Smallpox, Slavery, and Medical Myth-Making in the Spanish Empire

“When Narváez’s people disembarked, a black man with smallpox also came ashore, and he passed it on to the people of the house where he was kept in Cempoala. The disease was transmitted from one Indian to another, and as there were so many who slept and ate together, it spread everywhere rapidly, killing many natives across the land.”   

-Chimalpahin Cuauhtlehuanitzin, La Conquista: Chapter 104

The “black man” in question---known later, at times as Juan Eguía, at others, as Francisco Eguía---was an African man conscripted into the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition sent from Cuba to Mexico to arrest Hernán Cortés in 1520. Though we know very little about Eguía as an individual (or indeed, if he was a real individual at all) numerous histories cast him as the source of the first smallpox outbreak to spread in the continental Americas. This includes this excerpt from the retelling of Francisco López de Gómara’s La Historia de las Indias y conquista de México (1552) by the famed Nahua writer Chimalpahin. Such chronicles fashioned this figure into a “patient zero,” described often as a “black man who came with the Spaniards” as if of his own volition. These accounts, beginning with Toribio de Benavente Motolinía’s Historia de los indios de la nueva españa (1536), depict this figure as the single source of smallpox infection, even as earlier letters documented the presence of smallpox in Mexico before his arrival. Later histories, medical tracts, and epidemiological theories, well into the twentieth-century, would go on to repeat and reaffirm this myth as if it were an undisputed medical and historical fact. 

This talk draws on literary studies of outbreak narratives and theories of what Priscilla Wald has called “epidemiological belonging” to reexamine these chronicles and rethink both the construction of this foundational medical myth and its many afterlives. To do so, the talk attends to the genealogies and the story-telling strategies of conquest-era authors who began to link smallpox to the burgeoning transatlantic slave trade and who, in the process, began to tether emerging ideas about religion, race, and power through the construct of a single stigmatized and racialized vector of disease. As such, the talk considers what this episode can tell us about the formation of new beliefs about contagion and corporeality in the earliest years of settler colonialism in the Caribbean.