Commentary on the history of the use of bacteriological weapons by the English in North America.
Source: email from Alex Bérubé (Canada) dated August 5, 2002
Regarding your little commentary on the use of smallpox by the English in New Zealand, I would also like to tell you that they had tried it out in Canada beforehand. Indeed, at that time, the Amerindians lived on very good terms with the settlers of New France following the Great Peace of 1701 signed in Montreal at Pointe Calumet. It is the most important agreement signed between Europeans and Amerindians. This agreement recognized the co-existence on the territory of French America of the 2 great peoples composed on one side of the French and on the other of the reunification of the Huron and Iroquois Nations of the Great Lakes. One could compare this agreement to the European Union but in this case it is a matter of the Amerindian union. After the gift of the territory of New France by Louis XV, supposedly it was only a few acres of snow (we are talking here about a territory stretching from Nova Scotia to the Great Lakes in the North and which starts from the Great Lakes and goes down to Louisiana, leaving the English only the small territory between the Tennessee River and the New England Coast. Excuse this long intro but it is important to understand the context. So once the French were defeated at the Plains of Abraham in Quebec in 1759, the territory was ceded to the English. But the great Huron and Iroquois Nations had not been consulted. The great chief of the great Nation of the time by the name of Pontiac did not want to
recognize this French defeat and decided to drive the English from the territory. At that time, the Huron nation counted many people.
The Hurons were sedentary and lived in vast villages of up to 6000 inhabitants and practiced the cultivation of corn, squash and other crops. We
are therefore talking here about organized people capable of waging war. When the English saw what was being prepared, they had a brilliant idea. They asked
for a friendly meeting between the chiefs of the five main nations. As custom dictated at the time, such a meeting is always accompanied
by an exchange of presents. An English general had the brilliant idea of having silver boxes made inside which rags contaminated with smallpox had been placed by people who had survived the infection and then sealed in the boxes. The result was the disappearance of the Huron and Iroquois Nations from the Great Lakes region in proportions reaching up to 90%. It is difficult to estimate the real damage since some of these villages were isolated and often unknown to the Europeans who had not yet explored these regions. What is known is that today there is no longer any trace of these Nations. Only the Western Nations (Sioux) were spared. Entire villages were decimated during the winter. Everyone knows the rest, now all that remains of this story is a car brand.
There is an episode of a television series on the history of Canada presented in 2000 or 2001 on television in English and in French. radio-canada.ca