The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

  In their wandering passage through the Caribbean, the ships with their sick crews unknowingly spread epidemics of illness at many of the ports they visited. By 1494, these epidemics merged into a plague raging across Hispaniola and the rest of the Caribbean. “There came among [the Indians] such illness, death and misery,” Bartolomé de las Casas wrote, “that of fathers, mothers and children, an infinite number sadly died.” He estimated that a third of the population died in the two years from 1494 to 1496.

  A table of statistics for the island of Hispaniola tells the story:

  Date: 1492

  Native Population: ~500,000 (disputed)

  Date: 1508

  Native Population: 60,000

  Date: 1510

  Native Population: 33,523

  Date: 1514

  Native Population: 26,334

  Date: 1518 [before smallpox]

  Native Population: 18,000

  Date: 1519 [after smallpox]

  Native Population: 1,000

  Date: 1542

  Native Population: 0

  Not all of these deaths were caused by disease, of course; forced labor, starvation, cruelty, murder, rape, enslavement, and relocation also contributed mightily to the extinction of the Taíno Indians of Hispaniola and the other peoples of the Caribbean. But the overriding factor was European disease, against which the New World had almost no resistance. Modern epidemiologists have studied the old accounts to figure out what diseases struck down the Indians during these first epidemics. Their best guesses are influenza, typhus, and dysentery. Many later diseases joined the first in triggering wave after wave of mortality, including measles, mumps, yellow fever, malaria, chicken pox, typhoid, plague, diphtheria, whooping cough, tuberculosis, and—deadliest of all—smallpox.

  These epidemics did not stay in the islands. Las Casas described a “drag-net” of death that spread to the Central American mainland “and devastated all this sphere.” Native traders may have first spread contagion to the mainland before 1500; people may have begun dying there even before Europeans arrived. But we know for certain that Columbus, on his fourth voyage in 1502, inadvertently unleashed disease on mainland America.

  While probing for a passage westward to the Indies, Columbus reached Honduras’s Bay Islands on July 30, 1502. After spending a few weeks in the islands, he sailed on to the Central American main, becoming the first European to touch land there. He anchored in a harbor near the present-day town of Trujillo, and he christened the new land “Honduras” (the Depths) because of the very deep water he had encountered near shore. After disembarking on the Honduran mainland, he and his men held a Christian mass on August 14, 1502, and claimed the land for Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain.

  After meeting with friendly Indians, Columbus, who was ill yet again (with what we are not sure), continued exploring southward with his many sick men, sailing along the coastline of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama, stopping frequently along the way. Like spot fires set in a forest, disease spread outward from these points of contact, burning deep into the interior lands, far outracing actual European exploration. We do not know how many died in these first epidemics; the natives who witnessed them did not leave any accounts, and there were no European chroniclers.

  But the real apocalypse was yet to come. That arrived in the form of smallpox. Las Casas wrote that “it was carried by someone from Castile,” and it arrived in Hispaniola in December of 1518. “Of the immensity of peoples that this island held, and that we have seen with our own eyes,” Las Casas wrote, only “a thousand” were left by the end of 1519. In January it spread to Puerto Rico, and from there it raged across the Caribbean and jumped to the mainland. By September of 1519, smallpox had reached the Valley of Mexico.

  Traditional Indian remedies against illness—sweats, cold baths, and medicinal herbs—were ineffective against smallpox. Indeed, many efforts at healing only seemed to hasten death. In Europe, at its worst, smallpox killed about one out of three people it infected; in the Americas the death rate was higher than 50 percent and in many cases approached 90 to 95 percent.

