american-holocaust

PESTILENCE AND GENOCIDEHSsailed up the Pacific coast and landed with his crews on the Oregon shorein 1579. And Drake may not have been the first European to venture thatfar north. But whoever was the first among the sixteenth-century adventurers,eighteenth-century explorers found old smallpox scars on the bodiesof the native people there. 133In 1602 and 1603 Sebastian Vizcaino led an expedition of three shipsup and down the California coast, with frequent stops on shore where hismen spent time with various Indian peoples. There was sickness on Vizcaino'sships from the moment they set sail, and before the voyage wascomplete it combined with scurvy to literally shut the voyage down. Scoresof men were incapacitated. At one point Vizcaino wrote: "All the men hadfallen sick, so that there were only two sailors who could climb to themaintopsail." The ship that he was on, Vizcaino later added, "seemed morelike a hospital than a ship of an armada." Fray Antonio de la Ascension,one of three clergymen who made the voyage with Vizcaino, feared thewhole crew was close to death. But fortunately for the Spanish-and unfortunatelyfor the natives-the Indians helped the crippled sailors, offeringthem "fish, game, hazel nuts, chestnuts, acorns, and other things. . . .for though but six of our men remained in the said frigate, the rest havingdied of cold and sickness, the Indians were so friendly and so desirous ofour friendship . . . that they not only did them no harm, but showed themall the kindness possible." 134 There can be no doubt that for their kindnessthe Indians were repaid by plagues the likes of which nothing in theirhistory had prepared them.The earliest European mariners and explorers in California, as notedin a previous chapter's discussion of Cabrillo, repeatedly referred to thegreat numbers of Indians living there. In places where Vizcaino's shipscould approach the coast or his men could go ashore, the Captain recorded,again and again, that the land was thickly filled with people. Andwhere he couldn't approach or go ashore "because the coast was wild,"the Indians signaled greetings by building fires-fires that "made so manycolumns of smoke on the mainland that at night it looked like a processionand in the daytime the sky was overcast." In sum, as Father Ascension putit, "this realm of California is very large and embraces much territory,nearly all inhabited by numberless people." 135But not for very long. Throughout the late sixteenth and the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries, Spanish disease and Spanish cruelty tooka large but mostly uncalculated toll. Few detailed records of what happenedduring that time exist, but a wealth of research in other locales hasshown the early decades following Western contact to be almost invariablythe worst for native people, because that is when the fires of epidemicdisease burn most freely. Whatever the population of California was beforethe Spanish came, however, and whatever happened during the firstfew centuries following Spanish entry into the region, by 1845 the Indian