What killed the Indians?
Contemporaries and many his torians blame the carnage on Pedrarias Davila, who executed Balboa and ruled Spain’s first Central American settlements with such an iron hand that he was hated by all the chief chroniclers of the age. It can be effectively argued, however, that he was no more a berserk butcher of Indians than Pizarro, for the mortality among Indians of the Isthmus dur ing his years of power is parallel to the high death rates among the Indians wherever the Spaniards went.34 When charges against Pedrarias were investigated in 1527, his de fenders maintained that the greatest Indian-killer had been
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an epidemic of smallpox. This testimony is hard to reject, for another document of 1527 mentions the necessity of im porting aboriginal slaves into Panama City, Nata, and the port of Honduras, because smallpox had carried off all the Indians in those areas.35
The Spaniards could never do much to improve the state of public health in Panama. In 1660 those who governed Panama City listed as resident killers and discomforters smallpox, measles, pneumonia, suppurating abscesses, typhus, fevers, diarrhea, catarrh, boils, and hives—and blamed them all on the importation of Peruvian wine!36 Of all the killers operating in early Panama, however, smallpox was undoubtedly the most deadly to the Indians.
If we attempt to describe the first coming of Old World disease to the areas south of Panama, we shall have to deal with ambiguity, equivocation, and simple guesswork, for eruptive fever, now operating from continental bases, ap parently outstripped the Spaniards and sped south from the Isthmus into the Incan Empire before Pizarro’s invasion. Long before the invasion, the Inca Huayna Capac was aware that the Spaniards—“monstrous marine animals, bearded men who moved upon the sea in large houses”—were push ing down the coast from Panama. Such is the communicabil ity of smallpox and the other eruptive fevers that any Indian who received news of the Spaniards could also have easily received the infection of the European diseases. The biologi cally defenseless Indians made vastly more efficient carriers of such pestilence than the Spaniards.37
Our evidence for the first post-Columbian epidemic in Incan lands is entirely hearsay, because the Incan people had no system of writing. Therefore, we must depend on sec ondary accounts by Spaniards and by Indians born after the conquest, accounts based on Indian memory and written down years and even decades after the epidemic of the 1520s. The few accounts we have of the great epidemic are
52 I THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE
associated with the death of Huayna Capac. He spent the last years of his life campaigning against the people of what is today northern Peru and Ecuador. There, in the province of Quito, he first received news of an epidemic raging in his empire, and there he himself was stricken. Huayna Capac and his captains died with shocking rapidity, “their faces being covered with scabs.”