America, the Artifact --The Navarez Expedition and What the Americas

Were Like Before the Great Dying

Very Respected Relatives,

This is a part of the early history of our Hemisphere that few people are aware
of—how many Indigenous Peoples there really were and the diversity and
sophistication of our cultures. What clearly happened is that all of the early
European explorers, including the slavers, the conquers, and the pigs and other
animals that they brought with them, allowed infectious diseases to spread
throughout the Americas via trade routes and animal populations. The horses
that ultimately formed the basis of the horse culture of the Northern High Plains
Tribes were horses that escaped from these early expeditions. While they
searched for gold, silver and slaves they left behind death.

This is equally true of the conquests of Mexico, Central America, Venezuela and
the Andes— Indigenous Empires and nations that were already in the process of
being devastated or had already been devastated by these new European
infectious diseases. The early dates for these initial conquests were a couple of
hundred years before the Europeans went inland from the coasts and revisited
the Americas. This “great die-off” of 90-95% of all Indigenous Peoples of the
Americas, most as the result of European diseases, killed millions before they
ever saw a European. Historian, Charles Mann, in his book 1491: New
Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, quotes scholars who believe
that 80-100 million Indigenous Peoples perished from these infectious diseases
by the mid- 1600’s, a catastrophe on an even greater scale than the “black
deaths” in Europe. Millions were lost in a short time—entire tribes, nations
and cultures were destroyed.

The article below, America the Artifact talks about how the Navarez Expedition
witnessed the dying as they encountered large cities, connected by roads. Our
Indigenous relatives shaped the land—creating the open Great Plains for their
buffalo and areas for agriculture. Charles Mann speculates that the huge herds
of buffalo and the enormous flocks of carrier pigeons later settlers encountered
represented rebound species after these diseases took their toll and killed off
most of the humans beings. In wet climates, most signs of human habitation
would be gone in the ensuing 200+ years and even in the dry climates little
would remain—yet evidence of sophisticated societies remain.

Europeans had domesticated animals that they essentially lived with, along with
poor hygiene and zero sanitation. Disease was rampant in Europe with the
plague periodically killing off half or more of the population. Survivors
developed immunity to these crossover animal or Zoonotic diseases.
Indigenous Peoples of the Americas had not. Without the impact of Zoonotic
disease the history of the Americas would be very different.

Here is a story that I had not heard before. It is about a group of Spanish men—
a part of the Navarez expedition who walked from Galveston to the Pacific and
then south—witnessing the great dying and spreading disease along the way—
remember this is 200 years before the interior of the Americas is penetrated
again, and yet, the great dying is well underway.

This historical reality gives a new understanding, depth and meaning to the
intergenerational trauma of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas and of
those Europeans who carried with them this “collective death.”It reflects what
was orally shared with me by Elders and their Elders before them, retold, retold
again and remembered from the mists of recorded time.

May we always remember that the growing spiritual strength all of our
ancestors continue to be with us at all times and under all conditions! And that
they are only a prayer away!

With Warm and Loving Greetings,

Brother Phil

America, the Artifact

By Mark Sumner

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2011/1/30/939933/-America,-the-artifact

Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 05:58:18 AM PST

In July of 1536, a group of Spanish businessmen were surprised to find
themselves approached by four uncouth figures. The men had a scattering of
rags and bits of animal skin, but were otherwise completely naked except for a
covering of ground-in filth. Their skin showed the effects of long exposure to
sun, the scars of injuries, and the attention of millions of insects. Their bearded
faces were gaunt with hunger and exhaustion.

The initial wariness with which these men were greeted soon turned to open-
mouthed amazement as they addressed the businessmen in good Spanish. The
four were survivors of an expeditionary force that had originally numbered over
six hundred men, a force long assumed lost. Over a space of seven years, these
four had been part of pitched battles, withstood a siege, aided in a astounding
escape from encircling forces, and watched hundreds of their countrymen fall to
conflict, starvation and disease. Most of all they had walked thousands of miles
across a strange land no European had seen before and which few others would
ever see. They had seen wonders. They had seen North America.

The Spanish conquistadors of the 15th and 16th centuries are generally reduced
in high school history books to a sentence or two listing out their primary
accomplishment. Balboa drove his men across the boggy Isthmus of Panama,
becoming the first Europeans to see the eastern shore of the Pacific. Pizarro and
his small band of men destroyed an Incan army numbering in the tens of
thousands and collected a golden ransom measured in tons. Cortés made a
desperate retreat across the causeways of Tenochtitlan only to return, lay siege
to the city, and destroy the heart of the Aztec Empire. De Soto, trekking across
Florida, marching his armoured men incredible distances across forests,
mountains, and plains to reveal the heart of a continent that the Spanish had
not even been sure was a continent. If we're lucky, these accounts are
accompanied with an engraving or two – bearded men in iron chest plates
whose long features and piercing eyes are topped with oddly peaked metal
helmets. Men who clutch a blunderbuss in one hand, and a pike (likely bloody) in
the other.

