The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

  Along with mosquitoes, English settlers also introduced honeybees to the Americas. Feral hordes quickly began the mass pollination of indigenous plants and also aided the bounty of European farms and orchards.* Although insect pollination was not discovered until the mid-eighteenth century, the bees assisted European agricultural pursuits so much that indigenous peoples quickly recognized that the sight of these foreign “English flies” was accompanied by aggressive European expansion. Given that the Mongols had previously and forever bound Asia and Europe, as evidenced by the Black Death, the Columbian Exchange was a worldwide yard sale. It not only included poisonous mosquitoes but also their antidote.

  Quinine, the first effective prophylactic and treatment for malaria, rode the later swells of colonization and washed up on the global shores of the Columbian Exchange. In the mid-seventeenth century, the gossip corridors of the Old World were abuzz with a miraculous tale from a mysterious place called Peru. Within a few decades, advertisements extolling the enchanted power and curative properties of “Jesuit’s Bark,” the “Countess’s Powder,” and “Cinchona” were plastered across Europe. According to the rumor mill, in 1638, the beautiful Dona Francisca Henriquez de Ribera, the fourth countess of Chinchon, a Spanish province of Peru, was inexplicably cured of malarial fevers.

  The countess, or so the story goes, contracted a virulent strain of malaria. Although attending physicians performed one bleeding perforation after another, she continued to deteriorate, and death seemed imminent. Her loving husband, the count of Chinchon, determined to save his spouse, remembered an old wives’ tale he had heard a few years back. The story, as he remembered, was of a Spanish Jesuit missionary curing the governor of Ecuador of malarial fevers through local Indian black magic called ayac cara or quinquina. This was not some sorcerer’s stone amulet, “expecto patronum” incantation, or recited abracadabra dirge. It was the “bitter bark” or “bark of barks” from a rare and fickle tree growing at high altitude in the Andes Mountains. Intrigued by what he had passed up as a folktale, the count was willing to give it a shot to save his ailing wife. He hurriedly acquired a small sample of the mysterious bark from what remained of the once thriving native Quechua people.

  Sure enough, the countess was delivered from death, and upon her triumphant return to Spain, word spread of this miracle “fever bark.” This was the equivalent of someone today instantaneously conjuring up a cure for cancer or AIDS. Not only was malaria a huge obstacle to imperialism in the colonial tropics, its peak in Europe during the mid-seventeenth century corresponded with this lifesaving discovery of quinine, which is toxic to the malaria parasite by inhibiting its ability to metabolize hemoglobin.

  With the widespread uprooting, transference, and acceleration of global agriculture, commerce, and human populations during the Columbian Exchange, the period between 1600 and 1750 was the pinnacle of malarial misery in Europe, and the parasite was infecting the masses with reckless abandon. Keep in mind that this same period also witnessed a mass influx of European settlers and their malaria parasites to the Americas, adding potency to an already spiked punch bowl of colonial pathogens. Certain areas of Europe acquired strong malarial reputations, such as the littoral lowlands of the Scheldt in Belgium and the Netherlands, the Loire River Valley and the Mediterranean coasts of France, the salty marshes of the Fenlands or Fens in the counties east of London, England, the Don River delta in the Ukraine, certain regions lining the Danube River in eastern Europe, and as always the mosquito playgrounds of the Pontine Marshes and Po River in Italy. At last, a cure had been found for Roman Fever, English ague, Dante’s infernos, and Europe’s prevailing hellfire fevers.

  In the end, although the countess certainly had malarial bouts, she died of yellow fever and never made it back to Spain. The story connecting the countess to quinine seems to be a refashioned fairy tale. Cinchona, the common name of this “Miraculous Fever Tree,” nevertheless clings to the romance of the count and countess of Chinchon. This Jesuit’s Bark, however, quickly became an economic colonial cash crop for Spain, and was a later addition to the lengthy and booming list of products, foods, peoples, and diseases crisscrossing the oceans during the Columbian Exchange. Quinine and malaria are a perfect example of this unprecedented union and cross-pollination of extremely different, previously isolated, and evolutionarily distinct worlds kick-started by the voyages of Columbus. Quinine was a New World treatment for an Old World disease. The disease itself, and its vectoring mosquitoes, were born of Africa and the Old World and were transported to the New World, where they flourished.

