american-holocaust

138 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTspace for Indians in the missions averaged about seven feet by two feet perperson for unmarried captives, who were locked at night into sex-segregatedcommon rooms that contained a single open pit for a toilet. It was perhapsa bit more space than was allotted a captive African in the hold of a slaveship sailing the Middle Passage. Married Indians and their children, on theother hand, were permitted to sleep together-in what Russian visitor V.M.Golovnin described in 1818 as "specially constructed 'cattle-pens.' " Heexplained:I cannot think of a better term for these dwellings that consist of a long rowof structures not more than one sagene [seven feet] high and P/2-2 sageneswide, without floor or ceiling, each divided into sections by partitions, alsonot longer than two sagenes, with a correspondingly small door and a tinywindow in each-can one possibly call it anything but a barnyard for domesticcattle and fowl? Each of these small sections is occupied by an entirefamily; cleanliness and tidiness are out of the question: a thrifty peasantusually has a better-kept cattle-pen. 144Under such conditions Spanish-introduced diseases ran wild: measles,smallpox, typhoid, and influenza epidemics occurred and re-occurred, whilesyphilis and tuberculosis became, as Sherburne F. Cook once said, "totalitarian"diseases: virtually all the Indians were afflicted by them. 145As for malnutrition, despite agricultural crop yields on the Indian-tendedmission plantations that Golovnin termed "extraordinary" and "unheardof in Europe," along with large herds of cattle and the easily accessiblebounty of sea food, the food given the Indians, according to him, was "akind of gruel made from barley meal, boiled in water with maize, beans,and peas; occasionally they are given some beef, while some of the morediligent [Indians] catch fish for themselves.'' 146 On average, according toCook's analyses of the data, the caloric intake of a field-laboring missionIndian was about 1400 calories per day, falling as low as 715 or 865calories per day in such missions as San Antonio and San Miguel. To putthis in context, the best estimate of the caloric intake of nineteenth-centuryAfrican American slaves is in excess of 4000 calories per day, and almost5400 calories per day for adult male field hands. This seems high by modernWestern standards, but is not excessive in terms of the caloric expenditurerequired of agricultural laborers. As the author of the estimate putsit: "a diet with 4206 calories per slave per day, while an upper limit [is]neither excessive nor generous, but merely adequate to provide sufficientenergy to enable one to work like a slave." Of course, the mission Indiansalso worked like slaves in the padres' agricultural fields, but they did sowith far less than half the caloric intake, on average, commonly provideda black slave in Mississippi, Alabama, or Georgia. 147Even the military commanders at the missions acknowledged that the