In an autocracy no problem is more dangerous or more chronic than that of succession.
One crude but workable solution is to have the autocrat himself choose his successor. The Inca named one of his sons, Ninan Cuyoche, as next wearer of “the fringe” or crown, on the condition that the calpa, a ceremony of divination, show this to be an auspi cious choice. The first calpa indicated that the gods did not favor Ninan Cuyoche, the second that Huascar was no better a candidate. The high nobles returned to the Inca for another choice, and found him dead. Suddenly a terrible gap had
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opened in Incan society: the autocrat had died, and there was no one to take his place. One of the nobles moved to close the gap. “Take care of the body,” he said, “for I go to Tumipampa to give the fringe to Ninan Cuyoche.” But it was too late. When he arrived at Tumipampa, he found that Ninan Cuyoche had also succumbed to the smallpox pestilence.47
Among the several varying accounts of the Inca’s death the one just related best fits the thesis of this chapter. And while these accounts may differ on many points, they all agree that confusion over the succession followed the unex pected death of Huayna Capac. War broke out between Huascar and Atahualpa, a war which devastated the empire and prepared the way for a quick Spanish conquest. “Had the land not been divided between Huascar and Atahualpa,” Pedro Pizarro wrote, “we would not have been able to enter or win the land unless we could gather a thousand Spaniards for the task, and at that time it was impossible to get together even five hundred Spaniards.”48
The psychological effect of epidemic disease is enormous, especially^., an unknown disfiguring disease which strikes swiftly. Within a few days smallpox can transform a healthy man into a pustuled, oozing horror, whom his closest rela tives can barely recognize. The impact can be sensed in the following terse, stoic account, drawn from Indian testimony, of Tenochtitlán during the epidemic.
It was [the month of] Tepeilhuitl when it began, and it spread over the people as great destruction. Some it quite covered [with pustules] on all parts—their faces, their heads, their breasts, etc. There was a great havoc. Very many died of it. They could not walk; they only lay in their resting places and beds. They could not move; they could not stir; they could not change posi tion, nor lie on one side; nor face down, nor on their backs. And if they stirred, much did they cry out. Great was its [small pox] destruction. Covered, mantled with pustules, very many people died of them.’”
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In some places in Mexico the mortality was so great that, as Motolinia recorded, the Indians found it impossible to bury the great number of dead. “They pulled down the houses over them in order to check the stench that rose from the dead bodies,” he wrote, “so that their homes became their tombs.” In Tenochtitlán the dead were cast into the water, “and there was a great, foul odor; the smell issued forth from the dead.”30
For those who survived, the horror was only diminished, for smallpox is a disease which marks its victims for the rest of their lives. The Spanish recalled that the Indians who sur vived, having scratched themselves, “were left in such a con dition that they frightened the others with the many deep pits on their faces, hand, and bodies.” “And on some,” an Indian said, “the pustules were widely separated; they suffered not greatly, neither did many [of them] die. Yet many people were marred by them on their faces; one’s face or nose was pitted.” Some lost their sight—a fairly common aftereffect of smallpox.51
The contrast between the Indians’ extreme susceptibility to the new disease and the Spaniards’ almost universal im munity, acquired in Spain and reinforced in pestilential Cuba, must have deeply impressed the native Americans. The Indians, of course, soon realized that there was little relationship between Cortés and Quetzalcoatl, and that the Spaniards had all the vices and weaknesses of ordinary men, but they must have kept a lingering suspicion that the Span iards were some kind of supermen. Their steel swords and arquebuses, their marvelously agile galleys, and, above all, their horses could only be the tools and servants of super men. And their invulnerability to smallpox—surely this was a shield of the gods themselves!
One can only imagine the psychological impact of small pox on the Incans. It must have been less than in Mexico, because the disease and the Spaniards did not arrive simul
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taneously, but epidemic disease is terrifying under any cir cumstances and must have shaken the confidence of the In cans that they still enjoyed the esteem of their gods. Then came the long, ferocious civil war, confusing a people ac customed to the autocracy of the true Child of the Sun. And then the final disaster, the coming of the Spaniards.
