GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

YALI'S PEOPLE " 317
ubiquitous role of geography in the transmission of human culture and
technology.
IT REMAINS FOR US to consider the encounters of New Guinea's and
Australia's Stone Age societies with Iron Age Europeans. A Portuguese
navigator "discovered" New Guinea in 1526, Holland claimed the western
half in 1828, and Britain and Germany divided the eastern half in
1884. The first Europeans settled on the coast, and it took them a long
time to penetrate into the interior, but by 1960 European governments
had established political control over most New Guineans.
The reasons that Europeans colonized New Guinea, rather than vice
versa, are obvious. Europeans were the ones who had the oceangoing ships
and compasses to travel to New Guinea; the writing systems and printing
presses to produce maps, descriptive accounts, and administrative
paperwork useful in establishing control over New Guinea; the political
institutions to organize the ships, soldiers, and administration; and the
guns to shoot New Guineans who resisted with bow and arrow and clubs.
Yet the number of European settlers was always very small, and today
New Guinea is still populated largely by New Guineans. That contrasts
sharply with the situation in Australia, the Americas, and South Africa,
where European settlement was numerous and lasting and replaced the
original native population over large areas. Why was New Guinea different?
A major factor was the one that defeated all European attempts to settle
the New Guinea lowlands until the 1880s: malaria and other tropical diseases,
none of them an acute epidemic crowd infection as discussed in
Chapter 11. The most ambitious of those failed lowland settlement plans,
organized by the French marquis de Rays around 1880 on the nearby
island of New Ireland, ended with 930 out of the 1,000 colonists dead
within three years. Even with modern medical treatments available today,
many of my American and European friends in New Guinea have been
forced to leave because of malaria, hepatitis, or other diseases, while my
own health legacy of New Guinea has been a year of malaria and a year
of dysentery.
As Europeans were being felled by New Guinea lowland germs, why
were Eurasian germs not simultaneously felling New Guineans? Some
New Guineans did become infected, but not on the massive scale that