.

As for whether limited contact could cause this massive pandemic or whether it was caused by somewhat later events (usually trading and frequent visits but, of course, settlement as well). Rather than directly talk about the subject, I'm going to suggest an argument by analogy. The story of the Genoese Sailors arriving in Messina is said to be the trigger of the plague in Europe. That was actually a fairly brief encounter before they were expelled, but it was too late and the plague quickly spread to all of Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia (then presumably Pisa from there, but there were likely separate ports of entry for the disease by this point from Venice). Do people accept this account as true? If so, that would suggest that one simple contact is really all that's needed.

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The trick is, in this context, you're very rarely looking at one disease. It's the barrage of new diseases that destroyed populations, rather than any one illness. A given outbreak of, say, smallpox might not be hugely more destructive than one in Europe, but it's following on from an outbreak of bubonic plague two years earlier and would be followed by cholera two years later. The sort of population collapses you see in New England definitely require at least semi-regular contact, because they need multiple opportunities for infection.

Sure, but that's a separate issue. I'm talking more about the initial spread of pandemic than the number of times new ones appeared. From a European perspective, this issue might not matter so much. The only thing that matters of the history of contact is that it spread and decimated populations before they settled (obviously, from the perspective of natives, it mattered quite a bit more). But it is an interesting discussion on how much disease raced ahead of Europeans and how much did it follow behind them (a discussion that is confused by the number of apparent European contacts that went unrecorded).

Right, but I don't think there was ever any one pandemic. Few diseases are so terrible that they can devastate societies just like that. Indigenous American populations had no developed or inherited immunity to these diseases, but that didn't make the diseases more fatal, it just made people more liable to contract them. Most populations took a century or so to bottom out: populations begin to recover in Mexico in the early seventeenth century, in the Great Lakes in the mid-eighteenth century, and so on. It was the continuous barrage of disease that did the damage, that really ground down populations, and that's going to require prolonged contact.

Except everyone here is apparently not up to date on Native scholarship which proves the Americas were depopulated decades and thousands of miles ahead of deeper European exploration and trade. Not to mention the old theories that the America, as North King (a guy you should all listen to) brought up, had a low population have been debunked pretty heavily. To say there was no contact between Native peoples is to ignore all the facts and empty villages. White man did so well in the north because there were barely any Natives left. And by did well, I mean barely did well. Imagine if the populations hadn't be culled? This whole highschool understanding of Native history leads people to believe the Americas were always a mostly empty, noble savage landscape ripe for the picking instead of the mass grave it was in reality.

Traitorfish said:

A given outbreak of, say, smallpox might not be hugely more destructive than one in Europe,

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This is just plain incorrect. No exposure to the disease, ever, plus minimal genetic resistance to viral and bacterial infections and an immune system geared to fighting parasites, left Native peoples far more vulnerable than a comparable European population.

And no, you don't really need multiple points of contact, you just need multiple diseases in a single contact.

Which happens.

taillesskangaru said:

Yes, but before the Pilgrims set up camp, Europeans have been significantly involved in the region for more than half a century at least. As Oda already pointed out (several times) earlier.

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Thank you.

As to the debate on the exact death rate: honestly, I am more familiar with claims of 90%-98% *overall* rather than in the first 20 years (but more recent academic research may have reevaluated those numbers), but to a degree, it's sort of largely a detail. When talking about deaths on that sheer level, the exact amount is by and large a statistic. Whether it was 60% or 98% in the first twenty years, whether it took 5, 10, 50 or 100 years for a specific civilization to be wiped out (down to even their traces), the sheer nature of the event remain unchanged. European-introduced diseases wiped out flourishing civilizations and killed enormous numbers of people, to the point of giving Europeans the impression the once-densely-populated continent was deserted.

The sheer horror, the sheer scale of the tragedy is clear. The exact numbers pale in comparison to that.

And no, you don't really need multiple points of contact, you just need multiple diseases in a single contact.

Which happens.

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Yeah, but in this case the question is rather academic because there were multiple points of contact. I don'T think anyone here would really buy that only one of those actually introduced diseases.

Oda Nobunaga said:

Yeah, but in this case the question is rather academic because there were multiple points of contact. I don'T think anyone here would really buy that only one of those actually introduced diseases.

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Definitely not. Though I would note that one thing no one here has mentioned is how European settlers weren't exactly hives of disease themselves -- European settlements exhibited much lower mortality rates than Natives, obviously, but they also exhibited much higher than Europeans back home. The settler population was way too small to maintain epidemic diseases like smallpox for any length of time (something you also see with islands like St. Kilda, or, in a less extreme example, Iceland). Basically, they lacked the acquired immunity that Europeans usually had, but kept the various genetic resistances. So, the smallpox epidemic of 1780 shattered various white colonies, and while it was far more problematic for Native Tribes ranging from the Cherokee to the Tlingit, it still caused a fair bit of problems for them.

