The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

  The deadly virus first surfaced in British North America courtesy of the Royal Navy in transit from the Caribbean to attack Quebec. Mooring with the flotilla at the port of Boston in 1693, yellow fever sparingly killed only 10% of the 7,000 townsfolk. Predictably, Philadelphia and Charleston were hit later that year, and New York surrendered to yellow fever for the first time in 1702. Prior to the American Revolution, there were at least thirty major yellow fever epidemics in the British North American colonies, striking every major urban center and port on the 1,000-mile stretch of seaboard from Nova Scotia to Georgia.

  Throughout the Americas, yellow fever became the topic of fear, loathing, and legend, most notably at port cities that operated as the choke points for slaving and trading vessels of all nations. These ships of death ferried mosquito-borne disease across the Western Hemisphere and beyond. New Orleans, Charleston, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and Memphis head a lengthy list of American cities that would experience deadly yellow fever epidemics. In fact, these were the most lethal epidemics of any disease in American history. The epidemics, coupled with chronic malaria, helped mold the current configuration of the United States. Yellow fever, 3,000 miles removed from its 3,000-year-old ancestral home in West Central Africa, would significantly shape the density of the Americas. Without the African slave trade, however, the transformative influence of this deadly virus in the Americas would have followed an entirely different historical script.

  Since its origin, slavery has been chained to economic imperialism and a territorial projection of power. This bond has been a common theme in our story as evidenced by the Greeks, Romans, Mongols, and others. In antiquity, however, slavery was indiscriminate—race, creed, or color was irrelevant. The slaves within the Roman Empire, for example, came from all walks of life and a broad geographic radius, making up roughly 35% of the entire population. Slaves were often criminals, debtors, and prisoners of war. Among peoples across the planet, from the indigenous nations of the Americas to the Maori in New Zealand to the Bantu of Africa, slaves were often a primary motivation for hostility and also one of the leading spoils of war. This form of slavery, while perpetuating a chronic state of small raids, was localized and strictly controlled by codes of conflict and social mores. After a period of servitude, slaves were either killed or, more commonly, fully adopted and integrated into their new tribal family. In western Asia, impoverished parents often sold their children into servitude. When the Ottomans invaded the Balkans in the late fourteenth century and closed off the Silk Road to Asian trade, many locals became slaves, toiling on the land they formerly owned. Within the Ottoman army, however, slaves formed elite contingents with rank, privilege, and authority.

  For the most part, the majority of slaves were often treated as part of the extended family. They were often emancipated; they could not be subjected to corporal punishment; their offspring could not be enslaved or sold; and they were generally not constrained socially or physically by the bonds of slavery as they were in American plantation slavery. Many slave laws and the social conventions and customs of the ancient world were compassionate, sympathetic, and surprisingly concerned with the well-being and equitable treatment of slaves. In other cultures, slavery was localized and relatively small-scale and exhibited none of the tormenting and cruel traits of African chattel slavery.

  By the twelfth century, most of northern Europe had abandoned the practice of slavery, opting instead for a more refined and complex system of serfdom. With colder climates and shorter growing and toiling seasons, serfs were responsible for their own upkeep, thus saving the landowner money and labor overhead. In simple terms, prior to Columbus, slavery did not resemble the beast that it came to be after the colonization of the Americas. The Africa-to-America transatlantic slave-trading corridor tapped into, extended, and enlarged a preexisting African slave market, creating a uniquely American industrialized form of transport stock slavery.

  The Islamic conquest of northern Africa in the eighth century first opened West Africa to an overland slave-trading system. Muslim caravan routes crisscrossed the Sahara Desert, transporting slaves from West Africa to southern Europe, the Middle East, and beyond. African eunuchs became a favorite prized possession of the Chinese imperial court. By 1300, as many as 20,000 West Africans a year were being shuttled northward by both Muslim and Christian traffickers often working in unison. With the arrival of true European colonialism between 1418 and 1452, under the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator, this region would became the hub of origin for the transatlantic slave trade. Prince Henry kicked off the Age of Exploration with his voyages to the archipelagos of the Azores, Madeira, and the Canary Islands and his ventures along the Atlantic shoreline of northwestern Africa. The Portuguese continued to creep southward along this coast until Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope, at the tip of Africa, reaching the Indian Ocean in 1488.

  By the time Vasco da Gama finally reached India in 1498, the Portuguese African slave trade was in full swing, as was the corresponding dissemination of mosquitoes and malaria. Both mosquitoes and their diseases accompanied the slave-trading voyages or were transported within the blood of the Africans slaves themselves to their final destinations. When Columbus finally pushed the western limits of the known world, 100,000 African slaves had been snatched from their homelands and accounted for 3% of Portugal’s entire population.

