Of what did the Inca and his captains die?
One of the most generally reliable of our sources, Garcilaso de la Vega, describes Huayna Capac’s death as the result of “a trembling chill . . . , which the Indians call chucchu, and a fever, called by the Indians rupu. . . .” We dare not, four hundred years later, state unequivocally that the disease was not one native to the Americas. Most accounts call it smallpox, or suggest that it was either smallpox or measles. Smallpox seems the best guess because the epidemic struck in that pe riod when the Spaniards, operating from bases where small pox was killing multitudes, were first coasting along the shores of Incan lands.38
The impact of the smallpox pandemic on the Aztec and Incan Empires is easy for the twentieth-century reader to underestimate. We have so long been hypnotized by the dar ing of the conquistador that we have overlooked the im portance of his biological allies. Because of the achievements of modern medical science we find it hard to accept state ments from the conquest period that the pandemic killed one-third to one-half of the populations struck by it. Toribio Motolinia claimed that in most provinces of Mexico “more than one half of the population died; in others the proportion was little less. . . . They died in heaps, like bedbugs.”
The proportion may be exaggerated, but perhaps not as much as we might think. The Mexicans had no natural re sistance to the disease at all. Other diseases were probably operating quietly and efficiently behind the screen of small pox. Add the factors of food shortage and the lack of even
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minimal care for the sick. Motolinia wrote, “Many others died of starvation, because as they were all taken sick at once, they could not care for each other, nor was there any one to give them bread or anything else.” We shall never be certain what the death rate was, but from all evidence, it must have been immense. Sherburne F. Cook and Wood row Borah estimate that, for one cause and another, the population of central Mexico dropped from about 25 million on the eve of conquest to 16.8 million a decade later. This estimate strengthens confidence in Motolinia’s general veracity.39
South of Panama, in the empire of the Incas, our only means of estimating the mortality of the epidemic of the 1520s is by an educated guess. The population there was thick, and it provided a rich medium for the transmission and cultivation of communicable diseases. If the malady which struck in the 1520s was smallpox, as it seems to have been, then it must have taken many victims, for these Indians probably had no more knowledge of or immunity to smallpox than the Mexicans. Most of our sources tell us only that many died. Cieza de León gives a figure of 200,000, and Martín de Murúa, throwing up his hands, says, “infinite thousands.”40
We are reduced to guesswork. Jehan Vellard, student of the effect of disease on the American Indian, states that the epidemics in Peru and Bolivia after the Spanish conquest killed fewer than those in Mexico and suggests the climatic conditions of the Andean highlands as the reason. But small pox generally thrives under dry, cool conditions. Possibly his torians have omitted an account of the first and, therefore, probably the worst post-Columbian epidemic in the Incan areas because it preceded the Spanish conquest.41 A half cen tury or so after the conquest, Indians in the vicinity of Lima maintained that the Spanish could not have conquered them if, a few years before Pizarro’s invasion, respiratory disease
54 I THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE
had not “consumed the greater part of them.”42