The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story(83)

In the New World, on the other hand, no big-time diseases seem to have leapt from animals into the human population. While the Americas had cities as large as those in Europe, those cities were much newer at the time the Spanish arrived. People in the New World hadn’t been living in close quarters long enough for crowd diseases to spring up and propagate. Native Americans never had the opportunity to develop resistance to the myriad diseases that plagued Europeans.

This genetic resistance, by the way, should not be confused with acquired immunity. Acquired immunity is when a body gets rid of a pathogen and afterward maintains a state of high alert for that same microbe. It’s why people don’t normally get the same illness twice. Genetic resistance is something deeper and more mysterious. It is not acquired through exposure—you are born with it. Some people are born with greater resistance to certain diseases than others. The experience of our team in the valley of T1 is a textbook illustration. The doctors believe everyone on the expedition was bitten and exposed. Only half, however, came down with the disease. A few, like Juan Carlos, were able to fight it off without drugs. Others became seriously ill and some, even as I write this, are still struggling with the disease.

The genes that resist disease can only spread in a population through the pitiless lottery of natural selection. People with weaker immune systems (children especially) must die, while the stronger live, in order for a population to gain widespread resistance. A staggering amount of suffering and death over thousands of years went into building European (and African and Asian) resistance to crowd diseases. One biologist told me that what probably saved many indigenous Indian cultures from complete extinction were the mass rapes of native women by European men; many of the babies from those rapes inherited European genetic resistance to disease. (The scientist, after telling me this horrifying theory, said, “For God’s sake don’t attach my name to that idea.”)

In the New World, these many thousands of years of anguish and death were compressed into a window from 1494 to around 1650. The mass murder by pathogen happened in that one cruel century and a half, and it struck at precisely the worst moment, when the population of the New World had recently coalesced into big cities and reached the levels of density necessary for those epidemics to spread furiously. It was a perfect storm of infection.

We do not hear many of the voices of these victims. Only a handful of Native American eyewitness accounts of the cataclysm survive. One in particular stands out, a remarkable text called the Annals of the Cakchiquels, which describes an epidemic, probably smallpox or flu, that swept an area in Guatemala northwest of Mosquitia. This extraordinary manuscript, discovered in a remote convent in 1844, was written in a Mayan language called Cakchiquel by an Indian named Francisco Hernández Arana Xajilá. As a teenager, Arana Xajilá lived through the epidemic that destroyed his people.


It happened that during the twenty-fifth year [1520] the plague began, oh my sons! First they became ill of a cough, they suffered from nosebleeds and illness of the bladder. It was truly terrible, the number of dead there were in that period. The prince Vakaki Ahmak died then. Little by little heavy shadows and black night enveloped our fathers and grandfathers and us also, oh my sons!… Great was the stench of the dead. After our fathers and grandfathers succumbed, half of the people fled to the fields. The dogs and the vultures devoured the bodies. The mortality was terrible… So it was that we became orphans, oh my sons! So we became when we were young. All of us were thus. We were born to die!



I would ask the reader to pause for a moment and ponder the statistics. Statistics are mere numbers; they need to be translated into human experience. What would a 90 percent mortality rate mean to the survivors and their society? The Black Death in Europe at its worst carried off 30 to 60 percent of the population. That was devastating enough. But the mortality rate wasn’t high enough to destroy European civilization. A 90 percent mortality rate is high enough: It does not just kill people; it annihilates societies; it destroys languages, religions, histories, and cultures. It chokes off the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. The survivors are deprived of that vital human connection to their past; they are robbed of their stories, their music and dance, their spiritual practices and beliefs—they are stripped of their very identity.

The overall mortality rate in this wave of epidemics was indeed about 90 percent. To put that statistic into personal terms, make a list of the nineteen people closest to you: All but one will die. (This of course counts you also as a survivor.) Think what it would be like for you, as it was for the author of the Cakchiquel manuscript, to watch all these people die—your children, parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, your friends, your community leaders and spiritual authorities. What would it do to you to see them perish in the most agonizing, humiliating, and terrifying ways possible? Imagine the breakdown of every pillar of your society; imagine the wasteland left behind, the towns and cities abandoned, the fields overgrown, the houses and streets strewn with the unburied dead; imagine the wealth rendered worthless, the stench, the flies, the scavenging animals, the loneliness and silence. Enlarge this scenario beyond towns and cities; enlarge it beyond kingdoms and civilizations; enlarge it beyond even continents—until it embraces half the planet. This inferno of contagion destroyed thousands of societies and millions of people, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, from California to New England, from the Amazon rainforest to the tundra of Hudson Bay. It is what destroyed T1, the City of the Jaguar, and the ancient people of Mosquitia.