Assignment 2 200 words
Describe the European contact with the indigenous population? What was on the mind and arriving Europeans? What were their goals?
Sickness, Starvation, and Death in Early Hispaniola
Author(s): Noble David Cook
Source: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Winter, 2002), pp. 349-386
Published by: The MIT Press
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Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxII:3 (Winter, 2002), 349-386.
Noble David Cook
Sickness, Starvation, and Death in Early
Hispaniola The island of Hispaniola, site of the first European
settlement in the New World, has always intrigued historians of
the Americas. The Spaniards on Columbus’ first voyage, inauspi-
ciously grounded there by the shipwreck of the Santa Maria, hast-
ily constructed the fortress of Navidad, where many of them were
to remain when Columbus sailed back to Spain to report his “dis-
covery.” Months later, on Columbus’ return with a second fleet,
about 1,5oo00 Europeans ventured to the island, lured by the prom-
ise of wealth. The fate of those settlers, as well as that of the is-
land’s thousands of Taino inhabitants, provides a case study for
encounters between peoples previously isolated from each other.
In the I96os, two interrelated themes based on new
historiographical trends stirred fresh scholarly inquiry-the eco-
logical impact of the confrontation between the Old and New
Worlds and the rapid, almost complete disappearance of the is-
land’s aboriginal inhabitants. Historical quantification and demog-
raphy suddenly came to the fore. Woodrow W. Borah and
Sherburne F. Cook, Essays in Population History (Berkeley, 1979-
1982), 3v., offered data about central Mexico that stimulated new
interest in Hispaniola’s population, with hotly contested results.
The 1992 quincentenary commemoration of Columbus’ first ex-
pedition prompted further investigation. Scholars derived widely
different positions about disease and population from the available
research, and their discussions were frequently acrimonious. Res-
olution of the argument seemed impossible without new evi-
dence.
In the mid-I98os, nine letters written by Columbus to the
monarchs from 1492 to 1503 turned up in the hands of a book-
Noble David Cook is Professor of History, Florida International University. He is the author
of Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-165o (New York, 1998); Demographic
Collapse: Indian Peru, 152o-162o (New York, 1981).
The author thanks William M. Denevan, Juan Gil, Massimo Livi-Bacci, W. George
Lovell, Consuelo Varela, and Alexandra Parma Cook for critical comments on various drafts
of this article, as well as an anonymous reader for help in fine-tuning the argument.
? 2001 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of
Interdisciplinary History.
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350 1 NOBLE DAVID COOK
seller in Tarragona, Spain; six of them held information previously
unknown. These manuscripts, referred to as the “libro copiador,”
are now housed in the General Archive of the Indies in Seville.
Although the new documents do not change our fundamental un-
derstanding of early Spanish exploration and settlement of the Ca-
ribbean, they do clarify some of the details. The new information
presents a sharper picture of both European and Taino health con-
ditions relating to the second expedition to Hispaniola, specifically
mentioning the diseases of syphilis, modorra, malaria, and small-
pox.
The value of this documentary cache has been ignored until
recently, largely because of its publication history. The first edition
of the letters, by Antonio Rumeu de Armas, El libro copiador de
Cristdbal Coldn (Madrid, 1988-I989), 2V., was flawed by incom-
plete pages and incorrect transcription. The letters were later in-
cluded in a modified version of the standard set of Columbus
documents-Consuelo Varela and Juan Gil (eds.), Crist6bal Col6n.
Textos y documentos completos (Madrid, 1992)-but many libraries
did not purchase this new volume, believing it to contain only mi-
nor changes from its predecessors. Varela and Gil’s first compila-
tion under that title had appeared in 1984; a revised second edition
came out two years later, with a few additions and deletions. The
copyright page of the critical 1992 edition, with the new Colum-
bus letters, refers to the work as an “expanded second edition.”
Just pages later, however, a section entitled “Prologue to the
Third Edition” follows (11). No wonder the confusion about
whether the book had anything substantially new to offer. None-
theless, a careful comparison of this source with other published
materials coming from the Columbus voyages, if not decisive in
the matter of disease and population, undoubtedly provides much
food for thought.
SETTING THE STAGE: THE JERONYMITE INQUIRY In April I517,
an inquiry into the condition and preservation of the remaining
aboriginal inhabitants of the island of Hispaniola began in the city
of Santo Domingo. The inquiry was conducted under the direc-
tion of a small group ofJeronymite friars, who had been named to
take over the administration of the island. They were ordered to
conduct a count of the number of native chiefs (caciques) and In-
dians that still remained and to determine the most effective way
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EARLY HISPANIOLA 351
to control them. Numerous people testified, including secular
priests, clerics of other orders, administrative officials, and settlers.
The Crown wanted to know whether the caciques and the natives
could govern themselves and maintain the viability of the colony
for the European settlers. Would the Taino, the island’s free peo-
ple, work as Spanish peasants and laborers did? Could, or should,
they be congregated into European style villages nearer the colo-
nists, the better to indoctrinate them in the faith and “civilize”
them, according to Old World standards? The upshot was that en-
slavement or some form of directed labor and coercion might be
necessary for the colony to survive.’
The inquiry took place just a few months before the devastat-
ing and well-documented epidemic of smallpox that swept away
much of the remaining native population. Some of the witnesses
had come with the second Columbus expedition twenty-four
years earlier. Others were more recent arrivals to the island. The
majority argued that the natives were lazy and undependable-
even dangerous-and that they could never live as “civilized” Eu-
ropeans, though a few suggested that, with freedom and Chris-
tianity, they could become equal citizens.
All those assembled for the inquiry were worried about the
island’s fate. In spite of a generation of settlement, the European
population in 1517 was not large, well under 4,000. The gold pro-
duction that showed much promise in the first years never lived
up to expectations, and no other quick and easy alternatives for
acquiring wealth had presented themselves. The planting, harvest-
ing, and refining of sugar was still developing as a viable economic
base, but sugar plantations required a large and secure labor force.
The local labor force, however, was hard to direct, and, worse, it
was declining rapidly. Slaves from other islands, and even the
more distant mainland-not to mention a small number from Af-
rica-had already been imported to replace those who were dy-
ing.2
Three years earlier, the Crown had directed town officials to
prepare a list of the natives that each resident had under his con-
I Friars Bernardino de Manzanedo, Luis de Figueroa, and Alonso de Santo Domingo-
who conducted the inquiry-landed on Hispaniola on December 20, 1516, after a voyage of
only a month. Frank Moya Pons, La Espailola en el siglo XVI: 1493-1520. Trabajo, sociedad y
politica en la economia del oro (Santo Domingo, 1978), 196-207.
2 Moya Pons, Espahiola en el siglo XVI, 152-172.
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352 1 NOBLE DAVID COOK
trol. Registration was mandatory, and the penalties for non-com-
pliance were severe. Furthermore, two people in each town were
to be named to conduct an inspection of the estancias, mines, and
Indian villages, and to prepare a “census” of the Indians, by occu-
pation, age, sex, and capacity to work. The specific categories
were: “caciques, naborias, indios de servicio, nifios and viejos.” By
the end of the census two months later, 733 people had received
grants of natives, who officially numbered 25,303. That only 1,592
of the total count were listed as “nifios,” or young children,
reflects the demographic crisis affecting the native population of
the island.3
No one is certain of the number of Taino living on the island
when Columbus first arrived in December 1492. Bartolom& de las
Casas, who did not reach the island until 1502, reported numbers
that range from I to 3.5 million. Since he was a master of hyper-
bole, whose principal concern was the protection of the
Amerindians, his high numbers cannot be trusted. One witness at
the inquiry of 1517, InspectorJuan Mosquera, who came to the is-
land with Governor Nicolis de Ovando in 1502, testified that the
three distributions of natives among the Spanish settlers that he
experienced had resulted in “much harm done to the land and
many Indians.” Another, Licentiate Christobal Serrano, who also
came to the island in 1502, reported that some lords had as many
as “thirty and forty and fifty thousand naborias under their
charge.” Whatever the number of Amerindians at first contact-
figures given since the last half of the twentieth century range
from 6o,ooo to over 8 million-scholars agree that the Taino did
not survive well under the influence of the Old World. Sickness,
starvation, murder, and exploitation seem to have been their lot.
All accounts by the Europeans that come from the first years of re-
connaissance and settlement report the substantial loss of Taino
and Spanish lives.4
“PARADISE” GAINED AND LOST There is increasing evidence
that the impact of the encounter between previously isolated eco-
3 Ibid., 156-160.
4 Emilio Rodriguez Demorizi (ed.), Los Dominicos y las encomiendas de indios de la isla
Espahiola (Santo Domingo, 1971), 282, 299. William M. Denevan (ed.), The Native Population
of the Americas in 1492 (Madison, 1976; 2d ed., 1992), xxiii-xxiv, and Cook, “Disease and the
Depopulation of Hispaniola, 1492-15 18,” Colonial Latin American Review, II (1993), 214-220,
summarize the debate over “numbers.”
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EARLY HISPANIOLA j 353
systems of the Americas and the Old World was massive. But be-
cause of the relatively small number of Europeans who were with
Columbus on the first venture, as well as their limited contact
with coastal peoples of the islands during the three months from
October 1492 to January 1493, it was not felt immediately. The
exception was the likely transfer of New World syphilis, which hit
Europe in epidemic proportions with the return of the men of the
Pinta and Nifia. Not until the second expedition, consisting of 17
ships and approximately 1,5oo adventurers, did the ecological bar-
rier of the Atlantic Ocean break and the explosive transformations
begin. Thanks to new information on the second Columbus ex-
pedition, especially the admiral’s Relacion del segundo viaje, a more
complete view of the nature of that process is available. The pur-
pose of this article is to probe the rapidly changing health condi-
tions on the island between 1493 and 1496. Although the health
and nutrition of the Taino will be explored, the primary focus is
on the European settlers, because the documentary record is
skewed much more toward them than toward the Amerindians.5
The early Caribbean has been the focus of numerous studies,
because what happened there in the quarter century following first
contact provides a case study for the changes that occurred else-
where in the Americas. Sauer’s Early Spanish Main, a detailed anal-
ysis of the ecological changes taking place, provided a baseline for
future investigations. Unfortunately his lead was not well served
by his intellectual heirs. Floyd’s book on the Columbus dynasty
provided an administrative survey of the early European Carib-
5 Alfred W. Crosby, “Conquistador y Pestilencia: The First New World Pandemic and the
Fall of the Great Indian Empires,” Hispanic American Historical Review, XLVII (1967), 321-337;
idem, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, 1972);
idem, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William
and Mary Quarterly, XXX (1976), 289-299; Carl O. Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley,
1966); Varela and Gil (eds.), Cristdbal Colon. The second revised edition of 1992, or subse-
quent editions, of this work are preferred; note that those prior to 1992 do not include the
newly discovered Columbus letters. Miles H. Davidson, Columbus Then and Now: A Life Re-
examined (Norman, 1997), xxii, evaluated the “libro copiador”: “Spanish scholars accept these
sixteenth-century documents as scribal copies of letters written by Columbus.” The argu-
ments presented herein are similar to those proposed in Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New
World Conquest, 1492-1650 (New York, 1998), 26-39, but with important differences: (I) A
richer eyewitness narrative is provided, with a more critical evaluation of accounts; (2) evi-
dence not available to the author when the book was published raises the possibility of small-
pox among the Indian interpreters from Hispaniola, as they embarked on their return to the
island in 1493; (3) Francisco Guerra, Epidemiologia americana y filipina, 1492-1898 (Madrid,
1999), comes under close scrutiny; and (4) the issues of nutrition, starvation, and death among
both natives and Europeans are examined in the context of the initial three years.
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354 1 NOBLE DAVID COOK
bean, but only the various studies by Moya Pons most closely ap-
proximate Sauer’s model.6
In the quincentenary period, a number of new studies treated
the environmental impact of the discovery on the other lesser is-
lands of the region. Crosby’s work, for one, discusses the question
of disease impact and levels and patterns of morbidity and mortal-
ity, in relation to Amerindian population size. In the late I96os,
Dobyns was simultaneously revising localized population estimates
to provide a new hemispheric estimate that was substantially
higher than previous ones. Dobyns closely linked Amerindian de-
mise to epidemic disease, providing a still-useful chronology for
epidemic outbreaks in the Andean region. Higher population esti-
mates were fueled by the revisionist work of Borah and Sherburne
F. Cook, which concentrated primarily on Mexico. Only one
chapter of their seminal three volume work focused on Hispan-
iola, and their population projection for the island’s contact size
was about 8 million. Zambardino criticized their estimate on sta-
tistical grounds and Rosenblat on the basis of sources.7
GUERRA’S THESIS Although Denevan, who also was interested
in population densities and environmental carrying capacities, ed-
ited a series of chapters on The Native Population of the Americas in
1492 in 1976, close attention to the spread of European pathogens
via the expedition of Columbus had to await the short studies of
Guerra in the mid-1980s. Guerra was the first scholar to attempt to
identify the “illnesses” and deaths on Hispaniola, beginning with
the arrival of Columbus’ second expedition in late 1493. He sug-
gested that the primary cause of mortality was influenza, or swine
flu. Guerra postulated that Columbus and Diego Alvarez
Chanca-a university-trained court physician who sailed with the
fleet-delineated this first New World epidemic “in authentic,
truthful and incontrovertible documents.” That article has re-
6 T. S. Floyd, The Columbus Dynasty in the Caribbean, 1492 to 1526 (Albuquerque, 1973);
Moya Pons, Espahiola en el siglo XVI, 1493-1520 (Santiago, 1971); idem, Despues de Col6n.
Trabajo, sociedad y politica en la economia del oro (Madrid, 1987).
7 Henry F. Dobyns, “Disease Transfer at Contact,” Annual Review of Anthropology, XX
(1993), 273-291; idem, “Estimating Aboriginal Populations: An Appraisal of Techniques with
a New Hemispheric Estimate,” Current Anthropology, VII (1966), 395-449; idem, “An Outline
of Andean Epidemic History to 1720,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, XXXVII (1963),
493-515; idem, Their Number Became Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern
North America (Knoxville, 1983).
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EARLY HISPANIOLA 355
ceived much attention and some acceptance. In 1999, however,
Guerra shifted his focus, emphasizing the potential effect of ty-
phus. This article presents “new evidence” on other diseases not
available when Guerra published in the mid-I98os, and which he
omitted in his flawed compilation of 1999-.
All arguments are based on the extent and quality of the doc-
umentary evidence. The primary sources for the second expedi-
tion, although more numerous than the records of the first, are
incomplete and less than satisfactory. Guerra combed Columbus’
published letters, his “diary” of the first voyage, Chanca’s lengthy
letter, and the Decadas of Pedro Mirtir de Angleria, which had
been collected chronologically near the actual events that they re-
lated. Guerra also used subsequent texts of las Casas and those of
Oviedo, an administrator and chronicler, as well as Ferdinand Co-
lumbus’ biography of his father and Herrera’s chronicle.9
Almost at the same time when Guerra was searching for evi-
dence of disease in the early published sources, other scholars were
revisiting the same accounts for verisimilitude. The evolving con-
sensus in the 198os and early 199os, based on the work of Adorno,
Zamora, Mignolo, Gonzilez Echevarria, and other scholars who
8 Borah and Cook, Essays in Population History; Angel Rosenblat, La poblaci6n de America en
1492: Viejos y nuevos ccilculos (Mexico, 1967); idem, “The Population of Hispaniola at the Time
of Columbus,” in Denevan (ed.), Native Population, 43-66; David Henige, “On the Contact
Population of Histpaniola: History as Higher Mathematics,” Hispanic American Historical Re-
view, LVIII (1978), 217-237; Rudolph A. Zambardino, “Critique of David Henige’s ‘On the
Contact Population of Hispaniola: History as Higher Mathematics,’ ” ibid., 700-708; idem,
“Mexico’s Population in the Sixteenth Century: Demographic Anomaly or Mathematical Il-
lusion,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XI (1980), 1-27. See Guerra, “La epidemia
americana de influenza en 1493,” Revista de Indias, XLV (1985), 325-347 (quotation, 326);
idem, “El efecto demogrifico de las epidemias tras el descubrimiento de America,” ibid., XLVI
(1986), 41-58; idem, “The Cause of Death of the American Indians,” Nature, 326 (1987), 449-
450; idem, “The Earliest American Epidemic: The Influenza of 1493,” Social Science History,
XII (1988), 305-325; idem, “The Dispute over Syphilis: Europe versus America,” Clio Medica,
XIII (1978), 39-62. The origin and nature of syphilis have received substantial coverage.
Brenda J. Baker and George J. Armelagos, “The Origin and Antiquity of Syphilis,” Current
Anthropology, XXIX (1988), 703-737, provide a good starting point. Guerra, Epidemiologia
americana, 114-125, reiterates his earlier arguments for the introduction of influenza. Most
of his “sources” for the 1493 sequence are not actual eyewitnesses, but were prepared years
later.
9 Bartolome de las Casas (ed. Agustin Millares Carlo and Lewis Hanke), Historia de las Indias
(Mexico, 1952); Gonzalo Fernaindez de Oviedo (ed. Juan Perez de Tudela Bueso), Historia
general y natural de las Indias (Madrid, 1959), 6v.; Fernando Col6n (ed. and trans. Benjamin
Keen), The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son Ferdinand (Brunswick, 1992);
Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos en los islas y tierra
firme del mar oceano (Madrid, 1935-1957), 17v.
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356 NOBLE DAVID COOK
probed the creation and hermeneutics of early sources, was that
the accounts followed well-established rhetorical patterns that
were part of Spanish humanist historiography, that the line be-
tween “fact” and fiction was blurred, and significant exaggeration
and self-promotion corrupted the narratives. Further, the attempt
to portray native peoples was flawed, especially at first, since
few Europeans were fluent in both Amerindian languages and
Spanish. At the extreme, the accounts provide little of the “true”
past at a specific historical moment. Guerra stood largely out-
side this growing epistemological debate, accepting at, or near,
face value the information found in the chronicles, letters, and
diaries.10
Guerra’s reconstruction of the health of the second expedi-
tion’s members is relatively straightforward. There is little incon-
sistency in the chronology of the voyage found in the published
sources. On September 25, 1493, seventeen ships with about 1,500
mostly males on board departed Caidiz. They reached the Canary
Islands on October 2, and the island of La Gomera around the 5th.
Guerra found evidence that eight sows were loaded aboard ship
on the island of Gomera in the Canaries between 5-7 October.