  By the mid-nineteenth century, European powers armed with quinine even secured fragile footholds in more tropical outposts such as India, the East Indies, and Africa. In much of this lush zone between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, peoples of European ancestry are still transient backpackers in terms of natural selection and evolutionary history. They lack those lifesaving inherited genetic immunities to malaria of some African and Mediterranean peoples. Although at the time, malaria remained a mystery, quinine has been used as a malarial suppressant since its discovery in the mid-seventeenth century and the fabled story of the countess of Chinchon who finally defanged the beastly fever.

  Curing the Countess of Chinchón with Quinine, 1638: This painting circa 1850 recounts the legend of the beautiful Dona Francisca Henriquez de Ribera, the fourth Countess of Chinchon, a Spanish province of Peru, being inexplicably cured of malarial fevers through local Quechua “Indian black magic” called ayac cara or quinquina. Quinine derived from the Cinchona tree became the first effective medicine to combat malaria. As part of the Columbian Exchange, it was a New World treatment for an Old World disease. (Diomedia/Wellcome Library)

  The British imperialist adventure in India is the succinct narrative I use when teaching the ripple effects of the Columbian Exchange. This scenario, however, can also be applied to European colonies in Africa or the East Indies. British control of colonial India required the ability to combat malaria, so Brits in India consumed powdered rations of quinine in the form of “Indian tonic water.” By the 1840s, British citizens and soldiers in India were using 700 tons of cinchona bark annually for their protective doses of quinine. They added gin to the liquid to cut its bitter taste and, most certainly, for its intoxicating effect. And the gin and tonic cocktail was born. It became the drink of choice for Anglo-Indians and is now of course a universal staple on bar tabs worldwide.

  Quinine powder kept British troops alive, allowed officials to survive in low-lying and wet regions of India, and ultimately permitted a stable (though surprisingly small) British population to prosper in tropical colonies. By 1914, roughly 1,200 British Indian Civil Service members and a garrison of only 77,000 British troops ruled over 300 million Indian subjects. The scramble for empire was allied to epidemiology. A competitive scramble for scientific knowledge, including the discovery of quinine, was one small but historically weighty brick of the Columbian Exchange. The intermingling thematic ingredients of the exchange, including European colonization, the conveyance of diseases, the destruction of indigenous peoples, and the attainment of overseas imperial wealth, were all interwoven and bound by blood to the mosquito.

  Columbus himself never realized his influence, believing until his death at fifty-five years of age that he had discovered outlying bits of Asia. He died in 1506 of “reactive arthritis,” heart failure usually associated with syphilis. As his geographical miscalculations and personal failings emerged, he was defamed by the higher echelons of society and viewed as a pariah by the Spanish court, who rescinded his privileges and honors. Although he was a wealthy man, his later years were marked by humiliation, anger, and an omnipotent messiah complex outlined in his manuscript The Book of Prophecies. Due to severe isolation and depression, or perhaps from the last syphilitic symptom, insanity, he believed that he was a prophet of God destined to reveal to the world “the new heaven and earth of which Our Lord spoke through Saint
John in the Apocalypse.” Shortly before his death, Columbus wrote to the unamused king of Spain that only he, the stalwart Columbus, could convert the Chinese emperor and his subjects to Catholicism.

  Progressively, over the last few decades, his legacy has fared no better. Columbus did open a new world for European economic expansion and enterprise, but at a terrible price—the near extermination of indigenous peoples and the ensuing establishment of the exploitive transatlantic African slave trade.

