Numbers Without People: A Brief Relation of the Population Counts in the Works of Bartolomė de las Casas and Captain John Smith (Notes)

"It is generally thought that up to 100 million indigenous people may have lived in the Americas,” claims Wikipedia's entry on the indigenous population before European contact. This is qualified by a reference to geographer William Denevan's 1976 suggestion of a “consensus count” of 50 million for both continents; estimates for the number of North American Indians at the time of contact range between eight and twelve million.

Bartolomė de las Casas, the sixteenth-century Dominican missionary, was first to open the population debate in his role as scourge of the conquistadors. The cruelties of soldiers and colonists documented by Las Casas are widely corroborated by eye-witnesses of the conquest. More problematical are the friar's estimates of numbers wiped out by the settlers, especially since his mortality figures are attributed to war and massacre, and not epidemics that we now know to be the primary cause of death among the native population.

“We have in forty five or forty eight years wasted and consumed more land than all Europe, yea and part of Asia, does in length and breadth contain, robbing and usurping upon that with all cruelties, wrong and tyrannie, which we have seene well inhabited with humane people, among whom there have been slain twentie Millions of soules,” Las Casas reported.

In addition to 20 million victims on the mainland, Las Casas estimated three million dead in Hispaniola, a million in Jamaica and Saint John's, 550,000 in Nicaragua, and...”I mention not the innumerable multitudes in Cuba, Panuca, Florida, Xalico, Yucatan, Saint Martha, Carthagena, New Granada, River of Plata etc.” (Apologética historia de las Indias, excerpt from Hakluyt Posthumus.)

Captain John Smith's writings on Virginia and New England stand in sharp contrast to Las Casas's estimates:

“The land is not populous, for the men be fewe; their far greater number is of women and children. Within 60 miles of James Towne there are about some 5000 people, but of able men fit for their warres scarse 1500. To nourish so many together they have yet no means, because they make so smal a benefit of their land, be it never so fertill.”

In A Description of New England that follows his 1614 voyage, Smith reports “at least forty habitations” upon the seacoast from Pennobscot to Cape Cod. “Each of these habitations have divers towns and people, and by their descriptions, more than twenty habitations that stretch far up in the country.” In the country of the Massachusett Indians, he sees “great troops of well-proportioned people...very kind but in their fury no less valiant.”

In what is today Boston harbor, Smith finds that “the French having remained here near six weeks, left nothing for us to take occasion to examine the inhabitants' relations, viz if there be near three thousand upon these islands.” (Emphasis is mine, the way I read it, Smith is saying he could not confirm that there were 3,000 on the islands. I have often seen this figure of 3,000 stated as fact.)

Soldier-explorer that he is, Smith notes elsewhere that “30 or 40 good men will be sufficient to bring the salvages in subjection.”

Advertisements for the Inexperienced Planters of New England, or anywhere (1631,) Captain Smith's final publication describes “ a vast land enough for all the people in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and it seems God had provided this country for our nation, destroying the natives by plague, it not touching one Englishman, though many traded and were conversant among them."

For they had three plagues in three successive years near 200 miles along the seacoast, that in some places there scare remained five of a hundred....of five or six hundred about the Massachusetts there remained but thirty, on whom their neighbors fell and slew 28. The two remaining fled the Country till the English came, then they returned and surrendered their country and title to the English.”

In a note on the Spanish colonies, Smith says: “Who is it that knows not what a small handful of Spaniards in the West Indies, subdued millions of the inhabitants, so depopulating those countries they conquered, that they are glad to buy Negroes in Africa at a great rate, in countries far remote from them...

"Notwithstanding, there is for every four or five natural Spaniards, two or three hundred Indians and Negroes; and in Virginia and New England more English than savages that can assemble themselves to assault or hurt them, and it is much better to help to plant a country than unplant it and then replant it: but there Indians were in such multitudes, the Spaniards had no other remedy; and ours such a few, and so dispersed, it were nothing in a short time to bring them to labor and obedience.”

Unlike Las Casas's population counts with their medieval, if not biblical exaggerations, Smith's estimates appear more realistic. Which is not to minimize the devastating collision of Old and New World cultures, only to set a scene as Smith and his contemporaries saw it - a scene centuries away from the propaganda of a new “Black Legend” and its charges of “genocide” against American Indians.

[Images: Bartolome de las Casas, Wikipedia Commons; Captain John Smith, courtesy Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, Jamestown Rediscovery; New England Map by John Smith, Wikipedia C0mmons]