Between Hope and Fear Page 4
Coming to America
From its beginnings, America has always been a nation of immigrants. Even the “native Americans” and other indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere are relatively recent arrivals. Thus, while many Americans refer to the “Old World” in terms of European migration, the reality is that North America was subject to rounds of immigration from the “Old-Old World” in the form of migration from Asia. Until quite recently, it was believed that ancient humans began migrating to the New World no more than fourteen thousand years ago, largely as a consequence of the last great ice age.31 The widely held idea, conveyed by countless textbooks and documentaries, was based upon the hypothesis that the colder climate caused much of the planet’s northernmost oceans to become encased in ice, which served to both lower the ocean levels and create an ice bridge, known as the Bering land bridge or Beringia, between eastern Siberia and Alaska. As the ice bridge melted, but before it disconnected the two continents, a warmer climate provided just enough vegetation and animal life to nourish the travelers during their expeditions to the New World. This idea recalls depictions of a great migration by thousands of people trudging relentlessly over the ice sheets through gales of blowing snow, intent upon the great opportunities waiting for them in the Western Hemisphere. Until recently, there had been general agreement within the scientific community that some travelers embarked upon an odyssey that progressively led them south through North, Central, and finally South America. More recent findings cast doubt as to whether this image accurately conveys the primary mode of conveyance.
The Clovis peoples (named for an archaeological site near Clovis, New Mexico), used tools that readily identified them as immigrants to the New World. By analyzing the tools and other unique aspects of the Clovis culture, archaeologists and anthropologists could track their spread not just from north to south but also from east to west as they populated the large landmasses of the Western Hemisphere. Given the vast distances involved and the time (measured in scores of generations) needed to cross these on foot, it was largely assumed that the regions farthest from Alaska, namely the steppes of Patagonia, could not have been populated more recently than 12,500 years ago.
A convergence of information from many fields has identified inconsistencies in the popular theory associated with the Clovis peoples and their crossing of the great ice land bridge. First, carbon dating of archaeological evidence reveals bones, feces, and other detritus of humans in Patagonia more than 14,600 years ago (before the presumed opening of the Bering land bridge). From the results of recent meteorological studies, the timing of the Bering land bridge was inconsistent with the environmental conditions that the travelers would have required to access the necessary vegetation and animal sources needed to provide food, clothing, and shelter. Limitations in the availability of food, clothing and shelter would also have limited the number of people who could be provisioned to cover the considerable distance from habitable portions of Siberia to comparable climes in North America. Perhaps the most basic inconsistency is that artifacts linked with the Clovis culture have never been found in Alaska or the Canadian Yukon even though these have been found in Oregon, the American Southeast (as far as Florida), and in Patagonia.32
Although a frozen land bridge cannot be excluded and might indeed have contributed to the population of the Western Hemisphere by some early humans, many scientists now favor an idea that the Clovis population, or perhaps earlier settlers, might have entered the Americas along the coasts in boats in multiple waves of migration rather than within the limited timeframe needed for a land bridge crossing.33 Indeed, a 2017 bombshell study of an archaeological site in Southern California by scientists from the San Diego History Museum suggested that humans might have arrived in the New World 130,000 years ago, presumably by sea.34
Analyses of genetic ancestry reveal that many native peoples of North and Central America share genetic material with north Asians (especially the native people of modern-day Siberia and Taiwan). In contrast, some Amazonian tribes are more closely related to Australasians.35 A sea-based migration, at least by modern standards, would likely have involved small boats, which is consistent with the limited genetic diversity of the immigrants to the New World, whose founding numbers might have been measured in the hundreds or thousands.
The mode of transportation is not a minor consideration for our story, because understanding the means of movement impacts our understanding of genetic diversity. Rather than swarms of people crossing a land bridge, much of the Western Hemisphere might have been peopled by handfuls of migrants arriving from north or south Asia on rickety boats. This is combined with the unfortunate reality that these Asians had split from their Eurasian relatives before the latter were infected with smallpox. Both were ingredients that put a disaster in place. In addition, while the number of immigrants able to make the journey was limited by the size of the boats, a further reduction of genetic diversity arose as some individuals did not survive the arduous journey before passing along their genes to a new generation. Make no mistake, these were a hearty people, who proved able to conquer two entirely new and hostile continents. Indeed, Charles C. Mann’s opus, 1491, makes a strong case that far from a racist European view of Amerindians as “noble savages,” these first peoples were capable of extraordinary technical and engineering feats.36 However, the selection pressures on the surviving population that first populated the Western Hemisphere had not included resistance to diseases like smallpox.
