The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

  These colonies of European lust, while teeming with mosquitoes, were not yet tainted by the disease-carrying Anopheles and Aedes breeds. These angels of death were stowaways on board European ships. Foreign migrant mosquito populations thrived in the sanguine climates of their new homes, pushing out or destroying several local mosquito species. Their human counterparts played out this same scenario, as Europeans drove out or destroyed indigenous populations. The blood of settlers was boiling with mosquito-borne disease. With each new and distinct colonial footprint, malaria was introduced by Europeans, consuming outposts from Spanish and Portuguese South America, through the multinational haunts of the Caribbean, to the northerly British settlements at Jamestown, Virginia, and the Puritan haven of Plymouth, Massachusetts.

  Cavalcades of disease marched across the Americas through indigenous trading channels immediately after Columbus’s first voyage and were given a timely reinvigorating push by Juan Ponce de Leon’s exploratory and slave-raiding expedition to Florida in 1513.* Researchers have theorized that by the 1520s and 1530s, smallpox, malaria, and other epidemics ravaged indigenous populations from the Great Lakes region of Canada south to Cape Horn.

  Well-established, intersecting indigenous trade routes stretched across the entire Western Hemisphere. Peoples of the interior plains adorned their clothes with seashells although they had never tasted the salty breeze of an ocean. Coastal peoples who frolicked in those waves wore bison hides, yet they had never laid eyes on the magnificent creature. Indigenous nations smoked ceremonial tobacco, only imagining what the uncured plant might look like. Canadian Great Lakes copper was fashioned into jewelry in South America. Colonizing diseases, including malaria and smallpox, were also traded along these extensive economic corridors, ravaging indigenous peoples long before they ever set eyes on a European. During both the past and present, commerce is one of the most efficient carriers of communicable disease. William H. McNeill confirms that “malaria appears to have completed the destruction of Amerindians . . . so as to empty formerly well-populated regions almost completely.”

  When the first European expeditions of Hernando de Soto and Francisco Vazquez de Coronado trekked across the southern United States in the 1540s in search of great golden cities, according to chroniclers they found the lifeless ruins of countless villages occupied only by grazing bison. Galloping from Mexico City to Arizona’s Grand Canyon and northeast to Kansas, Coronado was traveling through the remnant survivors of once thriving communities. Likewise, de Soto’s climb from Florida to the Appalachians through the Gulf states and Arkansas, rafting the Mississippi River, traversed the graveyards and ghosts of already decimated indigenous populations. Clues to the cause of the collapse of these indigenous communities and the derelict ghost towns surveyed by these Spanish conquistadors can be found in a firsthand account from a decade earlier.

  Four marooned Spanish sailors had traversed the de Soto-Coronado corridor from Florida, west across the Gulf of Mexico, before straggling into Mexico City in 1536. Reporting to the governor of New Spain, they regaled a captivated crowd with the events of this implausible and incredible eight-year journey. One noteworthy detail was their description of indigenous peoples who were already infected with malaria. According to the Spaniards’ testimony, “In that land we encountered a very large number of mosquitoes of three different kinds, which are very bad and annoying, and during the rest of the summer they gave us great trouble.” The “Indians,” they reported, “are so bitten by mosquitoes that you would think they had the disease of Saint Lazarus the Leper . . . many others were lying in a stupor. We found these very ill and skinny and swollen-bellied, so much so that we were astonished. . . . I can affirm that no other affliction suffered in the world can equal this. It made us extremely sad to see how fertile the land was, and very beautiful, and very full of springs and rivers, and to see every place deserted and burned villages, and the people so thin and ill.” The introduction of malaria across the southern United States preceded Europeans, killing indigenous populations and paving the way for European settlement. Following in de Soto’s footsteps, a seventeenth-century French explorer traversing the abandoned shells of Natchez settlements on the lower Mississippi River wrote that with “these savages, there is a thing that I cannot omit to remark to you, it is that it appears visibly that God wishes that they yield their place to new peoples.” European diseases, including malaria, had penetrated the interior of North America long before the arrival of Europeans themselves.

