The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

By September of 1519, smallpox had reached the Valley of Mexico.

Traditional Indian remedies against illness—sweats, cold baths, and medicinal herbs—were ineffective against smallpox. Indeed, many efforts at healing only seemed to hasten death. In Europe, at its worst, smallpox killed about one out of three people it infected; in the Americas the death rate was higher than 50 percent and in many cases approached 90 to 95 percent.

Epidemiologists generally agree that smallpox is the cruelest disease ever to...

Unlike most other viruses, smallpox can survive and remain virulent for months or years outside the body in clothing, blankets, and sickrooms.

These epidemics of disease weakened Indian military resistance, and in many instances it aided the Spanish in their conquest. But overall, the Spanish (and Columbus personally) were deeply dismayed by the vast die-offs; the deaths of so many Indians interfered with their slaving businesses, killed their servants, and emptied their plantations and mines of forced labor.

Historians once marveled at how Cortés, with his army of five hundred soldiers, defeated the Aztec empire of over a million people. Various ideas have been advanced: that the Spanish had crucial technological advantages in horses, swords, crossbows, cannon, and armor; that the Spanish had superior tactics honed by centuries of fighting the Moors; that the Indians held back, fearful the Spanish were gods; and that the Aztecs’ subjugation and misrule of surrounding chiefdoms had created conditions ripe for revolt. All this is true. But the real conquistador was smallpox.

“When the Christians were exhausted from war,” one friar wrote, “God saw fit to send the Indians smallpox.” In sixty days, smallpox carried off at least half of the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan, which had a precontact population of 300,000 or more. Smallpox also killed the very capable successor to Moctezuma, the emperor Cuitláhuac, who in his brief, forty-day rule had swiftly been building military alliances that, had he survived, would very likely have repelled Cortés.

The worst effect of smallpox was the complete demoralization of the Indians: They saw clearly that disease decimated them while largely sparing the Spanish, and they concluded they had been cursed and rejected by their gods, who had shifted to the side of the Spanish. As the Spanish marched into the city, one observer wrote, “The streets were so filled with dead and sick people, that our men walked over nothing but bodies.”

At the same time that smallpox was ravaging Mexico, it burned southward into the Maya realm before the Spanish arrived. While the Maya cities were no longer inhabited, the Maya people were spread out over the region and were still known for their fierceness and military prowess. The contagion paved the way for the conquest of Guatemala four years later by one of Cortés’s captains.

Most of southeastern North America had been cleared out by a massive die-off from disease.

Compare this to the Spanish conquest of the Philippines, which occurred at the same time. The Spanish were just as ruthless there, but the conquest was not aided by disease: Filipinos were resistant to Old World diseases, and the islands experienced no mass die-offs or population crashes. As a result, the Spanish were forced to accommodate and adjust to coexistence with the indigenous people of the Philippines, who remained strong and retained their languages and cultures. Once the Spanish left, the Iberian influence largely faded away, along with the Spanish language, which is today spoken by few.

But did this catastrophe reach Mosquitia, and if so, how did it get into the remote interior, so far from Spanish contact? We don’t have much source material on how the 1519 smallpox epidemic affected Honduras specifically.

Ten years after smallpox, another dreadful pandemic swept the New World: measles. This we know ravaged Honduras with exceptional cruelty.

Before slavery was restricted by the Spanish crown in 1542, slaving parties scoured Honduras, kidnapping Indians to work plantations, mines, and households. The first Indians enslaved came from the islands and coasts.

sometime in the early 1500s several epidemics of disease swept T1 in close succession. If the mortality rates were similar to the rest of Honduras and Central America, about 90 percent of the inhabitants died of disease.

We have few accounts giving the native point of view of these pandemics. One of the most moving is a rare contemporary eyewitness description, called the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, which recalls the two worlds, before and after contact. It was written by an Indian in the Yucatec Mayan language: There was then no sickness; they had no aching bones; they had then no high fever; they had then no smallpox; no stomach pains; no consumption… At that time people stood erect. But then the teules [foreigners] arrived and everything fell apart. They brought fear, and they came to wither the flowers.

Leishmaniasis is the second deadliest parasitic disease in the world, behind only malaria, and it affects twelve million people worldwide, with around one or two million new cases every year. It kills sixty thousand people a year.

Of the leading “neglected tropical diseases” (NTDs) in the world leishmaniasis is one of the most prominent, if not number one. But because it almost always affects poor people in rural areas of the tropics, there is little economic incentive for pharmaceutical companies to develop vaccines or treatments.

