A Concise History of the United States of America (2012)

14 A Concise History of the United States of America
century. Yet although diseases such as smallpox, measles, or yellow fever
wreaked havoc in the Americas, there is little medical evidence to suggest
a particular indigenous susceptibility to European disease strains. Smallpox
alone could prove devastating even in a population that enjoyed herd
immunity to it. The death rate from that disease among white Union soldiers
in the Civil War (1861–65) was around 38 percent – about the same
as for Aztec society in 1520.
The danger for America’s indigenous peoples in the sixteenth century
was not solely the diseases carried from the Old World to the “New.”
The main problem was who carried them. Violence and virus worked in
tandem, and to devastating effect, in the Americas after first contact, and
continued to do so well into the late nineteenth century. Both emanated
from a European environment that, although not inured either to conflict
or contagion, was certainly familiar with both. The sixteenth century was
a violent age, made more so by the religious realignments prompted by,
first, the Protestant Reformation inaugurated by Martin Luther in 1517
and, later, England’s version of it, ushered in by Henry VIII’s Act of
Supremacy (1534) through which he challenged the power of the papacy
and established himself as head of the Church of England. When that,
coupled with the inevitable greed for gold and all the power that it could
purchase, moved across the Atlantic, the results were devastating. Competition
and conflict were certainly not alien to the native populations of
the Americas, but it was the relatively sudden burst of competitiveness
among the European powers during what has been termed the First Great
Age of Discovery that overwhelmed them. Inspired and threatened by the
impact of Columbus’s encounter in equal measure, the British and the
French in particular sought to challenge Spanish dominance, in Europe
as in the Americas.
The English were especially keen on undermining the power of Spain,
and to that end sent Venetian explorer Giovanni Caboto (anglicized to
John Cabot) to Newfoundland in 1497. His journey did a great deal for
the European fishing industry, but England lacked the resources to follow
up on Cabot’s initiative. Further south, the Spanish had kept their eyes
on the greater prize that the imagined wealth of the Americas offered.
Naked greed, however, found it both convenient and, in the context of
the Reformation, expedient to wrap itself in the banner of religion. So the
Spanish conquistadores set out from Hispaniola in a New World echo
of the crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Accompanied by
missionaries, they marched under the sign of the cross to convert – or
crush – the peoples they encountered. The most famous Spanish explorer