Lies My Teacher Told Me by James
Loewen, 1995, Excerpts
The inhabitants of North and South America were “a
remarkably healthy race” before Columbus. Ironically, their very health proved
their undoing, for they had built up no resistance, genetically or through
childhood diseases, to the microbes that Europeans and Africans would bring to
them.
In 1617, just before the Pilgrims landed, the plague started
in southern New England. For decades, British and French fisherman had fished
off the Massachusetts coast. It is likely that these fishermen transmitted some
illness to the people they met. The plague that ensued made the Black Death
pale in comparison. Within three years the plague wiped out between 90 percent
and 96 percent of the inhabitants of coastal New England. The Indian societies
lay devastated.
Unable to cope with so many corpses, the survivors abandoned
their villages and fled, often to a neighboring tribe. Because they carried the
infestation with them, Indians died who had never encountered a white person.
The ground was strewn with the skulls and the bones of thousands of Indians who
had died and none was left to bury them.
During the next fifteen years, additional epidemics, mostly
smallpox, struck repeatedly. These epidemics probably constituted the most
important geopolitical event of the early seventeenth century. Their net result
was that the British, for their first fifty years in New England, would face no
real Indian challenge. Indeed the plague helped prompt the legendarily warm
reception Plymouth enjoyed from the Wampanoag Indians.
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