“Its presence shaped the fate of North America fully as much as any bullets, blades or bayonets.”

By John Danielski

THE CORONA VIRUS is not the first contagion to cause disruption. Throughout history, disease has often functioned as a hidden force multiplier that has aided conquests, toppled empires and helped build new ones.

One pathogen that has enjoyed a long and pronounced impact on the military history of the Western Hemisphere is variola major. Also called “the speckled monster” and “the red plague” because of spots pock-marking a victim’s face, it is much better known as smallpox.

While the Corona virus has an estimated mortality rate of two to three per cent, smallpox carried off 43 per cent of its victims in one of its last outbreaks in India in 1960. And although over the centuries, Europeans typically suffered between 10 and 17 per cent mortality during bouts with the disease, among the native peoples of North America, the lethality of smallpox was off the charts. Indeed, its presence shaped the fate of North America fully as much as any bullets, blades or bayonets.

Smallpox likely arrived in the New World with Christopher Columbus, though the first description of it occurs in a 4^th century CE Chinese manuscript. While Europeans had developed some resistance to it, the indigenous inhabitants of the West Indies had none at all. The native population of those islands was estimated at 500,000 in 1492. Thirty years later, those peoples were virtually extinct. Though war accounted for some of those deaths, probably 90 per cent were due to smallpox.

When Hernan Cortes landed in Mexico in 1519, his small band of warriors faced a mighty Aztec Empire of perhaps 10 million. While much is made of the Spanish advantage of guns and horses, smallpox was Cortes’ strongest weapon. When his army of 1,000 men besieged the Aztec Capital of Tenochtitlan in 1521, a city of 100,000, smallpox accomplished what bullets could not. Over the next several decades, the disease went on to kill six million people.

Outbreaks of an unknown virus in 1545 and again in 1576 wreaked havoc on a population already weakened by smallpox. While the Native population of Mexico and Central America was estimated at 20 million in 1519, a century later it was a mere million.

In 1532, 180 soldiers of Francisco Pizarro subdued the 690,000 square miles of the Incan Empire in South America with smallpox and other opportunistic diseases as their chief allies. Battle deaths were negligible but deaths of from disease over the next decade likely killed more than seven million.

Explorers of what later became the United States like Hernando de Soto, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca sought riches rather than military conquest. Yet the smallpox they carried decimated the warrior populations of the tribes that they encountered.

The devastation of the Western Hemisphere’s indigenous populations made it possible for a handful of Spanish soldiers, administrators and priests to lay down the foundation of an empire stretching from Tierra del Fuego to California. The mass extermination also contributed to the enslavement of blacks, since the Spanish Empire faced a shortage of native agricultural workers.

The Pilgrims landing at Plymouth in 1620 found many cleared fields but far more graves than people. The 102 settlers from the British Isles faced no opposition; an outbreak of smallpox – possibly combined with influenza – four years earlier had reduced the population of Cape Cod from 100,000 to almost zero. The disease had likely been spread by passing European fisherman and traders. In fact, the Pilgrims built their first stockade on the site of an abandoned Nauset village.

Smallpox played a key role in the French and British struggle for North America, as well. Nearly every major European military venture from Phip’s Expedition against Quebec in 1690 to Amherst’s capture of Montreal in 1760 was plagued by local outbreaks that reduced the number of military effectives by 20 to 50 per cent.

Spread by European explorers, missionaries, and traders, the disease proved deadly to Indian peoples in what are now the United States and Canada. Massachusetts cleared out the last native resistance in New England in King’s Phillips War in 1676 chiefly because the Wampanoag’s had been devastated by smallpox. The Huron Nation was hit particularly hard by several outbreaks in the 17^th century; being reduced from 22,000 to 9,000. The Mohawks of the Six Nations went from 2,000 warriors to 800 after a single outbreak.

Mounting deaths among native peoples often provoked “mourning raids” directed chiefly against English settlements. And many tribes replenished their reduced numbers by adopting captives taken in such attacks. The French were happy to encourage the practice as a strategic weapon against their historic foe. The Deerfield, Massachusetts Raid of 1704 killed 47, but 300 prisoners were marched north to the St. Lawrence; many of the women, children and adolescents seized were incorporated into the Abenaki settlement of St. Francis. The community became a symbol of such raids and provoked a bloody reprisal by Roger’s Ranger’s in 1759.