The Mayan peoples, probably the most sensitive and bril liant of all American aborigines, expressed more poignantly than any other Indians the overwhelming effect of epidemic. Some disease struck into Guatemala in 1520 and 1521, clearing the way for the invasion shortly thereafter by Pedro de Alvarado, one of Cortés’s captains. It was apparently not smallpox, for the accounts do not mention pustules but em phasize nosebleeds, coughs, and illness of the bladder as the prominent symptoms. It may have been influenza;52 whatever it was, the Cakchiquel Mayas, who kept a chronicle of the tragedy for their posterity, were helpless to deal with it. Their words speak for all the Indians touched by Old World dis ease in the sixteenth century.
Great was the stench of the dead. After our fathers and grand fathers succumbed, half of the people fled to the fields. The dogs and vultures devoured the bodies. The mortality was terrible. Your grandfathers died, and with them died the son of the king and his brothers and kinsmen. So it was that we became orphans, oh, my sons! So we became when we were young. All of us were thus. We were born to die!“
NOTES
1. The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, trans. Ralph L. Roy, 83.
2. P. M. Ashburn, The Ranks of Death. A Medical History of the Conquest of America, passim; Henry H. Scott, A History of Tropical Medicine, 1:128, 283; Sherburne F. Cook, “The Incidence and Significance of Disease Among the Aztecs and Related Tribes,”
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321, 335; Jehan Vellard, “Causas Biológicas de la Desparición de los Indios Americanos,” 77-93; Woodrow Borah, “America as Model: The Demographic Impact of European Expansion upon the Non European World,” 379-387.
3. Quoted in E. Wagner Stern and Allen E. Stearn, The Effect of Smallpox on the Destiny of the Amerindian, 17.
4. Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, 448-451; Henry F. Dobyns, “An Outline of Andean Epidemic History to 1720,” 494.
5. Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, Historia General, 2:35; Charles Gibson, Spain in America, 141—142.
6. Joseph de Acosta, The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, 1:160. For specific references on depopulation see Antonio Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description of the West Indies, paragraphs 98, 102, 115, 271, 279, 334, 339, 695, 699, 934, 945, 1025, 1075, 1079, 1081, 1102, 1147, 1189, 1217, 1332, 1342, 1384, 1480, 1643, 1652, 1685, 1852, 1864, 1894, 1945, 1992, and 2050. An interesting comparison can be made between Spanish America and the Spanish Philippines. The aborigines of each suffered exploitation, but there were fewer epidemics and much less depopula tion in the Philippines. Contact between these islands and the main land of Asia had existed for many generations, and the Filipinos had acquired mainland immunities. See John L. Phelan, The His- panization of the Philippines, 105-107; Emma H. Blair and James A. Robertson, eds., Philippine Islands, 12:311; 13:71; 30:309; 32:93-94; 34:292.
7. Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, The Indian Popula tion of Central Mexico, 1531-1610; Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, The Aboriginal Population of Central Mexico on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest.
8. Dobyns, “Andean Epidemic History,” 514. 9. Hans Staden, The True History of His Captivity, trans. Mal
colm Letts, 85-89; Alexander Marchant, From Barter to Slavery: The Economic Relations of the Portuguese and Indians in the Settle ment of Brazil, 1500-1580, 116-117; Claude Lévi-Strauss, A World on the Wane, 87; Juan López de Velasco, Geografía y Descripción Universidad de las Indias, 552.
10. David B. Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, 1:378. 11. Ibid. 12. Quoted in Alfred G. Bailey, The Conflict of European and
Eastern Algonkian Cultures, 1504-1700: A Study in Canadian Civilization, 13.
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13. Charles Francis Adams, Three Episodes of Massachusetts History, 1:1-12.
14. Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of Alaska, 1730-1885, 350, 560-563.
15. C. W. Dixon, Smallpox, 68. 16. Franklin H. Top et al., Communicable and Infectious Dis
eases, 515; Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History, 87-88. 17. Donald B. Cooper, Epidemic Disease in Mexico City,
1761-1813, 87-88; Raúl Porras Barrenechea, ed., Cartas del Perú, 1524-1543, 22, 24, 33, 46.