  Epidemiologists generally agree that smallpox is the cruelest disease ever to afflict the human race. In the century before it was eradicated in the 1970s, it killed more than half a billion people and left millions of others horribly scarred and blind. It inflicts unbearable suffering, both physical and psychological. It usually starts like the flu, with headache, fever, and body aches; and then it breaks out as a sore throat that soon spreads into a body rash. As the disease develops over the subsequent week, the victim often experiences frightful hallucinatory dreams and is racked by a mysterious sensation of existential horror. The rash turns into spots that swell into papules, and then fluid-filled pustules that cover the entire body, including the soles of the feet. These pustules sometimes merge, and the outer layer of skin becomes detached from the body. In the most deadly variety of smallpox, the hemorrhagic form, called the bloody pox or black pox, the skin turns a deep purple or takes on a charred look, and comes off in sheets. The victim often “bleeds out,” blood pouring from every orifice in the body. It is extremely contagious. Unlike most other viruses, smallpox can survive and remain virulent for months or years outside the body in clothing, blankets, and sickrooms.

  The Indians were in abject terror of it. It was like nothing they had ever experienced before. The history of the Conquest contains many Spanish eyewitness accounts attesting to the horrors of the pandemic. “It was a dreadful illness,” wrote one friar, “and many people died of it. No one could walk; they could only lie stretched out on their beds. No one could move, not even able to turn their heads. One could not lie face down, or lie on the back, nor turn from one side to another. When they did move, they screamed in pain… Many died from it, but many died only of hunger. There were deaths from starvation, for they had no one left to care for them.”

  These epidemics of disease weakened Indian military resistance, and in many instances it aided the Spanish in their conquest. But overall, the Spanish (and Columbus personally) were deeply dismayed by the vast die-offs; the deaths of so many Indians interfered with their slaving businesses, killed their servants, and emptied their plantations and mines of forced labor. When smallpox arrived, the Indians often responded with panic and flight, abandoning towns and cities, leaving behind the sick and dead. And while the Spanish were less susceptible to these epidemics, they were not immune, and many also died in the general conflagration.

  Epidemics cleared out huge swaths of the New World even before Europeans got there. There are numerous accounts of European explorers arriving in a village for the first time, only to find everyone dead, the houses full of rotting, pustule-covered corpses.

  Historians once marveled at how Cortés, with his army of five hundred soldiers, defeated the Aztec empire of over a million people. Various ideas have been advanced: that the Spanish had crucial technological advantages in horses, swords, crossbows, cannon, and armor; that the Spanish had superior tactics honed by centuries of fighting the Moors; that the Indians held back, fearful the Spanish were gods; and that the Aztecs’ subjugation and misrule of surrounding chiefdoms had created conditions ripe for revolt. All this is true. But the real conquistador was smallpox. Cortés and his troops occupied the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan (the future Mexico City) in 1519, but this cannot be counted as a conquest: The uneasy Aztec emperor, Moctezuma, invited Cortés into the city, unsure if he were god or man. Eight months later, after Moctezuma was murdered under murky circumstances (perhaps by the Spanish, perhaps by his own people), the Indians rose up and handily drove the Spanish from the city, in the so-called Noche Triste, the “Night of Sorrows.” In this crushing rout, many Spanish soldiers either were killed or drowned as they fled the island on which the city was built, because they had overloaded their pockets with gold. After their flight, the Spanish encamped in Tlaxcala, thirty miles east of Tenochtitlan, licking their wounds and wondering what to do next. At that moment, smallpox
invaded the Valley of Mexico.

  “When the Christians were exhausted from war,” one friar wrote, “God saw fit to send the Indians smallpox.” In sixty days, smallpox carried off at least half of the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan, which had a precontact population of 300,000 or more. Smallpox also killed the very capable successor to Moctezuma, the emperor Cuitláhuac, who in his brief, forty-day rule had swiftly been building military alliances that, had he survived, would very likely have repelled Cortés. But with at least half the population dead and the city and surrounding countryside engulfed in chaos by the epidemic, Cortés was able to retake the city in 1521. The worst effect of smallpox was the complete demoralization of the Indians: They saw clearly that disease decimated them while largely sparing the Spanish, and they concluded they had been cursed and rejected by their gods, who had shifted to the side of the Spanish. As the Spanish marched into the city, one observer wrote, “The streets were so filled with dead and sick people, that our men walked over nothing but bodies.”

