Smallpoxalypse: An American Epidemic

Chapter 1: It Begins​

At the start of the Second Millennium, North America was emerging from the Late Woodland Period, an era of population dispersal. Around the year 1000, populations in the Mississippi River Valley were beginning to form sedentary communities. The rise of the Moundbuilders was occurring, as well as the beginning of the great empires in Mesoamerica. The seeds of the Inca empire were sown in the Andes, and a revolution in the North American farming communities was occurring. The birthplace of a dozen nations was preparing for an explosion in civilization. But by 1050, this great civilization would be strangled in its cradle.

In 950 AD, a viking conducting a raid in Iberia contracts Smallpox. He would carry the deadly virus back to Scandinavia. Though his name has been lost to history, he would indirectly cause one of the greatest tragedies in human history. Smallpox would reach Iceland in 972, and Greenland in 995.

In 999 AD, Leif Eriksson travels from Greenland to Norway, where he converts to Christianity. He sets out to travel back to Greenland to convert the Norse colonies there. On his way to Greenland, he is blown off course to a land he would call Vinland. He rescues two men who were shipwrecked there, before returning to Greenland. In 1001 AD, he set off to explore Vinland with his father, Erik the Red. Little did they know that an unsuspecting member of their crew had smallpox.

On the way back to Vinland, Leif Eriksson is once again blown off course, now landing in Nova Scotia. However, disease has taken its toll on the crew, with almost a third sucumbing to smallpox by the time winter hits. Erik the Red is killed in January of 1002, his body buried in on the new continent. Leif Eriksson returns to Greenland in spring of 1002. Only a quarter of his crew survives the entire trip. Eriksson vows to never return to Vinland, declaring that God has forbidden Man from exploring it. Vague whispers of a cursed land to the West would circulate Europe, but none would successfully return for centuries. But for America and its millions of residents, the nightmare was only beginning.
 
Good start. I read your old one too - I think the refugees from the North American Plains ending up in Patagonia stretches credibility.
 
Yeah, I realized that was kind of stupid. There were other things that I had planned that were even worse, and it got to the point where it wasn't really salvageable anymore. I'm hoping this time its more coherent.
 
Chapter 2: It spreads​

Not much is known about the people that inhabited North America prior to the arrival of the Vikings, as the Smallpox epidemic, or “Red Death” as it would come to be called, had wiped out as much as 90% of the residents, radically altering the face of North America. Most of the nations with written histories predating the epidemic occupied South and Central America. What is known is that the American populations entered what would be called the “Chaotic Era” of extreme population reduction and political instability. In a desperate attempt to escape the coming plague, many fled South or West. Ironically, this would only serve to spread the disease faster. As a result of rapid movement and decline across the two continents, many unique, independent cultures would be lost or assimilated into others. Still other nations would permanently relocate, or merge with other groups in the face of extinction.

One of the only North American peoples known to exist before 1000 was the Mound Builders of the Mississippi River valley. Their mounds dot the region, as eerie ghosts of antiquity. It is difficult to tell what is history and what is legend involving the fall of the Mound Builders, as so much has been mythologized by their successors. Most historians agree that Smallpox came to the river valley in spring of 1004. What followed was swift and brutal.

In the face of such destruction, a cult would take power in several communities that viewed the epidemic as punishment for increasingly sedentary lifestyles, centralized groups, and the construction of the aforementioned “mounds”. Many of the mounds were destroyed in the ensuing chaos, as the population of the Mississippi was halved, then halved again, and then a third time. Many residents of South America, the West Coast, and even the northern reaches of Aleskia can trace their ancestry back to refugees who fled the reign of terror. After the “Violet Cult” failed to stop the spread of the disease, they lost a significant amount of legitimacy, and the pre-smallpox establishment would retake Cahokia in 1013. It was a hollow victory, however, as there was nothing left of the country.

The Anasazi, the inhabitants of the Colorado Plateau, would endure the epidemic surprisingly well. They fragmented into two groups, the Howookon and the Molon. Their relationship, while far from perfect, was mostly peaceful, bar a few incidents in the 12th and 13th centuries.

