124 epidemics in the Americas Spaniards’ advantage Contributing to the spread of the disease was the Andean tradition of venerating the mummified corpses, as thousands of indigenous Andeans came into contact with the dead Inca and those who ritually had prepared his body During this early period, more politically decentralized zones including the Central American isthmus, the Maya regions, northern South America, and the Brazilian coast and hinterlands were also severely stricken, facilitating Spanish and Portuguese incursions less by exacerbating elite divisions or shattering cosmologies than by the sheer magnitude of the deaths Almost everywhere that Europeans intruded, indigenous polities, societies, and cultures became profoundly weakened by maladies with no precedent and no cure, as emphasized repeatedly in scores of locales by a diversity of Spanish, mestizo, and indigenous chroniclers The second major pandemic to sweep large parts of the Americas was measles, beginning in the early 1530s From the Caribbean islands the pathogen quickly spread to Mesoamerica, South America, and Florida, causing mortality rates estimated at 25–30 percent Outbreaks of bubonic and pneumonic plague began erupting around the same time In the mid-1540s, came another series of waves of epidemics across large parts of Mesoamerica and the Andes The precise bacterial or viral agents responsible for the “great sickness” that swept Central Mexico in the 1540s remain the subject of debate, though the evidence suggests typhus, pulmonary plague, mumps, dysentery, or combinations of these There is little disagreement that the death rates thus generated were extremely high, as upward of a million natives in New Spain succumbed to the collection of epidemic diseases in the 1540s By this time, bubonic plague, typhus, and other pathogens had spread to the Pueblo Indians in the Southwest and to Florida The spread of epidemic diseases swept inland from Florida beginning in the 1520s and perhaps earlier The odyssey of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his small party of shipwreck survivors across the U.S South and Southwest (1528–37) is thought to have introduced numerous diseases to the native inhabitants In particular, the expedition of Hernando De Soto from Florida through the North American Southeast to the Mississippi River Valley (1538–42) is believed to have wreaked tremendous ecological damage, introducing previously unknown pathogens across large parts of the interior By the time of sustained European encounters with these regions, beginning in the 1680s, the dense populations and many towns and settlements described by De Soto more than a century before had vanished, leaving behind a landscape largely denuded of its human inhabitants Local and regional studies show endless variations on these more general themes, with wave after wave of epidemic diseases wreaking demographic havoc for centuries after the initial encounter In Brazil, the creation of numerous disease vectors along the coast from the 1550s to the 1650s, diseases often carried by African slaves, generated repeated epidemics of smallpox, typhus, and other pathogens that dramatically reduced populations in the interior The disease chronology of northwestern Mexico in the first half of the 17th century illustrates the more general pattern of repeated outbreaks, which in this case were recorded in 1601– 02, 1606–07, 1612–15, 1616–17, 1619–20, 1623–25, 1636–41, 1645–47, and 1652–53 In his classic study of the postconquest Valley of Mexico, Charles Gibson recorded major disease outbreaks every few years, with 50 major epidemics from 1521 to 1810, an average of a major epidemic every six years Colonial North America The Pilgrims in Massachusetts and the first Europeans to settle on the coast of Maryland and Virginia found a nearly empty country Almost nine-tenths of the former Native American populations had been wiped out by smallpox in an epidemic of 1618–19 John Winthrop, the leader of colonial Massachusetts, commented in 1684: “For the native, they are neere all dead of the small Poxe, so as the Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess.” This Puritan leader and others felt that this disease was God’s plan to make land available for Europeans by eliminating the Native Americans who had previously occupied it Smallpox followed the priests, explorers, traders, soldiers, and settlers from Europe into the heartland of the North American continent The Hurons were affected in 1640, the Iroquois in 1662 In British North America, smallpox indirectly promoted the growth of institutions of higher learning Wealthy colonial families sent their sons to England to educate them Many of these young men, born in North America, did not have the immunity to smallpox their fellow students in England possessed Enough of these young men from the colonies contracted and died from smallpox while being educated in Europe that colonial North Americans founded their own colleges, including Harvard, William & Mary, and Yale In some cases, smallpox was spread to North American indigenous peoples intentionally, as a form of germ warfare During the American Revolution,