North King said:

This is just plain incorrect. No exposure to the disease, ever, plus minimal genetic resistance to viral and bacterial infections and an immune system geared to fighting parasites, left Native peoples far more vulnerable than a comparable European population.

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Most outbreaks were more destructive, yes, poor phrasing on my part, but my point is that this stuff was cumulative. There's no record of a single endemic of smallpox killing 90% of a community, and there are records of endemics which were in fact slightly less destructive than similar ones in Europe. (Granted, that's in part because they're coming at a time when there just isn't a lot of people left to kill, but still, it effects the model.)

And as I said, it's debated how far these diseases were actually more lethal to indigenous peoples than to Europeans. It doesn't seem that a given Indian was more likely to die of, say, smallpox than a given European. The difference is mostly that in Europe, these things hit generationally, so it's mostly kids who get it, but in America, it hits everyone at once, so in the first place a much larger part of the population is affected, and in the second, systems of food production, etc. break down because of the sudden drop in the able population. Nutrition is a big factor, here, in how lethal a disease is and how vulnerable a population is to future infection. (And then there's the endemic warfare and general upheaval that seems to follow any European intrusion, which isn't anywhere near as big a killer, but certainly doesn't help.)

It's also easy to overstate European immunity. These diseases were still killing Europeans by the bucket-load, they just weren't killing them in the same way, weren't killing as regularly or indiscriminately, so the losses were absorbed into an overall expansion of population.

And no, you don't really need multiple points of contact, you just need multiple diseases in a single contact.

Which happens.

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It's not just multiple diseases, though, it's multiple endemics taking place years apart. As I said, it takes a century or so for populations to bottom out, so the model of "contact, BOOM, hemisphere-wide population collapse" isn't really tenable.

I could be reading this wrong (coffee hasn't kicked in yet) but, if you're saying multiple flareups of disease require new population sources to reintroduce it, that's clearly wrong. Once again, you can look to the Bubonic Plague, which would flare up every so often for centuries.

That's not really what's happening in the Americas, though. We're not looking at a disease spreading, going dormant, and then reappearing a few generations later. We're looking at a constant barrage of diseases, in rapid succession. Later it can look like that, sure, especially when Old World livestock proliferate and treat the locals to a lovely new disease vector, but in the decades after first contact, but I don't think that works for the first few decades of contact.

Basically, my point is that we can't discount the actual historical processes behind population decline in the Americas, how it relates to the process of colonisiation, how it's tied up with the change, fragmentation or collapse of social structures. There's a tendency these days to simply conclude that the Indians were just naturally die-y, á la Jared Diamond, repeated a little uncritically by even otherwise very keen-eyed texts like 1491, but it's an easy explanation that doesn't really hold up in light of the scholarship.

Louis XXIV said:

The other is whether or not there was sufficient contact between Caribbean populations and mainland populations to facilitate the spread of disease that way. There hasn't been much discussion of the latter and I would suggest we simply don't have enough information to truly know.

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I remember reading somewhere that some historians were debating whether squanto first asked the pilgrims of plymouth if they had any alcohol when he first saw them. If this was true I remember reading it was argued that some trickle of information of an "other" [European] people had slowly moved through the Atlantic, so ostensibly disease could have done the same too [traveled through small trickles] but thats much harder to observe without some written or European recording of an event. Squanto himself had been taken prisoner by some random English fishermen before the settling of plymouth and he himself attested that his people had been largely wiped out by disease even before the settling of Plymouth

As we've already covered (many, many, many, many) times in this thread: by the time of the founding of Plymouth there were colonies up an ddown the American coast, and western fishermen, explorers, fur traders, slavers and so forth regularly visited the place by then.

By the late sixteenth century at the latest, there was frequent European/Native contact in the North-East.

Yes we know Oda - thats not what I was addressing. I was just giving that example as a theoretical about Louis wondering if earlier spread could have been possible over the wide Caribbean-Mainland gulf. In that regards as well river barges [that could sometimes skirt the coastline] from the Yucatan were suspected to have occasionally made contact with Caribbean peoples, so again the network theoretically may have been there.

Hmmm, I see, though given what I remember of the first native contacts along the coast and what's recorded of them, (which is limited), I doubt the theory of prior information. There's just nothing in eg the journals of Cartier to suggest that kind of foreknowledge among the natives.

What Squanto did or didn't know aout Europeans doesn't really help us either way, since Squanto was born 50 years after Cartier, even longer after Verrazano, and still longer than that after Cabot.

Traitorfish said:

That's not really what's happening in the Americas, though. We're not looking at a disease spreading, going dormant, and then reappearing a few generations later. We're looking at a constant barrage of diseases, in rapid succession. Later it can look like that, sure, especially when Old World livestock proliferate and treat the locals to a lovely new disease vector, but in the decades after first contact, but I don't think that works for the first few decades of contact.