While one-line descriptions make fine multiple choice material for a seventh
grade history quiz, they don't really tell us much about how, or why, these men
went through hardships to tick off all those "first to" whatever boxes. The era of
the conquistadors is often just a couple of paragraphs wedged between the
Santa Maria and Plymouth Rock, and it's not until years after middle school that
we get a glimpse of that other side of 16th century vacation activities in the
New World.

They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they
took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance... They would make fine
servants... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do
whatever we want. (Christopher Columbus)

It's little wonder that for most people today, these men blur into a kind of lumpy
amalgam: two parts self-righteous religious hypocrisy, three parts gunpowder,
one part cold steel -- add slavery, theft, rape and destruction to taste and far
beyond -- but when we skim past these stories, or look away from their cruelty,
we stand the chance of missing something more important than who was the
first European to dip their toe in a particular body of water. Sometimes we miss
something quite odd.

The Narváez expedition is one of those extraordinary bits of history that rarely
makes an appearance in standard texts. Maybe that's because it's difficult to
boil down what was accomplished to a bullet point. Over a decade before De
Soto launched his own expedition into North America, Carlos, King of Spain and
Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, granted Pánfilo de Narváez a claim to
Florida -- with Florida meaning more or less everything north of Mexico. It was a
chance for Narváez to become one of the richest, most powerful men in the
world. All he had to do was not screw up.

Narváez was already famous for his involvement in one of the strangest battles
of the time; a fight between two European armies conducted in the middle of
the Aztec Empire. The battle occurred due to a series of events, most of which
came back to the undeniable fact that Hernándo Cortés was an untrustworthy,
ruthless, massively ambitious, bastard who lied to both the Aztecs and the
Spanish. Feeling that Cortés had gone completely off the rails, the governor
nominally in charge of Cortés sent Narváez to stop the wayward conquistador at
the very moment Hernándo was busy in the capital negotiating with the hapless
Aztec leaders. Cortés left a large portion of his men behind, dashed off to face
Narváez, and defeated him handily despite being outnumbered over two to one.
Afterwards Cortés even talked many of Narváez' surviving soldiers to come over
to his side (wound, meet salt). Then he went back to finding creative ways of
torturing and dismembering his Aztec hosts. In this process, Cortés got Mexico, a
title, and became very, very rich. He also got to enjoy himself by hanging the
governor who had sent Narváez after him. Narváez got to return to Spain and
sulk.

Understandably, Narváez held a bit of a grudge. Forming a company for the

colonization of Florida and collecting the blessings of the king looked like a
golden chance redeem himself and to match the success of Cortés.

Narváez' charter called for him to found a couple of towns (no less than one
hundred people each), lay in a pair of forts, and settle down as potentate. Based
on the rumors he'd heard about La Florida, he expected arable land, gold, and
sizable heapings of glory. What he got was a series of errors that would have
been comedic, if it wasn't for all the dying.

Storms held the fleet of ships out of port and denied them supplies. Ships sent
off to find safe harbors disappeared. Arguments over the direction of travel
ended up with the main body of the expedition starving while a supply ship
wandered the Gulf looking for them. Painfully short on food after only a few
days in their new home, Narváez turned to trade with the locals as their only
chance to survive. The natives at the first fishing village they entered seemed
friendly enough, but disappeared after the initial meeting, taking their food
with them. The next village might have made more time for the visitors, but the
people there were already deeply engaged in dying when the expedition arrived
(using handy Spanish shipping crates for coffins). Within weeks, Narváez force
was starving, confused, short on options, and coming apart.

When they finally staggered into a well-made town with dozens of houses and
hundreds of inhabitants, they thought they had found the capital of the local
tribe and decided it might be a good idea to attack, capture the town, and do to
the locals what Cortés had done further south. As it turned out, the town was
actually a backwater village of the extensive Apalachee nation, and capturing
the place neither impressed nor cowed the Apalachee rulers. Within days,
hundreds of warriors were harrying Narváez, using a combination of direct
attacks and guerilla tactics to inflict sizable losses on the Spanish. During these
assaults the Indians lost only a handful of men – a reversal of the lopsided
results inflicted on native cultures by Pizzaro and Cortés. Unable to hold onto
the town they had taken, the harried Spanish retreated inland, where they
found themselves mired in swamps and more confusion. Now they had no food,
no idea where to go, and no ships on which to escape. The Apalachee helped
them along by keeping up a rain of arrows as the armoured Spanish aimlessly
waded waist deep in muck.

