The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  One exceptionally nasty bug that did travel east across the Atlantic was a variety of the bacterium that causes the chronic skin disease known as yaws. It found its own virgin soil by hitchhiking with Columbus and his crew back to Europe, where it morphed into syphilis, setting off an epidemic in 1495. In its first incarnation, syphilis was utterly terrifying, marked by intense pain and acorn-size pustules oozing smelly green matter. It was called the “great pox” to differentiate it from the deadly but less awful smallpox. Like many diseases, syphilis has become steadily less potent with time, since venereal diseases spread more readily when their carriers do not look like something from a horror movie; carriers with less virulent strains proved with time to be the more effective vectors.

  In this global game of microbial exchange, it now appears that tuberculosis was working both sides of the street. Long assumed to have originated in the Old World, it has since been found in the lungs of a thousand-year-old Peruvian mummy, and recent DNA evidence suggests that TB first infected human ancestors millions of years ago in Africa. This is also true of the prevalent species of the human head louse, which has been found on Peruvian mummies as well.

  Any isolated human population would be at similar risk as the Native Americans were. In 1707, smallpox broke out in Iceland, where the disease had been absent for generations; more than a third of the population died. In 1846, measles appeared for the first time in sixty-five years on the isolated Faeroe Islands in the North Sea, sparking an epidemic that infected more than three-quarters of the nearly eight thousand islanders and killed more than one hundred, most of them adults. And rat-borne human plague, which moved out of Asia in the sixth century and flared up repeatedly thereafter—most notoriously in the fourteenth century as the Black Death—killed between 30 and 60 percent of the population of Europe in just two years.

  Had Indian populations, however reduced, been facing a single disease, they probably would have recovered, since survivors would have acquired immunity. But the germs came in swarms. Influenza would lay a village low, then pneumonia would pick off the weakened survivors. Smallpox and measles would strike simultaneously, the latter leaving its victims highly susceptible to tuberculosis. And while lucky survivors would acquire immunity to smallpox or measles, the flu would constantly shift strains, so that each year brought a new variety against which they were rarely protected.

  In the urbanized cultures of central Mexico, introduced diseases could quickly spread to pandemic levels, but there is no evidence that they spread much beyond what is now the northern border of Mexico, perhaps because the populations were widely scattered enough to allow each outbreak to wither and die. Instead, diseases had to wait for the northward advance of English, French, and Spanish colonial efforts in the mid-sixteenth century. When they came, the results in Florida and along the Southeast coast were typically appalling.

  In 1585–86, when the English tried to settle Roanoke Island, their arrival was followed by what Thomas Hariot called a “rare and strange accident”: “Within a few dayes after our departure from every . . . Towne, the people began to die very fast, and many in short space, in some Townes about twentie, in some fourtie, and in one sixe score, which in truthe was very manie in respect of their numbers,” Hariot wrote. “The disease also was so strange, that they neither knewe what it was, nor how to cure it, the like by report of the oldest men in the Countrey never happened before, time out of minde.”

  “This happened in no place . . . but where we had bin,” Hariot concluded. Although he was a mathematician and astronomer, whom Sir Walter Raleigh had sent to America as the expedition’s science adviser, Hariot failed to connect the dots—probably because his own company experienced no comparable illness. In “all that space of [the Indians’] sickenesse, there was no man of ours knowne to die, or that was specially sicke,” Hariot said. He chalked this up to celestial justice, since in every village where the contagion struck, the Algonquians had—to Hariot’s mind—used some “subtile devise” against the colonists.

  Despite the enormity of loss, many European writers acknowledged the ghastly death rates among Natives only in passing, and often only in terms of how the epidemics affected their own priorities, such as filling labor quotas or making religious converts. Exactly what diseases lay at the root of these outbreaks is rarely clear to the modern reader, and it’s become a minor cottage industry among historical epidemiologists to try to diagnose sixteenth- and seventeenth-century epidemics from the meager clues.