18. Dixon, Smallpox, 171, 299-301. 19. Ashburn, Ranks of Death, 86. 20. Dixon, Smallpox, 325; John Duffy, Epidemics in Colonial
America, 20, 22; Stearn and Stearn, Effect of Smallpox, 14. 21. Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, A Life
of Christopher Columbus, 1:304-305. 22. Gonzalo Fernández Oviedo y Valdes, Historia General y
Natural de las Indias, 2d ed., 1:66-67. 23. Ibid.; Colección de Documentos Inéditos Relativos al
Descubrimiento, Conquista y Colonización de las Posesiones Es pañolas en América y Oceania, 1:428.
24. S. P. Bedson et al-, Virus and Rickettsial Diseases, 151-152, 157; Dixon, Smallpox, 174, 189, 296-297, 304, 359; Jacques M. May, ed., Studies in Disease Ecology, 1, 8.
25. Colección de Documentos Inéditos, 1:367, 369-370, 429; Colección de Varios Documentos para la Historia de la Florida y Tierras Adyzacentes, 1:44; Fray Bartoloméde Las Casas, Obras Escogidas de Bartolomé de Las Casas, 2:484.
26. Colección de Documentos Inéditos, 1:368, 397-398, 428-429; Dixon, Smallpox, 317-318, 325.
27. Pablo Alvarez Rubiano, Pedrarias Dâvila, 608; Colección de Varios Documentos para la Historia de la Florida, 1:45.
28. Diego de Landa, Landa’s Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, trans. Alfred M. Tozzer, 42; Book of Chilam Balam, 138.
29. Patricia de Fuentes, ed. and trans., The Conquistadors. First- Person Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico, 159. For the argument that this was measles, not smallpox, see Horacio Figueroa Marroquin, Enfermedades de los Conquistadores, 49-67.
30. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Bernal Diaz Chronicles: The True Story of the Conquest of Mexico, trans. Albert Idell, 250; Diego Duran, The Aztecs: The History of the Indies in New Spain, trans. Doris Heyden and Fernando Horcasitas, 323; Francisco López
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de Gómara, Cortés, the Life of the Conqueror by His Secretary, trans. Lesley Byrd Simpson, 204-205; Toribio Motolinia, Motolinia’s History of the Indians of New Spain, trans. Elizabeth A. Foster, 38; Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, 9:4.
31. Anales de Tlatelolco, Unos Anales Históricos de la Nación Mexicana y Códice de Tlatelolco, 64. The Annals of the Cakchiquels and Title of the Lords of Totonicapan, trans. Adrian Recinos, Dioniscio José Chonay and Delia Goetz, 115-116; Bedson, Virus, 155; Diaz del Castillo, Chronicles, 289; Miguel Léon-Portilla, ed., The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, 132; Top, Diseases, 515.
32. Hernando Cortes, Five Letters, trans. J. Bayard Morris, 226; Diaz del Castillo, Chronicles, 405-406; López de Gómara, Cortés, 285, 293; León-Portilla, Broken Spears, 92; Sahagún, Florentine Codex, 13:81.
33. Colección de Documentos Inéditos, 37:200; Oviedo, Historia General, 2d ed., 3:353. For corroboration see M. M. Alba C., Etnología y Población Historica, passim; Porras Barrenechea, Cartas del Perú, 24; López de Velasco, Geografía, 341; Relaciones Históricas y Geográficas de America Central, 216-218.
34. Herrera, Historia General, 5:350; Relaciones Históricas y Geográficas, 200.
35. Alvarez, Pedrarias Dâvila, 608, 619, 621, 623; Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica, 4:8.
36. Pascual de Andagoya, Narrative of the Proceedings of Pedrarias Dâvila, trans. Clements R. Markham, 6; Colección de Documentos Inéditos, 17:219-222; Herrera, Historia General, 4:217; Scott, Tropical Medicine, 1:192, 288.
