1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

Like well-run factories, cells are thrifty; part of the cellular machinery chops up and reuses anything that is floating around inside, including bits of the cell and foreign invaders such as viruses. Not all of the cut-up pieces are recycled. Some are passed on to HLAs, special molecules that transport the snippets to the surface of the cell.

Like minute scouts inspecting potential battle zones, leukocytes constantly scan cell walls for the little bits of stuff that HLAs have carried there, trying to spot anything that doesn’t belong. When a leukocyte spots an anomaly—a bit of virus, say—it destroys the infected or contaminated cell immediately.

All people have multiple types of HLA, which means that they can bring almost every potential problem to the attention of their leukocytes. Not every problem, though. No matter what his or her genetic endowment, no one person’s immune system has enough different HLAs to identify every strain of every virus.

Most human groups are a scattershot mix of HLA profiles, which means that almost always some people in the group will not get sick when exposed to a particular pathogen. Indeed, if laboratory mice have too much HLA diversity, Black told me, researchers can’t use them to observe the progress of an infectious disease.

In the 1990s Black reviewed thirty-six studies of South American Indians. Not to his surprise, he discovered that overall Indians have fewer HLA types than populations from Europe, Asia, and Africa. European populations have at least thirty-five main HLA classes, whereas Indian groups have no more than seventeen.

About one third of South American Indians, Black discovered, have identical or near-identical HLA profiles; for Africans the figure is one in two hundred.

Actually, some Old World populations were just as vulnerable as Native Americans to those diseases, and likely for the same reason. Indians’ closest genetic relatives are indigenous Siberians. They did not come into substantial contact with Europeans until the sixteenth century, when Russian fur merchants overturned their governments, established military outposts throughout the region, and demanded furs in tribute. In the train of the Russian fur market came Russian diseases, notably smallpox.

In 1768 the virus struck Siberia’s Pacific coast, apparently for the first time. “No one knows how many have survived,” confessed the governor of Irkutsk, the Russian base on Lake Baikal, apparently because officials were afraid to travel to the affected area.

Scarcely one thousand natives remained on the peninsula, according to official figures; the disease had claimed more than five thousand lives. The tally cannot be taken as exact, but the fact remains: a single epidemic killed more than three of every four indigenous Siberians in that area.

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.”*

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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

In retrospect, Fenn told me, “One of George Washington’s most brilliant moves was to inoculate the army against smallpox during the Valley Forge winter of ’78.” Without inoculation, she said, the smallpox epidemic could easily have handed the colonies back to the British.

Communications in those days were too poor to permit us to document a transmission chain, but records show smallpox flaring in separate explosions to the south like a chain of firecrackers: Guatemala (1780–81), Colombia (1781–83), Ecuador (1783). Was the virus retracing a journey to Tawantinsuyu it had taken before? “It seems likely,” decided Calloway, the Dartmouth historian.

First to suffer, or so the sketchy evidence suggests, were the Hopi. Already reeling from a drought, they were blasted by smallpox—as many as nine out of ten may have died.

As if drought and contagion were not enough, the Hopi were constantly under attack by the Nermernuh (or Nemene), a fluid collection of hunting bands known today as the Comanche (the name, awarded by an enemy group, means “people who fight us all the time”).

What is certain is that both Hopi and Nermernuh were part of a network of exchange that had hummed with vitality since ancient times and had recently grown more intense with the arrival of horses, which sped up communication.

Indians in the northern Great Plains kept “winter counts,” oral chronologies of the most important events in each year. Often the counts were accompanied by a spiraling sequence of drawings on a hide, with each year summarized by a drawing as an aide-mémoire. In several Lakota (Sioux) counts 1780–81 was bleakly summed as the year of Smallpox Used Them Up.

When the Shoshone finally obtained guns—they traded with their linguistic cousins, the Nermernuh, who took the weapons as booty from defeated Spaniards—open warfare broke out. In this bellicose context, the Blackfoot party knew exactly what to do when it happened upon a slumbering Shoshone encampment. With “sharp flat daggers and knives,” one of the raiders later remembered, they silently sliced open the Shoshone tents “and entered for the fight; but our war whoops instantly stopt, our eyes were appalled with terror; there was no one to fight with but the dead and the dying, each a mass of corruption.”

