Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650

Historians now agree that infectious diseases arriving from the Old World aboard European ships after 1492 had a devastating impact on Amerindian peoples—first in the Caribbean islands, and then on the mainland. Fifty years ago this was not so. A carefully nurtured Protestant view of Spanish cruelty to helpless Indians explained population decay in Spanish lands; and the comfortable assumption that the more northerly parts of the continent were almost empty of human inhabitants before English and French pioneers arrived on the scene made the die-off of Indians before the advancing tide of European settlement disappear as a problem of historical demography—even though the political record of French Canada and the English colonies demonstrated that militarily effective Indian communities survived into the eighteenth century.

Since 1967, however, when Alfred Crosby first called attention, in an article in the Hispanic American Historical Review, ¹ to the pestilences that felled the Aztec and Inca empires, a small army of investigators has shown how repeated outbreaks of lethal disease crippled one Indian community after another by killing off so many individuals as to leave survivors demoralized and unable to resist European newcomers, whose susceptibility to the same infections was far less, owing to long-standing exposures that had lodged inherited and acquired immunities in their bloodstreams. By the time repeated exposure to such infections created comparable immunities among surviving Amerindian populations, anything up to 90 percent of their initial numbers had disappeared, and smaller island communities had died out entirely.

Such studies are mostly local, and, as Cook remarks, “a study of disease in early colonial Brazil might be hidden in an obscure journal in France. The findings on sixteenth-century Quebec may not be known to someone working on the early contact in Tierra del Fuego. My purpose is to bring together in a succinct volume what is currently known of epidemic disease, especially as it relates to the conquest of native America” (p. 12). As his lengthy bibliography shows, he has consulted hundreds of authors, and he summarizes their hypotheses and conclusions in conveniently brief compass.

The book’s first two chapters, dealing with the “Disappearance of the Peoples of the Caribbean, 1492–1518” and the smallpox epidemic that allowed Cortez and Pizarro to conquer the Aztec and Inca empires so easily, are by far the most satisfactory. Here the story is dramatic and information comparatively scant, and Cook discusses the evidence with appropriate acuity. But when he launches on wider geographical surveys of subsequent disease disasters throughout the Americas, his book loses focus and becomes little more than a catalog of what others have said, summarized in what I judge to be a rather uncritical fashion.

Cook does try to make sense of the disease record by distinguishing how one infection after another began to afflict the native populations. But this runs into an intractable problem, inasmuch as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical language does not conform to contemporary diagnoses—quite apart from the fact that infections among inexperienced populations often show different symptoms from those produced by the same infections among disease-experienced hosts. Wildly divergent conclusions about exactly which infectious agent afflicted particular local populations therefore result from any and every effort to apply contemporary disease terminology to the historical record, as Cook, rather half-heartedly, wants to do. He recognizes the resulting uncertainties, yet he reproduces what others (some of them clearly less epidemiologically sophisticated than he) have concluded with only occasional expressions of doubt as to which infection (or infections) may actually have been at work.

The result is repetitious cacophony: a disappointing result for Cook’s effort to summarize what has been learned in the last generation about how imported infections ravaged native American populations and made contemporary American society what it is. The key role of infectious diseases in disrupting native populations does come through convincingly. So...