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A second argument is that Europeans at the time believed that the disease had “its origin and its birth from always in the island which is now named Española [Hispaniola],” as the prominent Spanish doctor Ruy Díaz de Isla put it in 1539. Díaz claimed that he had observed and tried to treat syphilis in the crew from Columbus’s first voyage, including, it seems, the captain of the
Pinta.
Apparently the man picked up the parasite in Hispaniola, brought it back to Europe, and died within months—but not before passing it on to some luckless bedmate. Díaz de Isla’s testimony was backed by the pro-Indian cleric Bartolomé de Las Casas, who was in Seville when Columbus returned.

Syphilis seems to have existed in the Americas before 1492—the third argument. In the mid-1990s Bruce and Christine Rothschild, researchers at the Arthritis Center of Northeast Ohio, in Youngstown, inspected 687 ancient Indian skeletons from the United States and Ecuador for signs of syphilitic disease. Up to 40 percent of the skeletons from some areas showed its presence. To nail down the chain of transmission, they subsequently discovered—working in concert with researchers from the Dominican Republic and Italy—that syphilis was equally common in Hispaniola when Columbus arrived. Indeed, the disease seemed to date back about two thousand years—it may have originated as a mutated form of yaws on the Colorado plateau.

The three main counterarguments against the America-as-origin theory are, first, that
Treponema pallidum
may have existed in Europe before Columbus. Archaeologists have turned up a few medieval skeletons, most of them in Britain, carrying what look like the marks of syphilis. Although pre-1492 syphilitic skeletons exist in the Americas, even a few European exemplars would undermine the Columbus-as-Typhoid-Mary case. Indeed, some medical researchers propose that syphilis has always existed worldwide, but manifested itself differently in different places. Second, the 1495 outbreak may not have been the introduction of a new disease but the recognition of an old one, which until then had been confused with Hansen’s disease (or, as it was known, leprosy). Descriptions of syphilis during and after the 1494–95 epidemic and Hansen’s before it are surprisingly similar; both were “treated” with mercury. In 1490 the pope abolished all of the leprosaria in Europe, allowing hordes of sick people to return home. Could that humanitarian gesture also have unleashed a storm of syphilis? At least some researchers think it likely.

The third counterargument is psychological. In part, as Alfred Crosby admitted, he initially devoted attention to the possible American origin of syphilis “because I was uneasy about so many diseases crossing west over the Atlantic and none going east.” He thought there must be some sort of “epidemiological-geographical symmetry.” Other historians followed suit. Later Crosby realized that examining the evidence in the hope of redressing the infectious balance was a mistake. “They want pox in Europe to balance the scales for smallpox in Mexico,” Vine Deloria Jr. told me. “They’re all hoping to find there’s a real Montezuma’s Revenge.”

Yet even if syphilis
did
originate in the New World, the scales would not be balanced. Syphilis is fascinating, “like all things venereal,” Crosby wrote in 2003, “but it was not a history-maker” like smallpox.
Treponema pallidum,
awful as it was and is, did not help topple empires or push whole peoples to extinction. “There was little symmetry in the exchange of diseases between the Old and the New Worlds,” Crosby said, “and there are few factors as influential in the history of the last half millennium as that.”

APPENDIX D

 

Calendar Math

Dictionaries define the calendar almost as if it were a machine: “a system for fixing the beginning, length, and divisions of the civil year.” But in every society calendars are much more than that. People experience time as both linear and circular. On the one hand, it marches remorselessly from birth to death, a vector with fixed endpoints and a constant velocity. On the other hand, time is cyclical, with the wheel of the seasons endlessly spinning, and no clear end or beginning. Calendars are records of a culture’s attempt to weight and reconcile these different visions.

In early European societies, the end of the year was regarded as dangerous: a period when the calendar literally runs out of days, the landscape is blanketed by night and cold, and nobody can be truly certain that the heavens would usher in a new year. Embodying that mysterious time when the end of the calendar somehow looped round and rejoined itself at the beginning, Romans celebrated Saturnalia, an upside-down week when masters served their servants and slaves held the great offices of state. The Christian calendar bracketed the strange, perilous final days of the year on one end with the birth of Christ, symbol of renewal, on December 25, and on the other with Epiphany, the day when the three kings recognized the infant Jesus as the Savior, another symbol of renewal, on January 6. Christmas and Epiphany bridge the dangerous gap between the end of one year and the beginning of the next.

The Mesoamerican calendar also tied together linear and cyclical time, but more elaborately. In its most fully developed form, at the height of Maya power, it consisted of three separate but interrelated calendars: a sacred tally known as the
tzolk’in;
the
haab,
a secular calendar based, like the Western calendar, on the rotation of the sun; and the Long Count, a system that, among other things, linked the other two.