  The first Portuguese slave port in West Africa was active by 1442. Sugar and slaves were imported from Africa to the plantation colonies on Madeira, which became the harbinger and model for the prototypical colonial slave economy and plantation system in the New World. During this time, Columbus himself had lived on the island of Madeira and married the daughter of the governor, a beneficiary of this newfound plantation wealth. Columbus also worked as a sugar runner for an Italian shipping company and frequented the slave forts of West Africa. Columbus had an appreciation for the European model of African mining and plantation slavery. He exported this system to the Americas as part of his own personal Columbian Exchange. His initial voyages prompted Spain to officially establish slave forts in West Africa in 1501. The English began competing at the grisly slave game by 1593. As Antony Wild illuminates in his book on the history of coffee, Columbus was “at the crest of the black slave wave that was to crash onto the shores of the New World, bringing first sugar, then coffee in its wake.” The grim reaper also rode on this tidal wave, masquerading as African mosquitoes, malaria, dengue, and yellow fever.

  By and large, until the eventual painstaking mass export production of Indonesian-grown cinchona quinine by the Dutch, beginning in the 1850s, the mosquito kept Europeans out of Africa. The cinchona tree is persnickety about altitude, temperature, and soil type. It will grow only in very strict and specific environments. This limited, expensive supply opened the door for numerous quinine shams and impostors to flood the market, feigning to meet the massive demand. William H. McNeill reiterates that “the penetration of the interior of Africa that became a prominent feature of Europe’s expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century would have been impossible without quinine from the Dutch plantations.” Armed with this transplanted quinine, the imperial European scramble for Africa began in 1880 and straddled the decades of the First World War. Quinine was not a panacea, however, as yellow fever continued to stalk Europeans who dared enter the wilds of Africa.

  Grafting Cinchona Trees in the Dutch East Indies, c.1900: The Cinchona tree is finicky when it comes to altitude, temperature, and soil type. It will grow only in very specific environments, which made the quinine-producing bark extremely rare and expensive. In the 1850s on the colony of Indonesia, the Dutch initiated the first successful Cinchona plantations outside of small isolated pockets in the South American Andes Mountains. Britain and America quickly became the primary importers of the valuable and lifesaving Cinchona quinine grown across the Dutch East Indies. (Diomedia/Wellcome Library)

  Such was the fate of
Belgian king Leopold II’s mad enterprise to exploit the Congo between 1885 and 1908. Convincing the international community that his main objectives were humanitarian and philanthropic, Leopold was given absolute title and rule over the Congo Free State. He made a personal fortune in ivory, rubber, and gold while subjecting local populations to unspeakable and widespread atrocities. Polish-British author Joseph Conrad served as captain on a Belgian steamer shuttling valuable cargo on the Congo River. His 1899 novella, Heart of Darkness, is a semifictional account of his adventures, including his near-death experiences from malaria and yellow fever.* His book raised questions about imperial racism while also igniting international outcry over Belgian cruelty and carnage. Roughly 10 million Africans died as a direct result of Leopold’s policies and rule. His European traders and mercenaries fared no better, with reports from his Congo indicating that “there are only seven per cent who can do their three year service.”

  Prior to the intensification of Dutch Indonesian cinchona plantations permitting the “African Scramble” of the 1880s, however, mosquito-borne diseases firewalled European meddling and intrusion in Africa. Any attempt by Europeans to penetrate the interior of the continent to capture slaves, construct gold mines, exploit economic resources, or spread the word of their god was met by an impenetrable perimeter of lethal mosquito defenders. These expeditions ended in failure, with European death rates consistently between 80% and 90%. For Europeans, Africa was nothing short of a death sentence. During the sixteenth century, for example, the Portuguese monarchy was accused by the Vatican of violating the ban on the execution of immoral Catholic priests by banishing the criminal clergymen to Africa, “knowing that within a short time they would be dead.” Sir Patrick Manson, a pioneer of malariology and often recognized as the “father of tropical medicine,” saluted the mosquito in 1907 and confirmed that “the Cerberus that guards the African Continent, its secrets, its mystery, and its treasure is disease, which I would liken to an insect!” For the indigenous peoples of the Americas, mosquito-borne disease functioned as an offensive European biological weapon; for Africans, however, it was a defensive European biological deterrent.

  For the initial three centuries of global European expansion, Africa remained “the dark continent.” For the British, the mosquito’s reign of terror earned Africa the title the “White Man’s Grave.” Europeans could sparsely occupy little more than crude slave forts, called “barracoons.” Even these were boneyards.* It is estimated that annual European mortality rates in these West African shoreline slave centers hovered around 50%. “When civilized nations come into contact with barbarians,” wrote Charles Darwin in 1871, “the struggle is short, except where a deadly climate gives its aid to the native race.” Substitute “climate” with “mosquito-borne disease.” The mosquito safeguarded Africa and was both a killer and a savior. An early king of Madagascar rightly boasted that no foreign power could defeat the dense forests and crushing malarial fever of his country. The mosquito, he said, had saved not only his motherland but Africa as a whole. This statement would have held true if not for the collusion of Africans with European goals and objectives.

  The willingness of Africans to participate in the slave trade in Africa allowed it to flourish. Africans delivered fellow Africans into the clutches of European subjugation and servitude, something the mosquito made impossible for Europeans to do themselves. The mosquito would not allow Europeans to pluck Africans from their homelands. Without African slavery, New World mercantilist plantation economics would have failed, quinine would not have been discovered, and Africa would have remained African. The entire Columbian Exchange would have been vastly different, or perhaps not have occurred at all.