Within a relatively short time (in a geological and anthropological sense), the population of the Western Hemisphere grew rapidly as people spread from west to east and north to south (and south to north if some travelers arrived by boat and landed in South America). Estimates of the number of pre-Columbian native Americans vary widely. On the low end, the population of the New World might have peaked at a low level of 1,000,000.37 At the other extreme, the 1968 book The Population of Miexteca Alta, 1520–1960 states that more than 25,000,000 people lived in the Mexican plain alone (not including the rest of North America or South America).38
The new tenants of the New World were likely not the primitive noble savages romanticized by many European conquerors but a wide variety of sophisticated cultures. For example, early Amerindians shaped and cultivated the land extensively. Consistent with this idea, archaeological evidence reveals that the system of mounds located just across the river from St. Louis, known as Cahokia, was a sophisticated metropolitan and religious center for the Mississippian culture, which extended from the northernmost lands of modern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Missouri River valley.39 The ruins at Cahokia reveal an advanced culture with sophisticated astronomical landmarks that aided agricultural planning (much as Stonehenge did for the Bronze Age Britons) and copper metalworking that supported the manufacture of intricate religious items.
Despite these achievements, the relatively low genetic diversity of these thriving civilizations (as compared with their Eurasian counterparts) made them susceptible to outside microbial challenge. The landing of Columbus and other Europeans triggered a comprehensive and rapid collapse in the population and infrastructure that had supported human life on the two continents of the Western Hemisphere.40 Much as we saw with the Romans, the existence of a more modern transportation and urbanization infrastructure provided a superhighway to facilitate the spread of diseases brought along by the newly arrived Europeans. Within the half century separating 1492 from the time in which Hernando de Soto became the first European to gaze upon the almost uninhabited regions of the lower Mississippi River, much of the population had already been decimated by waves of disease. These diseases were spread by the vital interactions among tribes that ranged up and down the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and into the heartlands. The considerable contacts among the different native peoples, much like the Roman highways, facilitated the spread of diseases, decimated entire civilizations, and rendered those remaining susceptible to subjugation. Chief among
these pathogens was smallpox.
Smallpox was endemic throughout the classical world by the time of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. While bouts of disease continued to claim many lives, the population had been culled such that the threat to human civilization was problematic, to be certain, but no longer existential. From the cold, analytical standpoint of a population scientist, smallpox in the Old World had been rendered into something greater than a Eurasian annoyance, albeit a fatal one, but less than a society-ending apocalypse. For the natives of both Americas, who lacked prior exposure to the virus, and who were subject to a relative genetic bottleneck, the virus was to prove much more problematic.
Smallpox was introduced into the New World by a Spanish sailor most likely in or around 1507, though rather dubious accounts of the time tend to point the finger at African slaves as the culprits.41 By 1520, smallpox had been transported beyond the Caribbean islands and entered the continental Americas. Just over a quarter century after Columbus first set sail to the New World, a pandemic was raging throughout the Americas. As we have seen with the Romans, the organization and technologies that facilitated the transportation and urban sophistication of the natives rendered them particularly susceptible to the spread of disease. Evidence for this vulnerability can be seen by the fact that disease efficiently decimated virtually all native cultures on two continents, ranging from the extreme northeastern provinces of Canada to the tip of Patagonia, all within a few generations. By its conclusion, a lethal combination of smallpox and other Eurasian diseases likely claimed the lives of as many as 90–95 percent of all New World natives.42 The physiological collapse of individual smallpox victims mirrored governmental and societal collapses, much as was reported by Thucydides during the Plague of Athens. This rendered the few survivors susceptible to conquest by the likes of Hernando Cortes and Francisco Pizarro. Rapid depopulation might in part have explained the open spaces witnessed by de Soto and other early European explorers and settlers; they were unknowingly witnessing infrastructures that had been created and maintained for centuries but which had quickly fallen into disrepair after their stewards were killed by a stew of infectious microbes introduced in the early years of the 16th century.
