Smallpox and Slavery in Ah Cuzamil: a Reappraisal of Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón’s 1520 letter to Emperor Charles V
We touched on the island of Cozumel, to pick up certain Spaniards who were there, those of the said armada, who had left a ship anchored there after reaching the port of the said island, having split off from the armada when it came to the port of La Trinidad. And on that island, there were very few native Indians, because most of them had died of smallpox, like the Indians of the said island Fernandina [Cuba], like with the Spaniards who left, they had been infected.[1]
Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón wrote this brief account of his time on Ah Cuzamil—or as the Spanish called it, Cozumel—in a 1520 letter to Charles V, the King of Spain and recently throned ruler of the Holy Roman Empire.[2] The letter served as evidence of his involvement in the attempted arrest of conquistador Hernán Cortés. Acting as an agent of Diego Velázquez, the governor of Cuba, Cortés famously ignored his orders to survey the coast of what is now Mexico. Instead, he chose to invade and claim the space as his own in the name of the Spanish Crown. Velázquez retaliated by sending an expedition, captained by Pánfilo de Narváez, to either capture or kill Cortés. Both Cortés and Velázquez were eager to secure grand political positions in this new world of opportunity and would do so at any cost.[3]
Vásquez de Ayllón, one of several judges appointed in nearby Hispaniola, sailed to Cuba to intervene. His own interest was in maintaining the precarious stability of the newly colonized Caribbean, and he joined Narváez as a referee, hoping to mitigate the worst of any fall out. As we well know, he was unsuccessful. Cortés had already marched on the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan, and the battle that would soon ensue between his men and Narváez would result in a smallpox epidemic that irrevocably changed the lives of Native people throughout the Americas. Or so we are typically told. As Vásquez de Ayllón’s letter indicates, however, smallpox was present in Ah Cuzamil before the Narváez expedition arrived and before they launched their attack on Cortés in the Totonac compound of Cempoala.
Figure 1. Willem Janszoon Blaeu. Nova Hispania, Nova Galicia, Guatimala (1660). Courtesy of the Harold B. Lee Library. Brigham Young University.
Located just off the coast of the Yucatán peninsula, Ah Cuzamil was an important pilgrimage site and trading station for Native sailors, and it was in this capacity that the Maya halach uinic Naum Pat met with the conquistador Juan de Grijalva the previous year.[4] Leaving Naum Pat in charge, Grijalva claimed the island for the Crown, providing the armada with a critical outpost for its ships to resupply. It was these ships that introduced smallpox to the Maya community that continued to call the island home.
Figure 2. The meeting between Cortes & the Principal Cacique and Inhabitants of Cozumel.” The world displayed; or, A curious collection of voyages and travels, Vol. II. (Printed for J. Newbery, London, 1761). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.
This account is arguably the first to document smallpox in what would become Mexico, with the opening quote detailing the demographic effect of this outbreak on the island. And as Vásquez de Ayllón later expounds, he himself was implicated in its further spread:
I facilitated the removal of the ships that were in that other port, still without my knowledge, they carried away up to a thousand Indians, in addition to the damage already done in that island and the damage that will be done, because they have infected the Indians there with smallpox.[5]
As his letter makes clear, it was Spanish sailors—first those traveling in an armada from Cuba to Ah Cuzamil and then those in the Narváez expedition, who enslaved Maya survivors—who facilitated the introduction of smallpox to the mainland, where Vásquez de Ayllón and Narváez would anchor shortly thereafter.[6]
This portrait of disease transmission starkly contrasts with the prevailing narrative of Mexico's first smallpox epidemic. In this version of history, the initial outbreak is attributed to an enslaved African, sometimes named as Francisco de Eguía, who was one of many African men held captive by Spanish conquistadors in the Caribbean. In 1568, for example, the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote of
a black man whom [Narváez] brought covered in smallpox, and a very black affair it was for New Spain, for it was owing to him that the whole country was stricken and filled with it, from which there was great mortality, for according to what the Indians said they had never had such a disease, and, as they did not understand it, they bathed very often, and on that account a great number of them died; so that dark as was the lot of Narváez, still blacker was the death of so many persons who were not Christians.[7]
His account cast a single enslaved African man as the sole source of infection that would spread throughout the continent. It also cast the Native people of "New Spain" as vulnerable and witless, ostensibly in need of Spain's spiritual and sanitary guidance. Together, these rhetorical moves worked to bolster the Spanish claim to sovereignty through evangelization and exculpate them from any potential blame. It was a powerful narrative, one first spun in Toribio de Benavente Motolinía's 1536 Historia de los indios de la nueva españa, an eschatological account of the conquest, in which the Americas was visited by ten plagues and twelve Franciscan apostles - including himself - who would save the New World.[8] As Francis J. Brooks argues, Motolinía needed smallpox to be spread by an "Ethiopian slave" to better allude to the biblical tale of plague that the priest allegorized from the book of Exodus.[9] Díaz del Castillo's own account echoes this early religious racialization that began to link blackness with the ungovernable and the diabolic.
All of the conquest narratives that pin smallpox to de Eguía seem to draw on Motolinía, and for this reason, the Vásquez de Ayllón letter offers a unique counterpoint and eyewitness account of smallpox as it spread beyond (and before) the epidemic in Cempoala.[10] He himself says nothing about this outbreak, as he was not present for the battle between Cortés and Narváez, nor its deadly wake. Narváez had arrested him upon arrival and kept him imprisoned on the isle of San Juan de Ulúa to prevent any further meddling.
