american-holocaust

300 NOTES34. Quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question ofthe Other (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), p.148.35. Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents, p. 93.36. Ibid., p. 226.37. Ibid., p. 227.38. Michele de Cuneo, "Letter on the Second Voyage," in Morison, ed., journalsand Other Documents, pp. 213-14.39. Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1966), p. 76: Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery ofAmerica: The Southern Voyages, A.D. 1492-1616 (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1974), p. 118; Sale, Conquest of Paradise, p. 149.40. Frederick L. Dunn, "On the Antiquity of Malaria in the Western Hemisphere,"Human Biology, 37 (1965), 385-93; Saul Jarcho, "Some Observationson Disease in Prehistoric North America," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 38(1964), 1-19.41. On yellow fever, see Kenneth F. Kiple and Virginia Himmelsteib King,Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora: Diet, Disease, and Racism (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 31-35. On smallpox in the Americas generally,as well as on this point, see Dauril Alden and Joseph C. Miller, "UnwantedCargoes: The Origins and Dissemination of Smallpox via the Slave Trade fromAfrica to Brazil, c. 1560-1830," in Kenneth F. Kiple, ed., The African Exchange:Toward a Biological History of Black People (Durham: Duke University Press,1987), pp. 35-109.42. Francisco Guerra, "The Earliest American Epidemic: The Influenza of 1493,"Social Science History, 12 (1988), 305-25.43. Alfred W. Crosby, "Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the AboriginalDepopulation in America," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 33 (1976),293-94; Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native AmericanPopulation Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of TennesseePress, 1983), p. 18. For a discussion of zoonotic diseases from wildlife on thisquestion, see Calvin Martin, "Wildlife Diseases as a Factor in the Depopulation ofthe North American Indian," The Western Historical Quarterly, 7 (1976), 47-62.There are some nagging problems with Guerra's thesis that need to be addressed.Key among them concern the relatively short incubation period for influenza, whichmakes it unlikely that the virus could have survived the lengthy ocean voyage (unlessit was kept active by passing from host to host), and the difficulty of explaininghow the virus was so well contained among the sows, even if they were storedbelow deck, and did not spread to the shipboard humans until the ships' arrival atthe future site of Isabela. An answer to at least one of these problems may emergefrom some new research on influenza suggesting that, in addition to direct host-tovictimtransferral of the virus, many cases may be spread by symptomless yearroundcarriers of the disease in whom contagion is triggered by an unknown mechanismduring so-called "flu seasons." See R.E. Hope-Simpson and D.B. Golubev,"A New Concept of the Epidemic Process of Influenza A Virus," Epidemiologyand Infection, 99 (1987), 5-54. I have discussed this elsewhere in Before the Horror:The Population of Hawai'i on the Eve of Western Contact (Honolulu: SocialScience Research Institute and University of Hawai'i Press, 1989), pp. 74-75, and