The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

  When visiting the Darien settlement in Panama in 1534, Las Casas was shocked to see the open-pit mass graves of mosquito-bitten Spaniards. “So many died daily,” he recounted, “they did not want to close it, because they knew for certain that within a few hours another might die.” He concluded that the Spanish residents at Darien were mercilessly molested by “the large numbers of mosquitoes that attacked them . . . they began to fall ill and die.” While cruising this northern shoreline of Central America during his final voyage, Columbus and his crews were so assailed and ravaged by mosquitoes and malaria that they duly christened the region “the Mosquito Coast.” Founded in 1510 in the wake of this voyage, the Spanish settlement at Darien on the Panama isthmus of the now infamous Mosquito Coast was the first European colony on the mainland of the Americas. The mosquitoes of Darien, as we will see, would also put an end to Scottish sovereignty.

  Darien was a hell on earth ruled by bloodthirsty mosquitoes. The Mosquito Coast was, as one early chronicler asserted, “corrupted by miasmatic emanations,” and quickly established a reputation as “death’s door.” The low-lying settlement of Darien was surrounded by swamps and, to one recent arrival, was a cesspool where “dense and sickly vapors rise, the men began to die and there died two-thirds of them.” The initial 1,200 Spanish adventurers “began to sicken to such an extent that they were unable to care for each other,” wrote another participant, “and thus in one month seven hundred died.” Las Casas, and other contemporary reporters, surmise that between 1510 and 1540, over 40,000 Spaniards had perished in the wilds of the Mosquito Coast alone. As shocking as this may be, the suffering and death of the indigenous peoples was disproportionately worse. Fifteen years after the establishment of Darien, it is estimated that disease, most notably malaria, had already killed roughly two million indigenous people in Panama.

  In 1545, Las Casas reached Campeche on the western Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico shortly after the establishment of a slave-labor Spanish sugar colony. The indigenous Mayans were long gone, having perished, fled, or been flogged into slavery. Las Casas lamented that his comrades soon “began to find themselves ill because the village is unhealthy,” and quickly became “feverish and indisposed.” One of his tormented malarious companions lamented the “many long-beaked mosquitoes . . . that it was a pitiful thing to see, because this type of mosquito is very poisonous.” On his travels throughout the burgeoning Spanish Empire, Las Casas was appalled and sorrowed by the death of Spanish and Indians alike.

  What Las Casas did not know was that his dying compatriots had brought the diseases and their vectoring mosquito reservoirs with them, directly from Spain and their African pit stops en route to the Caribbean. For the fugitive mosquitoes from Africa and Europe, the journey across the middle passages of the Atlantic Ocean was an all-inclusive, two-to-three-month cruise vacation offering an all-you-can-eat buffet and an orgy of breeding in the plentiful and readily available cisterns and casks of welcoming water. They arrived at an untarnished virgin environment in the Americas on board the first European ships, steered by one of the most celebrated and vilified characters in history—Christopher Columbus.

  From its epicenter in Turkey, the Islamic Ottoman Empire expanded across the Middle East, the Balkans, and eastern Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and closed the Silk Road to Christian traders and European access to the Asian market. With an economic recession at hand, the great powers of Europe sought to reopen this crucial commercial lifeline by circumventing the increasingly vast and combative Ottoman Empire. After six years of pestering the monarchies of Europe for funding, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain finally relented and agreed to back the first voyage of a mystic crackpot named Cristóbal Colon (as Columbus was known in 1492) to reestablish trade with the Far East. Columbus was willing to be the vanguard of such an enterprise to, as he put it, “reach the lands of the Great Khan.” He set sail with a satchel of royal letters of introduction and a stack of fill-in-the-blank trade agreements for tendering to Asian rulers.

  The reluctance of Europe’s monarchies to invest in such an audacious and risky scheme is understandable, for oceanic voyages were extremely expensive. The Spanish Crown’s nominal token investment in Columbus, one-thirtieth of what was spent on their daughter’s wedding, illustrates not only their concern over finances but also their lack of faith in his abilities. He sailed with only three small ships manned by a total crew of ninety. Columbus himself also had to front 25% of the budget, and was made to borrow from his Italian merchant brethren. By all logical assessment, his was a reckless and financially ruinous enterprise.

