Isn't that the truth!!! Found this timeline: What it was like before Columbus arrived...
bradshawfoundation.com
1491 SANTA MARIA 1492
In the past it was thought that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago, that they lived for me most part in small isolated groups and that they had so little impact on the environment that even after millennia of habitation it remained mostly wilderness. It is now realised that this picture of Indian life is wrong in almost every aspect. Indians have been in America far longer than previously thought, and in much greater numbers. They were so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere completely dominated by humankind, in fact the population of America was greater than that of Europe.
1620 November 9
The Mayflower arrived at Cape Cod Massachusetts six weeks before winter. Only half the 102 people on the Mayflower made it through to spring. Why? In his history of Plymouth Colony, Bradford provided the answer: by robbing Indian houses and graves. When the Mayflower first hove to at Gape Cod, an armed company staggered out and eventually found a recently deserted Indian settlement. The newcomers-hungry, cold, sick-dug up graves and ransacked houses, looking for underground stashes of corn. “And sure it was God’s good providence that we found this corn,” Bradford wrote, “for else we know not how we should have done.”
Plymouth
When the colonists came to Plymouth, a month later, they settled in another deserted Indian village. All through the coastal forest the Indians had “died on heaps, as they lay in their houses,” the English trader Thomas Morton noted. “And the bones and skulls upon the several places of their habitations made such a spectacle” that to Morton the Massachusetts woods seemed to be “a new found Golgotha”-the hill of executions in Roman Jerusalem.
Blond Hair
To the Pilgrims’ astonishment, one of the corpses they exhumed on Gape Cod had blond hair. A French ship had been wrecked there several years earlier. The Patuxet Indians imprisoned a few survivors. One of them supposedly learned enough of the local language to inform his captors that God would destroy them for their misdeeds. The Patuxet scoffed at the threat. But the Europeans carried a disease, and they bequeathed it to their jailers. The epidemic, (probably of viral hepatitis), took years to exhaust itself and may have killed 90 percent of the people in coastal New England. It made a huge difference to American history. “The good hand of God favored our beginnings,” Bradford mused, by “sweeping away great multitudes of the natives ... that he might make room for us.”
Mayflower
By the time the Mayflower set sail, a multitude of Europeans had been visiting New England for more than a hundred years. English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese mariners regularly plied the coastline, trading what they could, occasionally kidnapping the inhabitants for slaves. The New England, the Europeans saw, was thickly settled and well defended. In 1605 and 1606 Samuel de Champlain visited Cape Cod, hoping to establish a French base. He abandoned the idea. Too many people already lived there. A year later Sir Ferdinando Gorges tried to establish an English community in southern Maine. It had more founders than Plymouth and seems to have been better organised. Confronted by numerous well-armed local Indians, the settlers abandoned the project within months. The Indians at Plymouth would surely have been an equal obstacle to the Mayflower settlers’ ramshackle expedition had disease not intervened.
The Native Population
Faced with such stories, historians have long wondered how many people lived in the Americas at the time of contact. Debated since Columbus attempted a partial census on Hispaniola in 1496, this remains one of the great inquiries of history. The first scholarly estimate of the indigenous population was made in 1910 by James Mooney, a distinguished ethnographer at the Smithsonian Institution. Combing through old documents, he concluded that in 1491 North America had 1.15 million inhabitants. Mooney’s reputation ensured that most researchers accepted his figure uncritically.
Aboriginal American Population
That changed in 1966, when Henry F. Dobyns published “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques With a New Hemispheric Estimate,” in the journal Current Anthropology. By looking into the papers of the Lima cathedral and reading Spanish histories concerning the Indians in Peru, Dobyns concluded, that they had first faced a smallpox plague seven years ahead of the Spanish conquistadors’ arrival in 1525. Brought to Mexico apparently by a single sick Spaniard, it swept south and eliminated more than half the population of the Inca Empire. Smallpox claimed the Inca dictator Huayna Capac and much of his family, setting off a calamitous war of succession. So complete was the chaos that Francisco Pizarro was able to seize an empire the size of Spain and Italy combined with a force of just 168 men.
More people lived in the Americas than in Europe
Smallpox was only the first epidemic. Typhus (probably) in 1546, influenza and smallpox together in 1558, smallpox again in 1589, diphtheria in 1614, measles in 1618-all ravaged the remains of Inca culture. Dobyns was the first social scientist to piece together this awful picture. If all those people died, how many had been living there to begin with? Before Columbus, he calculated, the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.
Already depopulated
It is well known that Native Americans had no experience with many European diseases and were therefore immunologically unprepared. What Dobyns realised was that such diseases could have swept from the coastlines initially visited by Europeans to inland areas controlled by Indians who had never seen a white person. The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas encountered places that were already depopulated.
Vancouver
Peru was one example, the Pacific Northwest another. In 1792 the British navigator George Vancouver led the first European expedition to survey Puget Sound. He found a vast charnel house: human remains “promiscuously scattered about the beach, in great numbers” Smallpox, Vancouver’s crew discovered, had preceded them. Its few survivors, second lieutenant Peter Puget noted, were “most terribly pitted ... indeed many have lost their eyes.” In Pox Americana (2001), Elizabeth Fenn, a historian at George Washington University, contends that the disaster on the Northwest coast was but a small part of a continental pandemic that erupted near Boston in 1774 and cut down Indians from Mexico to Alaska. |
