Diseases of the Americas, 1492-1700

Abstract

During the first 200 years of European exploration and settlement of the Americas, native populations experienced catastrophic die-offs from the introduction of acute infectious diseases. Pinpointing which parasites were responsible for this decimation is not a simple matter. European knowledge of the infectious disease process was primitive in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the result that conquerors, settlers, and clergy were ill-prepared to describe the illnesses they witnessed. Statements that simply describe the death experience of native peoples are the most common. In the Roanoke documents of 1588, for instance, T. Hariot described native death from disease, but he attributed the outbreaks to witchcraft: There was no towne where he had any subtile devise practiced against us, we leaving it unpunished or not revenged (because we sought by all meanes possible to win them by gentlenesse) but that within a fewe dayes after our departure from every such town, the people began to die very fast, and many in short space, in some townes about twentie, in some fourtie, and in one sixe score, which in trueth was very many in respect to their nombers. This happened in no place that we could learne, but where we had bene, where they used a practice against us, and after such a time. The disease, also strange, that they neither knew what is was, not how to cure it. (Hariot 1973)

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