diseases proved to be the most destructive agent if a fatal complex

some Indian groups fared much better than others in the face of European expansion

It befell an american geographer Carl O Sauer to be among the forms modern scholars to call attention to the impact of the Old World disease on Native American life (1935), a relationship that Las Casas understood well and chose not to emhasize

until the beginning of the 20th century, the Black legend ruled, a view that attributed native loss of life primarily to demoniac acts of cruelty. This was a vision promoted by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas.

provoked a lot of heated debate and there is a lot of disagreement

At the low end, Verlinden (1968) suggests a mere 60000, roughly half the figures put forward by Amiama (1959) and Rosenblat (1976)

Sauer, shrewdly uncommitted refers to a figure of 1.100.000 also the number that Las casas mentions (p.428)

Critics of the low number accuse them of defending columbus. Rosenblat (1976) explains the extinction of 10000 instead of 3 million is also not a glorification of colonialism.

1519 what safer says Hispaniola has been reduced to a sorry shell

Until recently, the disease factor could not be invoked with confidence because most scholars believed that the first major outbreak of Old World sickness was smallpox, which did not appear in Hispaniola until December 1518 (N. D. Cook and Lovell 1992, 221)

Sauer (1966, 204) called that outbreak "the first epidemic of record."

Henige (1986, 19) declares that his perusal of sources revealed "no serious or epidemic incidence of infec- tious disease in Hispaniola before late 1518."

there were sick people on the very first voyage and and it is unlikely that the sick would have stayed isolated so that the natives would not have picked up any diseases. They received support from Guerra (1985)

suggests that there was an outbreak of Influenza on Hispañola

while the natives suffered infinitely, the invaders were also affected.Of the 1500 men who sailed from Ca'diz on September 25, 1493, scarcely 200 were alive a decade later. Columbus actually himself became ill bur recovered.

influenza transmitted by pigs -> 8 sows had been taken on board -> source of 10 million deaths in 1518 -> then would spread to the continent.

main difference: native peoples in the Philippines lived alongside domesticated animals, whereas those in the West Indies did not. This meant that humans in the former archipelago had ad- justed biologically to the presence among them of diseases originating in animals, including swine fever.

contact with China from early on also ensured to the old world disease pool

seems like afterwards the Spaniards id not want nothing to do with that area and knew that the riches would be found on the mainland.

The Spaniards could never have conquered the city without the support of the diseases. He also admits that the could have never been defeated without the help of the natives. There was a lot of turmoil that broke out because of smallpox, which worked to the invaders advantage.

While the Spaniards were in Tlaxcala, a great plague broke out here in Tenochtitldn. It began to spread during the thirteenth month [September 30-October 19, 1520] and lasted for seventy days, striking everywhere in the city and killing a vast number of our people. Sores erupted on our faces, our breasts, our bellies; we were covered with agonizing sores from head to foot. The illness was so dreadful that no one could walk or move. The sick were so utterly helpless that they could only lie on their beds like corpses, unable to move their limbs or even their heads. They could not lie face down or roll from one side to the other. If they did move their bodies, they screamed with pain. A great many died from this plague, and many others died of hunger. They could not get up to search for food, and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they starved to death in their beds.6. Look up footnote 6 here and chip it into the essay

scholars agree that the disease described there was smallpox. Disagreement exists over how many perished. (p.430)

S. F. Cook and Simpson (1948) first volunteered 11 million for central Mexico, a figure Borah and S. F. Cook (1963) later raised to 25.2 million. Rosenblat (1954) reckoned 4.5 million for all of Mexico, an estimate close to that of Sanders's (1972) 5-6 million inhabitants for the Aztec empire. Sand- ers and archaeologist Barbara Price (1968) favor 12-15 million for all of Mesoamerica. For the Basin of Mexico, Sanders (1976,149) calculates 1-1.2 million

Zambardino concerns himself more with meth- odological procedure than source interpreta- tion, offering a contact figure of 5-10 million for central Mexico, which for him "matches the evidence gathered and presented by Borah and Cook far more accurately than their esti- mate of 25 million

states that all of these numbers contain high margins of error and is in this statement talking about the calculations for the population of Cook and Borah 1971)

The Indian population fell by 1620-1625 to a low of approxi- mately 3% of its size at the time the Europeans first landed on the shores of Veracruz. Even if these figures are not true they caused a lot of debate.This school is also called the Berkeley schoo (p.430)

first disease is smallpox, we even know the name of the black slave. so there is convergence about the first wave from 1520 onwards, that is not the case for the second wave

the manner in which a disease is presently thought to behave may not correspond to its manifestation of the past. (2) a second problem is that later outbreaks involved several epidemics.

while the population followed some sudden drops the livestock actually increased. Ecological consequence of the introduction for the animals is still poorly understood

posal to arrive at a New World population in 1492 of 57.3 million, which he now adjusts to 53.9 million to incorporate the research findings of the past fifteen years. Denevan's hemispheric estimates are notably higher than the 8.4 million of Kroeber (1939), the 13.4 mil- lion of Rosenblat (1954), and the 15.5 million of Steward (1949). On the other hand, Denevan's reckoning falls far below that of Borah (1976), who mentions upwards of 100 million, and the 90-113 million favored by Dobyns (1966). His estimates most approximate the 37-48.5 mil- lion of Sapper (1924) and the 40-50 million of Spinden (1928). In general, a trend towards acceptance of higher rather than lower contact estimates is apparent, with growing acknowl- edgement that Native American populations a century or so after European intrusion were roughly one-tenth or less their contact size. The disease factor is crucial in any attempt to explain the massive fall in Indian numbers (N. D. Cook and Lovell 1992).

Progress has been made, but much remains to be done. It would be a mistake, for instance, to think that balanced recognition of the role disease played in depopulating the Spanish In- dies is shared by all. This is manifestly not the case, nor is it likely to be. The disease issue is distorted or dodged by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons, many of them governed more by ideological conviction than by igno- rance or lack of interest. In a study of the plague of 1629 in Muzo, a mining community in Colombia, Friede (1967, 341) declares that "when there were epidemics in Spanish Amer- ica, these were neither general nor of identical consequences throughout the regions af- fected." We may concede Friede the latter point, but he seems unusually blinkered on the former, perhaps influenced too much by the data for the area he happens to know best. For him, however, there exist "numberless docu- ments which definitely attribute the decrease of the Indian population to excessive work, malnutrition, flight, segregation of the sexes, ill-treatment, cruelty, conscription for expedi- tions, enslavement [and the labor draft known as] the mita" (Friede 1967, 339).

Sempat As- sadourian (1985) is of a similar disposition. The mindset is perhaps best exemplified by the Per- uvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa (1990), who manages to address "questions of conquest" in an extended essay in Harper's without once demonstrating awareness that the transfer of disease had a marked influence on how events unfolded.

At the same time as some intellectuals con- veniently ignore or marginalize the disease question, others embrace it far too wholeheart- edly. The trait is particularly evident among some Spanish scholars, whose near-exclusive focus on epidemiology and biological inequal- ity serves to deny that which cannot be denied: barbarous heavy-handedness on the part of the conqueror, from which Indians suffered dread- fully and against which individuals like Las Casas fought and lobbied nobly. Thus we may concur with Zamora (1985, 131) that disease must be considered "the fundamental cause" but express reservation at its being designated the "almost single" cause of native disappear- ance. Similar proclivity to oversimplify the mat- ter may also be found in Guerra (1986, 58), who states with more than a shrug of resignation that "the American Indian was victimized by sickness, not by Spaniards." Historical autopsy should not be performed that surgically, least of all on the countless many who died a con- quered death after October 12, 1492.