Reaching the water near Apalachee Bay, the remainder of the force found
themselves under nearly constant attack and with no way of sending for relief.
At that point, Narváez' expedition came up with a plan so desperate it beggars
belief. They would eat their warhorses for food, then weave the horsehair and
hide into ropes. At the same time, they would use trees and stones to create a
makeshift forge and literally melt down their weapons and armor to create
saws, hammers, and other tools. Then, using the ropes and implements they'd
made, the Spanish would harvest local trees and turn them into boats they
needed to escape. Amazingly, even though the Indians were still taking out men
at a fairly steady clip, this worked well enough that a month later Narváez' force
had constructed five small boats and launched out into the Gulf.

Of the six hundred who arrived in Florida, 242 survived long enough to set sail.
As you might expect from the way this story has gone so far, they sailed directly
into a hurricane. Three of the boats (including the one holding Narváez) were
lost along the way. When the remaining boats, that lacked pretty much
everything that would have been helpful on a sea voyage, including food and
water, crashed into the barrier islands near Galveston, Texas, there were only
eighty people still alive. The survivors became entangled with local tribes (who,
having never met them before, were less inclined to kill them on sight) and
settled into a life of hard work as they were traded like mascots around
different villages and groups, all the time suffering disease and hunger. The
combination of poor food, hard conditions, and disease was as hard on the
survivors as the Apalachee had been. A rough census a couple of years later
showed only fourteen members of the expedition still alive. Not long after that,
it was four.

Finally, not quite understanding where they were but understanding well
enough that seventy-six of their numbers were already dead along that coast;
these last survivors decided they had to go inland to find a Spanish outpost.
However, they were not completely clear on where they were relative to the
Mexican outposts, so they walked west. Then they traveled west some more.
And then they travelled west. Eventually, unbelievably, they walked right across
Texas and northern Mexico (and quite possibly portions of New Mexico and
Arizona) before hitting the Pacific Ocean and taking a turn to the south.

Along the way they saw vast panoplies of nations. Some had structures similar
to that seen among the Aztec and Maya in Mexico and in the other empires of
Central and South America – large capital cities complete with rulers, priests,
and temple complexes connected by roads to smaller towns and villages. Others
appear to be individual communities of farmers, fishermen, craftsmen and
traders. Some seemed closer to the cultures we would now associate with
Amazonian tribes. But they were not Aztecs or Amazonians, they were unique.
Few were seen or described thoroughly enough to make sense of the details we
get in accounts of the survivors (the written accounts are heavily fixated on the
type and amount of food available, which was understandably more important
to the starving men than any details about the natives' beliefs or social
structure). They certainly encountered peoples who would never again be met
by any European explorer. Their biggest conclusion about the people was that
they were both poor and plagued by disease, because disease and death was
what they saw everywhere they went. Ironically, the wandering Spaniards
acquired a reputation as faith healers, and were followed along the way by a
retinue of natives displaced from their failing settlements.

It was once thought that, pre-invasion, the Americas had a population of less
than ten million – like taking half the population of New York City and spreading
it over an area of 15 million square miles. At nearly a thousand acres per person,
that's a pair of pretty lonely continents. The image we get is of a few wandering
bands, hunting buffalo over vast ranges. For settlers from the time of the
Pilgrims on, the understanding was that they were moving into a place that was
just shy of empty, with the few inhabitants making light use of a land that was
to all intents a primordial wilderness. It's now known that the population
previous to 1492 was certainly at least five times greater, was probably at least
ten times greater, and may well have been higher still. The Aztec Empire alone
held around 15 million people at the time of first contact, and that may not have
been its peak population. Everywhere across the Americas there were villages,
towns, cities, nations. It wasn't a land of scattered tribes. It was a land of
empires, extensive trade, and delicate diplomacy.

When historians conclude that Cortés conquered the Aztecs, this is really not
true. What he conquered was the shadow of the Aztecs, a nation already
decimated several times over by disease and wracked by the conflict that
ensued. The Inca that Pizzaro met were the actually the remnants of an empire
that had already descended into a bloody and exhausting civil war after disease
took out not only sizable parts of the population but also much of the ruling
family. It was not so much conquest as grave robbing.

Still, we know something about the Inca and the Aztec because the Spanish
arrived while their crumbling empires were staggering along in their death
throws. About most of the Americas, north and south, we know next to nothing.
We have only the accounts of Narváez survivors, the de Soto descriptions from a
decade later, artefacts and traditions passed on to living descendants.