The irony is that while the devastation of smallpox was wreaking havoc in “the New World,” the Old World was embarking on the first of a series of scientific revolutions that would eventually eradicate the disease altogether. Sadly, these achievements were not to be put into widespread practice until after the microbe-based genocide had taken its toll on the first peoples of the Americas.
Variolation
The first intentional and successful intervention in the long war against smallpox was recorded more than a thousand years ago. A scholar of East Asian history, Joseph Needham of Cambridge University, attributes the first attempt to prevent smallpox to a basic tenet of Taoist medical philosophy.43 According to Chinese tradition, the medical community had, since at least the year 1000 CE, adopted a practice of “nasal insufflation” to prevent smallpox. The idea behind this procedure was to isolate scabs from individuals who had suffered relatively mild cases of smallpox. This material was dried and refined into powder that was blown into the nose of healthy children. Over time, this practice became a ritual to mark a milestone of a child’s life (probably marking five years after birth). These children might display some or all of the symptoms of a mild form of the disease, but the ancient Chinese recognized they would be spared the severity of extreme scarring and death that might accompany an infection later in life.
The geographic proximity of the abutting Turkish civilization, assisted by the ease of transport afforded by the Silk Road, eventually allowed them to learn of the practice of nasal insufflation.44 It appears that the details of the procedure had been carefully safeguarded for as long as a half millennium by passing along the knowledge in an oral, but not written, form. In a tragic case of poor timing, nasal insufflation was first introduced into the Eastern parts of Europe at a time roughly coincident with the beginning of the Columbian voyages to the New World, which originated at the other end of the continent. Consequently, the practice arrived too late to prevent the tragedy conveyed by Spanish soldiers and sailors that would ravage the native population of the Western Hemisphere. Over the next two hundred years, the Ottomans increasingly experimented and refined the practice, preferring a subcutaneous introduction of the infectious material (jabbed just under the skin) rather than up the nose. This practice came to be known as variolation.
Despite the heavy toll smallpox continued to impart upon western and central Europe, leading minds were not particularly inclined to embrace what seemed to be a highly unhygienic practice. Indeed, the venerated Royal Society of London was inundated with reports from multiple sources of the Chinese and Ottoman practices by 1700 but chose not to act upon this information. Nonetheless, individual acts of bravery and foresight allowed a handful of quite remarkable personalities to convey the life-saving procedures that would save the lives of thousands.
Prominent among these early advocates was the remarkable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and a talented figure, who excelled as a writer and poet.45 Lady Montagu had lost a brother to smallpox and herself had suffered severe scarring from an infection with the pox in 1715. During her travels throughout the Ottoman Empire, she learned of variolation, a technique preferred by the Ottomans in which smallpox material was introduced into a scratch in the skin. While variolation would cause an infection, the symptoms were generally less severe and conferred immunity thereafter. As a demonstration of her belief in the practice, Lady Montagu in 1718 volunteered her four-year-old son, Edward, for inoculation by an experienced and elderly Greek woman.46 Apparently, she strong-armed the embassy surgeon, Dr. Charles Maitland, to witness and document the procedure. The doctor reluctantly agreed and watched with considerable discomfort as the old woman introduced the dried scabs into the child’s arm with a rusty and dull needle. Dr. Maitland then utilized a more pristine lancet to do the same to Edward’s other arm. Over the following few days, Dr. Maitland remained discomforted, as he had been sworn to secrecy. As it happens, Lady Montagu had elected not to inform her husband, Ambassador Edward Wortley-Montagu, of the risky procedure that had been conducted upon his only male heir until at least a week had passed and the fear of danger to the child had expired.
