The European nation that came into the American territory was the Spanish. The first contact between Europeans and the Maya was in 1502” (Source 3), this expedition was headed b y Christopher Columbus, who was trying to find a new trade route to the far East but inadvertently landed in what came to be known to the Europeans as the “New World” (Source11). The Spanish had claimed the New World territory, and when they found out that the Mayans were a divided group, had no political authority; they were also able to exploit this division by taking advantage of the rivalries within the group. Even when Montejo travelled to Mexico, he soon later left Yucatan in 1534 because “no gold had been discovered, nor is there anything [else] from which …show more content…
So although they were under Spanish control they still managed to keep hold of some official control because it is stated that some provinces were regarded independent i.e. the Maya, long after the fall of the other Mesoamerican groups. The Mayan population decreased between 1515 and 1516 there was a rapid wildly spread epidemic among the Mayan people in eastern Yucatan know as the “mayacimil (or “easy death”)”. This epidemic was caused by smallpox which was transmitted by a soldier arriving in Mexico (probably a Spanish soldier), who was carrying the epidemic. This plague spread through the native population of the Americans, modern estimation of the death rate varied from “75% to 90% mortality” among the natives. The Mayan had no immunity, medicine or technology so the epidemic spread among them. Small pox was rapidly transmited and other Old World diseases, which were the most deadly were, “aforementioned smallpox, influenza, measles…pulmonary diseases, including tuberculosis; the latter disease was attributed to the arrival of the Spanish by the Maya inhabitants of Yucatán.” (Source
From a proud Conquistador, to a castaway, a slave and trader, and then medicine man, Cabeza de Vaca was the first European to explore much of the southern coast of Texas. Cabeza was a 37 year old military veteran in 1527 when he left on the Narvaez Expedition to find gold and colonize the Gulf Coast. He was the expedition’s treasurer. Cabeza de Vaca was enslaved by Indians in 1528 when one of the rafts the crew made crashed on present day Galveston island, he then escaped in 1530 and joined/was enslaved by another tribe called the Charrucos until his escape with 3 other survivors in 1534. He then walked to Mexico City. Cabeza survived this ordeal because of the incredible patience he had, his skills of diplomacy and goodwill, and his amazing wilderness survival skills.
... The plague was brought over by the Spanish who where immune to the disease, but the Aztecs weren't so lucky. Many where killed over the course of seventy days, including the new King Cuitlahucs (92). Obviously this had a dramatic impact because they lost their leader. Those that remained where very weak with a milder form of the disease (93). Obviously this affected their strength to fight.
After the discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus in 1492, the powerful Old World scrambled to colonize it. The three major nations involved in this were Spain, France, and England. Spain took more to the south in the Central American and Mexico areas while France went north in the Canada region. The English came to America and settled in both the New England and Chesapeake area. Although the people in these regions originated from the same area, the regions as a whole evolved into different societies because of the settlers’ purpose for coming to America and the obstacles faced in both nature and with the natives.
Christopher Columbus discovered the America’s for Spain in 1492. The explorers and settlers that settled in Central and South America were mostly Spanish and Portuguese. The English took notice of the Spanish success in the America’s, so they decided to explore the upper part of the America’s, North America, in the late 1500’s.
From the moment Hernan Cortes landed in Mexico and began his campaign against the Aztec empire, the people of the new world were doomed to be conquered by both technological and biological means. Smallpox, a disease that had never been experienced in America before the arrival of the Europeans devastated large scale native populations. The abandonment of the famous lost city of Machu Picchu stands as a famous example of the devastation of native populations.
Cultures had been flourishing thousands of years before the Europeans arrived to the New World. Great empires such as the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas inhabited the vast lands of Central and South America. These three major powers controlled the land before Columbus or Cortez were even born. Although the Pre-Columbian civilizations and the Europeans shared some similar ideas, life was very different in the New World compared with that of Middle Age Europe.