  At the same time that smallpox was ravaging Mexico, it burned southward into the Maya realm before the Spanish arrived. While the Maya cities were no longer inhabited, the Maya people were spread out over the region and were still known for their fierceness and military prowess. The contagion paved the way for the conquest of Guatemala four years later by one of Cortés’s captains.

  In the ten years following the first outbreak of smallpox in the New World, the disease had stretched deep into South America. The pandemics also felled several of the great pre-Columbian kingdoms in North America. From 1539 to 1541, explorer Hernando de Soto passed through a powerful and flourishing chiefdom called Coosa, which occupied territory encompassing parts of Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, and had a population of perhaps 50,000 people. But twenty years later, by the time the next European came through, Coosa had been almost entirely abandoned, the landscape littered with empty houses, the once-abundant gardens overgrown with thistles and weeds. In the Mississippi River Valley, de Soto had found forty-nine towns, but the French explorers La Salle and Joliet, a century later, encountered only seven wretched settlements, a decline of 86 percent. Most of southeastern North America had been cleared out by a massive die-off from disease.

  Though the figures are hotly disputed, scholars estimate that, before Columbus’s arrival, the population of North America was about 4.4 million, Mexico around 21 million, the Caribbean 6 million, and Central America another 6 million. But by 1543, the Indian peoples of the main Caribbean islands (Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico) had become extinct: almost six million dead. In the smaller islands, a few shattered native populations clung to a precarious existence. The fall of Tenochtitlan, the general collapse of native populations everywhere, and the continuing waves of pandemics allowed the Spanish to quickly crush Indian resistance throughout most of Central America.

  Compare this to the Spanish conquest of the Philippines, which occurred at the same time. The Spanish were just as ruthless there, but the conquest was not aided by disease: Filipinos were resistant to Old World diseases, and the islands experienced no mass die-offs or population crashes. As a result, the Spanish were forced to accommodate and adjust to coexistence with the indigenous people of the Philippines, who remained strong and retained their languages and cultures. Once the Spanish left, the Iberian influence largely faded away, along with the Spanish language, which is today spoken by few.

  But did this catastrophe reach Mosquitia, and if so, how did it get into the remote interior, so far from Spanish contact? We don’t have much source material on how the 1519 smallpox epidemic affected Honduras specifically. Common sense tells us that, with smallpox raging both north and south, Honduras must have been badly afflicted. Ten years after smallpox, another dreadful pandemic swept the New World: measles. This we know ravaged Honduras with exceptional cruelty. For Europeans, measles is a far milder disease than smallpox; although easily spread, it rarely kills. But when it reached the New World it proved to be almost as deadly, killing at least 25 percent of the affected population. The conquistador Pedro de Alvarado sent a report from Guatemala to Charles V in 1532: “Throughout New Spain, there passed a sickness which they say is measles, which struck the Indians and swept the land, leaving it totally empty.” The measles pandemic coincided with epidemics of other diseases in Honduras, among them possibly typhoid, flu, and plague.

  Antonio de Herrera, another Spanish chronicler of the period, wrote that “at this time [1532] there was such a great epidemic of measles in the Province of Honduras, spreading from house to house and village to village, that many people died… and two years ago there was a general epidemic of pleurisy and stomach pains which also carried away many Indians.” Oviedo wrote that half the population of Honduras died from disease in the years from 1530 to 1532. One Spanish missionary lamented that only 3 percent of the population of the coast had survived and “it is likely the rest of the Indians will in short time decay.”

  The British geographer Linda Newson produced a magisterial study of the demographic catastrophe in Honduras during the Spanish period, entitled The Cost of Conquest: Indian Decline in Honduras Under Spanish Rule. It is the most detailed analysis of what happened in that country. Precise figures of the original population are hard to come by, especially for eastern Honduras and Mosquitia, which remained uncolonized, but Newson evaluated a vast amount of evidence and provided the best possible estimates—despite, she noted, being hampered by the lack of good archaeological work.

