Smallpox Conquers the Americas

When Columbus arrived in the West Indies in 1492, he described the native people as being of ‘pleasing appearance with fine features and medium height with muscular bodies.’ Their healthy appearance, however, belied their vulnerability to the diseases of the Old World.

In 1518 an outbreak of smallpox erupted on the island of Hispaniola. Native Americans had never been exposed to smallpox before, and the effect was catastrophic. A Spanish eyewitness estimated that only a thousand people on the island survived. The epidemic soon spread to Mexico and Peru, with similar consequences.

The following century, when the Pilgrim settlers arrived in the area of Massachusetts in North America, they discovered that smallpox had practically cleared the land of inhabitants. “The natives, they are near all dead of the smallpox,” wrote Pilgrim leader John Winthrop.

Native Americans, of course, were not the only victims of smallpox. “Over the course of human history, smallpox claimed hundreds of millions of lives, far more than plague . . . and all the wars of the twentieth century combined,” notes the book Scourge​—The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox.