Barrel Strength

I have been reading a truly interesting book, 1491, by Charles Mann. It deals with the catastrophic impact of European diseases on the Indians of the Americas. It deals with the epidemioligical facts of life and death, covering some of the same ground as Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel, Hans Zinsser’s Rats Lice and History, and William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples.

1491 recounts the growing consensus that the population of the Americas was reduced by 95% in the centuries after contacts with whites by smallpox, measles, influenza, and other diseases to which Europeans, Africans, and Asians had developed greater resistance. A “virgin” population was destroyed several times over before whites even arrived on the scene.

The same was said by Francis Parkman in the 19th century. He said that European settlement advanced into the de-populated regions of North America, which he thought, mistakenly, consisted of a band about several hundred miles in advance of white settlements, where white desieases had ravaged the aboriginal population. His error, apparently, was in considering that anyplace in the Americas at all had escaped these catastrophic ravages. Bernal Diaz, a junior officer in Cortes’ invasion force, recounts how the Aztecs were dying like flies in the siege of Tenochtitlan, the great capital of the Aztec Empire, in 1521. Other Spanish accounts confirm the dreadful effects of disease and plague on the Amerindian population.

1491 gets into trouble from the opponents of political correctness, who think that the idea that North and South America were densely populated before the advent of white men is so much PC nonsense, and from another school which likes to think the Indians went “light on the ground”, interfering with nature as little as possible, living in harmonious balance with Gaia.

Neither view is true, according to the latest research. This consensus may be no more valid than the consensus on anthropogenc global warming. For several reasons, 1491 can be read with pleasure by a broad readership, in confidence that they are not being seriously misled. First, billions of government funding for research are not at stake. Second, because all historians and all contemporary observers of the European Conquest of the Americas are at one in remarking upon the immediate effects of smallpox and other diseases on the Indians; only the size of the original population is at issue. Third, because, as the book itself relates, the Indians have left massive evidence of their systematic working of the earth in many places in both Americas.

An entertaining and informative book such as this deserves a wide readership. You will learn a lot, painlessly.