The National Institutes of Health’s overall mission is to “seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems,” and then leverage that knowledge to “enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability.” It is strictly a research institution, and anyone admitted for treatment must be part of a research study. Each of its projects has a set of rules that outline who can be treated, why, and how their treatment will contribute to medical knowledge.

Leishmaniasis has a long and terrible history with human beings, stretching back as far as human records exist and causing suffering and death for thousands of years. A few years ago, a hundred-million-year-old piece of Burmese amber was found to have trapped a sand fly that had sucked the blood of a reptile, most likely a dinosaur. Inside this sand fly, scientists discovered leishmania parasites, and in its proboscis, or sucking tube, they found reptilian blood cells mingled with the same parasites. Even dinosaurs got leishmaniasis.

The archaeologist James Kus, a retired professor at California State University, Fresno, believes that the Inca site of Machu Picchu may have been chosen, in part, because of the prevalence of mucosal leish. “The Incas were paranoid about leishmaniasis,” he told me. The sand fly that transmits leish can’t live at higher altitudes, but it is widespread in the lowland areas where the Inca grew coca, a sacred crop. Machu Picchu lies at just the right altitude: too high for leish, but not too high for coca;

Because most people who get parasites are poor, and because infectious-disease medicine is not usually fee-based, parasitology is one of the lower-paying of all the medical specialties.

He also said you never really knew what kind of side effects might pop up until at least ten thousand people had taken a drug, and miltefosine had not reached that benchmark.

a perverse part of me was also curious about the effects of the drug. What would it be like to believe I was dying? Maybe I’d see the face of God, or the light at the end of the tunnel, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

While neither doctor could talk about the other members of the expedition due to medical confidentially, I did learn that I was one of the lucky ones, and that some of my fellow travelers (who have asked me not to identify them) have not been cured and require additional courses of treatment using miltefosine or other drugs. Some are still struggling with the disease.

one of medicine’s greatest mysteries is why some people get sick and others do not, given the same exposure. Environment and nutrition play a role in infection, but genetics are paramount. This is the very question at the heart of why so many New World people died of Old World disease. What was the actual genetic machinery that made some more susceptible than others?

(The link between mosquitoes and malaria, for example, wasn’t made until 1897. Previously, malaria was thought to be caused by the “bad air” of nighttime—which is what mal aria means in Italian.)

National Geographic magazine once again hired me to cover the team’s work. I was apprehensive about going back but intensely curious to see what was in the cache. Wisely or not, I was no longer worried about leish: I was, in fact, far more concerned about poisonous snakes and dengue fever.

The issue of indigenous rights in Honduras is not simple; Honduras is a robust mestizo society in which most citizens, rich and poor, have a large proportion of Indian ancestry. The Miskito people are themselves of mixed Indian, African, Spanish, and English ancestry with roots not in the interior mountains where T1 is located, but along the coast.

The Maya and other Mesoamerican cultures engaged in human sacrifice, presenting the gods with that most sacred and precious nourishment—human blood. The priest would either decapitate the victim or split the breastbone and yank out the still-beating heart, offering it to the sky. These sacrifices were often conducted at the top of a pyramid in view of all.

People need history in order to know themselves, to build a sense of identity and pride, continuity, community, and hope for the future.

Why did Old World diseases devastate the New World and not the other way around?

When people in the Near East first domesticated cattle from a type of wild ox called an aurochs, a mutation in the cowpox virus allowed it to jump into humans—and smallpox was born. Rinderpest in cattle migrated to people and became measles. Tuberculosis probably originated in cattle, influenza in birds and pigs, whooping cough in pigs or dogs, and malaria in chickens and ducks. The same process goes on today: Ebola probably jumped to humans from bats, while HIV crashed into our species from monkeys and chimpanzees.

Over thousands of years and countless deaths, people in the Old World gradually built up a genetic resistance to many brutal epidemic diseases.

This genetic resistance, by the way, should not be confused with acquired immunity. Acquired immunity is when a body gets rid of a pathogen and afterward maintains a state of high alert for that same microbe. It’s why people don’t normally get the same illness twice. Genetic resistance is something deeper and more mysterious. It is not acquired through exposure—you are born with it. Some people are born with greater resistance to certain diseases than others.

It is tempting to argue that if Europeans hadn’t arrived in the New World, these deadly pandemics would not have happened. But the meeting of the Old World and the New was inevitable. If Europeans hadn’t carried disease to the New World, Asians or Africans would have; or New World mariners would have eventually reached the Old.

Archaeology contains many cautionary tales for us to ponder in the twenty-first century, not just about disease but also about human success and failure. It teaches us lessons in environmental degradation, income inequality, war, violence, class division, exploitation, social upheaval, and religious fanaticism.

No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate.