CHAPTER 22

They came to wither the flowers.

The myths of the White City, the City of the Monkey God, a Casa Blanca or Kaha Kamasa, have a similar arc: There was once a great city in the mountains struck down by a series of catastrophes, after which the people decided the gods were angry and left, leaving behind their possessions. Thereafter it was shunned as a cursed place, forbidden, visiting death on those who dared enter.

A legend, certainly, but legends are frequently based on the truth, and this one, so persistent and long-lasting, is no exception.

To dig the truth out of the myth, we have to go back in time, to the discovery of the New World by Europeans. In October of 1493, Columbus set sail on his second voyage to the New World. This expedition was very different from the first. That one, with three ships, had been a voyage of exploration: This one was primarily aimed at subjugation, colonization, and conversion. Columbus’s enormous flotilla on that second voyage consisted of seventeen ships carrying fifteen hundred men and thousands of head of livestock, including horses, cattle, dogs, cats, chickens, and pigs. But on board those ships was something far more threatening than soldiers with steel arms and armor, priests with crosses, and animals that would disrupt the New World ecology. Columbus and his men unwittingly carried microscopic pathogens, to which the people of the New World had never been exposed and against which they had no genetic resistance. The New World was like a vast, tinder-dry forest waiting to burn—and Columbus brought the fire. That European diseases ran rampant in the New World is an old story, but recent discoveries in genetics, epidemiology, and archaeology have painted a picture of the die-off that is truly apocalyptic; the lived experience of the indigenous communities during this genocide exceeds the worst that any horror movie has imagined. It was disease, more than anything else, that allowed the Spanish to establish the world’s first imperio en el que nunca se pone el sol, the “empire on which the sun never sets,” so called because it occupied a swath of territory so extensive that some of it was always in daylight.

Columbus had boasted on his first voyage that “no one had been sick or even had a headache,” except for an old man with kidney stones. The second voyage, carrying soldiers from different parts of Spain and teeming cargo of livestock, was a Noah’s ark of pestilence. Even during the Atlantic crossing, hundreds of men and animals on board Columbus’s flotilla began to sicken. When they reached the outer islands of the Caribbean, the ships, carrying their ripe payload of disease, made a grand tour of the islands, landing on Dominica, Monserrat, Antigua, and other islands of the Lesser Antilles before sailing on to Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, where most of the men disembarked. Even while he and his men were getting sicker, Columbus took a smaller fleet that then explored Cuba and Jamaica before returning to Hispaniola.

Columbus’s first descriptions of Hispaniola reveal a wondrous and fertile place, an island “larger than Portugal with twice the population,” which he extolled as “the most beautiful land I have ever seen.”* Hispaniola (today divided between the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic) was richly inhabited by Taíno Indians, but how many is disputed by historians. Bartolomé de las Casas, the early Spanish chronicler who wrote a largely eyewitness account of the colonization of the Indies, said that the Indian population of Hispaniola when Columbus arrived was about a million, which he later revised upward to three million. Many modern historians believe las Casas exaggerated the numbers and that the actual population was perhaps around half a million. Regardless, Hispaniola and all the big islands of the Caribbean were astoundingly prosperous. In nearby Jamaica, Columbus encountered “all the coast and land filled with towns and excellent ports” where “infinite numbers of Indians followed us in their canoes.”

All that was about to change.

On that fateful second voyage, Columbus himself became so ill that he almost died, and for weeks he stopped writing in his log. The flotilla reached Hispaniola on November 22, 1493, and reestablished a Spanish settlement to replace the one that had been destroyed by Indians in their absence. Many of the Spanish by this time had fallen sick, and quite a few had died, due to the unsanitary conditions on board ship and the impossibility of escaping contagion. In a few years, fully half of Columbus’s fifteen hundred soldiers would be dead of disease. But that was nothing compared to what happened to the native populations.

In their wandering passage through the Caribbean, the ships with their sick crews unknowingly spread epidemics of illness at many of the ports they visited. By 1494, these epidemics merged into a plague raging across Hispaniola and the rest of the Caribbean. “There came among [the Indians] such illness, death and misery,” Bartolomé de las Casas wrote, “that of fathers, mothers and children, an infinite number sadly died.” He estimated that a third of the population died in the two years from 1494 to 1496.

A table of statistics for the island of Hispaniola tells the story:

Date: 1492

Native Population: ~500,000 (disputed)

Date: 1508

Native Population: 60,000

Date: 1510

Native Population: 33,523

Date: 1514

Native Population: 26,334

Date: 1518 [before smallpox]

Native Population: 18,000

Date: 1519 [after smallpox]

Native Population: 1,000

Date: 1542

Native Population: 0