Question

How do the Spanish Conquistadors bringing disease to the new world compare/contrast with new disease outbreaks in today's society?

Answer 1

When the Taino gathered on the shores of San Salvador Island to welcome a small celebration of overseas sailors on 12 October 1492, they had little idea what lay in store. They laid down their weapons willingly and added the overseas sailors—Christopher Columbus and his crewmen—tokens of friendship: parrots, bits of cotton thread, and other presents. Columbus later wrote that the Taino “remained so plenty our buddies that it was once a marvel.”

A 12 months later, Columbus constructed his first town on the nearby island of Hispaniola, where the Taino numbered at least 60,000 and maybe as many as 8 million, according to some estimates. But by 1548, the Taino populace there had plummeted to less than 500 Lacking immunity to Old World pathogens carried by means of the Spanish, Hispaniola’s indigenous inhabitants fell sufferer to terrible plagues of smallpox, influenza, and other viruses

Epidemics soon grew to become a common end result of contact. In April 1520, Spanish forces landed in what is now Veracruz, Mexico, unwittingly bringing alongside an African slave infected with smallpox. Two months later, Spanish troops entered the capital of the Aztec Empire, Tenochtitlán (shown above), and by means of mid-October the virus was sweeping through the town (depicted above in snap shots from the Florentine codex, a record written by means of a 16th century Spanish friar), killing almost 1/2 of the population, which pupils nowadays estimate at 50,000 to 300,000 people. The useless included the Aztec ruler, Cuitláhuac, and many of his senior advisers. By the time Hernán Cortés and his troops commenced their closing assault on Tenochtitlán, our bodies lay scattered over the city, permitting the small Spanish force to overwhelm the startled defenders.

But no longer all indigenous groups suffered such a grim fate. The smallpox virus unfold extra easily in densely populated Tenochtitláan than it did in carefully inhabited regions, such as the Great Plains of the United States. There migratory hunter-gatherers accompanied the first-rate bison herds, and disease outbreaks have been every so often contained in single bands. During the smallpox epidemic of 1837 to 1838 along the Upper Missouri River, for example, some Blackfoot bands suffered heavy losses, whilst neighboring Gros Ventre humans escaped almost unscathed. The Gros Ventre have been eventually forced to stay on reservations, the place some left lovely “ledger art” (see above), drawing and retaining small print of their dress and way of life in ledgers provided through Bureau of Indian Affairs agents. Contact with Europeans also introduced one primary gain to Plains populations: the horse, which made following and searching bison herds easier

In far flung components of the Americas such as the Amazon, resource extraction has driven many contacts with indigenous groups. During the late 1880s, European and American industries producing gaskets, electrical insulators, bicycle tires, and different goods created an large demand for rubber. Amazon forests have been rich in rubber-producing trees: All that was lacking, it seemed, used to be a nearby team of workers to tap them. Unscrupulous rubber retailers eventually enslaved “hundreds of heaps of Indians” from remoted Amazonian tribes to work as rubber tappers, in accordance to a 1988 study through the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. To avoid capture, many isolated tribes fled into ever greater far off areas of the rainforest, where a few stay isolated even today. In 1914, new rubber plantations in Asia and Africa supplanted Amazonian rubber.