american-holocaust

PESTILENCE AND GENOCIDE 93either of the scourges by itself-and with most deaths occurring within aweek of first infection, even among people with centuries of exposure andthus a measure of resistance-the Continent was reeling.l1 9 About 40,000people died in Lisbon alone from this single epidemic. People with no historyof the maladies, of course, would succumb at an even greater rate.The 100,000 natives who had died in the Rio de la Plata two years earlierwere mute testament to that. And so, in January of 1563, the plague andsmallpox left a ship that was anchored off the coast and accompanied theirhuman hosts onto the mainland of Brazil.The resulting carnage beggared all description. The plague was first. Itseemed as though everyone was infected. At least everyone who was anative. As is common when a contagion invades a people with no previousexposure to it, the first generation of symptoms are like nothing anyone,even anyone with long experience with the infection, has ever seen: "Thedisease began with serious pains inside the intestines," wrote Simao deVasconcellos, "which made the liver and the lungs rot. It then turned intopox that were so rotten and poisonous that the flesh fell off them in piecesfull of evil-smelling beasties." Thousands died in a matter of days, at least30,000 within three months. Then, among the plague's survivors, thesmallpox was discovered. Wrote Leonardo do Vale:When this tribulation was past and they wanted to raise their heads a little,another illness engulfed them, far worse than the other. This was a form ofsmallpox or pox so loathsome and evil-smelling that none could stand thegreat stench that emerged from them. For this reason many died untended,consumed by the worms that grew in the wounds of the pox and were engenderedin their bodies in such abundance and of such great size that theycaused horror and shock to any who saw them. 120As had been the case in the Caribbean and Mexico and Central Americaand Peru before, the secondary consequences of the epidemic were as bador worse than the monstrous diseases themselves. With no one healthyenough to prepare food or to draw water or even to comfort the others,multitudes starved to death, died of dehydration, or of outright despair,even before the infection could run its deadly course. Children were theworst afflicted. "In the end," recalled Vale, "the thing grew so bad thatthere was no one to make graves and some were buried in dunghills andaround the huts, but so badly that the pigs routed them up." 121If enslavement had weakened the Indians, increasing their susceptibilityto the fatal microbes, the destruction of their ways of life by armadas ofdisease in turn made them more susceptible to enslavement. For many,whose crops now were gone, because there was no one strong enough totend them while the epidemic raged, giving themselves over to servitudebecame the only way they could even hope to eat. They approached plan-