  African slavery was a central element of the Columbian Exchange and the prosperity of a plantation economy. As the captive indigenous labor force was destroyed by infection, African slaves, and their complementary free-of-charge diseases, were shipped directly to any destination in the Americas, or globally for that matter. The mosquito played its part by ensuring the selective genetic immunity to mosquito-borne diseases of the millions of Africans being delivered to the shores of the Americas as replacement for a dwindling pool of indigenous slaves. Questions of morality aside, “Why trade when you can invade?” was now chained to “Why pay when you can enslave?” At its core, the Columbian Exchange was always predicated upon the European accumulation of wealth derived from African slave labor in plantation and mining colonies in the Americas. The New World was a vast and biologically diverse landmass with boundless economic potential initially breached and opened for business by Columbus, Spanish conquistadors, and conquering mosquitoes.

  CHAPTER 8

  Accidental Conquerors: African Slavery and the Mosquito’s Annexation of the Americas

  In 1514, only twenty-two years after Columbus’s fateful first steps on Hispaniola, the Spanish colonial regime conducted a census with the intention of divvying up the surviving Taino among the colonists as slave labor. I imagine they were sorely disappointed to count only 26,000 among the living from what was once a thriving population of 5 to 8 million. By 1535, malaria, influenza, and smallpox, which made its New World debut in 1518, in combination with Spanish brutality, brought the Taino to extinction. For the sake of comparison, an equivalent level of killing in Europe would have wiped out the entire British Isles and then some. While I do not want to trivialize Spanish cruelty, known as the Black Legend, it did not play the main role in the cataclysmic demise of local populations. Across the Spanish dominion, malaria, smallpox, tuberculosis, and eventually yellow fever were the paramount killers. As a result, however, the mosquito, and the Spanish colonists to a much lesser extent, had wiped out the prospect of a substantial, self-reproducing Taino labor force. As both Europeans and indigenous peoples succumbed to malaria and other diseases, alternative labor was needed to fuel the lucrative production of tobacco, sugar, coffee, and cocoa. The African slave trade was caught up in the whirlwinds of the Columbian Exchange.

  The first African slaves to the Americas arrived at Hispaniola in 1502, along with our Spanish priest Bartolome de las Casas, piggybacking on Columbus’s fourth and final voyage. These initial Africans joined a dwindling number of Taino slaves in the search for imaginary gold seams and laboring on the newly minted tobacco and sugar plantations of Hispaniola. In the opinion of Las Casas, however, not all slaves were created equal. Shortly after his arrival in the Americas in 1502, Las Casas asserted that Indians, including the Taino, were “truly men” and must not “be treated as dumb beasts,” and he petitioned the Spanish Crown for their humane management. “The entire human race is one,” he proclaimed, while entreating that Indians receive “all guarantees of liberty and justice. Nothing is certainly more precious in human affairs, nothing more esteemed than freedom.”

  Long before 1776, Las Casas was extolling the virtues of the American and French Revolutions and the philosophical ideals of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” and, per Locke’s template version, “the protection of property.” Like the American Founding Fathers, Las Casas also included a fine-print disclaimer as to the definition of men. Within the principles and moral clauses of both Las Casas and the Declaration of Independence, it turns out that not all men are created equal after all, for African slaves were considered chattel and property, not persons, even by this Spanish priest who at the same time was passionately endorsing the virtue of personhood for the enslaved indigenous populations of the Americas.

  At the same time that Las Casas was demanding a gentle hand for the Taino, he was also championing the importation of African slaves, arguing that they were more constitutionally fit for tropical labor, in part due to their “thick skin” and “offensive odors from their persons.” He boasted that in the Spanish colonies checkering the Caribbean, “the only way a black would die would be if they hanged him.” The fate of Spanish fortune in the Americas, he surmised, hinged on the importation of African slave labor.

