Evocative post in the Kilt Accessories forum - some thoughts

[Scott Gilmore]

Thanks Norbydog, that was my question too. Which diseases went from Native American to European settlers?

... booze only kills about a hundred thousand Americans a year...

Might not be long before the Native peoples finally win their continent back if we keep on smoking.

Alcohol and smoking are child's play - virtually insignificant when the scale of the events that took place in the Americas five-hundred years ago are considered soberly (absolutely no pun intended). There is nothing to suggest that an exchange of diseases took place. Europeans seem to have had superior resistance to epidemics because of the variety of cultures, animals and races that existed within contactable distances in the European-African-Asian continents. The Americas, by comparison, were and had remained relatively, but not completely isolated for thousands of years.

The insidious nature of the situation becomes clear when it is understood that "smallpox visited before anyone in South America had even seen Europeans." It turns out, the source of the epidemic was the Caribbean, on the island of Hispaniola in the last couple of months of 1518.

There it killed one third of the native population before moving on to Puerto Rico and Cuba. Smallpox made landfall on the continent near what is now Veracruz, Mexico.

Therefore, by the time Europeans reached much of the New World, it was already depopulated. As a result, population estimates were too low by a significant factor. Calculations of the effects of the epidemiological catastrophe made with better knowledge of these events indicate that "about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died" in the first 130 years of contact with Europeans.

When carefully studied, the inevitable conclusions are stunning. The "Central Mexican plateau alone had a population of about 25 million. By contrast, Spain and Portugal together had fewer than ten million inhabitants. Central Mexico [...] was the most densely populated place on earth, with more than twice as many people per square mile [as] China or India."

What happened in the New World was, it has been said, "the greatest destruction of lives in human history." In light of all this, a little tobacco and alcohol being exchanged seems a bit insignificant. Sorry if I missed your point though. I'm just a little shaken by what I've read - the scale of it all.

Oh, and incidentally, by all accounts, syphilis originated in the near east, not in the new world. It apparently was the gift of domesticated animals to their shepherds for being, how shall we say ... a bit too "intimate" with the animals in their charge.

Regards,
Scott Gilmore