1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

Dobyns was not the first to arrive at this horrific conclusion. But he was the first modern researcher to put it together with the fact that smallpox visited before anyone in South America had even seen Europeans. The most likely source of the virus, Dobyns realized, was the Caribbean. Smallpox was recorded to have appeared on the island of Hispaniola in November or December 1518. It killed a third of the native population before jumping to Puerto Rico and Cuba. Spaniards, exposed in childhood to the virus, were mostly immune. During Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico, an expedition led by Pánfilo de Narváez landed on April 23, 1520, near what is today the city of Veracruz. According to several Spanish accounts, the force included an African slave named Francisco Eguía or Baguía who had smallpox. Other reports say that the carriers were Cuban Indians whom Narváez had brought as auxiliaries. In any case, someone brought the virus—and infected a hemisphere.