  But whichever specific microbes wreaked such havoc, the effects were ghastly. Where de Soto in 1541 found a packed and thriving urban environment along the central Mississippi Valley—the heart of the mound-building Southern Ceremonial Complex—French explorers 150 years later found a landscape that was, for all practical purposes, void of people. Similar collapses occurred among the Coosa chiefdom in Georgia. According to some archaeologists, after de Soto passed through their territory, the Coosa’s numbers rapidly fell by more than 95 percent. Throughout the Southeast, de Soto’s arrival effectively marked the end of the mound-building society that had flourished for more than four hundred years.

  In the North, however, the relative scarcity of epidemics until the early seventeenth century has puzzled and intrigued anthropologists and medical experts alike. Even leaving aside the Norse, the Indians of the Northeast had protracted contact with Basques and other fishermen, starting at least as early as the fifteenth century. These encounters might have sparked epidemics that no European was present to chronicle, but the evidence suggests that disease outbreaks in the sixteenth century must, at worst, have been occasional and locally contained, especially when compared with the overwhelming waves of infection and death sweeping across the Spanish colonies.

  Ironically, the first recorded instance of what seemed to be an epidemic illness in the Northeast struck Europeans, not Indians. Jacques Cartier’s men, settled in for the winter of 1535–36 along the St. Lawrence River near present-day Quebec City, heard that an illness had befallen the Indians at nearby Stadacona and forbade them to come near the French fort or ships. Soon, however, “the strangest sort [of sickness] that ever was eyther heard of or seen” began to spread among the French, who found their strength gone, their legs swollen, their skin speckled with bloody spots, their gums rotten and bleeding, and their teeth falling out. Cartier was so alarmed that he ordered the body of a newly dead man “ripped”—crudely dissected—“to see if by any means possible we might know what it was.”

  The impromptu autopsy did nothing to solve the mystery. Twenty-five of Cartier’s company died, and all but three or four were so weakened they could barely move through the icebound ships to care for themselves. But then, said Cartier, “God of his infinite goodenesse and mercie . . . revealed a singular and excellent remedie.” Actually, however, it was the Indians, who knew exactly what was ailing the French, who came to the rescue.

  The disorder was winter scurvy, the inevitable consequence of a meat-heavy diet with little or no vitamin C. While no one knew the physical cause of the malady, the Indians understood from long experience how to treat it. Despite ample reasons to let the French suffer, Domagaia—one of the two brothers Cartier had kidnapped and taken to France—dispatched women to collect the bark and needles of a local conifer, which was used to make a tea that cured the surviving Frenchmen in short order. “That Cartier was blind to this generosity is perhaps seen in enthusiastic thanks to God, rather than to [Domagaia], for the miraculous cure,” one historian has noted.

  Epidemics, though delayed, eventually reached the Mid-Atlantic region. The short-lived Jesuit mission on Chesapeake Bay observed a disease of unknown origin that the Algonquians there said had been raging among them for six years. Along the New England coast, the “multitude of people” John Smith and others had described—the countless villages; the fields of corn, beans, and squash; the flotillas of canoes—fell victim to a great dying between 1616 and 1622. That pandemic cleared the Northeast just as the fi
rst boatloads of English and French settlers were arriving. For religious people, it was impossible not to draw the obvious conclusion.

  A few years earlier, as a company of French sailors were trading for beaver pelts on what is now Peddocks Island in Boston Harbor, Indians suddenly attacked, burning their ship and killing all but five of the men. One of the enslaved survivors learned Massachusett well enough to berate his captors in their own tongue for “their bloudy deede,” saying that God would revenge himself upon them. “The Salvages (it seemes boasting of their strength) replyed and sayd, that they were so many that God could not kill them,” wrote Thomas Morton in 1637, recounting what was by then a common tale among the settlers in and around Plymouth Colony.