Basically, my point is that we can't discount the actual historical processes behind population decline in the Americas, how it relates to the process of colonisiation, how it's tied up with the change, fragmentation or collapse of social structures. There's a tendency these days to simply conclude that the Indians were just naturally die-y, á la Jared Diamond, repeated a little uncritically by even otherwise very keen-eyed texts like 1491, but it's an easy explanation that doesn't really hold up in light of the scholarship.

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No, see, this isn't actually the case. Because they did have similar patterns after a while in both Old World and New -- the disease goes dormant for a generation, then strikes again. And the disease still had higher mortality rates for Native tribes. Now, sure, you can argue that the disease cocktail was not fun, but on some level, you have to recognize that the source material suggests that there were only a few diseases at any given time. The primary one in, say, Mexico, seems to have been smallpox for the first twenty or so years, with not many other suggested diseases, and there, we're pretty sure that those first twenty years saw like an 80% mortality rate -- which isn't enough time for it to be hitting a different generation except at the very start and the very end.

On another note, the genetic studies have been done to prove there's a hereditary component to the virulence and lethality, and it does pop up again and again.

With regards to exact mortality figures, I'm fairly certain figures are available on the way things hit the Maori vs, say, Iceland, but I don't remember them offhand.

Moreover, as Jared Diamond would probably be quick to point out (), it's not exactly a racial thing to point out that people who have developed in the absence of animal-sourced diseases for thousands of years don't have an immune system particularly geared to fighting animal-sourced diseases. It's sort of the same way that you can argue the high prevalence of sickle-cell anemia in West African populations is a genetic adaptation to the disease cocktail there (that gave them a significant survival edge in the tropics, for that matter), and it's not like I'm being racist to whites.

North King said:

Moreover, as Jared Diamond would probably be quick to point out (), it's not exactly a racial thing to point out that people who have developed in the absence of animal-sourced diseases for thousands of years don't have an immune system particularly geared to fighting animal-sourced diseases. It's sort of the same way that you can argue the high prevalence of sickle-cell anemia in West African populations is a genetic adaptation to the disease cocktail there (that gave them a significant survival edge in the tropics, for that matter), and it's not like I'm being racist to whites.

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The point is that it's not a case of immune people mixing with non-immune people, it's a case of people who are killed in their millions by diseases mixing with people who are killed in their millions by diseases. Why this practically wiped out one group but not the other is not a question of biology.

Oda Nobunaga said:

Hmmm, I see, though given what I remember of the first native contacts along the coast and what's recorded of them, (which is limited), I doubt the theory of prior information. There's just nothing in eg the journals of Cartier to suggest that kind of foreknowledge among the natives.

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Well, if the records are limited, it's hard to get a full picture. It's also unclear that news would spread faster than disease.* If one Caribbean population traded with another Caribbean population and either didn't mention it or did mention it but the mainland population that traded with them did not, then it's fairly simple not to spread the news while still spreading disease.

* Although, if I return to the ever handy Bubonic Plague, word of the disease certainly spread faster than the disease itself because people were aware of its existence in China before it hit Europe.

North King said:

No, see, this isn't actually the case. Because they did have similar patterns after a while in both Old World and New -- the disease goes dormant for a generation, then strikes again. And the disease still had higher mortality rates for Native tribes. Now, sure, you can argue that the disease cocktail was not fun, but on some level, you have to recognize that the source material suggests that there were only a few diseases at any given time.

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Define "a few". In North America, at least, we seem to be looking at smallpox, chickenpox, influenza, yellow fever, measles, malaria, typhus, typhoid and bubonic plague all pretty early on. There's enough variety there to have a brutal epidemic every few years, and by the time you've workd down the list, it's time to start again. Some epidemics did cause catastrophic mortality, yes, but usually among communities which had already been hit by disease, so this isn't infecting healthy, well-fed people, it's hitting sick people who are struggling to keep their way of life together.

The primary one in, say, Mexico, seems to have been smallpox for the first twenty or so years, with not many other suggested diseases, and there, we're pretty sure that those first twenty years saw like an 80% mortality rate -- which isn't enough time for it to be hitting a different generation except at the very start and the very end.

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This is where the point about history comes into it again, though: the period 1519-39 in Mexico was not business as usual except a bunch of people happened to get sick, it was a period of turmoil and upheaval. Civil war and invasion exacerbate disease as the always do; additionally, the high mortality rate is linked to the Mexican dependence upon certain labour-intensive systems of agriculture that couldn't be sustained. We don't see a >50% mortality rate (80% is at higher end of common estimates, not a consensus view) because Indians were always going to die at that rate, we see it because of when, where and how the epidemic came about.

Biology is certainly a factor, but like Flying Pig says, it's not a sufficient explanation. It tells us how people died, but not why.