Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest (review)

Born to Die is the latest title in a spate of works seeking to make sense of the biological impact of the Encounter. A fundamental difficulty for those according disease an early, instrumental, and hemispheric role is that the primary sources are almost entirely unhelpful. Although they frequently speak of de-population, they seldom attribute it to biological agents, and when they do, they tend to be aggravatingly unclear, usually referring in the early stages only to generic and undefined “illness.” Cook gets around this silence by consummate question-begging. Thus, he accuses some chroniclers of “conveniently ignor[ing] disease” in pursuit of the Black Legend (6); infers that disease was present early on Hispaniola, simply because “[t]here were too few Spaniards to have killed the millions who were reported to have died” there (9); and wistfully suggests that “[o]nly the lack of interest in careful record keeping meant that the major episodes of disease were not documented” (165).

For Cook, such wish fulfilment begins as early as it possibly can. He devotes considerable effort to positing that influenza spread from the members of Columbus’ second voyage to the Indians of Hispaniola, where, he has it, “[p]rodigious numbers of deaths coincided with the . . . expedition, the consequence of starvation and epidemic disease” (38). The trouble with this claim is that there is no contemporary evidence whatever to support it and much to contradict it. Although Cook could be right when he asserts that “[t]o argue that no disease transfer took place on [Columbus’ voyages] is to assume the highly improbable” (43), nonetheless, the first mention of disease occurs only in 1518. Cook does not seem concerned by this annoying silence, but abstract assumptions do not ordinarily make useful working hypotheses. This is not to say that Cook’s modus operandi for the pre-1518 period differs from that of others who have addressed the issue. It is simply that as a methodology, it is fatally compromised by its estrangement from reliable evidence. It is, as Cook’s quote indicates, a case of ex hypothesi must-have-been.

As time passed, both disease and its recording naturally multiplied. Much of Born to Die catalogs these later incidents. Cook generally shies away from a futile numbers game, but he displays an unfortunate predisposition to magnify many of these episodes beyond what the historical record allows, wasting few opportunities to imply high orders of mortality. He, like others, wants to believe that such occasions spread well beyond the areas for which they are recorded. This argumentative gambit cannot be refuted—that absence of evidence again!—but it has engendered the most risible calculations of contact population.

Cook exhibits a disquieting habit of not citing sources. To give just one example, it is hardly acceptable to quote the Archbishop of Mexico City that “more than half of the native population” had died and then assert that Juan de Torquemada spoke of “more than 2 million” deaths without providing any citation whatever, not to mention finishing with an incorrect reference to a modern work on another topic (121–122). Far too often, as well, Cook uses sources in translation or in an inferior edition, or even secondary or tertiary paraphrases. Misspellings and misstatements are frequent—for example, “Zinnser” for “Zinsser” (12, 100, 235, 248), “Trentine” for “Tridentine” (13), “perspectively” for “perceptively” (55), “1519” for “1520” (64), “Pizzaro” for “Pizarro” (84, 85), “eighteen” for “thirty-eight” (207), “1619” for “1620” (194), and “and Moscoso” for “under Moscoso” (157). There were no Jesuit “friars” (150), and no “St. Nevis” (215). Finally, are bubas “pox” or “boils” (142)?

Carelessness is responsible for such errors and for missing accents, haste for the inclination to rely on secondary sources when the primary source is available, and calculation for the adroit choice of source material. But the sheer impossibility of Cook’s self-imposed task must be held the chief culprit for his failure...