The Maya disintegrated. Utterly and completely, there was almost no trace left. While the Maya city-states were certainly struggling in the 900s, it was smallpox that finally wiped them out. Like the mound-builders, their structures would far outlive them. The Mayan culture would be looked back on with pride, and some states would even claim to be their descendents.

The Inuits were mostly insulated from the epidemic due to their northern location and frigid temperatures. In fact, the disease may have even benefited the Inuit, as Southern refugees brought with them ideas about cities and agriculture. In the absence of these developments, the Inuit would most likely not have attained the prominence and influence they would come to possess.

The Andes were dominated by the Wari and Tiawanku, as well as the Chimu culture. Though they are often refered to as empires, there is some debate as to whether this accurately characterizes them. They were loose collections of trade networks that lacked a single ruler. The Chimu and Tiawanku would reach the breaking point under Smallpox, regressing into miniscule nations. The Wari would weather the epidemic, and even experience something of a resurgence in the 1100s.
 
1) smallpox doesnt have asymptomatic carriers. So there's no way there could be an 'unsuspecting' crew member.
2) the course of an infection is shorter than an Atlantic crossing. Let alone allowing for someone being blown off course.
2a) Which is why, iOTL, it took until 1241 for it to first arrive in Iceland. When it did, it killed off a large chunk of the population, leaving almost everyone dead or immune.
2b) so, if your smallpox arrives in Iceland in 972, there will be none left in 1000. It takes a MUCH larger population than Iceland has/had to keep smallpox endemic.
3) Inuit is already plural. 'Inuits' makes as much sense as 'Englishes'.
4) the base camp, Anse aux Meadows, was on Newfoundland. Even if smallpox made it to Newfoundland, how does the infection get off the island?
 
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I'm just going to reproduce this in its entirety, because it's a point that seems to get ignored, despite the popularity of the book it comes from. From Charles C Mann's 1491:

Charles Mann said:
The second type of vulnerability [The first he describes being the kind where you have yet to acquire immunity via trained antibodies -- MF] stems from a quirk of history. Archeologists dispute the timing and manner of Indians' arrival in the Americas, but almost all researchers believe that the initial number of newcomers must have been small. Their gene pool was correspondingly restricted, which meant that Indian biochemistry was and is unusually homogeneous. More than nine out of ten Native Americans -- and almost all South American Indians -- have type O blood, for example, whereas Europeans are more evenly split between types O and A.

Evolutionarily speaking, genetic homogeneity by itself is neither good nor bad. It can be beneficial if it means that a population lacks deleterious genes. In 1491, the Americas were apparently free or almost free of cystic fibrosis, Huntington's chorea, newborn anemia, schizophrenia, asthma, and (possibly) juvenile diabetes, all of which have some genetic component. Here a limited gene pool may have spared Indians great suffering.

Genetic homogeneity can be problematic, too. In the 1960's and 1970's Francis L. Black, a virologist at Yale, conducted safety and efficacy tests among South American Indians of a new, improved measles vaccine. During the tests he drew blood samples from the people he vaccinated, which he later examined in the laboratory. When I telephoned Black, he told me that the results were "thought-provoking." Every individual person's immune system responded robustly to the vaccine. But the native population as a whole had a "very limited spectrum of responses." And that, he said, "could be a real problem in the right circumstances". For Indians, those circumstances arrived with Columbus.

Black was speaking of human leukocyte antigens (HLAs), molecules inside most human cells that are key to one of the body's two main means of defense. Cells of all sorts are commonly likened to biochemical factories, busy ferments in which dozens of mechanisms are working away in complex sequences that are half Rube Goldberg, half ballet. Like well-run factories, cells are thrifty; part of the cellular machinery chops up and reuses anything that is floating around inside, including bits of the cell and foreign invaders such as viruses. Not all of the cut-up pieces are recycled. Some are passed on to HLAs, special molecules that transport the snippets to the surface of the cell.

Outside, prowling, are white blood cells -- leukocytes, to researchers. Like minute scouts inspecting potential battle zones, leukocytes constantly scan cell walls for the little bits of stuff that HLAs have carried there, trying to spot anything that doesn't belong. When a leukocyte spots an anomaly -- a bit of virus, say -- it destroys the infected or contaminated cell immediately. Which means that unless an HLA lugs an invading virus to where the leukocyte can notice it, that part of the immune system cannot know it exists, let alone attack it.