Beginning in 1492, Spain had been the first European nation to sail westward across the Atlantic Ocean and colonize the Amerindian nations of the Western Hemisphere. The empire that came from this exploration extended from Virginia on the
It is believed that 40 million to 50 million people inhabited the New World before the arrival of Columbus and the Europeans, and that most of them died within a few decades. For example, Mexico's population fell from about 30 million in 1519 to 3 million in 1588. The other South and Central American countries as well as the Caribbean islands suffered the same devastation (Cowley, 1991). Mass epidemics were virtually unknown in the New World prior to the invasion of the Europeans. Aside from their lack of immunity to the pathogens, another factor in the rapid spread of the diseases could have been the weariness of the Indian populations. Due to their recent conquest and oppression by the Spaniards, the Indians were probably too tired to fight the infections.
Pizarro, being the decisive, military leader that he was, would take advantage of the terrible plague and use it against the Inca. As he traveled from village to village, he would leave a person infected with smallpox in the village so that the whole village would become infected and die. When his men were in Cuzco while it was under siege from Manco Inca, he ordered dead bodies infected with small pox to be thrown into the Inca camps at night. Huge number of Inca soldiers died because of attacks like these. Pizarro and his men were from Europe, so they had some resistance to the diseases they brought with them, so they were not affected by them.
The Spaniards arrived at the Americas prior to the English. The Spanish mainly wanted to explore in the first place because after the Black Death, the population increased, and thus, so did the frequency of commerce. There was a sudden new interest in new products and the new strong monarchs who sponsored the journeys wanted to be more affluent. Therefore, explorers such as Christopher Columbus attempted to go west to target Asia. However, he ended up on Cuba and called the natives Indians. The Spanish soon started to consider the Americas less of a blockage and could now see it as a source of resources. In 1518, Cortes arrived into Mexico with his group of conquistadors, or conquerors, which is a proper name because the men after gold exterminated native areas using their military skills, brutality and greed to turn the Southern America into a vast Spanish empire. The smallpox the Spanish unknowingly carried also helped wipe many people out. When they saw the religious ceremonies of the Aztecs that produced many skulls, they thought of these people as savages and not entirely human. This of coarse was quite hypocritical because the Spanish have killed before during the Inquisition for their faith. It was this contempt that made them think it was all right to slaughter the natives. Spanish colonies were established when conquistadors had gotten a license to finance the expedition from the crown to fixture encomiendas. These encomiendas were basically Indian villages that became a source of labor. The Spanish dreamed of becoming wealthier from South America, but they also wanted a profitable agricultural economy and to spread their Catholic religion (the Pueblo Indians converted to Christianity), which became very important in the 1540s.
European exploration in the Americas started in approximately the year 1000, in which Norse people fled their homeland of Norway and Greenland and settled around modern day
Europeans, Spanish and the French. American Indians had thrived on American soil for thousands of
The Mayans are American Indian people who lived in southern Mexico (Miller "Maya" Grolier). The Yucatan was the center of the Mayan civilization from about the 1st century B.C. ("Yucantan" Grolier). They flourished in Mexico and central America from 250 to 1600 A.D. ("History of Agriculture" Grolier). Their ancestors had crossed the Bering land Bridge from Asia (Miller "Maya" Grolier). Honduras was once a part of the Mayan Empire. It had flourished between 250 and 950 A.D. (Seligson "Honduras" Grolier). The Mayans also had lived in Mexican states: Yucantan and Chiapas, British Honduras, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador (Burland 1770)
Upon the arrival of the Spanish, and in addition to the “Columbian Exchange” of plants and animals, a plethora of diseases were introduced in Latin America. As a result, bacteria and viruses such as influenza, measles, smallpox, and typhus were credited as the most effective Spanish allies. Unlike the Spanish who had been exposed to these illnesses long before, the Indians’ millennia of isolation had prevented them from developing immunities against a series of diseases imported from Europe. In truth, the high death toll was not exclusive to the inhabitants of Mexico and Peru as the pattern of destruction in Brazil was similar. For example, it is noted that smallpox and measles killed thousands in northeastern Brazil in the
The colonialism by Europeans of the Caribbean resulted in devastating and severe impacts on the indigenous people. They were dispossessed of their land, exposed to European diseases that were new to them and had to be involved in violent conflicts, which resulted in the death of so many indigenous people. Their lives and those of their future generations were changed forever. As the settlers arrived in the Caribbean, they came in with epidemic diseases from Europe, among them smallpox, chickenpox, influenza and measles (Lang 273). The indigenous populations of the Caribbean had not acquired immunity to the unfamiliar diseases, and just within weeks, the