The world virtually buzzed last week with the ‘news’ that Christopher Columbus might have also ‘discovered’ syphilis in the new world and taken it to the old. This theory is not new, given that the first epidemic of syphilis was recorded in the early 1490s around the time Columbus would have returned to Europe from one of his voyages. But there was never any evidence to prove it. However, researchers have published the results of a study, which began about two years ago and is based on bacterial samples from Guyana, that they say links Columbus and his men to syphilis and to the Americas. How did Guyana get involved? Purely by chance, as it happens; it was the last place in South America where yaws still existed up to two years ago.
According to the study, which was published in the online Public Library of Science journal last week, and reported by Reuters, AP, AFP and practically every news service and news agency in the world, Canadian doctors who have been coming here since 1996, said they first noticed several untreated cases of yaws among Amerindian children in 1998. They treated the children with penicillin and after five years of visits and treatment wrote about successfully controlling yaws in South America in the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal. This stirred interest with an American researcher who had been studying yaws and she asked for samples of the bacteria. In 2005, they were able to obtain what may have been the last two samples. During subsequent trips in 2006 and last year, there were none to be found. They compared the samples with “a family tree” of the disease constructed from yaws genes from Africa and Asia, syphilis from humans worldwide and related bacteria from animals and found that the Guyana yaws samples were the most syphilis-like.
The researchers have presented facts, which though not indisputable, make some sense. They conclude that it is likely that while yaws had been present in both the old world and the new, the bacteria evolved in the Americas to become more syphilis-like, but remained a skin disease of children, until Columbus and his men returned to Europe from the Caribbean. They were the only Europeans to make that trip before 1495. That certainly explains the fact that we still have an Indigenous people population at all, given that syphilis was reported to have killed millions in Europe before penicillin was advanced as a cure. So Columbus and his men will have been the conduits through whom ‘syphilitic yaws’ evolved to become a dreaded sexually transmitted disease.
There’s some amount of irony in the thought that the voyagers credited with wiping out whole populations of native Indians by bringing influenza and smallpox to the West Indies, had also backhanded Europe in one fell swoop with venereal syphilis. Unfortunately, they also brought the venereal syphilis back to the Americas.
Looking back at the sanitised accounts of the voyages to the West Indies that were taught in school, I can’t help but agree with those persons who have constantly railed against certain historians for their highly subjective writing. No history book I ever read in school even hinted at sexual plunder here, nor were there any known accounts of a West Indian Pocahontas.
But even as a 15-year-old schoolgirl I had considered that there was no way Columbus and his men only bartered for tangibles with their bits of glass and beads. As voracious a reader as I have always been, I have travelled with other adventurers in history. Some of the stories were myths, but some were true. Some were romanticised, others written in gripping tortured poetry and brutal prose. The stories have had a common theme: the adventurers/explorers pillaged, raped and plundered entire villages, cities and countries; enslaved the inhabitants and then claimed the land for their king/queen.
I believed then and still do now, that there ought to have been, maybe even a single line in our school history books as it pertained to the European voyages to these parts that said ‘they also bought/traded/raped/fell in love with the women.’ I stand corrected if that book has since been written.
Might any of my schoolmates have had a different perception? We never discussed it, but I can’t help but wonder now if any of them were completely and naively taken in by the sexless awe of the “Indian who had known no change.”
And finally, while I again felt a sense of helpless rage at the liberties that would have been taken with our women in that era, there is also sort of wry satisfaction that if this research is correct, Columbus would have gotten a bit more than he bargained for.