  Drawing on early narratives, population estimates, cultural studies, and ecological data, Newson concluded that the areas of Honduras first colonized by the Spanish started with a pre-Conquest population of 600,000. By 1550, only 32,000 native people remained. This is a population collapse of 95 percent, a staggering statistic. She broke down the figures like this: 30,000 to 50,000 were killed in wars of conquest, while another 100,000 to 150,000 were captured in slave raids and transported out of the country. Almost all the rest—over 400,000—died of disease.

  In eastern Honduras, which includes Mosquitia, Newson estimated a pre-Conquest population density of about thirty people per square mile, establishing the population of the interior mountains of Mosquitia at about 150,000. However, the discovery of large cities like T1 and T3—which Newson did not know about when she wrote her book in 1986—significantly revises that calculus. Regardless of the actual numbers, though, we now know this was a thriving and prosperous region, linked to its neighbors by extensive trading routes; it was not at all the remote, sparsely inhabited jungle we find today. We have the testimony of Cortés and Pedraza of extensive and rich provinces, and we have the evidence from T1 and T3, Las Crucitas, Wankibila, and other former cities in Mosquitia.

  The mountain valleys like T1 were too deep in the jungle to be of interest to conquistadors or slavers; the people living there should have continued to flourish long after the Europeans arrived. Many of these areas weren’t opened up until the twentieth century or later, and, as we now know, parts remain unexplored even today. But given how diseases spread, it is virtually impossible for the T1 valley to have escaped the general contagion. Almost certainly, epidemics of European disease swept T1, T3, and the rest of Mosquitia sometime between 1520 and 1550. (More and better archaeology is needed to refine this; perhaps the continuing excavations at T1 will help.)

  Those pathogens invaded Mosquitia via two pathways. The first was through trade. When Columbus landed in Honduras’s Bay Islands, he described a memorable sight: a huge trading canoe, eight feet wide and sixty feet long, manned by twenty-five paddlers. The canoe had a hut built amidships and it was heaped with valuable trade goods: copper, flint, weapons, textiles, and beer. There was extensive maritime trade throughout the Caribbean and Central America. Some historians say the canoe Columbus saw must have been operated by Maya traders, but it’s more likely they were Chibcha traders, given that the Bay Islands were settled not by the Maya but by Chibchan-speaking people who had ties to Mosquitia. The
se merchants, whoever they might be, were certainly trading with the mainland, as well as with Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico—some archaeologists believe they may have reached as far north as the Mississippi River delta. And the two main highways into Mosquitia—the Río Plátano and the Río Patuca—flow into the sea not far eastward of the Bay Islands. During the time of plagues in the Caribbean, there can be little doubt these traders, peddling goods from the islands and coasts, carried European pathogens up the rivers into Mosquitia, where the microbes escaped into the local populations and burned deep into the hinterlands.

  A second likely track of infection was the slave trade. Before slavery was restricted by the Spanish crown in 1542, slaving parties scoured Honduras, kidnapping Indians to work plantations, mines, and households. The first Indians enslaved came from the islands and coasts. As disease wiped out these early captives, the Spanish raiders went deeper into the countryside to find replacements. (The African slave trade also ramped up at this time.) By the 1530s, the slavers were ravaging the Mosquito Coast and the Olancho Valley, where Catacamas is today, destroying villages and rounding up people like cattle. On three sides—west, north, and south—Mosquitia was surrounded by brutal slave raids. Thousands of Indians fleeing their villages took refuge in the rainforest. A great many disappeared into the mountains of Mosquitia. Some of these refugees, unfortunately, carried European disease into the otherwise well-protected interior valleys.

  If we follow this hypothetical scenario to its conclusion, then sometime in the early 1500s several epidemics of disease swept T1 in close succession. If the mortality rates were similar to the rest of Honduras and Central America, about 90 percent of the inhabitants died of disease. The survivors, shattered and traumatized, abandoned the city, leaving the cache of sacred objects behind as a final offering to the gods, ritually breaking many to release their spirits. This was not a grave offering for an individual; it was a grave offering for an entire city, the cenotaph of a civilization. The same abandonment, with broken offerings, occurred across the region.