However, even the earliest accounts don't give us an image of these cultures as
they existed before Columbus. The reason for this is contained within that
moment when the four survivors staggered up to the Spanish businessmen. Of
the four men, one was a slave. The businessmen themselves were slavers. The
reason the villagers back in Florida were already dying (and had Spanish crates
to use as coffins) was because this first official expedition to the mainland was
far from the first encounter. Slavers had been there for years. In fact, slavers
had been plying the waters up the chain of the Bahamas since 1494 – less than
two years after Columbus stepped onto San Salvador and declared of the people
who were providing food and drink to his crew, "They would make fine
servants". Long before the wretched Narváez expedition left Spain, slavers had
been in Florida, raiding villages and spreading disease. The first European to see
mainland North America didn't come to explore, to search for gold, or even to
conquer. He came with chains.

If our perceptions about early European activities in the Americas are often
wrong, our view of pre-invasion Native America is just as shaky. The Indian
cultures we both attack and romanticize are for the most part very poor
representations of actual societies that existed in North America previous to the
16th century. In a very real sense, it can be said that we never defeated the
majority of nations that existed in the Americas – because we never met them.
They died or fell into ruin before we got the chance to destroy them up close and
in person. We're forced to scurry for meaning among their burials and artefacts,
and we often miss the evidence that's bigger than all the rest.
The idea that we have of Native Americans existing only in small bands and
scattered villages is a distorted, wholly skewed image. The idea that we
understand Native American traditions and beliefs is just as skewed. We
understand the traditions of the survivors as they were shaped in the aftermath
of disaster. The Native Americas we know were as diverse the Cherokee and the
Lakota, the Hopi and the Chumash, but this is only a sliver of the diversity that
once existed. In the Middle East, cultures as different as the Philistines,
Hebrews, and Egyptians were neighbours. The Americas were almost certainly
far more varied.

With the population densities that existed previous to the 16th century, it's clear
that many Native Americans not only lived in large communities, they
conducted extensive trade, had stratified and complex societies with specialized
craftsmen and officials, and conducted sophisticated forms of agriculture and
ranching. The results of that last activity lingered on the land centuries after the
practitioners were gone. Huge mono-specific herds of buffalo weren't something
the Indians discovered, they were something native societies had cultivated and
tended. This included not only management of the animals themselves, but
keeping the land they roamed open and suited to pasture in areas that were far
beyond the limits of grassland as defined by soil and rainfall. The open
woodlands that spread east of the Mississippi didn't grow by accident; they
were carefully culled and cleared to provide space for grazing and agriculture.
Along the banks of rivers, some of the ancient temple sites, like those at Cahokia
near St. Louis, are still visible because of the large earthen mounds, but it's not
just the mounds that are artificial. Much of the flat grounds of the "river
bottom" are no more natural than the mound. Natural rills have been filled and
ridges cut to provide ground suited to irrigation and raising the food for the
10,000 priests, rulers, and court officials who lived at the site.

In the Appalachians, some mountains are still topped with grassy "balds" free of
large trees. These features were more widespread a few decades ago (and much
more common two centuries ago) but over time the balds have gradually been
overgrown and many crests that once offered a fine view are now topped by
unbroken forest. For many years scientists thought the balds were natural
features, created by some fluke of climate or perhaps by fires triggered when
lightning struck the mountain summits. But as the balds have shrunk in and
disappeared, it's become clear that they were both built or maintained by men.
They were cleared by men, though for what purpose we can't be sure.
Pre-invasion America was neither an untended wilderness nor the Garden of
Eden, it was a working farm.

In Europe, both Justinian's plague and the Black Death took between a third and
a half of the population. In each case, it took centuries for the population to
return to pre-plague levels and the loss of population trigger major changes in
society. In America, the population loss may have been as great as 90%. From
that information alone, you can assume that it would take much longer for the
continents to rebuild the population levels previously seen and there's no doubt
that the shape of the societies on the other side of this bottleneck would have
been vastly different than those going in.

The effects of the population loss might have pushed the New World into it's
own Dark Age, or it might have stimulated a second Renaissance. We'll never
know. The destruction of the varied civilization in the Americas was not caused
by disease alone. Slavers, conquerors, and settlers followed on the heels of
smallpox and measles. Libraries were burned, temples smashed, languages and
traditions rooted out like weeds. The work that was started from the (mostly)
unintentional spread of germs was followed up with malice aforethought.

Natural disasters – whether they are earthquakes, storms or plagues – can go a

long way into weakening a society. But if you really want to do in human
civilization, it's best to call in the experts – humans.