James, thanks for doing this Q&A. This book is a great introduction to the Conquistador Age. I see the clash of the Old World and the New as Mother Nature's greatest and bloodiest experiment in parallel evolution of the human ape itself, his technology and culture, down to his pathogens and other aspects of the ecology. I would like to do a second part on Sickness of the Heart and continue on this topic in general, if it suits you.

-Lynn

Lynn, I'd love to. I'm crestfallen that I had to stop this series at two slim volumes. I intend to do other narratives of minor and little known conquistador entradas if life permits. I forget now if I addressed it, but the big disease issue in South and Central America and the West Indies was not human borne pathogens, but the introduction of mosquitos species hosting yellow fever and malaria, which rendered the area we now know as panama into a tangled jungle, where it had been a managed woodland threaded by open parkland, home to some 2 million before the invasion of Davilla. After the initial slaughter the area reverted to a jungle inhabited largely by runaway mixed-race slaves and Indian survivors. The Mayans faired better partially because they were already in a post-centralized, post-collapse stage, in which the natural flora, which played so much havoc with the invaders, was able to reclaim some land.

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