CORONADO

The question of the day is: How do you stop this coffin? (Remind me to get on Sine about how to spell this word.) Anyway, this isn’t really what you call a tour, though the little guys we call virus probably would. Smallpox is the one I’m talking about, even though at the moment everybody is talking about the coronavirus it’s believed bothered a snake and somehow got from the snake into some Chinese dude. Sine doesn’t want to talk about it. I’m not going to either, because the one that got into our story turned up centuries before coronavirus came along: Smallpox bugged people for centuries until 1949 when some scientists finally figured out how to kill it off. (Aura and Sine are quite insistent that I point out it wasn't economists who accomplished this feat.) --- I suppose the virus might call this a tour. A tour de force in fact, because, despite its diminutive size, it got to be a very big deal as it covered a wider and wider area of the earth’s surface, hitching a ride on us from Egypt to China and India and eventually to Europe. Columbus’s crew and subsequent explorers unwittingly gave it a lift to the Americas. Even though Sine tells me the only way we got to where we are was for all the other bacteria and whatever else that live in us to live in harmony, this little bugger, the smallpox virus, was just a moocher and very self centered. It didn’t care if its host (That’s us.) lived or died so long as it got its fill.

When Columbus got going, the sailors were men who’d survived and were basically immune to it. But when they got to America, it was like they’d walked into a kindergarden where nobody, not even the adults, had even heard of smallpox. And when it got into some Indian thanks to a sailor maybe sneezing in their direction or an Indian maybe checking out or wearing a sailor’s shirt or what-have-you, the smallpox virus landed on virgin territory and had a field day. The little devils just want to have progeny and prosper like everybody else. Aura’s so taken with the birds in the trees and everything that isn’t human, it’s a wonder she’s not here to advocate for the microbes too. - In fact, you can blame this so-called tour on her being so fixated on touting the Indians and the raw deal they got.

Back in Coronado’s time, before anybody’d figured out what was going on, the only thing that made any sense was that this was Fate, and since everybody explained that by pointing to forces outside of themselves, Fate seemed the work of the gods who’d created everything.

I’ve chosen a few amplifications of observations touched on in our first encounter to present this tour. The chief takeaway is that from the first moment of contact with Europeans, the peoples already in the Americas succumbed to diseases they hadn’t had before, to the degree that over the next hundred years it’s estimated nine out of ten died. Though European diseases hurt Europeans too, they had at least developed some immunity. But the Indians had not and the resulting devastation of their society made it much easier for the Europeans to take over. As it happens, first contact was not without consequences for the Europeans. Somehow, somebody or somebodys in Columbus’ crew happened to pick up syphilis while bunking on shore, and apparently escorted it on a ride back to Europe. Syphilis had never been a thing in Europe until Columbus got back. But it was by no means as big a deal for Europe as smallpox was for the Americas.