Hence, his argument for swine flu. Guerra seems to have specu-
lated without evidence that both men and animals onboard
quickly sickened. The voyage from the Canaries to the Caribbean
was rapid; the fleet reached the Caribbean island of Dominica on
November 3. According to Guerra, the vessels reached Hispaniola
on the 28th or so, touching land near Navidad where the first ex-
pedition had departed a little less than a year earlier. They found
none of the men they had left behind; all had succumbed to star-
Io See, for example, Walter Mignolo, “El metatexto historiogrifico y la historiografia indi-
ana,” Modern Language Notes, XCVI (1981), 358-402; Roberto Gonzilez Echevarria,
“Humanismo, ret6rica y las cr6nicas de la conquista,” in idem (ed.), Isla a su vuelo fugitiva:
ensayos criticos sobre literatura hispanoamericana (Madrid, 1983), 9-25; Rolena Adorno, “Nuevas
perspectivas en los estudios literarios coloniales hispanoamericanos,” Revista de Critica Literaria
Latinoamericana, XIV (1988), 11-28; Margarita Zamora, “Historicity and Literariness: Prob-
lems in the Literary Criticism of Spanish American Colonial Texts,” Modern Language Notes,
XII (1987), 334-346; idem, “‘If Cahonaboa learns to speak …’: Amerindian Voice in the Dis-
course of Discovery,” Colonial Latin American Review, VIII (1999), 191-205. Henige decons-
tructs the sources for the first Columbus voyage in In Search of Columbus: The Sources for the
First Voyage (Tucson, 1991). James C. Murray provides an overview in Spanish Chronicles of the
Indies: Sixteenth Century (New York, 1994), 6-13. The arguments are placed in perspective by
Santiago Juan-Navarro, Archival Reflections: Postmodern Fiction of the Americas (Self-Reflexivity,
Historical Revisionism, Utopia) (London, 2000).
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EARLY HISPANIOLA 357
vation, sickness, or, in most cases, the hand of the not completely
“peaceful” Taino.
Guerra postulated that almost immediately an illness that had
been carried along with the fleet spread outward: “Suddenly, on
the following day 9 December 1493, all the people began to sicken
with high temperatures and great prostration, so that very few es-
caped, and even those who had left to explore had to return upon
feeling ill.” When livestock and passengers disembarked on His-
paniola, most were already infected. Guerra argued that illness de-
bilitated the Spaniards, and then spread rapidly among native
peoples. “The Indians then died in infinite numbers.” Columbus
was so weakened by sickness that he was unable to write for sev-
eral weeks. In his review of the relevant published sources, Guerra
found that Ferdinand Columbus’ biography of his father showed a
three-month gap in the latter’s diary [December II, 1493, to
March 12, 1494]. Ferdinand’s text tells of the reconnoitering of
the northern coast of Hispaniola and the discovery of what seemed
an appropriate site for settlement, which Columbus named
Isabela, in honor of the Spanish queen. According to Ferdinand,
his father “so drove himself to lay the foundation of that town that
not only did he lack time to enter in his journal each day’s hap-
penings, as had been his custom, but he even fell ill and was unable
to keep a journal at all from December II, 1493, till March 12,
1494.” Ferdinand also wrote of growing discontent among a num-
ber of the settlers of the second expedition, who tired of the hard
unrewarding labor and of being “made ill by the climate and diet
of that country.”11
Guerra was convinced in 1985 that his evidence was valid:
Contemporary descriptions of the first epidemic that took place in
America, their concordance in terms of the basic clinical manifesta-
tions, confirmation of some complementary details and later epide-
miological facts that are here presented permit one to affirm that
the epidemic that appeared on the island of Santo Domingo in
1493, the principal cause for the disappearance of the American na-
tives in the quarter century after discovery, was the swine flu. All
the sources are in agreement that the epidemic that broke out in
Isabela on 9 December 1493 was an acute infectious sickness, ex-
tremely contagious and with a short period of incubation, that af-
11 Guerra, “La epidemia americana,” 338. Col6n, Life of the Admiral, 121-122.
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358 | NOBLE DAVID COOK
fected simultaneously wide groups of the population, and was
characterized by an elevated fever, great prostration, and an appre-
ciable mortality.12
The symptoms described by Guerra, however, could cover
various illnesses, not just influenza. Catarrh (catarro), clearly associ-
ated with influenza, is not even mentioned. Guerra qualifies his
argument that “although in these first descriptions the respiratory
symptoms do not yet appear, at the time that the sickness passed to
Tierra Firme, the narratives begin to incorporate additional
symptomatologies: secretion of mucus (romadizos), catarrh
(catarros), pleurisy (dolor de costado), and in Mexico for the first time
nosebleeds are mentioned.” Hence, not until the third decade af-
ter 1493 did more specific influenza-like symptoms appear in the
texts cited by Guerra. Although Guerra’s 1999 compilation reiter-
ated that the first Old World epidemic to hit America was
influenza, his evidence for swine flu striking early Hispaniola is in-
adequate to sustain his argument.”
