The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story(65)

Antonio de Herrera, another Spanish chronicler of the period, wrote that “at this time [1532] there was such a great epidemic of measles in the Province of Honduras, spreading from house to house and village to village, that many people died… and two years ago there was a general epidemic of pleurisy and stomach pains which also carried away many Indians.” Oviedo wrote that half the population of Honduras died from disease in the years from 1530 to 1532. One Spanish missionary lamented that only 3 percent of the population of the coast had survived and “it is likely the rest of the Indians will in short time decay.”

The British geographer Linda Newson produced a magisterial study of the demographic catastrophe in Honduras during the Spanish period, entitled The Cost of Conquest: Indian Decline in Honduras Under Spanish Rule. It is the most detailed analysis of what happened in that country. Precise figures of the original population are hard to come by, especially for eastern Honduras and Mosquitia, which remained uncolonized, but Newson evaluated a vast amount of evidence and provided the best possible estimates—despite, she noted, being hampered by the lack of good archaeological work.

Drawing on early narratives, population estimates, cultural studies, and ecological data, Newson concluded that the areas of Honduras first colonized by the Spanish started with a pre-Conquest population of 600,000. By 1550, only 32,000 native people remained. This is a population collapse of 95 percent, a staggering statistic. She broke down the figures like this: 30,000 to 50,000 were killed in wars of conquest, while another 100,000 to 150,000 were captured in slave raids and transported out of the country. Almost all the rest—over 400,000—died of disease.

In eastern Honduras, which includes Mosquitia, Newson estimated a pre-Conquest population density of about thirty people per square mile, establishing the population of the interior mountains of Mosquitia at about 150,000. However, the discovery of large cities like T1 and T3—which Newson did not know about when she wrote her book in 1986—significantly revises that calculus. Regardless of the actual numbers, though, we now know this was a thriving and prosperous region, linked to its neighbors by extensive trading routes; it was not at all the remote, sparsely inhabited jungle we find today. We have the testimony of Cortés and Pedraza of extensive and rich provinces, and we have the evidence from T1 and T3, Las Crucitas, Wankibila, and other former cities in Mosquitia.

The mountain valleys like T1 were too deep in the jungle to be of interest to conquistadors or slavers; the people living there should have continued to flourish long after the Europeans arrived. Many of these areas weren’t opened up until the twentieth century or later, and, as we now know, parts remain unexplored even today. But given how diseases spread, it is virtually impossible for the T1 valley to have escaped the general contagion. Almost certainly, epidemics of European disease swept T1, T3, and the rest of Mosquitia sometime between 1520 and 1550. (More and better archaeology is needed to refine this; perhaps the continuing excavations at T1 will help.)

Those pathogens invaded Mosquitia via two pathways. The first was through trade. When Columbus landed in Honduras’s Bay Islands, he described a memorable sight: a huge trading canoe, eight feet wide and sixty feet long, manned by twenty-five paddlers. The canoe had a hut built amidships and it was heaped with valuable trade goods: copper, flint, weapons, textiles, and beer. There was extensive maritime trade throughout the Caribbean and Central America. Some historians say the canoe Columbus saw must have been operated by Maya traders, but it’s more likely they were Chibcha traders, given that the Bay Islands were settled not by the Maya but by Chibchan-speaking people who had ties to Mosquitia. These merchants, whoever they might be, were certainly trading with the mainland, as well as with Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico—some archaeologists believe they may have reached as far north as the Mississippi River delta. And the two main highways into Mosquitia—the Río Plátano and the Río Patuca—flow into the sea not far eastward of the Bay Islands. During the time of plagues in the Caribbean, there can be little doubt these traders, peddling goods from the islands and coasts, carried European pathogens up the rivers into Mosquitia, where the microbes escaped into the local populations and burned deep into the hinterlands.

A second likely track of infection was the slave trade. Before slavery was restricted by the Spanish crown in 1542, slaving parties scoured Honduras, kidnapping Indians to work plantations, mines, and households. The first Indians enslaved came from the islands and coasts. As disease wiped out these early captives, the Spanish raiders went deeper into the countryside to find replacements. (The African slave trade also ramped up at this time.) By the 1530s, the slavers were ravaging the Mosquito Coast and the Olancho Valley, where Catacamas is today, destroying villages and rounding up people like cattle. On three sides—west, north, and south—Mosquitia was surrounded by brutal slave raids. Thousands of Indians fleeing their villages took refuge in the rainforest. A great many disappeared into the mountains of Mosquitia. Some of these refugees, unfortunately, carried European disease into the otherwise well-protected interior valleys.

If we follow this hypothetical scenario to its conclusion, then sometime in the early 1500s several epidemics of disease swept T1 in close succession. If the mortality rates were similar to the rest of Honduras and Central America, about 90 percent of the inhabitants died of disease. The survivors, shattered and traumatized, abandoned the city, leaving the cache of sacred objects behind as a final offering to the gods, ritually breaking many to release their spirits. This was not a grave offering for an individual; it was a grave offering for an entire city, the cenotaph of a civilization. The same abandonment, with broken offerings, occurred across the region.