  Columbus set sail into the great unknown in August 1492 determined to reopen access to the riches of the Asian east by sailing west. He believed the world was undersize and that it was composed predominantly—six-sevenths, to be exact—of land. “Columbus changed the world not because he was right,” comments author and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Tony Horwitz, “but because he was so stubbornly wrong. Convinced the globe was small, he began the process of making it so, by bringing a new world into the orbit of the old.” Despite being nearly 8,000 miles off course, and believing he had reached the East Indies (referring to all of Asia east of Alexander’s threshold, the Indus River), his first small step onto the island of Hispaniola in December was indeed a giant leap for mankind.

  This first voyage of Columbus marked the beginning of a new world order, including the introduction and enduring establishment of deadly mosquitoes and their diseases in the Americas, courtesy of the Columbian Exchange. Coining this term with the title of his seminal 1972 work, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, historian Alfred W. Crosby proposed that, whether by accident or by design, global ecosystems were forever rearranged in the largest interchange in natural and human history.

  The trek to the Americas roughly 20,000 years ago (possibly earlier) by the small band of original hunter-gatherers from Siberia put a freeze on any cycles of parasite transmission.* Their passage over the Bering Strait land bridge by foot, or more likely by seaworthy vessels hugging the northwest coast of the Americas, was too frigid for the animals or insects (and their reproduction) needed to complete the sequence of infection. Moreover, the population densities of these early migrants were too low and they weren’t mobile enough to support the life cycle of zoonotic diseases. The chains of infection were broken. These reasons also explain why there was apparently no, or at best fleeting, transference of disease to indigenous peoples during the brief Norse visits to Newfoundland initiated around 1000 CE. Although the Anopheles mosquitoes of the Americas were certainly capable and not unwilling to house the malaria parasite, climate conditions on the routes traversed by both the original inhabitants of the Americas and their Scandinavian visitors froze out this possibility for the time being. This, however, would not be the case when Europeans stormed the southerly climes and beaches of the New World.

  At the commencement of his Columbian Exchange, both New World Anopheles mosquitoes and those Anopheles and Aedes breeds imported from Africa and Europe were part of the larger mosquito-borne disease cycle in the Americas. The formerly benign Anopheles species native to the Americas promptly became a vector for malaria. Given that they had been following their own evolutionary line for 95 million years, and had never known the parasite, this is an amazing adaptive feature of both the mosquito and malaria. As Harvard entomologist Andrew Spielman relayed to acclaimed author Charles Mann, “In theory, one person could have established the parasite in the entire continent. It’s a bit like throwing darts. Bring in enough sick people in contact with enough mosquitoes in suitable conditions, and sooner or later you’ll hit the bull’s-eye—you’ll establish malaria.” Spielman’s assertion was a reality across the Western Hemisphere from South America through the Caribbean and the United States to Canada’s northerly capital city of Ottawa. Person zero, that one human malarial conduit, was a member of Columbus’s initial
voyage.

  On Christmas Day 1492, Columbus’s first voyage came to an abrupt end when his flagship, the Santa Maria, ran aground on the northern shoals of Hispaniola. The remaining vessels, the Nina and Pinta, could not accommodate the spillover crew, forcing Columbus to leave behind a crude palisade-garrison of thirty-nine men when he returned to Spain. Eleven months later, in November 1493, his second voyage, to create a permanent Spanish colonial bastion (supposedly in Asia) for further economic penetration, found the island in ruin. His marooned Spaniards were dead and the indigenous Taino people were in the thralls of a dual outbreak of malaria and influenza. The virgin blood of the Taino, whom Columbus nonchalantly described as “innumerable, for I believe there to be millions upon millions of them,” was a welcoming red carpet for the famished parasite. Columbus also attested that during his second visit to Hispaniola, “all my people went ashore to settle, and everyone realized it rained a lot. They became gravely ill from tertian fever.” One such sufferer recorded that “there are plenty of mosquitoes in those countries which are extremely annoying.” Another penned, “There are many mosquitoes, and very vexing, and of many types.” Given its utter lack of prejudice for the nonimmune, the mosquito and its malaria took a heavy toll on Spaniards and Taino alike. Foreign mosquitoes and their diseases were immediately embraced by the New World.

