Smallpox epidemic of 1518 in Hispaniola

A letter dated 10 January 1519

On that day the Hieronymite friars Luis de Figueroa and Alonso de Santo Domingo reported to Charles V that viruelas — the pustular sickness generally identified as smallpox — was still raging among Hispaniola's Indigenous population. The outbreak had probably begun in December 1518 rather than starting sometime in 1519 as the listing says.

The friars reported that almost one-third of the remaining Indigenous people had already died or were dying. The same letter said Indigenous people on San Juan — Puerto Rico — had begun dying of the same disease.

Written by men counting labour

The mortality disrupted a colonial programme that was concentrating surviving Taíno people into settlements, and it threatened the labour available for Hispaniola's gold mines. That economic alarm is what prompted the report.

Those figures were produced by colonial officials concerned with labour and mining; the near-one-third proportion is contemporary but cannot be independently counted. Taíno communities were already under severe strain from enslavement, forced labour, displacement, hunger and earlier disease.

A pandemic story that will not hold

Alfred Crosby grouped the later spread through Mexico, Central America and perhaps Peru into a pandemic beginning in 1519. That chronology is now too compressed.

Central Mexico's well-documented outbreak began in 1520, after the Narváez expedition reached the Gulf coast. A pre-conquest Andean epidemic identified as smallpox is dated by some scholars to around 1524–1526 and rejected by others. Las Casas later said the disease was carried by someone from Castile, but the specific carrier and chain of transmission cannot be identified.

The identification itself rests on retrospective description. Sixteenth-century viruelas named a pustular appearance and could cover diseases other than smallpox; smallpox is the best-supported reading of the friars' report, not a laboratory finding.