Much has been made of British General Jeffrey Amherst’s 1762 suggestion that Indians be given blankets contaminated with smallpox, but the weaponization of the disease was never a systematic policy, even though many British officers approved of the idea. Incidents of biological warfare were chiefly the products of individual initiatives – an example occurring during the siege of Ft. Pitt in 1763. The fort’s commander, Captain Simeon Ecuyer, authorized his Indian agent to supply infected trade goods to the Shawnee, Mingo, Delaware and Seneca tribes during negotiations to end the siege. Smallpox had already broken out among the fort’s soldiers though Ecuyer had carefully quarantined the victims. His attempt at biological warfare however, seems to have had little effect on the resolution of the siege.

Accident and the law of unintended consequences spread smallpox far better than careful plotting. The massacre of 200 prisoners after the fall of Fort William Henry in 1757 was immortalized in the 1826 James Fenimore Cooper novel The Last of the Mohicans and provoked mass outrage in New England, but its actual consequences were something of a Pyrrhic victory for the English. There had been a bad outbreak of smallpox in the fort prior to Montcalm’s attack: Indian trophies of English and Yankee scalps and clothing dispersed far and wide inaugurated a mass outbreak of the disease that greatly reduced the numbers of warriors available to the French in the later stages of the war.

Interestingly, the Indians’ noted compassion for smallpox victims worked against them. Rather than quarantining the afflicted, as was the case with sick Bostonians who were relegated to “pest houses,” Indian methods of treatment favored bringing family members and shamans to sufferers’ bedsides; a true community effort. This had the effect of exponentially increasing exposure to the pathogen.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu introduced the practice of inoculation to England in 1718, having witnessed it in Turkey as the wife of the British ambassador. Cotton Mather led the charge to inoculate 240 Bostonians in a 1721 outbreak with excellent results, but opposition remained widespread and the practice was illegal in New York City as late as 1776. Inoculation generally consisted of applying dried, powdered scabs from earlier victims to a healthy person. Inoculated people had only a one per cent mortality rate.

George Washington had seen the alarming results of smallpox in the French and Indian War and had noted the pattern repeating during the siege of Boston. When the British evacuated the city, the first soldiers he sent in were men who had survived the disease. Both he and John Adams believed the American failure to take Quebec in 1775 resulted from an outbreak that reduced combat effectives by 50 per cent. As a result, Washington decided to become a medical, as well as a political revolutionary. In 1777, he ordered the inoculation of all troops under his command; setting an example to all by even having his wife Martha undergo the procedure.

While Washington’s prophylactic measures were largely successful, civilians did not fare nearly so well. The years 1775 to 82 saw a huge spike in North American outbreaks of the disease, largely due to poor sanitary conditions common in wartime. Outbreaks in British prison hulks housing American POWs in New York harbor killed 10,000; the windowless, cramped conditions proved an ideal breeding ground for the disease.

Edward Jenner perfected the cowpox vaccine in 1798 and the practice of inoculation gradually spread. Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, a friend of Jenner’s, introduced it to the United States in 1800. American soldiers were routinely inoculated by the time of the Civil War, though enough recruits slipped through the cracks that 7,000 died of smallpox during that conflict. Severe outbreaks continued in Europe as late as the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. The disease was carried by French prisoners to Prussia, where it killed 140,000. It then spread to Austria where it took an additional 170,000 lives and finally to England where it claimed 143,000 victims.

The last naturally occurring case of smallpox was diagnosed in 1977; the World Health Organization declared the disease eradicated in 1980. Though currently a historical memory, smallpox’s historical track record as a killer is probably second only to that of the Bubonic Plague. Military men from Pericles to Patton have known that anything built by man can be overcome but defeating a weapon fashioned by nature is a much tougher nut to crack. Absent smallpox, the European conquest of the Western Hemisphere would probably have happened, but it would have taken considerably longer and been much harder to accomplish.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John Danielski is the author of the Tom Pennywhistle series of novels about a Royal Marine officer in the Napoleonic Wars. Book five of the series, Bellerophon’s Champion: Pennywhistle at Trafalgar was published by Penmore Press in May 2019. Watch for Bombproofed, the next Pennywhistle adventure, coming in May of 2020. For more, visit: www.tompennywhistle.com or check him out on Amazon.