Summary

The myths of the White City, the City of the Monkey God, and other related myths all have one thing in common: a catastrophe that caused people to conclude the gods were angry and to leave, consigning the place they left as cursed. These myths, Preston believes, are often based on truth, and delves into what might have happened to the people of Mosquitita. To do so, he goes back to the second voyage of Columbus to the New World in 1493. Columbus and his crew transported pathogens against which the New World people had no resistance to the Western Hemisphere. Preston writes that it was disease more than any other factor that helped the Spanish to establish their empire. As Columbus and his crew, who were sick, journeyed through the Caribbean, they unwittingly spread epidemics that became a...