A Decimated Continent

In the left image, a drawing by a European explorer in the sixteenth century, a Tupinambá family mourns victims of disease in Southeast Brazil. The middle image, a drawing by the same explorer, portrays a charnel house in North America, which experienced some of the most destructive and least documented epidemic outbreaks of the century. The right image, from the late eighteenth century, depicts an Indigenous woman struck by smallpox in northern Peru, a glimpse into one of the many epidemics that devastated vulnerable communities in the centuries following the European encounter.

Colonial epidemics led to the largest population decline in human history. Countless outbreaks, some local, some of pandemic proportions, spread across the land, bringing death and havoc. By 1525, the Taino people and their circum-Caribbean neighbors were nearly extinct. By 1600, in the Valley of Mexico alone, the population plummeted to an estimated 1.5–2 million from an approximate 15–30 million before European contact. Meanwhile, in other areas of the continent, European germs spread through contact between Indigenous populations, preceding the arrival of Europeans. The Inca Empire experienced its first outbreak in the 1520s. By 1620, nine out of ten inhabitants of the Andean empire had perished. The first European explorations of Florida and the Savannah River found entire towns abandoned due to recent outbreaks and subsequent famine. The same occurred across the Mississippian chiefdoms, populous and organized societies that were destroyed before Europeans settled in their lands. It is estimated that the Indigenous population of the Western Hemisphere collapsed by nearly 90 percent by the beginning of the seventeenth century.

America was not the only continent ravaged by the diseases brought by European exploration and colonization. Smallpox alone extinguished whole clans of the Khoisan people in South Africa, decimated Aboriginal Australians, and wiped out entire populations in the Pacific islands.

Image Sources

• Theodor de Bry. Collectiones peregrinationum in Indiam Occidentalem et Indiam Orientalem. 1590–1692. Vol. 1, pp. 269 and 69.
• Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón y Bujanda. Códice Trujillo del Perú. Ca. 1785. Vol. 2, plate 197. Courtesy of the Patrimonio Nacional, Real Biblioteca II/344, estampa 197. 

Further Reading

• Cook, Noble David. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650. New Approaches to the Americas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Contributions in American Studies 2. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972.
• Shanks, Dennis. “Pacific Island Societies Destabilised by Infectious Diseases.” Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health 24, no. 4 (2016): 71–74.
• “Smallpox Epidemic Strikes at the Cape.” South African History Online, September 30, 2019. https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/smallpox-epidemic-strikes-cape.