The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

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. In the ten years following the first outbreak of smallpox in the New World, the disease had stretched deep into South America. The pandemics also felled several of the great pre-Columbian kingdoms in North America. From 1539 to 1541, explorer Hernando de Soto passed through a powerful and flourishing chiefdom called Coosa, which occupied territory encompassing parts of Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, and had a population of perhaps 50,000 people. But twenty years later, by the time the next European came through, Coosa had been almost entirely abandoned, the landscape littered with empty houses, the once-abundant gardens overgrown with thistles and weeds. In the Mississippi River Valley, de Soto had found forty-nine towns, but the French explorers La Salle and Joliet, a century later, encountered only seven wretched settlements, a decline of 86 percent. Most of southeastern North America had been cleared out by a massive die-off from disease.