  Contrary wise, in short time after the hand of God fell heavily upon them, with such a mortall stroak that they died on heapes as they lay in their houses; and the living, that were able to shift for themselves, would runne away and let them dy, and let there Carkases ly above the ground without burial. For in a place where many inhabited, there hath been but one left a live to tell what became of the rest . . . And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle after my coming into those partes, that, as I travailed in that Forest near the Massacussets, it seemed to mee a new found Golgatha.

  “By this meanes,” Morton concluded, “the place is made so much more fitt for the English Nation to inhabit in, and erect in it Temples to the glory of God.”

  The disease that caused the New England pandemic has never been satisfactorily identified. It wasn’t smallpox, which would hit a few years later, and references by English and French observers to “plague” do not necessarily mean it was bubonic plague; the word was often used as a general term for contagion. Eyewitness accounts of jaundice among its victims suggest it may have been liver failure resulting from hepatitis, which can be quite virulent in immunologically naive communities.

  Historians have suggested that what finally unleashed epidemic disease of all sorts on the Northeast was the arrival of families, especially children. The sea voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were long enough (six weeks or more) for most viruses to burn themselves out among a small crew. The smallpox virus could more easily survive the passage, but the crewmen would likely not have served as carriers; having been exposed to it, as to measles and similar diseases, in childhood, they would have been immune. The Spanish, bringing hundreds of soldiers at a time (de Soto’s band, for example, numbered more than six hundred men) and ships whose holds were crammed with African slaves, provided the diseases easy passage. Such access was lacking in the Northeast until the early seventeenth century, when French and English families began arriving.

  For the French, the sweeping population clearances were a challenge to their twin goals of a stable fur trade and religious conversion, although there was a run on deathbed baptisms, willing or no. The outbreaks also robbed the French of their trading partners. Messamouet, for example, who had visited France and sailed his shallop with Samuel de Champlain a few years earlier, disappears from the historical record after an epidemic struck the Mi’kmaq in 1610, killing the majority of the people in many villages.

  But for the agrarian English colonists, the pandemic left a fertile land primed for the hoe. In 1619, Thomas Dermer sailed down the Maine and Massachusetts coast and found “some antient Plantations, not long since populous now utterly void.” Four years later, Christopher Levett enthused over the prospects for an English settlement in southern Maine that he would name York, saying there was “good ground, and much of it already cleared, fit for planting of corne and other fruits, having heretofore ben planted by the Salvages who are all dead.”

  Farther north, the villages of the Wapánahki had been devastated as well. In 1611, Pierre Biard, a Jesuit priest at the colony of Port Royal, found much disease along Penobscot Bay, in a village whose major sagamore was “Betsabés, a man of great discretion and prudence.” This was the same grand sachem whom George Waymouth and James Rosier called the Bashabes six years earlier, and with whom Champlain had traded before that. The Indians, Biard later wrote, “are astonished and often complain that, since the French mingle and carry on trade with them, they are dying fast, and the population is thinning out. For they assert that, before this association and intercourse, all their countries were very populous . . . Thereupon they often puzzle their brains, and sometime think that the French poison them.”

  In a peculiar way, the fortunes of war and accidents of geography could act as lifesavers. Thanks to their relative isolation, villages on Noepe (Martha’s Vineyard) and Canopache (Nantucket) were initially spared, as was most of Cape Cod, while mainland coastal villages were decimated. As Dermer skirted the shore in May 1619, he found a few survivors—“a remnant remaines, but not free of sicknesse,” he wrote. “Their disease [is] the Plague, for wee might perceive the sores of some that had escaped, who described the spots of such as usually die.”

  Dermer’s guide was Tisquantum (Squanto), returning home after being kidnapped by the English five years earlier. Having survived abduction, enslavement by the Spanish, and subsequent release, he was anxious to see his village of Patuxet, home to as many as two thousand Wampanoag. Instead, Dermer and Tisquantum found the place empty, full of bones and weeds. The coastal Wampanoag had been all but obliterated, and Dermer finally reached the survivors two days’ journey inland.

