In the ten years following the first outbreak of smallpox in the New World, the disease had stretched deep into South America. The pandemics also felled several of the great pre-Columbian kingdoms in North America. From 1539 to 1541, explorer Hernando de Soto passed through a powerful and flourishing chiefdom called Coosa, which occupied territory encompassing parts of Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, and had a population of perhaps 50,000 people. But twenty years later, by the time the next European came through, Coosa had been almost entirely abandoned, the landscape littered with empty houses, the once-abundant gardens overgrown with thistles and weeds. In the Mississippi River Valley, de Soto had found forty-nine towns, but the French explorers La Salle and Joliet, a century later, encountered only seven wretched settlements, a decline of 86 percent. Most of southeastern North America had been cleared out by a massive die-off from disease.
Though the figures are hotly disputed, scholars estimate that, before Columbus’s arrival, the population of North America was about 4.4 million, Mexico around 21 million, the Caribbean 6 million, and Central America another 6 million. But by 1543, the Indian peoples of the main Caribbean islands (Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico) had become extinct: almost six million dead. In the smaller islands, a few shattered native populations clung to a precarious existence. The fall of Tenochtitlan, the general collapse of native populations everywhere, and the continuing waves of pandemics allowed the Spanish to quickly crush Indian resistance throughout most of Central America.
Compare this to the Spanish conquest of the Philippines, which occurred at the same time. The Spanish were just as ruthless there, but the conquest was not aided by disease: Filipinos were resistant to Old World diseases, and the islands experienced no mass die-offs or population crashes. As a result, the Spanish were forced to accommodate and adjust to coexistence with the indigenous people of the Philippines, who remained strong and retained their languages and cultures. Once the Spanish left, the Iberian influence largely faded away, along with the Spanish language, which is today spoken by few.
But did this catastrophe reach Mosquitia, and if so, how did it get into the remote interior, so far from Spanish contact? We don’t have much source material on how the 1519 smallpox epidemic affected Honduras specifically. Common sense tells us that, with smallpox raging both north and south, Honduras must have been badly afflicted. Ten years after smallpox, another dreadful pandemic swept the New World: measles. This we know ravaged Honduras with exceptional cruelty. For Europeans, measles is a far milder disease than smallpox; although easily spread, it rarely kills. But when it reached the New World it proved to be almost as deadly, killing at least 25 percent of the affected population. The conquistador Pedro de Alvarado sent a report from Guatemala to Charles V in 1532: “Throughout New Spain, there passed a sickness which they say is measles, which struck the Indians and swept the land, leaving it totally empty.” The measles pandemic coincided with epidemics of other diseases in Honduras, among them possibly typhoid, flu, and plague.
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.)