The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

The Indians were in abject terror of it. It was like nothing they had ever experienced before. The history of the Conquest contains many Spanish eyewitness accounts attesting to the horrors of the pandemic. “It was a dreadful illness,” wrote one friar, “and many people died of it. No one could walk; they could only lie stretched out on their beds. No one could move, not even able to turn their heads. One could not lie face down, or lie on the back, nor turn from one side to another. When they did move, they screamed in pain… Many died from it, but many died only of hunger. There were deaths from starvation, for they had no one left to care for them.” 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. When smallpox arrived, the Indians often responded with panic and flight, abandoning towns and cities, leaving behind the sick and dead. And while the Spanish were less susceptible to these epidemics, they were not immune, and many also died in the general conflagration. Epidemics cleared out huge swaths of the New World even before Europeans got there. There are numerous accounts of European explorers arriving in a village for the first time, only to find every...