  During his fourth and final voyage, of 1502–1504, Columbus also discloses, “I had become ill, and many times approached death with strong fever, and so fatigued that the only hope of escape was death.” At the same time as Columbus and his sailors were exhibiting malarial “delirium and ravings” while cruising the Mosquito Coast and the Caribbean, across the Atlantic in Spain a bitter and resentful Hernan Cortes thought he had missed his opportunity for adventure, treasure, and adoration. He was sidelined from joining an auxiliary fleet to Columbus’s last voyage by a nasty bout of domestic Spanish malaria. Cortes, as it turned out, would soon gain fame, glory, and unimaginable wealth by bringing down and sacking a vast and mighty empire—or so the story goes.

  All the original zoonotic pathogens that ran amuck in the Americas were of European or African origin. Smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, influenza, and, of course, mosquito-borne disease reigned supreme during the so-called Age of Exploration or Age of Imperialism, kick-started by Columbus in 1492. These diseases to which many Europeans, but by no means all, were immune allowed the invaders to conquer and colonize much of the world, including the Americas. Time and again, European triumphs, including that of Cortes, rode the coattails of infection, not the other way around. Conquistadors and colonizers simply mopped up after the conquest by disease. Europeans began their global push with the advantage of their contagions. This is the explanation and the sole reason why Europeans conquered the world. The “germs” in Jared Diamond’s title trifecta Guns, Germs, and Steel were far and away the most effective tool of colonization and the subjugation and extermination of indigenous peoples. In numerous (I hesitate to say all) European colonial outposts, indigenous peoples suffered genocide by germs.

  Peoples of European heritage now generally inhabit the temperate zones of the world or “Middle Earth.” These biological environments, from the United States and Canada to New Zealand and Australia, were relatively comparable to that of their European homelands, allowing settlers to adapt more easily to their new surroundings. Even today, we are protected by our acclimatization or seasoning to our immediate surroundings and our local germs. Our homes and where we live for extended periods are natural safe zones. Our immunological defenses become accustomed to the different bacteria and viruses that cohabitate in our local ecological spheres, bringing a balance to the force. We strike this equilibrium with these germs so that, for the most part, we can all procreate and live without causing undue harm to the other. In short, we carefully coexist. If new, foreign germs are introduced into our safe little bubble, and upset this delicate balance, we get sick. If we travel to foreign environments with alien germs, we get sick, until we are resident long enough to meld into and become part of that ecosystem, which then becomes our own.

  Upon my arrival at Oxford to pursue my doctorate, I remember being sick for a month. My unsympathetic teammates on the university hockey team told me that it happens to every “newbie.” I soon found out that this biological “seasoning period” was legendary and was touted as “the Oxford flu.” Inoculations and medications can ease the illnesses and diminish the dangers associated with these transitions. During the Columbian Exchange, many Europeans had the benefit of acquired immunity, having long been exposed to their own infections. They simply carried their germs with them.

  These diseases, including malaria and yellow fever, introduced by Columbus and the successive hordes of colonizers laid waste to nonimmune indigenous peoples who teetered on the precipice of extermination. He personally oversaw and participated in brutal acts of barbarity and sexual transgressions by his Spaniards against indigenous peoples. The United States celebrates Columbus Day as a federal holiday on the second Monday in October (honoring his arrival in the Americas on October 12, 1492), even though he was 8,000 miles removed (or disoriented and lost) from his intended destination; his résumé is the stuff of Neverland nightmares; and he was nowhere near the actual United States. In 1992, on this work-free day of celebration, indigenous Sioux activist Russell Means poured blood on a statue of Columbus, declaring that the “discoverer” of the New World “makes Hitler look like a juvenile delinquent.” Although the Norse preceded Columbus by 500 years with their colonial outpost erected at L’Anse aux Meadows on the island of Newfoundland, Canada, Columbus’s name is still synonymous with the “discovery” of the New World. Disdain aside, Christopher Columbus’s impact, including his unintentional introduction of mosquito-borne disease to the Americas, is unshakable.