Upon returning home, Lady Montagu broadly advocated for variolation and, as a person of considerable prominence, gained the attention of her friend Caroline of Anspach, the Princess of Wales and future queen to George II. Amidst a particularly obnoxious London epidemic in 1721, Lady Montagu demanded that Maitland inoculate her daughter, Mary, who was four years old at the time. Back home in Britain, Maitland initially resisted this request, since variolation was regarded to be an “eastern” or “Asian” practice, which could sully his reputation.47 Ever subservient to Lady Montagu, Maitland eventually agreed to do so but only if the procedure was witnessed by prominent members of the Royal College of Physicians. At least one of the witnesses, Dr. James Keith, was so impressed that he had Dr. Maitland variolate his only remaining son (all others had died from smallpox).48
Within weeks, the news of variolation spread through the London medical community and among the gentry. Soon thereafter, the Princess of Wales (who possessed an intellect for science and a strong propensity for advocacy every bit as strong as Lady Montagu’s) demanded that an experiment be conducted on prisoners held at London’s Newgate prison. Three men and three women prisoners were subjected to inoculation and observation. To verify the protective effect, one of the women, a nineteen-year-old by the name of Elizabeth Harrison, was compelled to care for patients in the town of Hertford, where a particularly aggressive outbreak of smallpox was burning through the region. Elizabeth was in close contact with at least two patients, including sleeping every night for six weeks in the bed of a ten-year-old infected boy. Elizabeth remained healthy, and she was later releas
ed from bondage for her service. The following weeks bustled with experimental activity, including a somewhat unsuccessful and widely publicized attempt at the Chinese practice of nasal insufflation. In the end, Maitland’s approach (actually, the elderly Greek woman’s approach) of subcutaneous delivery of smallpox residue became accepted practice.
The use of smallpox variolation was initially adopted by the wealthy and educated population of London, largely based on the advocacy and prominence of Lady Montagu and the Princess of Wales. As we will soon see, this outcome sits in stark and ironic contrast to a modern wrinkle in which wealthy and educated individuals tend to resist vaccination. As with any new medical procedure, there were many bumps along the road, as evidenced by high-profile deaths and improper technique. The conventional (for early-19th-century Europe) but inaccurate understanding of the immune system suggested that deep punctures would confer a more lasting immunity. However, this deeper form simply increased the degree of discomfort and lowered the efficacy of variolation, and the elderly Greek woman’s technique (credited to Dr. Maitland) ultimately regained favor.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, variolation was advocated by a personality and intellect comparable to that of Lady Montagu. Cotton Mather is best remembered today as a 17th-century paragon of intolerance. One of his earliest publications, the 1689 treatise Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions, detailed the possession by evil spirits of every child—save one—born to Bostonian mason John Goodwin.49 The literal evildoer was identified as the family’s neighbor and housekeeper, an Irish Roman Catholic indentured servant by the name of Ann Glover. The housekeeper was accused of possessing Mr. Goodwin’s eldest child after the child accused her of stealing the linens. The evidence included the unfortunate statement that the servant’s husband had claimed she was a witch just prior to his death. Mather continued that the accused old woman (described in Mathers’s writings thereafter as “the Hag”) responded to the child’s accusation of stealing her laundry with an outburst of vulgar language (though the record suggests Ann did not speak English and the child did not speak Irish). Nonetheless, the trauma triggered a series of convulsive episodes in the girl. More troublingly and in a seeming chain reaction caused by the supposed hex, some of Mr. Goodwin’s other children began to act out in the coming days. Despite the clergy’s attempts to exorcise the demons by reciting biblical passages, the possessions seemed a form of particularly dark witchcraft, as it caused the children not to hear the sermons or other parental requests. Upon questioning, Mrs. Glover apparently was tricked into admitting she was an atheist (i.e., a Roman Catholic) and that she prayed to a set of figurines (idols of Catholic saints). As pious Puritans, Mather and the prosecutors recognized the figurines as powerful conveyors of witchcraft and acted swiftly to contain the danger to the community. During her trial, one pious neighbor recounted that Mrs. Glover routinely came down their chimney and put a hex on his wife. Laying to rest the worries of the God-fearing families of early Boston, the witch was hanged on November 16, 1688, and her story was memorialized by Cotton Mather as a means to identify future witches. Ann’s story became the prototype for a series of events that would occur four years later and just down the road from Boston in what would become known as the Salem witch trials. Ultimately, history would recognize Ann as the first Catholic martyr in New England, and her memory is preserved by a plaque at the site of her Boston home.