  One of the sachems with whom Dermer eventually met was probably Massasoit, who faced an enormous problem. Not only had the epidemic gutted the Wampanoag, but it had spared their enemies to the west, the Narragansett, who, it seemed, had deflected the spirits that brought on illness through a burning ritual in which valuable possessions and even homes were sacrificed. More likely, the state of war between the two groups ensured that none of the infected Wampanoags came in contact with the Narragansett. It was into this power vacuum that the Pilgrims would step two years later, to be welcomed by Massasoit, who had empty land to share, had powerful enemies to hold at bay, and was badly in need of allies.

  Eventually, the pathogens reached everywhere. English immigrants, their bloodstreams awash with plasmodium parasites, were bitten by mosquitoes as they worked in the fields of their new homes, and malaria began to spread through coastal Indian communities from Massachusetts to Virginia. The Swedes, settling along Delaware Bay in the 1630s, were confronted by Lenape sachems who accused them of bringing a manitou, or evil spirit. Don’t be ridiculous, replied a young man named Peter Lindeström. “Our ship had [not] brought along any evil . . . as many of our people were dying and the sickness had come among them,” he said. “[We] told them that sickness had formerly often been among them, through which whole tribes had died out.”

  The Lenape told Dutch colonists that before smallpox came, “they were ten times as numerous as they are now, and that their population had been melted down by this disease, whereof nine-tenths of them had died.” Along the lower Delaware River, a Lenape in 1670 lamented, “In my grandfather’s time the small-pox came; in my father’s time the small-pox came; and now in my time the small-pox is come.”

  Thanks to extensive Indian trade networks, the diseases ran well beyond the handful of European outposts. In the summer of 1634, twenty-five French children arrived at Quebec City, and not long after, an outbreak of what was described as “a sort of measles, and an oppression of the stomach” erupted among Montagnais (Innu) and other traders coming to the French settlements. They carried the contagion farther back into the Great Lakes, to the twenty or so large villages of the Wendat-Tionontate, the confederacy better known as the Huron-Petun, along the eastern shore of Lake Huron. “The people of the countries through which they pass are all sick, and are dying in great numbers,” wrote one Jesuit. As many as 2,500 people, a tenth of the Wendat-Tionontate, may have perished in this single outbreak; within five years, between one-half and two-thirds of the Huron-Petun were dead.

  No one really knows what cultures were lost in the vir
gin soil outbreaks. By the time Europeans finally breached the wall of the Allegheny Mountains to reach the Ohio Valley in the early eighteenth century, they found an almost completely empty land, into which were starting to move refugees from crumbling tribes farther to the east and south. All that is known about the original inhabitants—known today simply as “the Monongahela people,” for lack of a better name—comes from the excavations of their stockaded villages, built on defensible high ground. But not all enemies are visible, nor can all be stopped by log walls.

  The new illnesses did not simply cause physical suffering. They brought down entire social orders, killing elders in whom authority was vested and knowledge preserved, breaking up families and communities, disrupting hunting and planting (and thus generating or exacerbating famine), sparking warfare and tides of refugees, and robbing religious leaders of public confidence.

  But Indians also fought back, with the weapons they had. The Cherokee blamed smallpox on evil spirits known as kosvkvskini and battled them with a seven-day ritual they developed known as the itohvnv, or “smallpox dance,” in which the entire village remained in the council house, taking special medicine and listening to prayers. While this may not have slowed the disease—in fact, corralling everyone in a council house may have aided its spread—it gave the Cherokee a cultural bulwark against what must have been a terrifying loss of control over their lives.

  Disease was not the only agent of change. The Europeans also brought trade goods, such as metal hatchets, knives, and pots; wool blankets; cotton cloth; and glass beads. Traditional trade networks were in flux as furs flowed from the interior to the coast, where many tribes (the Mi’kmaq in particular) set themselves up as middlemen. With the traders came missionaries, bringing a new god and a new religion, exploiting the upheaval for which they themselves were partially responsible.