Once sent back to Santo Domingo, he and his fellow Audiencia judges penned their respective testimonies. His letter was intended to evidence his stymied efforts to suppress open warfare. But inadvertently it hints at the otherwise unseen links that colonialism forged through smallpox between the sites of Cempoala, Ah Cuzamil, Cuba, and even Hispaniola, where the virus first took root a year earlier. Compounded by brutal encomienda labor regimes, smallpox felled much of the Taíno families and enslaved laborers brought there from Spain and from neighboring islands. The consequence was additional slaving raids, which brought colonizers and contagion into even greater contact with at-risk communities in the Native Caribbean.[11]
Vásquez de Ayllón's letter encourages us to think of these events in the interrelated way that people at the time experienced them. To resist a story of isolated conquests resulting in distinct polities (that would become distinct nation states). Centering intermediary spaces like Ah Cuzamil can help us take this approach, as well as challenge the racialized myth-making that creates patient zeros out of subjects like de Eguía. Historical accounts of the conquest repeatedly portray him as such, as they portray smallpox as an archipelago of disease, each outbreak limited to its own terrestrial confine. As Vásquez de Ayllón's letter demonstrates, however, these epidemics were nodes in a simmering network that moved across the Caribbean in those first few years of contact. As colonial settlers expanded into Native lands, so too would smallpox, propagating disease, as well as increasingly entrenched ideas about enslaved Africans as inherently infectious and in need of containment. For this reason, tracing smallpox through history can tell us a great deal about the experiences of enslaved and free Africans, as well as the anxieties of colonial settlers who feared disease, enslaved resistance, and the many other consequences of their colonization.[12]
Farren Yero
[1] “Relación que hizo el licenciado Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón, de sus diligencias para estorbar el rompimiento entre Cortés y Narváez. 30 de Augusto de 1520,” in Cartas y relaciones de Hernan Cortés al emperador Carlos v., ed. Pascual de Gayangos, (Paris: A. Chaix y ca., 1866), 42. All translations unless otherwise specified are my own.
[2] Vázquez de Ayllón is best known for his failed settlement, San Miguel de Guadalupe, which ended with the first slave revolt in US history. Perhaps ironically, Vázquez de Ayllón died during a fever epidemic in October 1526. Survivors either fled into the interior or abandoned the mainland to return to Hispaniola.
[3] For more on their conflict, see: Hernán Cortés, Anthony Pagden, and John H. Elliott, Letters from Mexico (Yale University Press, 2001).
[4] Shankari Patel, “Pilgrimage and Caves on Cozumel,” in Stone Houses and Earth Lords: Maya Religion in the Cave Context, eds. Keith M. Prufer and James E. Brady (Denver: University Press of Colorado, 2021), 91-122.
[5] Vásquez de Ayllón, "Relación," 40.
[6] Cortés also stopped at Ah Cuzamil and could potentially have introduced smallpox there from Cuba. However, there is no documentation that evidences this. It was on this island that the conquistador learned from Naum Pat of his countryman, Gerónimo de Aguilar, who had shipwrecked enroute back from the recently settled Santa María de la Antigua del Darién and who was kept captive with the Cocom Maya. Aguilar, along with Malintzín, later served as translators who made Cortés's invasion possible.
[7] Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain, Vol. 2. (Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1967), 218-219.
[8] Toribio Motolinía, History of the Indians of New Spain (Washington: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1951), 87-88.
[9] Francis J. Brooks, “Revising the Conquest of Mexico: Smallpox, Sources, and Populations,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24, no. 1 (1993): 25.
[10] This observation appears in a number of works, including: Ralph Vigil, “A Reappraisal of the Expedition of Panfilo de Narvaez to Mexico in 1520,” Revista de Historia de América, no. 77/78 (1974): 101–25; Robert McCaa, “Spanish and Nahuatl Views on Smallpox and Demographic Catastrophe in Mexico,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 25 (1994): 397–431; Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 63-65, 68; Matthew Restall, “Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America,” The Americas 57, no. 2 (2000): 171–205.
[11] As a consequence, at least sixty-four slave raiding expeditions left Santo Domingo between 1514 -1524: Juan José Ponce Vázquez, Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580-1690 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 32; Erin Woodruff Stone, Captives of Conquest: Slavery in the Early Modern Spanish Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 69. For more on the 1518 epidemic, see: Noble David Cook, “Sickness, Starvation, and Death in Early Hispaniola,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no. 3 (Winter 2002): 349–86.
[12] The scholarship on slavery, health, and healing is vast. Recent key texts on the Americas include: Sowande’ M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016); Rana A. Hogarth, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Pablo F Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Kristen Block, “Slavery and Inter-Imperial Leprosy Discourse in the Atlantic World,” Atlantic Studies 14, no. 2 (April 3, 2017): 243–62; Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017); Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2017); Farren Yero, “An Eradication: Empire, Enslaved Children, and the Whitewashing of Vaccine History,” Age of Revolutions (December 7, 2020); ); Bethan Fisk, “Black Knowledge on the Move: African Diasporic Healing in Caribbean and Pacific New Granada,” Atlantic Studies 18, no. 2 (April 3, 2021): 244–70; Sean Morey Smith and Christopher Willoughby, eds. Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2021); Elise A. Mitchell, “Morbid Crossings: Surviving Smallpox, Maritime Quarantine, and the Gendered Geography of the Early Eighteenth-Century Intra-Caribbean Slave Trade,” The William and Mary Quarterly 79, no. 2 (2022): 177–210; Christopher D. E. Willoughby, Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2022).