  As it was, however, the Portuguese, and eventually the Spanish, English, French, Dutch, and other Europeans, were able to tap into the existing internal African slave culture that revolved around captives of war. Africans initially sold their captives to the Portuguese, and a small, localized slave trade emerged. Originally, it generally operated under the cultural umbrella of customary and conventional African slavery. By exploiting this traditional feuding among African nations and social networks, Europeans were able to introduce a vastly different form of captive slavery, one of bulk commercial export. African leaders and monarchs began raiding traditional enemies and allies alike, solely for the purpose of capturing slaves to sell at a growing number of slave forts on the coast, operated by an increasingly broad range of European nationalities. The European demand was met by an African supply of African slaves. The cycle of coastal African violence and slave raids continued to intensify and ultimately penetrated the interior of what became known by its primary exports as the Slave Coast, the Gold Coast, or the Ivory Coast.

  With the European discovery of the Americas, the near annihilation of its indigenous people by disease, and the desire to export and expand the Portuguese sugar plantation system of Madeira to other cash crops, the African transatlantic slave trade was fully charged. The floodgates were opened, and the mosquito was swept up in these history-making currents, thanks to the trade winds stretching from Africa to the Americas. Columbus secured for Spain the prestigious honor of being the first to transport African slaves, foreign mosquitoes, and malaria to the New World. Although starting out as a trickle, as indigenous manpower declined, the importation of African slaves became a steady and ever-rising stream of human trafficking.

  As Spanish “extraction” colonies proved increasingly profitable, thriving manpower meant more raw materials, which equated to more money. African genetic immunities and seasoning resistance to malaria, yellow fever, dengue, and other mosquito-borne diseases simply made them more productive. Where others died on the mosquito-infested plantations, they survived. Africans lived to produce profit, thereby becoming profitable themselves.

  For early European settlers, however, it was essentially playing Russian roulette with mosquitoes loaded with malaria and yellow fever. It was a personal gamble at the game of life. Nevertheless, despite the danger and high death rates from mosquito-borne diseases to the European owners and overseers themselves, these profits fueled the extraordinary growth of the plantation-slave economy in the Americas. At the height of the slave trade in the mid-eighteenth century, the French and English were each importing over 40,000 slaves a year. This uptick in tempo of African slavery in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was directly tied to the mosquito.

  African slaves withstood her wrath and became a hot commodity because of their genetic defenses to mosquito-borne disease. The extensive hereditary evolution of Africans was shaped by their homeland and their local environments in Africa. Mother Nature never intended for, nor factored in, the Columbian Exchange of Africans, mosquitoes, and their diseases. In this sense, Africans and these elements of their natural environment were imported to the Americas as one cohesive, interdependent unit. In an unforeseen genetic, but nevertheless cruel, biting twist of mosquito-driven irony, these African traits of natural selection against mosquito-borne diseases ensured their survival, which ensured their enslavement.

  On a far more lethal scale, during the Columbian Exchange, Africans brought their complex and highly evolved man-mosquito-disease relationship with them. When sugar, cocoa, and coffee arrived from Africa as the staple plantation cash crops in the New World, the cycle of this imported African ecosystem to the Americas was complete. “Only after a significant African slave trade was established did the British American New World disease environment begin to resemble that of tropical West Africa,” assert professors of disease economics Robert McGuire and Philip Coelho. “The changed environment made the American South a pest house, and the New World’s tropics a graveyard for Europeans.” For African mosquitoes, their new home, despite being half a world away, seemed indistinguishable from the one they had left, and native mosquitoes quickly adapted to their new surroundings. Africa was transplanted to the Americas complete with the appendages of year-round malaria,
dengue, and yellow fever.

  Karl Marx chastised this early displaced colonial capitalism in 1848 with the admonition, “You believe perhaps, gentlemen, that the production of coffee and sugar is the natural destiny of the West Indies. Two centuries ago, nature, which does not trouble herself about commerce, had planted neither sugarcane nor coffee trees there.” Notwithstanding Marx’s observations of the natural world order and his disdain for the bourgeoisie, the basis for this wholesale forced relocation and capitalist system was still African slaves. As the demand for coffee and sugar (and its waste product molasses, used to distill rum) grew, so, too, did the importation of Africans. Coffee cultivation was complementary to sugar, not in competition with it.

  By 1820, the Portuguese colony of Brazil was importing 45,000 slaves a year, where coffee and sugar profits hovered between 400% and 500% on up-front investments. During this same period, sugar and coffee accounted for 70% of Brazil’s total economy. It is not surprising that Brazil was the leading destination for African slaves, accounting for an astonishing 40% (or 5 to 6 million people) of the entire transatlantic slave trade. By the end of the eighteenth century, coffee was being grown in suitable locations across the Western Hemisphere from Portuguese Brazil to English Jamaica and Spanish Cuba, Costa Rica, and Venezuela to French Martinique and Haiti.