section_path: Legacy/Criticism and defense/Depopulation
section_name: Depopulation
paragraph_text: Depopulation
  
  Around the turn of the 21st century, estimates for the pre-Columbian population of Hispaniola ranged between 250,000 and two million, but genetic analysis published in late 2020 suggests that smaller figures are more likely, perhaps as low as 10,000–50,000 for Hispaniola and Puerto Rico combined. Based on the previous figures of a few hundred thousand, some have estimated that a third or more of the natives in Haiti were dead within the first two years of Columbus's governorship. Contributors to depopulation included disease, warfare, and harsh enslavement. Indirect evidence suggests that some serious illness may have arrived with the 1,500 colonists who accompanied Columbus' second expedition in 1493. Charles C. Mann writes that "It was as if the suffering these diseases had caused in Eurasia over the past millennia were concentrated into the span of decades." A third of the natives forced to work in gold and silver mines died every six months. Within three to six decades, the surviving Arawak population numbered only in the hundreds. The indigenous population of the Americas overall is thought to have been reduced by about 90% in the century after Columbus's arrival. Among indigenous peoples, Columbus is often viewed as a key agent of genocide. Samuel Eliot Morison, a Harvard University historian and author of a multivolume biography on Columbus, writes, "The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide."
  
  According to Noble David Cook, "There were too few Spaniards to have killed the millions who were reported to have died in the first century after Old and New World contact." He instead estimates that the death toll was caused by smallpox, which may have caused a pandemic only after the arrival of Hernán Cortés in 1519. According to some estimates, smallpox had an 80–90% fatality rate in Native American populations. The natives had no acquired immunity to these new diseases and suffered high fatalities. There is also evidence that they had poor diets and were overworked. Historian Andrés Reséndez of University of California, Davis, says the available evidence suggests "slavery has emerged as major killer" of the indigenous populations of the Caribbean between 1492 and 1550 more so than diseases such as smallpox, influenza and malaria. He says that indigenous populations did not experience a rebound like European populations did following the Black Death because unlike the latter, a large portion of the former were subjected to deadly forced labor in the mines.
  
  The diseases that devastated the Native Americans came in multiple waves at different times, sometimes as much as centuries apart, which would mean that survivors of one disease may have been killed by others, preventing the population from recovering. Historian David Stannard describes the depopulation of the indigenous Americans as "neither inadvertent nor inevitable", saying it was the result of both disease and intentional genocide.