HLAs carry their burdens to the surface by fitting them into a kind of slot. If the snippet doesn't fit into the slot, the HLA can't transport it, and the rest of the immune system won't be able to "see" it. All people have multiple types of HLA, which means that they can bring almost every potential problem to the attention of their leukocytes. Not every problem, though. No matter what his or her genetic endowment, no one person's immune system has enough different HLAs to identify every strain of every virus. Some things will always escape notice. Imagine someone sneezing in a crowded elevator, releasing into the air ten variants of the rhinovirus, the kind of virus that causes the common cold. (Viruses mutate quickly and are commonly resent in the body in multiple forms, each slightly different from the others.) For simplicity's sake, suppose that the other elevator passengers inhale all ten versions of the virus. One man is lucky: he happens to have HLAs that can lock onto and carry pieces of all ten variants to the cell surface. Because his white blood cells can identify and destroy the infected cells, this man doesn't get sick. Not so lucky is the woman next to him: she has a different set of HLAs, which are able to pick up and transport only eight of the ten varieties. The other two varieties escape the notice of her leukocytes and go on to give her a howling cold (eventually other immune mechanisms kick in and she recovers). These disparate outcomes illustrate the importance to a population of having multiple HLA profiles; one person's HLAs may miss a particular bug, but another person may be equipped to combat it, and the population as a whole survives.

Most human groups are a scattershot mix of HLA profiles, which means that almost always some people in a group will not get sick when exposed to a particular pathogen. Indeed, if laboratory mice have too much HLA diversity, Black told me, researchers can't use them to observe the progress of an infectious disease. "You get messy results -- they don't all get sick." the opposite is true as well, he said. Peole with similar HLA profiles fall victim to the same diseases in the same way.

In the 1990's Black reviewed thirty-six studies of South American Indians. Not to his surprise, he discovered that overall Indians have fewer HLA types than populations from Europe, Asia, and Africa. European populations have at least thirty-five main HLA classes, whereas Indian groups have no more than seventeen. In addition, Native American HLA profiles are dominated by an unusually small number of types. ABout one third of South American Indians, Black discovered, have identical or near-identical HLA profiles; for Africans the figure is one in two hundred. In South America, he estimated, the minimum probability that a pathogen in one host will next encounter a host with a similar immune spectrum is about 28 percent; in Europe, the chance is less than 2 percent. As a result, Black argued, "people of the New World are unusually susceptible to diseases of the Old."

[He goes on to detail the experience of Siberian native populations with European borne diseases, reasoning on the basis of the close ancestry American and Siberian natives share. Not entirely relevant to the explanation here, however, as he includes it mostly to bolster his case about 70-90% death rates over the centuries - MF]

After learning about this sad history [The Siberian experiences - MF] I again telephoned Francis Black. Being genetically determined, Indian HLA homogeneity cannot be hanged (except by intermarriage with non-Indians). Did that mean that the epidemics were unavailable? I asked. Suppose that the peoples of the Americas had, in some parallel world, understood the concept of contagion and been prepared to act on it. Could the mass-death have been averted?

"There have been lots of cases where individual towns kept out epidemics," Black Said. During plague episodes, "medieval cities would barricade themselves behind their walls and kill people who tried to come in. But whole countries -- that's much harder. England has kept out rabies. That's the biggest success story that comes to mind, offhand. But rabies is primarily an animal disease which helps, because you only have to watch the ports -- you don't have many undocumented aliens sneaking in with sick dogs. And rabies is not highly contagious, so even if it slips through it is unlikely to spread."

He stopped speaking for long enough that I asked him if he was still on the line.

"I'm trying to imagine how you would do it," he said. "If Indians in Florida let in sick people, the effects could reach all the way up to here in Connecticut. So all these different groups would have had to coordinate the blockade together. And they'd have to do it for centuries -- four hundred years -- until the invention of vaccines. Naturally they'd want to trade, furs for knives, that kind of thing. But the trade would have to be conducted in antiseptic conditions."

The Abenaki sent goods to Verrazzano on a rope strung from ship to shore, I said.

