american-holocaust

102 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTarea, followed by Jacques Cartier in 1534, and numerous others after him.Their impact on the lives of the native peoples they encountered varied, asdid their specific intentions. But for most, their intentions were dear inwhat they brought with them. Thus, in 1539, Hernando de Soto landedwith a force of 600 armed men, more than 200 horses, hundreds ofwolfhounds, mastiffs, and greyhounds, a huge supply of neck chains forthe slaves they planned to capture, and a portable forge in case that supplyproved inadequate. 19By the 1560s and 1570s European militiamen were traveling throughoutthe southeast, spreading disease and bloody massacre everywhere theywent. Still, in the early 1570s-even after a series of devastating Europeandiseases had attacked the Virginia Indians for more than half a decadetheJesuit Juan Rogel, generally regarded as the most reliable of all theearly Spanish commentators on this region, wrote of coastal Virginia: "Thereare more people here than in any of the other lands I have seen so faralong the coast explored. It seemed to me that the natives are more settledthan in other regions I have been." 20 And Father Rogel previously hadlived in densely populated Florida. Twenty-five years later, when the Britishcolonizing troops arrived at Jamestown, they found "a Iande;" wroteone of them, "that promises more than the Lande of promisse: In steed ofmylke we fynde pearl. I & golde Inn steede of honye." But by now thepeople they found were greatly reduced in number from what they hadbeen before the coming of the earlier Europeans. The signs of the previousinvaders' calling cards could not be missed, "for the great diseaze reignesin the [native] men generally," noted an anonymous correspondent, "fullfraught with noodes botches and pulpable appearances in their forheades."21A decade earlier, in 1596, an epidemic of measles--r possibly bubonicplague-had swept through Florida, killing many native people. It mayhave made its way to Virginia as well, since on previous occasions the twolocales had been nearly simultaneous recipients of European pestilence: in1586, for instance, Thomas Hariot's English troops left disease and deaththroughout Virginia at the same time that Francis Drake had loosed some"very foul and frightful diseases" (at least one of which appears to havebeen typhus) among the Indians at St. Augustine; and in 1564, a six-yearsiege of disease and starvation began that reduced Virginia's populationdrastically, at the same time that a devastating plague of some sort waskilling large numbers of Florida's Timucuan people. 22Invariably, in the New World as in the Old, massive epidemics broughtstarvation in their wake, because the reduced and debilitated populationswere unable to tend their crops. As one Jesuit wrote of Virginia in the fallof 1570:We find the land of Don Luis [the Spanish name given an Indian aboard shipwho had been taken from Virginia to Spain some years earlier] in quite an-