The sacred calendar is both the calendar most dissimilar to Western calendars and the most important culturally. Each day in the
tzolk’in
had a name and a number, in somewhat the same way that one might refer to, say, “Wednesday the 15th.” In the Western calendar, the day names (e.g., Wednesday) run through cycles of seven, making weeks, and the day numbers (e.g., the 15th) run through cycles of 28, 30, or 31, making months. The
tzolk’in
used the same principle, but with less variation in the lengths of the cycles; it had a twenty-day “week” of named days and a thirteen-day “month” of numbered days. The analogy I am drawing is imprecise; what I am describing as the
tzolk’in
“week” was longer than the “month.” But just as Thursday the 16th follows Wednesday the 15th in the Christian calendar, 10 Akbal would follow 9 Ik in the
tzolk’in.
(The Maya had a twenty-day “week” in part because their number system was base-20, instead of the base-10 in European societies.)

Because the
tzolk’in
was not intended to track the earth’s orbit around the sun, its inventors didn’t have to worry about fitting their “weeks” and “months” into the 365 days of the solar year. Instead they simply set the first day of the year to be the first day of the twenty-day “week” and the thirteen-day “month,” and let the cycle spin. In the language of elementary school mathematics, the least common multiple (the smallest number that two numbers will divide into evenly) of 13 and 20 is 260. Hence, the
tzolk’in
had a length of 260 days.

In the Western calendar, a given combination of named and numbered days, such as Wednesday the 15th, will occur a few times in a calendar year. For instance, in 2006 the 15th of the month falls on Wednesday three times, in February, March, and November; in 2007 Wednesday the 15th occurs just once, in August. The irregular intervals are due to the differing lengths of the months, which throw off the cycle. In the
tzolk’in,
every “month” and every “week” are the same length. As a result, “Wednesday the 15th”—or 1 Imix, to give a real example—in the
tzolk’in
recurs at precise intervals; each is exactly 13 × 20 or 260 days apart.

Many researchers believe the movements of Venus, which Mesoamerican astronomers tracked carefully, originally inspired the
tzolk’in.
Venus is visible for about 263 consecutive days as the morning star, then goes behind the sun for 50 days, then reappears for another 263 days as the evening star. It was a powerful presence in the heavens, as I noted in Chapter 8, and a calendar based on its celestial trajectory would have shared some of that power. Within the sacred year, every day was thought to have particular characteristics, so much so that people were often named after their birth dates: 12 Eb, 2 Ik, and so on. In some places men and women apparently could not marry if they had the same name day. Days in the
tzolk’in
had import for larger occasions, too. Events from ceremonies to declarations of war were thought to be more likely to succeed if they occurred on a propitious day.

 

The Mesoamerican calendar was both more complex and more accurate than the European calendars of the same period. It consisted of a 365-day secular calendar, the
haab
(right), much like contemporary European calendars. The
haab
was tied to the second, sacred calendar, the
tzolk’in
(left), which was unlike any Western calendar. With a “week” of twenty named days and a “month” of thirteen numbered days, the
tzolk’in
produced a 260-day “year.” Mesoamerican societies used both simultaneously, so that every date was labeled with two names (1 Ix 0 Xul in the drawing). I have not rendered the
haab
as a wheel-within-wheel like the
tzolk’in,
even though it, too, had perfectly regular “weeks” and “months.” This is because the
haab
had to fit the 365-day solar year, which forced Maya calendar designers to spoil their system by tacking on an irregular, extra-short month at the end.

 

Because people also needed a civil calendar for mundane purposes like knowing when to sow and harvest, Mesoamerican societies had a second, secular calendar, the
haab:
eighteen “months,” each of twenty days. (Unlike the
tzolk’in,
which counted off the days from 1, the
haab
months began with 0; nobody knows why the system was different.) Simple arithmetic shows that eighteen twenty-day months generates a 360-day year, five days short of the requisite 365 days. Indians knew it, too. Rather than sprinkling the extra five days throughout the year as we do, though, they tacked them onto the end in a special “month” of their own. These days were thought to be unlucky—it was as if the year ended with five straight days of Friday the 13th. Although the ancient Maya knew (unlike their contemporaries in Europe) that the solar year is actually 365¼ days, they did not bother to account for the extra quarter day; there were no leap years in Mesoamerica. The failure to do so seems surprising, given that their astronomers’ mania for precision had led them to measure the length of the lunar month to within about ten seconds.