  The Caribbean Arawak, the Inca and the Aztec of Mesoamerica, the Beothuk of Newfoundland, and a staggering number of indigenous cultures across the globe would suffer the same fate as the Taino—extinction. Hernan Cortes did not conquer six million Aztecs, just as Francisco Pizarro did not subjugate ten million Inca. Following crippling epidemics of smallpox and endemic malarial fever, these two conquistadors simply rounded up the few ailing survivors and sold them into slavery. When Pizarro arrived on the coast of Peru in 1531, the devastation wrought by smallpox (having been introduced five years earlier), allowed his whopping 168 men to conquer an Inca civilization that only a decade prior numbered in the millions. Crosby recognizes that “the miraculous triumphs of that conquistador, and of Cortes, whom he so successfully emulated, are in large part the triumphs of the virus of smallpox.” Repeatedly across the Americas, disease made the European attainment of “victory” over indigenous peoples a leisurely and undemanding undertaking. It must have also been utterly demoralizing for indigenous peoples to observe that these illnesses tore at their own peoples while sparing and passing over many Europeans.

  One of the few surviving Aztecs lamented that before the Spanish arrival, “there was . . . no sickness; they had no aching bones; they had then no high fever; they had then no abdominal pain; they had then no headache. . . . The foreigners made it otherwise when they arrived here.” Cortes had no more than 600 men and a few hundred local allies in 1521 during his successful seventy-five-day siege of Tenochtitlan (present-day Mexico City). Once home to over 250,000 people, the Aztec capital was far more populated than any European city of the time. Tenochtitlan was a magnificent metropolis possessing, among other engineering marvels, an elaborate system of interconnected lakes, canals, and aqueducts allowing mosquitoes and malaria to blossom during the Spanish siege. Following this annihilation of the Aztec civilization, a malaria epidemic tore through Mexico during the 1550s. By 1620, only 1.5 million (or 7.5%) of Mexico’s original indigenous population of 20 million endured.

  The military achievements of the European armies, like those of Cortes and Pizarro, are seemingly easily explained. Repeatedly, the history books tell us that the use of steel weapons and guns versus those fashioned of stone or wood safeguarded European victories. The real reason that European colonizers displaced or destroyed indigenous peoples, however, was largely a matter of disease and differing immunities. It was the dissemination of exotic European germs and foreign mosquitoes and their diseases unconsciously acting as biological weapons that sounded the death knell for indigenous peoples.

  With disease and the mosquito having set their hooks, European settlers and successive colonial and national governments used an assortment of strategies to subjugate indigenous populations. These approaches included, but were not limited to: waging decisive military campaigns; destabilizing political organizations; inhibiting identifiable cultural traits; creating economic dependency; drastically shifting demographics in Europeans’ favor, which disease and the mosquito made certain; and expropriating and limiting the land base of indigenous nations. Indigenous peoples attempted to promote and protect their own interests and agendas in the face of a cultural upheaval and genocidal epidemics of European disease, including malaria and yellow fever.

  In the wake of this tsunami of change unleashed by Columbus, and at the onset of intensified European colonization, Sir Thomas More’s 1516 political satire Utopia foreshadowed the pervasive themes that dominated global European
-Indigenous relations:

  If the natives wish to live with Utopians, they are taken in. Since they join the colony willingly, they quickly adopt the same institutions and customs. This is advantageous for both peoples. For by their policies and practices the Utopians make the land yield an abundance for all, which before seemed too small and barren for the natives alone. If the natives will not conform to their laws, they drive them out of the area they claim for themselves, waging war if they meet resistance. Indeed they account it a very just cause of war if a people possess land that they leave idle and uncultivated and refuse the use and occupancy of it to others who according to the law of nature ought to be supported from it.

