Biological warfare by primitive europeans

 Those Taino who did not succumb to overwork, malnutrition, brutality and despair could not withstand European diseases. They had no immunity to the smallpox, bubonic plague, yellow fever, typhus, dysentery, cholera, measles and influenza that germinated aboard filthy ships laden with sick and sickening sailors and colonists, putrid, maggot riddled food, ailing livestock, flea-ridden dogs and cats and legions of enterprising rats. A single epidemic could kill off more than half of any village. In 1518, smallpox wiped out 90 percent of Hispaniola's remaining Tainos. By mid-century, they were extinct. In other colonies, up to 90 percent of the native population would disappear well before the seventeenth century. By 1611, for example, only seventy-four natives had  survived the Spanish colonization of Jamaica.— What did survive was slavery's fundamental brutality. Las Casas believed that when Spaniards punished a Taino by hacking off his ears, their savagery "marked the beginning of the spilling of blood, later to become a river of blood,  first on this island and then in every corner of these Indies."— For centuries after, slaveholders hacked off extremities and limbs as part of their arsenal of punishment. Las Casas describes the first time dogs were used against rebellious slaves.