  In his 1776 masterpiece, The Wealth of Nations, economist and philosopher Adam Smith proclaimed, “The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind. . . . To the natives however, both of the East and West Indies, all the commercial benefits which can have resulted from those events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned. . . . One of the principal effects of those discoveries has been to raise the mercantile system to a degree of splendor and glory which it could never otherwise have attained to. It is the object of that system to enrich a great nation.” European imperialism was coupled to the wealth of resources offered by the colonies. The backbone of reaping this capital and the economic system of mercantilism, to which Smith referred, was the African slave trade, which included the introduction of African Aedes and Anopheles mosquitoes and their diseases to the Americas.*

  African transport slavery only became a profitable replacement after local indigenous servitude was no longer an option. An early observer noted “the Indians die so easily that the bare look and smell of a Spaniard causes them to give up the ghost.” As malaria, and eventually yellow fever, helped to eliminate the feasibility of indigenous slave labor in the hotbed mosquito climates of the Spanish and other European empires, the transatlantic African slave trade flourished. Duffy negativity, thalassemia, and sickle cell provided the Africans hereditary shields against malaria. Many had also been previously seasoned by yellow fever in Africa, rendering them immune to reinfection. While these factors were unknown at the time, what was easily observable to European owners of mining operations and plantations was that African slaves were relatively unafflicted by malaria and yellow fever, and simply did not die at the same rate as non-Africans. Their genetic immunities and prior seasoning made Africans an important ingredient of the Columbian Exchange and indispensable in the development of New World mercantilist economic markets.

  Yes, Europeans came, but they did not conquer indigenous peoples and the Americas by themselves. The Anopheles and Aedes mosquitoes came and conquered. As involuntary entries in the Columbian Exchange, they were, Jared Diamond proclaims, “Accidental Conquerors.” In the immediate centuries following Columbus, Europeans were generally the beneficiaries of this lopsided global traffic and its transactions.* “Events four centuries ago set a template for events we are living through today,” explains Charles Mann. “The creation of this ecological system helped Europe seize, for several vital centuries, the political initiative, which in turn shaped the contours of today’s world-spanning economic system, in its interlaced, omnipresent, barely comprehended splendor.” Mann is also mindful to point out “the introduced species that shaped, more than any others, societies from Baltimore to Buenos Aires: the microscopic creatures that cause malaria and yellow fever.” The introduction of these toxic twins, and other mosquito-borne diseases, to the Americas by infected Europeans, their African slaves, and stowaway mosquitoes changed the course
of history. “Had the slave trade not brought yellow fever and malaria to the Americas,” notes J. R. McNeill, “none of the story offered here would have happened.” Yellow fever was one of the most important historical influences defining the political, geographic, and demographic arrangements of the Western Hemisphere.

  The deadly yellow fever virus disembarked in the Americas with African slaves and an imported Aedes breed of mosquito that easily survived the journey on the slave ships, reproducing in the plentiful barrels and pools of water. European slave traders and their human cargo provided ample opportunity for a continuous cycle of viral infection during the voyage until fresh blood could be claimed upon arrival at a foreign port. The Aedes mosquito quickly found its niche and a suitable home in the cheerful climate of its new world and thrived both in its superiority to domestic species and in its role as a deliverer of suffering and death.

  A Dutch slaving vessel from West Africa anchoring at Barbados in 1647 introduced yellow fever to the Americas. In less than two years, this first definitive outbreak of the disease killed over 6,000 in Barbados. The following year an outbreak killed 35% of the populations on the islands of Cuba, St. Kitts, and Guadeloupe in six months, before slashing its way through Spanish Florida. At Campeche, a struggling Spanish garrison on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, a traumatized tenant recorded the telltale signs of yellow fever, noting that the region was “totally laid waste.” To the scattered Mayan remnants, the contagion was “a great mortality of people in the land, and for our sins.” Within fifty years of its arrival, the dreaded “Black Vomit,” “Yellow Jack,” or “Saffron Scourge” had gone viral, gnawing through Caribbean expanses and the coastal regions of the Americas as far north as Halifax and Quebec City, Canada.