  In his highly readable 2011 narrative, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, Charles Mann argues that of all the people to have walked this earth, Columbus “alone inaugurated a new era in the history of life.” While this is perhaps a touch overstated, there can be no questioning that his voyages set in motion a chain of sweeping events, as prophesied by Thomas More, arranging the current symphony of global power.*

  In the centuries following Columbus, infection cut a contagious swath through indigenous populations. European diseases to which indigenous peoples had no immunity exterminated local populations to the point of near extinction. As Charles Darwin observed in 1846, “Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope and Australia, and we find the same result.”* Of the estimated 100 million indigenous inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere in 1492, a population of roughly 5 million remained by 1700. Over 20% of the world’s population had been erased. The mosquito, along with other diseases such as smallpox, was culpable of genocidal extermination.* The small bewildered surviving populations then faced an unrelenting merry-go-round of wars, massacres, forced relocations, and enslavement.

  Until recently, academics across various fields underestimated the potency of disease in reducing indigenous peoples in the Americas, thereby miscalculating the actual population prior to contact. Extremely low estimates eased the burden and guilt of colonization for the descendants of European settlers. Until the 1970s, schoolchildren were taught that most of the United States was vacant and summoning European settlement. After all, the alleged one million “Indians” did not need all this land that was yearning for American manifest destiny. It was prophesied that expansion was inevitable, justified, and ordained by divine providence. But it is now believed that Florida alone was home to almost one million indigenous inhabitants. Current estimates for the total indigenous population of the pre-Columbian United States hover around 12–15 million accompanied by 60 million bison.*

  As Jared Diamond explains, low numbers were “useful in justifying the white conquest of what could be viewed as an almost empty continent. . . . For the New World as a whole, the Indian population decline in the century or two following Columbus’s arrival is estimated to have been as large as 95 percent.” Conservatively in plain numbers, that is 95 million dead across the Americas—the largest single population catastrophe in recorded human history, nearing an extinction-level event. It far exceeded even the Black Death. On the other hand, over the same time period, the immigration of Europeans and their shipments of African slaves to the Americas marks the greatest human population transfer and relocation in history. As always, the mosquito was one of the stars of this touring Columbian Exchange horror show.

  The Columbian Exchange was truly universal and involved peoples, products, plants, and disease from every corner of the globe. In addition to mosquitoes, in 1494 during his second voyage, Columbus introduced the zoonotic animal hosts horses, cattle, pigs, chickens, goats, and sheep to their new world. Tobacco, corn, tomatoes, cotton, cocoa, and the potato were uprooted from the Americas to fertile fields across the planet, while apples, wheat, sugarcane, coffee, and various greens found an awaiting home in the Americas. The potato, for example, was lovingly transplanted to pastures across Europe, half a world away from its indigenous roots. It entered the waves of the Columbian Exchange for a second time during the Irish Potato Famine. Potato crops were ravaged by a blight from 1845 to 1850, leading to mass starvation that killed over one million Irish. Over this five-year period, the island’s total population decreased by an astounding 30%, as an additional 1.5 million Irish fled the famine and emigrated predominantly to the United States, but also to Canada, England, and Australia.

  During the Columbian Exchange, the planet was forever rearranged demographically, culturally, economically, and biologically. The natural order of Mother Nature and the balance of the force was turned on its head and thrown to the wind like a deck of cards. In a sense, the human international village became a singular, wholly united body for the first time, and immeasurably smaller. Globalization, including mosquito-borne diseases, became the new reality.

  American tobacco, for instance, became a household drug. It was also frequently used to ward off bugs. Smoke has been used all over the planet as an insect deterrent, presumably since fire was first harnessed and domesticated. “Some human species may have made occasional use of fire as early as 800,000 years ago,” explains Yuval Noah Harari. “By about 300,000 years ago, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and the forefathers of Homo sapiens were using fire on a daily basis.” Perhaps tobacco’s allure was also tied to its mosquito-repellent properties. In any event, the addiction spread so quickly that by the early seventeenth century, the Vatican was receiving complaints that priests were conducting Mass with a Bible in one hand and a cigar in the other. At the same time, the Chinese emperor was fuming upon discovering that his soldiers had been selling their weapons to purchase tobacco. Little did he know that this was just a “gateway drug,” as it quickly became common to mix tobacco with opium.