"You'd have to have the entire hemisphere doing that. And the Europeans would presumably have to cooperate, or most of them, anyway. I can't imagine that happening, actually. Any of it."

Did that mean the epidemics were inevitable and there was nothing to be done?

The authorities, he replied, could "try to maintain isolation, as I was saying. But that ends up being paternalistic and ineffective. Or they can endorse marriage and procreation with outsiders, which risks destroying the society they supposedly are trying to preserve. I'm not sure what I'd recommend. Except getting these communities some decent health care, which they almost never have."

Except for death, he went on, nothing in medicine is inevitable, "But I don't see how it [waves of epidemics from European diseases] could have been prevented for very long. That's the terrible thought. But I've been working with highly contagious diseases for forty years, and I can tell you that in the long run it is almost impossible to keep them out.

Woo, so yeah, there you go. This is by no means a final word, but in order to give indigenous American populations the ability to accrue immunity to diseases over generations you need to stretch back much further than just a couple of centuries. The implication of this section quoted above is that, while an individual can gain immunity as T-cells learn to recognize virii in the bloodstream, thus making it harder for that person to be successfully reinfected and easier for them to survive reinfection, that immunity is not heritable. You will have possible virgin field epidemics every generation that don't show any signs of burning out over the centuries. Only relatively sparse populations will survive in the long run as the physical pathways for infection are more scarce (fewer people interacting with each other in unclean conditions).

You need to reach back thousands of years and introduce domesticates or other vectors that give Native American immune system evolution a push in the direction of increasing HLA diversity. Or you need some way of introducing that diversity. A Vinland colony that thrives for a century or two, sustaining a large immigrant population, but dies off with the end of the Medieval Warm Period is a possibility. The immigrant population could then form a diaspora that spreads across the North American continent, intermarrying with the locals and producing hybrids that have a greater HLA diversity.

Whether you could sufficiently spread this new diversity in a few centuries is an open question.
 
This is a good premise since there was a plague which devastated Greenland OTL in 1002.

The first problem is, it wasn't smallpox.

Smallpox first reached Iceland, never mind Greenland, in 1240.

The second problem is that the Beothuk in Newfoundland are a hunter-gatherer society with sparse population living on an island. Their neighbors on Labrador are even more sparesley populated.

Smallpox might ravage them, but it would burn out quickly, not become endemic, and not propagate far enough south to reach areas with sufficiently dense populations (The Missipi Valley and the American Southeast Basically. Chesapeke bay as an outside possibility. In 1000 CE agriculture was not yet fully established in new england) and sufficiently developed trade networks to become endemic.
 
The initial symptoms of smallpox are very nonspecific - fever, malaise etc. It is entirely possible for a person in the early stages of smallpox to board a ship and not be obviously ill until they have infected other susceptible crew members. Depending on the length of the voyage, the number of susceptible crew on board you could have sick people on board ready to spread the infection when they reach their destination. Furthermore smallpox crusts remain infectious for some time on blankets etc. The history of giving bedding/clothing from smallpox victims to susceptibles to spread disease is well known.

OTL the spread of smallpox amongst the Native Americans was mostly organic, that is contact between tribes and villages, along trading routes etc. Archeological evidence with finds of of shells, turquoise, etc at great distances from where these materials were normally found indicates that well before European arrival there were long distance trading routes in the Americas. Furthermore once smallpox is introduced in to the Americas, it will stay there, so one can expect endemic smallpox and recurring epidemics. If the gene pool of Native Americans means that they are congenitally incapable of an adequate immune response, every epidemic will be devastating. Eventually, due to random mutations, people will be selected who have a better immune response but for those folks to repopulate the Americas with a population that has the same resistance to smallpox the Europeans have.

Smallpox being introduced to the Americas by a random event by vikings, fishermen or whomever is not ASB at all. Assuming introduced around 1000AD by 1500 you'll see a Native American population much smaller than OTL, certainly not susceptible to smallpox as OTL, but still vulnerable to other new diseases such as measles. IMHO this makes early colonization much easier due to much lower initial native population density, however you won't see the depopulation you saw OTL so further expansion will be against stronger opposition. However, the technological edge the Europeans have will still be there - the die off and repopulation won't get the remnants any further ahead from this aspect than OTL.
 
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