Encyclopedia of the Incas

and yellow fever, was delayed given the need for an American vector species
capable of carrying it, or until the Old World vectors transported to the New
World survived and prospered. Typhus, largely vectored by the body louse
(Pediculus humanus), could be identified by early modern physicians, especially
since it was well known in times of warfare and siege in^ late-fifteenth-century
Europe. The bubonic plague, transferred from person to person, but mostly by
infected fleas (Xenopsylla cheopis) on rodent hosts, was generally identified by
its obvious symptoms. Malaria, caused by three strains of plasmodium with
different rates of mortality, was primarily transported by Anopheles mosquitoes.
Direct physical contact between Spaniards and Incas took place almost four
decades after exploration and scattered settlement of the Atlantic and Caribbean
coasts. Record keeping in the Andean world differed from the European, so our
knowledge of many things is imperfect. Oral history, recorded by Europeans
years later, sheds some light on the events of the previous century, but the longer
the passage of time from the actual event, the faultier that oral history is.
Smallpox may have been introduced into the Caribbean by Columbus’s large
second fleet as early as 1493, although it may not have reached the mainland.
But the terrible pandemic that began on Hispaniola in 1518 did, and it devastated
Mesoamerica and slowly but inexorably moved beyond. Deadly smallpox
coincided with the conquest of the Aztec state, and in 1520 the epidemic was
noted in Panama as well. Either from there or from sites of infection along the
north coast of Colombia, the virus potentially moved southward deeper into the
interior, as it passed from one group to another. Both smallpox and measles were
present in the circum-Caribbean a decade or more before the Spanish arrival in
Peru. Having never experienced smallpox or measles, all Native peoples were
susceptible. Both diseases were highly contagious and affected all ages and
sexes. The mortality rates were quite high in these initial epidemics.
When smallpox arrived in the mid-1520s, it swept away its indigenous victims
prior to the penetration of Francisco Pizarro and his men. By 1531 smallpox was
coupled with measles, as mentioned by early Spanish observers who looked to
Native sources. The earliest information, taken from a group of quipucamayocs
interviewed by Governor Cristóbal Vaca de Castro in the early 1540s, reports
that Inca Huayna Capac died of a “pestilencia de viruelas” (disease of smallpox).
At the end of the 1540s and in the early 1550s, two other Spaniards secured oral
testimony concerning the death of the ruler. The chronicler Juan de Betanzos
married an Inca ñusta (princess), and wrote a description of the Inca world based
on accounts provided by her and her relatives. Betanzos noted that the Inca came