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Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600

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In 1604, sixteen years before the Pilgrim Fathers staggered ashore in Plymouth Bay in a snowstorm, Samuel de Champlain visited the site that was to be Plymouth and left us a neat map on which the main features --- the Town Brook, Plymouth's Long Beach and Clark's Island among them --- can be clearly seen. You can also see all the signs of a thriving, healthy native American community, with huts, smoking fires, gardens and cleared woodland, not to mention dozens of drawings of Indians. By the time the Pilgrims arrived, Patuxet, the Wampanoag village on the site where they built Plymouth, was dead. Every single native American had died in an epidemic of what was probably smallpox, except Squanto, who was saved only because an English slaver kidnapped him and sold him in the Malaga slave market in Spain,from which mirculously he managed to return. David Jones shows how wherever Europeans who had acquired immunity to viral diseases in their childhood --- Spaniards in Hispaniola in the 1520s, Englishmen, Frenchmen and Dutch in the 1620s, and Brazilians in the Amazon and Americans in Alaska as late as the twentieth century --- fearful mortality struck the indigenous population. Something between 90 and 95 percent of the native American inhabitants of eastern Massachusetts, for examaple, succumbed to European infections in the early seventeenth century. Europeans had been on the coasts of New England and the maritime provinces of Canada as fishermen and traders for more than a century when the Pilgrims arrived, and European diseases had taken hold, to become even more dangerous when settlers brought children with them. David S. Jones has analyzed the story of this series of medical catastrophes coolly, with empathy, compassion and great erudition. This is an impressive example of medical hnistory.