  Acclaimed historian Daniel Boorstin argues that, unlike Columbus, the Norse visit to “America did not change their own or anybody else’s view of the world. Was there ever before so long a voyage (L’Anse aux Meadows is a full forty-five hundred miles as the crow flies from Bergen!) that made so little difference? . . . What is most remarkable is not that the Vikings actually reached America, but that they reached America and even settled there for a while, without discovering America.” Certainly, Columbus did not discover the Americas, as indigenous peoples breathed in this world for millennia before his blundering arrival. Columbus was not even the first foreigner to discover the Americas. Columbus was, however, the first to open the doors permanently to the prevailing presence of Europeans, African slaves, and their diseases in their new world.

  There are numerous well-known reasons why zoonotic diseases were absent from the pre-Columbian Americas. Indigenous peoples did not domesticate many livestock, making the disease jump from animals to humans highly improbable, if not impossible. This is a point I brought up earlier, but given the weight of its importance, it deserves another mention. By the end of the last great ice age around 13,000 years ago, 80% of the big mammals of the Americas were extinct. The few domesticated animals that were kept, such as turkeys, iguanas, and ducks, did not live in large clusters, did not require hovering “helicopter-parent” supervision, and were generally left to their own devices. And while I suppose it depends on personal preference, fur is more alluring to our senses than feathers or scales. Cuddling an infant turkey poult or iguana hatchling does not sound as appealing as snuggling a newborn lamb, foal, or calf.

  Along with this lack of domesticated zoonotic animals, indigenous peoples had not practiced industrial agriculture to the extent of upending the ecological balance, as was seen throughout much of the Old World. Resource and climatic limitations generally allowed only for subsistence farming. Unlike their European counterparts, indigenous peoples of the Americas lacked any large beasts of burden, limiting crop sizes and any significant commercial or tradable agricultural surplus. In fact, the dog was the only animal of labor employed in the Americas, and its use was limited to
the northern plains of the United States and Canada. In South and Central America, it was semidomesticated (essentially taming itself by loitering for scraps) and was eaten. Yes, indigenous peoples purposefully cleared land, usually by controlled burning, to control the migration of animal herds, and to farm the Three Sisters of corn, beans, and squash, and other crops, but the relative equilibrium of local ecosystems remained uninterrupted.

  It would, however, be folly to romanticize the noble, loincloth-modeling, ecological, tree-hugging “Indian Environmentalist” and to misrepresent the precontact Americas as some organically utopian Garden of Eden. Indigenous peoples’ interaction and manipulation of their local environments was far from a perfect harmony. This is not realistic or attainable by the very nature of our existence and our intrinsic survival instincts. Their land usage was simply not intrusive enough to alter the natural rhythm and status quo. “Indigenous peoples produced goods not for a distant marketplace,” writes James E. McWilliams, “but mainly for themselves and their communities. Trade was local rather than foreign and overtly capitalistic, and the ecosystem reflected the effect of this difference. . . . The distinction between local and market production was critical.” On the eve of the Columbian Exchange and the imminent European onslaught, only 0.5% of the land east of the Mississippi River in the United States and Canada was under cultivation. For European countries, this figure ranged from 10 to 50%! When Europeans arrived on the East Coast of the United States in the early seventeenth century, they were clearing 0.5% of the old-growth forests per year.

  With the introduction of commercial agriculture and dam building, European settlers unwittingly created a toxic environment for themselves by establishing ideal mosquito-breeding habitats. Entomologists have suggested that within a century of colonization, indigenous and imported mosquito populations increased by fifteen times, prompting Thomas Jefferson to ominously declare that the ravages of mosquitoes were immutable and “not within human control.” Malaria and yellow fever were soon rooted along the Atlantic seaboard of North America.