413 



eocolitzle had been severe, giving them houses and lands and exempting 

 them from taxes for a term of years ; in this way the coast was repeopled, 

 whenever it became necessary, with those who were not needed in the places 

 from which they had been taken. So also the name eocolitzle has been given 

 to general diseases of smallpox, which they have suffered, and to universal 

 plagues." 



I wish to call particular attention to Herrera 's remark: "as happens 

 now", referring, no doubt, to the year 1598 in which he wrote — whereby 

 he identifies the ''pestilence" which, up to that time, the newly-arrived 

 Spaniards suffered every summer in Vera Cruz, with the "eocolitzle" 

 which in Montezuma's time attacked the inhabitants of the high plateaux 

 around the City of Mexico who had been sent to repeople the coast upon 

 which Vera Cruz was subsequently built. Both diseases were annual and 

 prevailed in the summer season, as does now yellow fever in the same spot, 

 after the lapse of three and a half centuries. It was not, therefore, without- 

 good reason that a belief prevailed among the inhabitants of Vera Cruz 

 that yellow fever had existed there ever since the foundation of the City — 

 as Humboldt was informed when he visited the place at the beginning of 

 the nineteenth century. 



If Montezuma had in view the protection of the coast of his empire 

 against foreign maritime invasions, when he adopted a measure which 

 seemed well calculated to maintain alive the eocolitzle infection, he must 

 have relied upon its success and cherished the hope that, after having by 

 his dilatory policy induced Cortés to remain on that coast from April till 

 the middle of August, the Spanish leader would have been forced 

 to abandon his enterprise in consequence of the havoc which the Mexican 

 eocolitzle would have made among his soldiers. That Cortés had not to 

 submit to the sad fate which befell General Leclere in Santo Domingo in 

 1802, must be attributed to the circumstance that the 600 Spaniards who 

 came with him had previously gone through epidemics of "modorra" at 

 Darien and at Santo Domingo ; another proof being thus afforded that the 

 two names belonged to one identical disease. 



On the American coast and islands — with the exception of the Island 

 of Cuba — where the Spanish discoverers made their first settlements, those 

 who came for the first time to America had always to reckon with the ' ' mod- 

 orra" or "pestilence" which, as a rule, attacked them in the summer 

 months. The propagation of the infection was not generally limited to the 

 seaboard, as happened on the coast of Vera Cruz ; this difference arising 

 from the peculiar orography of the Mexican territory, on the one hand, 

 and, on the other, from the circumstance that the modorra or eocolitzle 

 disease, like our modern yellow fever, was only transmissible within mod- 

 erate altitudinal limits above the sea level. Mexico, indeed, differs from 

 the other places mentionel above by the fact that its shores toward the 

 Atlantic consist of a comparatively narrow strip of lowlands at the back 