According to Fenn, “the great preponderance of the evidence” indicates that the Shoshone also transmitted smallpox down the Columbia River into the Pacific Northwest. Calloway suggests the Crow as a plausible alternative. Whoever passed on the virus, its effects were still visible a decade later in 1792, when the British navigator George Vancouver led the first European expedition to survey Puget Sound. Like Cook’s crew in Kamchatka, he found a charnel house: deserted villages, abandoned fishing boats, human remains “promiscuously scattered about the beach, in great numbers.”

Europeans were well versed in the brutal logic of quarantine. When plague appeared, they boarded up houses and fled to the countryside. By contrast, the historian Neal Salisbury observed, family and friends in Indian New England gathered at the sufferer’s bedside to wait out the illness, a practice that “could only have served to spread the disease more rapidly.”

Living in the era of antibiotics, we find it difficult to imagine the simultaneous deaths of siblings, parents, relatives, and friends.

Indian villages became societies of widows, widowers, and orphans; parents lost their children, and children were suddenly alone. Rare is the human spirit that remains buoyant in a holocaust. “My people have been so unhappy for so long they wish to disincrease, rather than to multiply,” a Paiute woman wrote in 1883.

A Lakota winter count memorialized the year 1784 with a stark image: a pox-scarred man, alone in a tipi, shooting himself.

Jesus

King Liholiho Kamehameha II and Queen Kamamalu of Hawai’i visited Great Britain on a diplomatic mission in 1824. While staying in a posh London hotel and attending the theater in the English king’s own box, the royal couple and most of the rest of their party came down with measles. It killed the queen on July 8. The grieving king died six days later, at the age of twenty-seven.

A particularly poignant loss occurred in the summer of 1701, when the leaders of forty native nations convened in Montreal to negotiate an end to decades of war among themselves and the French. Death stalked the congress in the form of influenza. By then the Indians of the Northeast knew such diseases all too well: sickness had carried off so many members of the Haudenosaunee that the alliance was forced to replenish itself by adopting abductees and prisoners of war. At the time of the conference at least a quarter of the Haudenosaunee were former captives. At great personal risk, many Indian leaders attended the conference even after they knew that influenza was in Montreal. Dozens died. Among them was the Huron leader Kondiaronk, a famed orator who had, more than any other, convened the gathering as a last-ditch effort to avoid internecine conflict.

Nobody knows how many died during the pandemics of the 1770s and 1780s, but even if one had a number it wouldn’t begin to tally the impact. Disease turned whole societies to ash. Six Cree groups in western Canada disappeared after 1781; the Blackfoot nation, blasted by smallpox, sent peace emissaries to Shoshone bands, only to find that all had vanished.

So broken were the Omaha by disease that according to tradition they launched a deliberately suicidal attack against their enemies. Those who did not die quit their villages and became homeless wanderers.

Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked, each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth century, more books were burned than ever before or since. How many Homers vanished? How many Hesiods? What great works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music vani...

Although the pope in Rome had authorized the friars’ mission, all twelve were Spanish, because Spain had conquered the empire, and because Spain, which had spent centuries extracting itself from the rule of African Muslims, had experience with powerful alien ideologies. Analogously, the priests of the Triple Alliance were probably all Mexica. The Mexica were the dominant partner in the Alliance, and they had founded and populated Tenochtitlan, the empire’s biggest city.

The sole record of the discussions between the monks and the Mexica was compiled four decades later by another Franciscan, Bernardino de Sahagún. Sahagún knew ten of the twelve Spaniards at the meeting, interviewed four of the Mexica priests, and filled in gaps by extrapolating from similar theological discussions in which he had participated. Written in dialogue verse, an opera seria exchange of long recitatives, his reconstruction does not individually identify the speakers—perhaps, some historians believe, because the great meeting did not actually take place, Sahagún’s account being a distillation of many smaller encounters. Only part of the original manuscript survives, written in Nahuatl, the Mexica language, which Sahagún learned to speak fluently.

Not wanting to join Christendom, they also know that they cannot prevail in a direct confrontation with their conquerors. Shrewdly, they try to shift the terms of the argument to more congenial rhetorical ground—an approach that will force the friars to treat them as equals.

Behind the priests’ refusal is an implied request: You know what it is like to be in our shoes. You carry the same responsibilities. As one group of highly placed religious functionaries to another, don’t do this to us!