37. Garcilaso de la Vega, First Part of the Royal Commentaries of the Yncas, trans. Clements R. Markham, 2:456-457. Fernando Montesinos, Memorias Antiguas Historiales del Perú, trans. Philip A. Means, 126. Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, History of the Incas, trans. Clements R. Markham, 187. It has been suggested that the source of the great epidemic in question was two men, Alonso de Molina and Ginés, left behind by Pizarro at Tumbez on the reconnaissance voyage of 1527. Pedro de Cieza de León, The Incas of Pedro Cieza de León, ed. Victor W. von Hagen, trans. Harriet de Onis, n. 51. If the epidemic was smallpox or measles, this explana tion is unlikely, because these diseases are of short duration and have no carrier state. The expedition of which these men were
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members had had no contact with pestilential Panama for some time before it returned there from Tumbez. If these two men caught smallpox or measles, it must have been already present among the Indians.
38. Felipe Guarnan Poma Ayala, Nueva Corànica y Buen Govierno, 85-86. Cieza de León, Incas, 52, 253; Bernabé Cobo, Obras, 2:93. Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries, 2:461; Martín de Murúa, Historia General del Perú, Origen y Descendencia de los Incas, 1:103-104; Clements R. Markham, ed. and trans., Narratives of the Rites and Laws of the Incas, 110; Pedro Pizarro, Relation of the Discovery and Conquest of the Kingdoms of Peru, trans. Philip A. Means, 1:196-198; Sarmiento de Gamboa, History of the Incas, 167-168; Miguel Cabello Valboa, Miscelánea Antartica, una Historia del Perú Antiguo, 393-394;’ Marcos Jiménez de la Espada, ed., Relaciones Geográficas de Indias-Perú, 2:267.
Did smallpox exist in the Incan lands before the 1520s? Fernando Montesinos, writing in the seventeenth century, claimed that Capac Titu Yupanqui, a pre-Columbian Peruvian, died of smallpox in a general epidemic of that disease. Also, some examples of the famous naturalistic Mochica pottery show Indians with pustules and pocks which bear a ,very close resemblance to those of smallpox. But Montesinos is regarded as one of the least reliable historians of Incan times, and there are several other diseases native to the north western section of South America, such as the dreadful verrugas, which have a superficial dermatological similarity to smallpox. Fur thermore, the aborigines of the Incan Empire told Pedro Pizarro that they had had no acquaintance with smallpox in pre-Columbian times. Montesinos, Memorias Antiguas, 54; Pizarro, Relation, 1:196; Victor W. von Hagen, Realm of the Incas, 106; Myron G. Schultz, “A History of Bartonellosis (Carrion’s Disease),” 503-515; see also Raoul and Marie D’Harcourt, La Medicine dans ¡’Ancien Pérou. passim.
39. Cook and Borah, Aboriginal Population, 4, 89; Motolinia, History, 38; Sahagún, Florentine Codex, 13:81.
40. Ashburn, Ranks of Death, 20; Cieza de León, Incas, 52; Murúa, Historia General, 1:104; Pizarro, Relation, 1:196.
41. Vellard, “Causas Biológicas,” 85; Bedson, Virus, 157, 167; Dixon, Smallpox, 313.
42. Reginaldo ^de Lizárrago, Descripción Colonial por Fr. Reginaldo de Lizárrago, 1:136.
43. Díaz del Castillo, Chronicles, 282, 301; López de Gómara, Cortés, 238-239.
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44. Cortés, Five Letters, 136; Díaz del Castillo, Chronicles, 289, 311.
45. Cieza de León, Incas, 53; Pizarro, Relation, 1:198-199. 46. Ayala, Nueva Coránica, 86; Cobo, Obras, 2:93; Sarmiento
de Gamboa, History of the Incas, 167-168; Valboa, Miscelánea Antartica, 393.
47. Sarmiento de Gamboa, History of the Incas, 167-168, 197-199; for corroboration see Cieza de León, Incas, 253; Valboa, Miscelánea Antartica, 394.
48. Pizarro, Relation, 1:199. 49. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, 13:81. 50. Motolinia, History, 38; Sahagún, Florentine Codex, 9:4. 51. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, vol. 13:81; López de Gómara,
Cortés, 204-205; Dixon, Smallpox, 94; A. J. Rhodes and C. E. van Rooyen, Textbook of Virology, 2d. ed., 319.
52. F. Webster McBryde, “Influenza in America During the Six teenth Century,” 296-297.
53. Annals of the Cakchiquels, trans. Recinos, Chonay, Goetz, 116.