In a 1999 article, Guerra introduced another element into the
disease environment of the second expedition-typhus. He stated
that Columbus became ill again several months after his malady in
Isabela. In the mid-198os, Guerra had written that the second time
the admiral fell sick, he suffered a separate illness, “una modorra
pestilencial. ” But in 1999, Guerra ignored his diagnosis of swine flu:
“The frequent parasitical infestation of the head and the body of
sailors during these years, that Las Casas and other chroniclers of
America spoke about, explains that typhus was frequent among
the crews of the ships of the Indies fleet, and they called it
“modorra,” owing to the characteristic drowsiness which the sick
display. . . . One might accept that the first case of typhus
exanthematicus in America was the Admiral Christopher Columbus
himself. “14
12 Guerra, “La epidemia americana,” 325-326, 338. Almost a decade later, Guerra, “Early
Epidemics at La Hispaniola and Demographic Collapse 1492-1518,” Latin American Population
History Bulletin, 23 (1993), 19, maintained his position: “It can now be stated that every quota-
tion by Guerra was correct, the facts stand as they were first presented, and even the Spanish
dead from the influenza epidemic at La Hispaniola in 1493 have been found and can be
counted.” Henige, “Is Virtual Reality Enough or Should We Settle for Less?” ibid., 23, coun-
tered, “the disagreeable fact is that, when treated integrally and contextually, Guerra’s own
sources undermine almost every aspect of his case.”
13 Guerra, “La epidemia americana,” 339-
14 Ibid., 327; idem, “Origen y efectos demograificos del tifu en el Mexico colonial,” Colonial
Latin American History Review, VIII (I999), 283.
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EARLY HISPANIOLA 359
Guerra used the texts of las Casas, and the Ferdinand Colum-
bus biography. Ferdinand wrote that his father, while returning
from the reconnaissance of Jamaica and Cuba, stopped including
entries in his journal in late September 1494: “Because of the great
past hardships, his weakness and the scarcity of food, he was hit by
a very serious illness between pestilential and modorra, which al-
most immediately deprived him of sight, of the other senses, and
consciousness.” His crew continued sailing as quickly as possible
to Isabela, where they landed on September 29, 1494. Las Casas
provided a similar account: “All of a sudden he was afflicted by a
pestilencial modorra that totally removed from him use of the
senses and all his strength, and he became as if dead, and they did
not think he would last a day.”15
It took five months for Columbus to recover his health. For
those attempting to diagnose the sickness using English-language
sources, further confusion is added by Keen’s translation of
Ferdinand’s biography of his father. Keen uses the word “drowsi-
ness” instead of modorra, a specific disease. According to Keen, on
September 24, 1494, as he sailed along the eastern end of Hispan-
iola, Columbus stopped entries in his daily journal. “Because of
his great exertions, weakness, and scanty diet he fell gravely ill in
crossing from Amona to San Juan; he had a high fever and a
drowsiness, so that he lost his sight, memory, and all his other
“16
senses.
AN EARLY INTRODUCTION OF TYPHUS? In this new case, Co-
lumbus’ documents provide fresh insight. Las Casas and Ferdinand
Columbus probably had access to a Columbus letter of February
26, 1495, that was sent back to Europe with Antonio de Torres’
fleet. The relevant text reads, “And having arrived at the island of
San Juan Baptista [Puerto Rico] all of a sudden I was knocked
down by a sickness that deprived me of all sense and understand-
ing, as if it were pestilence or modorra [italics added]. The shipm
