Smallpox Blankets

December 3, 2009

Over the years, I have come across numerous references to an insidious form of germ warfare that some Europeans employed to defeat Native Americans: smallpox blankets. Historians suggest that the practice may have begun as early as the 1530s, when Spanish conquistador Francesco Pizarro handed out bedding of smallpox victims to the Inca inhabitants of Peru, believing that the “miasma” that caused the disease still clung to the fabric.

One of the most clearly documented conspiracies to employ this weapon comes from the letters and papers of Lord Jeffery Amherst, the British commander-in-chief for America in 1763. His hardliner policies against Native Americans in the Great Lakes region had sparked Pontiac, the chief of the Ottawa tribe, to rise up against the British troops. Amherst wanted victory at any cost. To defeat the tribes, he approved the use of smallpox blankets to, as he said, “Extirpate this Execrable Race.”

Some historians have questioned whether smallpox can indeed be spread from blankets. But some studies clearly suggest that it can. In Vectors of Death: The Archaeology of European Contact, University of New Mexico anthropologist Ann Ramenofsky notes that “although the virus is most frequently transmitted through droplet infection, it can survive a number of years outside human hosts in a dried state.”

All this comes to mind thanks to a fascinating recent post on the Northwest Coast Archaeology blog. There you will find a partial transcript of an interview that CBC radio interviewer Imbert Orchard conducted in 1969 with Solomon Wilson, a Haida elder from Maude Island Village on Haida Gwaii in northern British Columbia. In this interview, Mr. Wilson recounts a story he had heard from an elder about smallpox blankets and the spread of disease on the Northwest Coast. It’s definitely worth checking out.

Who Discovered Australia?

December 2, 2009

An Australian newspaper carried a fascinating story yesterday of a mystery shipwreck, a team of nautical archaeologists, and a ocean-going expedition that may end up rewriting a crucial chapter in Australian history. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, a team of archaeologists led by Kieran Hosty, a curator at the Australian National Maritime Museum, sailed this morning for Wreck Reef in search of debris from a ship that may have carried American whalers to Australia before James Cook claimed the continent for Great Britain.

Very quickly, here’s the (slender) evidence. In 1803, more than 30 years after James Cook sailed the Australian coast, a British sloop under the command of Lieutenant Robert Fowler slammed at night into an uncharted reef some 700 miles north of Sydney. Fowler remained aboard, but some of the crew explored the sandy reef. They discovered to their amazement pieces of wooden nautical wreckage. They later reported that the debris likely came from the stern of large 40- ton ship and that it had been there for a long time.

The crew must have been sopping wet and cold, because they built a roaring fire with the ship’s timber, thereby disposing of the prime evidence. But the Australian archaeologists hope to find other clues on the reef. Hosty himself thinks its unlikely that the wreckage came from a Dutch or British ship. The Dutch sailed further north and British maritime records make no mention of such a shipwreck from the area during this period. So Hosty now suspects American whalers, who did sail west to South Pacific waters in search of prey.

I will be following this story with great interest. Nautical archaeology is exceptionally expensive, which is why serious researchers encounter real difficulties raising funds to conduct important underwater exploration. (We mainly see newspaper reports of finds made by treasure hunters looking for gold and silver). And this is an inherently fascinating story.

But I would like to point out that the newspaper headlines miss a critical point. While James Cook may have claimed Australia for Great Britain, the ancestors of the Australia’s indigenous people landed on the shores of the continent some 50,000 years earlier. To get there from mainland Asia, they crossed at least 10 ocean straits: one of these crossings was greater than 44 miles. As Jon Erlandson, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon and one of the world’s experts on coastal archaeology once told me, it would have been “a real exercise to get across, and the magnitude of that is illustrated by the fact that, before anatomically modern humans make the leap, no large-bodied animal ever gets all the way across.”

I wish the Australian team the best of luck in their search for the mystery wreck. But I sure would like to see more researchers turn their attention to the real discovery of the Australian continent.

The Architecture of Quarantine

December 1, 2009

Image courtesy of Richard Nickel Jr/The Kingston Lounge

I recently came across a series of remarkable photographs that have given me pause for serious thought. The images are the work of a guerilla preservationist and urban archaeologist, Richard Nickel Jr., and they capture in haunting detail the current state of a place once known as the Georgia Lunatic Asylum in Milledgeville, Georgia. What struck me immediately was how much these institutional corridors and claustrophobic rooms resembled the architecture I had seen at Dachau concentration camp in Germany.

Dachau was the first concentration camp that the Nazi government built in Germany, and it was constructed to isolate those who could not, according to a German government press release issued on March 21, 1933, be housed “in normal state prisons.” Moreover, its prisoners could not be released back into the general population because, and again I’m quoting here from the 1933 press release, “they continue to agitate and create unrest when released.” In other words, Dachau was designed as a quarantine facility.

And who needed such quarantining? Adolf Hitler had a very specific population in mind. In Mein Kampf, he likened a Jewish person to a type of germ–“a noxious bacillus [that] keeps spreading as soon as a favorable medium invites him. And the effect of his existence is also like that of spongers; wherever he appears, the host people dies out after a shorter or longer period of time.” This hideous racism led directly to the death of six million European Jews.

Facilities such as the Georgia Lunatic Asylum were also clearly designed as places of quarantine, isolating people with a wide range mental health issues (including the emotional trauma that resulted from sexual abuse and incest) from the general population. And many of the inmates in these facilities perished far from the public eye. Some historians suggest that 30,000 people lie buried today at the old Georgia asylum, an astonishing figure in my view. This cemetery is, according to one paper I read, the largest graveyard in the world for people with mental issues.

How did so many people come to die in this institution? Some historians cite rampant epidemics of typhoid and other infectious diseases. This is may well be true. But I personally think this is a tragic history that needs further exploring.

For further information on the history of Dachau, see Barbara Distel and Ruth Jakusch (ed.), Concentration Camp Dachau 1933-1945 (Comite International de Dachau, Brussels: Munich, 1978.)