Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-1782 (review)

Elizabeth Fenn provides an excellent academic study of what she describes as the smallpox (variola) epidemic of 1775-82 that, by her estimates, killed a minimum of 130,658 people on the mainland of North America. Her most significant discoveries suggest that smallpox spread northward from Mexico internally, to afflict the native American population as far north as Vancouver—throwing into doubt the long-held notion that it was spread by Spanish and English ships along the Northwest Coast.

With regard to the East Coast of North America during the period of her study, Fenn's evidence is both less conclusive and more sinister. It is less conclusive with regard to the claim of an epidemic among white English- and French-speaking Americans: Boston had experienced much worse in 1721, for example, and her numbers seem to make sense as an epidemic generally among populations that either did not practice wholesale inoculation (Spanish America) or were brought together to fight a war and were selectively inoculated. By her own account, those most affected by the outbreak of smallpox on the East Coast were soldiers and runaway slaves. The former was the more benign of the outbreaks, if that word can be used in reference to one of the most devastating and virulent viruses to afflict humans. By far the greatest casualties of the epidemic, using the Baseline (Minimal) Mortality Rate found on page 274, were the Spanish and the Indians they either conquered or came in contact with, spreading the disease internally northward from the teeming urban centers of Mexico. Of the total 130,658 estimated casualties of smallpox between 1775 and 1782, fully 113,557 were from Spanish America.

Why the author failed to explore the possible spread of the disease either to or from the Caribbean and Atlantic islands is not clear, but because of the widespread contact among Spanish and European colonists, native "Indians," and residents of African descent (slave and free), that area should have been a breeding ground for variola and an excellent test of her theories of transmission, treatment, and the course of the epidemic. In Bermuda, for example, where Spanish bullion galleons met their doom on the coral reefs and goods were traded legally and illegally with the mainland, the fear of smallpox was omnipresent. For the British islands there should be detailed reports on population and the extent of variola recorded among the Colonial Office Papers at the British Archives (formerly the PRO). The archivist of Bermuda recently indicated that such a study was under way by a Scottish scholar, but to date I have located no published work on the subject. To ignore variola in the islands of the Atlantic and the Caribbean in this period may prove a serious oversight. In Bermuda by 1837 there were only 1,158 people out of 8,465 who had not "had smallpox and who have not been vaccinated" (Bermuda Archives, 1837 unpaginated annual report of the Governor General).

Possibly an even more serious omission from this book, however, is research in the Spanish archives. With such a high percentage of casualties emerging from Mexican sources, it might have greatly strengthened the author's narrative and argument if she had explored the central Spanish archives for reports on the extent of the epidemic. To be fair, her research in Mexican burial records is extensive and her conclusions plausible (p. 355 n. 20)—but the Spanish are known for their extensive, fastidious bureaucratic reporting from the colonies, and such a source is not to be overlooked.

Of the total 8,102 baseline casualties of variola in the continental English-speaking colonies, fully 5,980 were individuals of African origin, enticed to fight or flee for their freedom by the British Army...