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Input: By the time my ancestor set sail on the Mayflower  Europeans had been visiting New England for more than a hundred years. English  French  Italian  Spanish  and Portuguese mariners regularly plied the coastline  trading what they could  occasionally kidnapping the inhabitants for slaves. New England  the Europeans saw  was thickly settled and well defended. In 1605 and 1606 Samuel de Champlain visited Cape Cod  hoping to establish a French base.  He  abandoned the idea. Too many people already lived there. A year later Sir Ferdinando GorgesâBritish despite  his  nameâtried to establish an English community in southern Maine. It had more founders than Plymouth and seems to have been better organized. Confronted by numerous well-armed local Indians  the settlers abandoned the project within months. The Indians at Plymouth would surely have been an equal obstacle to my ancestor and his ramshackle expedition had disease not intervened. Faced with such stories  historians have long wondered how many people lived in the Americas at the time of contact. "Debated since Columbus attempted a partial census on Hispaniola in 1496 " William Denevan has written  this "remains one of the great inquiries of history." (In 1976 Denevan assembled and edited an entire book on the subject  The Native Population of the Americas in 1492.) The first scholarly estimate of the indigenous population was made in 1910 by James Mooney  a distinguished ethnographer at the Smithsonian Institution. Combing through old documents  he concluded that in 1491 North America had 1.15 million inhabitants. Mooney's glittering reputation ensured that most subsequent researchers accepted his figure uncritically.
That changed in 1966  when Henry F. Dobyns published "Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques With a New Hemispheric Estimate " in the journal Current Anthropology. Despite the carefully neutral title  his argument was thunderous  its impact long-lasting. In the view of James Wilson  the author of The Earth Shall Weep (1998)  a history of indigenous Americans   Dobyns 's colleagues "are still struggling to get out of the crater that paper left in anthropology." Not only anthropologists were affected.  Dobyns 's estimate proved to be one of the opening rounds in today's culture wars.  Dobyns  began  his  exploration of pre-Columbian Indian demography in the early 1950s  when  he  was a graduate student. At the invitation of a friend   he  spent a few months in northern Mexico  which is full of Spanish-era missions. There  he  poked through the crumbling leather-bound ledgers in which Jesuits recorded local births and deaths. Right away  he  noticed how many more deaths there were. The Spaniards arrived  and then Indians diedâin huge numbers  at incredible rates. It hit  him    Dobyns  told me recently  "like a club right between the eyes." It took  Dobyns  eleven years to obtain  his  Ph.D. Along the way  he  joined a rural-development project in Peru  which until colonial times was the seat of the Incan empire. Remembering what  he  had seen at the northern fringe of the Spanish conquest   Dobyns  decided to compare  it  with figures for the south.  He  burrowed into the papers of the Lima cathedral and read apologetic Spanish histories. The Indians in Peru   Dobyns  concluded  had faced plagues from the day the conquistadors showed upâin fact  before then: smallpox arrived around 1525  seven years ahead of the Spanish. Brought to Mexico apparently by a single sick Spaniard  it swept south and eliminated more than half the population of the Incan empire. Smallpox claimed the Incan dictator Huayna Capac and much of his family  setting off a calamitous war of succession. So complete was the chaos that Francisco Pizarro was able to seize an empire the size of Spain and Italy combined with a force of 168 men.
Smallpox was only the first epidemic. Typhus (probably) in 1546  influenza and smallpox together in 1558  smallpox again in 1589  diphtheria in 1614  measles in 1618âall ravaged the remains of Incan culture.  Dobyns  was the first social scientist to piece together this awful picture  and  he  naturally rushed  his  findings into print. Hardly anyone paid attention. But  Dobyns  was already working on a second  related question: If all those people died  how many had been living there to begin with? Before Columbus   Dobyns  calculated  the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe. His argument was simple but horrific. It is well known that Native Americans had no experience with many European diseases and were therefore immunologically unpreparedâ"virgin soil " in the metaphor of epidemiologists. What  Dobyns  realized was that such diseases could have swept from the coastlines initially visited by Europeans to inland areas controlled by Indians who had never seen a white person. The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas may therefore have encountered places that were already depopulated. Indeed   Dobyns  argued  they must have done so. Peru was one example  the Pacific Northwest another. In 1792 the British navigator George Vancouver led the first European expedition to survey Puget Sound.  He  found a vast charnel house: human remains "promiscuously scattered about the beach  in great numbers." Smallpox  Vancouver's crew discovered  had preceded them. Its few survivors  second lieutenant Peter Puget noted  were "most terribly pitted ... indeed many have lost their Eyes." In Pox Americana  (2001)  Elizabeth Fenn  a historian at George Washington University  contends that the disaster on the northwest coast was but a small part of a continental pandemic that erupted near Boston in 1774 and cut down Indians from Mexico to Alaska.
Because smallpox was not endemic in the Americas  colonials  too  had not acquired any immunity. The virus  an equal-opportunity killer  swept through the Continental Army and stopped the drive into Quebec. The American Revolution would be lost  Washington and other rebel leaders feared  if the contagion did to the colonists what it had done to the Indians. "The small Pox! The small Pox!" John Adams wrote to his wife  Abigail. "What shall We do with it?" In retrospect  Fenn says  "One of George Washington's most brilliant moves was to inoculate the army against smallpox during the Valley Forge winter of '78." Without inoculation smallpox could easily have given the United States back to the British. So many epidemics occurred in the Americas   Dobyns  argued  that the old data used by Mooney and his successors represented population nadirs. From the few cases in which before-and-after totals are known with relative certainty   Dobyns  estimated that in the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas diedâthe worst demographic calamity in recorded history. Dobyns's ideas were quickly attacked as politically motivated  a push from the hate-America crowd to inflate the toll of imperialism. The attacks continue to this day. "No question about it  some people want those higher numbers " says Shepard Krech III  a Brown University anthropologist who is the author of The Ecological Indian (1999). These people  he says  were thrilled when  Dobyns  revisited the subject in a book  Their Numbers Become Thinned (1983)âand revised his own estimates upward. Perhaps  Dobyns 's most vehement critic is David Henige  a bibliographer of Africana at the University of Wisconsin  whose Numbers From Nowhere (1998) is a landmark in the literature of demographic fulmination. "Suspect in 1966  it is no less suspect nowadays " Henige wrote of  Dobyns 's work. "If anything  it is worse."

1491