  By the mid-nineteenth century the British trade in opium was a late addition to the Columbian Exchange and a clandestine instrument in the toolbox of British imperialism. Manipulating the endemic presence of malaria, the British government creatively argued that for Indians and Asians, opium was a highly effective antimalarial drug. The 1895 report of the Royal Commission on Opium, “compelling because of the terror and suffering it addressed, portrayed opium as being able to prevent and cure malaria,” writes Paul Winther in his study on malaria and the British opium trade. “By 1890 the opium and ‘malaria’ correlation appeared periodically. . . . By 1892 it was commonplace. The severity of malaria in South Asia permitted the Commission to phrase its opposition to substantial cuts in production . . . as a refusal to contribute to human suffering. The people who did not want Great Britain to stop being involved in the cultivation, processing, and distribution of opium had interpreted the Commission’s findings as a moral imperative.” Spuriously, the mosquito was scapegoated and was now a drug dealer and a trafficker of narcotics. Both opium and tobacco set their hooks into Asia, particularly China. By 1900, 135 million Chinese, an astonishing 34% of the total population of 400 million, were smoking opium at least once a day, initially as a malarial suppressant, and then, once hooked, to feed their addiction.

  By 1612, when John Rolfe shipped the first crop of Virginia-grown tobacco to England, London already boasted more than 7,000 “tobacco houses.” These cafés offered nicotine junkies a place to sit and converse while drinking (as smoking was originally labeled) tobacco. Coffee, a newcomer to the Columbian Exchange, soon joined the smoke-filled dialogue. From their Oxford origin as an intellectual meeting place, coffeehouses soon appeared on street corners across England, as ubiquitous as today’s Starbucks where people pose over laptops pondering as they sip $6 spiced lattes. In fact, by 1700, coffeehouses in London occupied more properties and paid more rent than any other retail trade. Within the walls of these “penny universities,” you could pay that sum for a “dish of coffee” and sit endlessly listening to and engaging in academic and highbrow conversation and exchanges, as was the expectation whether you knew your tablemates or
not. “The results could be shared, debated, and refined in the society of like-minded men in the coffee house,” explains Antony Wild in his book Coffee: A Dark History. “The Enlightenment in England was born and nurtured there.” Of course, as coffee went viral in England and Europe, it was still linked to its origin as a malarial cure championed in the mid-eighth century by our Ethiopian goatherd Kaldi.

  In addition to curing malaria, or “ague,” as the English knew it, coffee was also marketed as a panacea for plague, smallpox, measles, gout, scurvy, constipation, hangovers, impotence, and general melancholy. As with anything new and trendy, there was the inevitable backlash. In 1674, a women’s social organization in London published a pamphlet, “The Women’s Petition Against Coffee,” carping that after spending all day in coffeehouses, “never did Men wear greater Breeches, or carry less in them of any Mettle whatsoever. . . . They come from it with nothing moist but their snotty Noses, nothing stiffe but their Joints, nor standing but their Ears.” The equally sexually explicit and graphic rebuttal pamphlet, “The Men’s Answer to the Women’s Petition Against Coffee,” countered that the drink “makes the erection more Vigorous, the Ejaculation more full, adds a spiritual essence to the Sperme.” I will let modern medicine resolve this lovers’ quarrel.

  Even into the early twentieth century, it was still alleged that Kaldi’s “coffee is a valuable remedial agent, or rather a preventative, when there are epidemics of . . . the various types of malarial fever.” More importantly, as William Ukers advocated in his 1922 book, All about Coffee, “Wherever it has been introduced it has spelled revolution. It has been the world’s most radical drink in that its function has always been to make people think. And when the people began to think, they became dangerous to tyrants.” Tea or coffee? This was but one question asked during the political parties prior to the American Revolution. Both could be sweetened with the choice of sugar or honey, however. Just two more items on the menu of the Columbian Exchange.