In the end the friars resorted to a crude but effective argument: the Indians had to pledge fealty to the Christian god, because their own “gods were not powerful enough to liberate them from the hands of the Spaniards.” In a sober ceremony, the Mexica abjured their old religion and embraced Christianity.

Despite lip-service devotion to the Gospel, the Mexica remained outside Christendom, as do some of their descendants to this day.

Sahagún is known as the first American anthropologist, for he labored for decades to understand the Indians he sought to convert. With other missionaries, he amassed an archive on the Mexica and their neighbors—dynastic histories, dictionaries of native languages, descriptions of customs, collections of poetry and drama, galleries of paintings and sculpture—unequaled by that on any other Indian group, even the Inka. From it emerges, in almost full detail, a group portrait of a kind that is usually obscured by loss.

Masters of power politics, engineers of genius, the Mexica were also upstarts and pretenders, arrivistes who falsely claimed a brilliant line of descent. They are best known for assembling the greatest empire ever seen in Mesoamerica.

The city was organized around the Avenue of the Dead, a miles-long, north-south boulevard that cut straight as an ax stroke across the landscape. From the northern end of the avenue rose the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, each as big as the biggest Egyptian pyramids.

Teotihuacan fell in the eighth century for reasons yet unknown, but left an enduring mark in central Mexico. Three hundred years afterward the rising Toltec styled themselves its heirs. They, too, built an empire, which fell amid internal dissension in about 1200 A.D. The collapse of the Toltec created an opening in the warm, fertile basin. Into it moved half a dozen groups from the northern and western desert, the Mexica among them.

Among the Mexica, a council of clan elders chose the overall ruler. Or, rather, chose the overall rulers—the Mexica divided authority between a tlatoani (literally, “speaker”), a diplomatic and military commander who controlled relations with other groups, and a cihuacoatl (literally, “female serpent”), who supervised internal affairs.

During his long life Tlacaelel was twice offered the position of tlatoani but turned it down both times. Preferring the less glorious and supposedly less influential position of cihuacoatl, head of internal affairs, he ruled from behind the scenes, dominating the Alliance for more than fifty years and utterly reengineering Mexica society.

In addition to taking slaves and booty, wartime victors in central Mexico often burned their enemies’ codices, the hand-painted picture-texts in which priests recorded their people’s histories. Tlacaelel insisted that in addition to destroying the codices of their former oppressors the Mexica should set fire to their own codices. His explanation for this idea can only be described as Orwellian: “It is not fitting that our people / Should know these pictures. / Our people, our subjects, will be lost / And our land destroyed, / For these pictures are full of lies.”

To motivate the people properly, Tlacaelel said, the priesthood should rewrite Mexica history by creating new codices, adding in the great deeds whose lack now seemed embarrassing and adorning their ancestry with ties to the Toltecs and Teotihuacan.

because ambition succeeds best when disguised by virtue, he wanted to furnish the Alliance with an animating ideology—a manifest destiny, as it were, or mission civilisatrice. He came up with a corker: a theogony that transformed the Mexica into keepers of the cosmic order.

In some versions of the story, the brother became the sun; in others, he merely supervised its workings. Either way, life could exist only when one brother held sway and the cosmic battle quieted and the sun was able to shine. But when the balance came apart, as it always did, the brothers would resume their strife. The sun would go dark, sinking the cosmos into an endless, lethal night. Eventually the sons would arrive at a new transitory order and reignite the sun, letting existence begin anew. This apocalyptic cycle had occurred four times before. The Mexica lived during the Fifth Sun, when the sun was identified with Huitzilopochtli.

To gain strength, the sun needed chalchíhuatl—the mysterious, ineffable fluid of life-energy. The sacred mission of the Triple Alliance, Tlacaelel proclaimed, was to furnish this vital substance to Huitzilopochtli, who would then use it for the sun, postponing the death of everyone on the planet.

Occasionally the victims were slaves and criminals, but mainly they were prisoners of war. In this way the sacred mission of the Triple Alliance became translated into a secular mission: to obtain prisoners to sacrifice for the sun, the Alliance had to take over the world. In Tlacaelel’s scheme, imperial conquests were key to “the moral combat against evil,” explained Miguel León-Portilla, a Mexican historian who has devoted much of his career to analyzing Mexica thought.