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2 The Other Invaders Deadly Diseases and Extraordinary Animals

      European colonists did not arrive alone in the Americas. They brought a great deal of baggage, some of it unintentionally. Many of the most significant changes in America’s natural environments came about through autonomous workings of natural organisms that accompanied colonists and traders. These included disease-causing microbes, or pathogens, domesticated animals such as cows, sheep, and horses, and also weeds, or plants – many of them imported – that grew in conditions of disturbance brought on by plowing, grazing, or other colonial activities.

      The impact of these organisms was enormous. Together, they remade much of American nature to better suit the new arrivals from Europe. While all of them had different effects, which varied from one region to the next, it is fair to say that without these small, often microscopic “co-invaders,” it is unlikely that Europeans would have conquered those vast sections of the Americas which their descendants now dominate.

In the material presented below, we see how the linking of the Americas to the rest of the world in the early colonial period (and even after) meant that the nature of the New World was suddenly attached to the nature of the Old World, often with astounding consequences. Alfred Crosby explores the impact of microscopic germs, viruses, and plasmodia on American Indians, and particularly the impact of smallpox and its role in the conquest of the Americas and Australia. This piece is taken from one of Crosby’s most famous books, but some of his terms need to be explained. Crosby refers to “Pangaea,” which is the name scholars give to the world’s single great land mass before it broke into continents millions of years ago, long before people existed. In part, Crosby argues that after the world split into separate continents, different disease environments eventually emerged in different places. To cross the ocean becomes, in Crosby’s narrative, to cross “the seams of Pangaea.”

      The people who cross the ocean, sailors, he occasionally refers to by their Portuguese name, marinheiros, because many of the earliest European sailors and explorers were Portuguese. And finally, he refers to “neo-Europes,” by which he means those parts of the world outside Europe where the marinheiros and other Europeans settled and successfully transformed the natural environment into some approximation of European nature. These include the temperate zones of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of southern Africa, among others. In Crosby’s analysis, the process of making a strange new environment into a “neo-Europe” was the key to success for any European colonial regime.

      In this excerpt, keep a close eye on how the diseases mentioned come to the Americas, and pay special attention to the way in which long isolation from the disease environments of Eurasia makes American Indians especially vulnerable at the time of contact. Why did Europeans bring diseases to Indians, without Indians having diseases of their own to kill Europeans? Also, you might ask why disease did not play the same role in the Europeans’ attempted conquest of Africa, where pathogens worked in the opposite direction, often undermining the power of the colonists. Does the fact that natural organisms often worked to European and Euro-American advantage mean that the conquest was “natural?” Or were settlers who took the land from dying Indians merely exploiting the environmental conditions they had created, intentionally or otherwise?

It is important to remember that as important as biological change can be, it never determines the totality of history. In other words, we must resist what is called biological or environmental determinism – the belief that nature determines history. Instead, we should try always to keep in mind that people make their histories from a range of possibilities within any environmental setting. Indian responses to the conflagration of smallpox and other Eurasian ailments are as much a part of environmental history as the epidemics themselves. This chapter includes a document offering clues to how some Indian people thought about smallpox and how to save themselves from it. Also, we will consider how modern experience of a virgin soil epidemic, the COVID-19 outbreak of 2020, offers us a chance to rethink Crosby’s history of epidemics among Native American peoples. Finally, it is important to keep in mind that not all the Eurasian biota that arrived with the Europeans were so bad for Indian peoples. The documents in this chapter suggest how Indians made use of another European organism that flourished in the Americas, the horse.

       Virgin Soil Epidemics

       Alfred W. Crosby

      (Excerpt from Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.)

      … We must examine the colonial histories of Old World pathogens, because their success provides the most spectacular example of the power of the biogeographical realities that underlay the success of European imperialists overseas. It was their germs, not these imperialists themselves, for all their brutality and callousness, that were chiefly responsible for sweeping aside the indigenes and opening the Neo-Europes to demographic takeover…

      The isolation of the indigenes of the Americas and Australia from Old World germs prior to the last few hundred years was nearly absolute. Not only did very few people of any origin cross the great oceans, but those who did must have been healthy or they would have died on the way, taking their pathogens with them. The indigenes were not without their own infections, of course. The Amerindians had at least pinta, yaws, venereal syphilis, hepatitis, encephalitis, polio, some varieties of tuberculosis (not those usually associated with pulmonary disease), and intestinal parasites, but they seem to have been without any experience with such Old World maladies as smallpox, measles, diphtheria, trachoma, whooping cough, chicken pox, bubonic plague, malaria, typhoid fever, cholera, yellow fever, dengue fever, scarlet fever, amebic dysentery, influenza, and a number of helminthic infestations. The Australian Aborigines had their own infections – among them trachoma – but otherwise the list of Old World infections with which they were unfamiliar before Cook was probably similar to the list of Amerindian slaughterers. It is worth noting that as late as the 1950s it was difficult to get a staphylococcal culture from Aborigines living in the sterile environs of the central Australian desert.

Indications of the susceptibility of Amerindians and Aborigines to Old World infections appear almost immediately after the intrusion of the whites. In 1492, Columbus kidnapped a number of West Indians to train as interpreters and to show to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Several of them seem to have died on the stormy voyage to Europe, and so Columbus had only seven to display in Spain, along with some gold trinkets, Arawack finery, and a few parrots. When, less than a year later, he returned to American waters, only two of the seven were still alive. In 1495, Columbus, searching for a West Indian commodity that would sell in Europe, sent 550 Amerindian slaves, 12 to 35 years of age, more or less, off across the Atlantic. Two hundred died on the difficult voyage; 350 survived to be put to work in Spain. The majority of these soon were also dead “because the land did not suit them.”¹

      The British never shipped large numbers of Australian Aborigines to Europe as slaves or servants or in any other category, but in 1792, two Aborigines, Bennilong and Yemmerrawanyea, did sail to England as honored pets. Despite what we can assume was good treatment, they did no better than the first Amerindians in Spain. Bennilong pined and declined and showed indications of a pulmonary infection, but he did survive to return to his home. His companion succumbed to the same infection (perhaps tuberculosis, which was very widespread in Western Europe at the end of the eighteenth century) and was buried beneath a stone inscribed “In memory