The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

To fuel the European mercantilist economies, including the coffee, sugar, tobacco, and cocoa plantation colonies in the Americas, over 15 million Africans were transported across the middle passages of the Atlantic and arrived alive at plantation and mining destinations in the Western Hemisphere. Another 10 million died between their abduction and the port of terminus in the New World, while an additional 5 million Africans were marched across the Sahara Desert to be sold in the slave bazaars of Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and Istanbul. In total, roughly 30 million people were stolen from West Central Africa during the slave trade to produce profit for their masters. In colonies across the Americas, these African slaves, the accumulation of plantation wealth, and the preservation of imperial authority were inseparable from the mosquito. With the voyages of Columbus and his swashbuckling conquistadors, Spain got in on the ground floor of this capitalist opportunity in the Americas.

  Seeing as Spain arrived first, disease quickly carved out a mighty Spanish overseas empire. By 1600, Spanish mining settlements and plantation colonies stretched across South and Central America, the Caribbean islands, to the southern United States. Spanish imperialism had two advantages over other contending European nations. First, some Spaniards, especially those from the southern coast, had genetic immunity to vivax malaria through G6PDD (favism) and thalassemia. Second, the fact that the Spanish were the first also meant they were the first to be seasoned to New World malaria and yellow fever.

  Partial immunity to malaria is the result of repeated infections. This curse and blessing, however, takes time. Of the 2,100 Spaniards who accompanied Columbus to colonial stations, for example, by the end of his last voyage, only 300 remained alive. For thirsty mosquitoes and her malaria parasites, the blood of the initial Spanish explorers and that of freshly arrived pioneers were open for business. Early Spanish conquistadors bushwhacked their way through unmapped tropical landscapes, clutching a sword in one hand and swatting mosquitoes with the other. Europeans in the New World tropics, and the southern United States, were marked with a mosquito-mobilizing bull’s-eye.

  Prior to 1600, Spain dominated the New World, reaped the economic benefits of its sugar and tobacco plantation colonies, and controlled the profits of the African slave trade. Eventually, Spanish settlers, traders, soldiers, and their slaves who permanently settled in the Americas built up an acquired immunity to malaria and yellow fever. The envious nations of England and France jealously coveted Spain’s preeminent place in colonial commerce. By the early seventeenth century after a rocky start and a period of trial and error, England and France, with luck and pluck, doggedly forged their own exploitive economic empires in the New World. European susceptibility to malaria and yellow fever in the Caribbean was observed by a traveling French missionary who noted that “of ten men that go to the islands [from each nationality], four English die, three French, three Dutch, three Danes and one Spaniard.” This observation reaffirms the lengthier Spanish colonial occupation, their genetic immunities, and their more robust disease seasoning in the New World when contrasted with other, more recent European arrivals. This early ethnic mapping of the Americas by mosquito cartographers can still be seen today.

  The introduction of mosquito-borne diseases, according to McGuire and Coelho, “served to eliminate substantial numbers of Europeans from the sugar-producing regions of the New World tropics, resulting in present-day populations in the former Caribbean colonies of Britain, France, and Holland that are primarily of African origins. The former colonies of Spain (Cuba, Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo) are exceptions. These islands have retained a substantial European contingent.”

  During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nearly half of all Europeans who ventured into Caribbean waters were killed by a mosquito-borne disease. The need and demand for African slaves became strikingly clear. During the first two centuries of industrial slavery in the Americas, slaves imported directly from Africa fetched top dollar. Direct African imports cost three times more than a European indentured servant, and double an indigenous slave. Africans who had proved themselves locally immune and seasoned to New World mosquito-borne disease were of the highest value, twice that of an imported, as yet untried African. Over time, however, with local home-grown reproduction and the banning of the slave trade, genetic immunities decreased among country-born slave populations.

  Britain banned the slave trade in 1807, the United States capitulated the following year, and Spain relented in 1811. The import of new slaves to these countries or their colonies directly from Africa was outlawed. And yet, slave populations continued to grow. One repulsively common feature of slavery was the rampant sexual abuse of women at the hands of their masters. After all, the legal definition coded that any offspring born to a slave was automatically and legally born into slavery. Given the perversely high up-front cost of purchasing a slave, rape was a surefire as well as sadistically satisfying way to acquire slaves free of charge. These sexual transgressions, emotionally and physically torturous for the victims, also had severe biological consequences. The interracial sex and genetic exchange resulted in the gradual loss of Duffy negativity and sickle cell immunities, especially in the southern United States. The result was a much larger percentage, and ever-creeping ratio, of nonimmune American-born slaves. Malaria was now attacking country-born slaves in greater number, altering the place of Africans within the bogus racial constructs of Social Darwinism. Ignorant of the debilitating indicators of malaria, Americans now deemed Africans to be listless and lazy.

  The loss of hereditary immunity had unforeseen and lasting consequences. This increasing susceptibility to mosquito-borne diseases, as we will encounter during the American Civil War, also equated to higher death rates, which fueled the demand for more and increasingly expensive slaves. Given that the slave trade was illegal and the British Royal Navy was diligently patrolling the West African coast, forced breeding and plantation rape became not only extremely lucrative but also exceedingly common. The standard of slavery, the growing number of those chained to servitude, and the callous means to produce this swelling population, however, invited insurrection.

  Attempting to keep one step ahead of slave revolts and domestic racial conflict, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century the United States and Britain shipped freed Africans to the colonies of Sierra Leone and Liberia in West Africa. Having been born outside of Africa and lacking genetic immunities, within the first year of residence, four out of every ten of these relocated former slaves died of mosquito-borne disease, with half of their non-African overseers suffering the same fate. The mosquito provoked history to unfold in mysterious and macabre ways. Her insurance of the African slave trade is certainly one of her more sinister historical influences and cruel manipulations during the Columbian Exchange.

  African resistance to many mosquito-borne diseases helped fashion the hierarchy of races, with long and far-reaching implications—slavery and its legacy of racism. This immunity was used to “scientifically” and legally justify African slavery in the southern United States, factoring into the multiple causes of the American Civil War, during which time the mosquito went on a feeding frenzy. Historian Andrew McIlwaine Bell points out that prior to the Civil War, abolitionists believed that southerners were smote by ominous yellow fever epidemics as “divine punishment for the sin of slavery and argued (correctly as it turns out) that the malady was a consequence of the slave trade.” Undeniably, the slave trade was the direct cause of yellow fever and its towering influence in the Americas.

  Historically, despite the presence of suitable mosquitoes, Asia and the Pacific Rim, for example, have been completely pardoned from yellow fever. Given that the Far East did not deal in the African slave trade, the renowned killer of yellow fever never materialized as it did across the intersected circles of the Columbian Exchange. While other mosquito-borne diseases, such as malaria, dengue, and filariasis, were endemic, this absence of yellow fever diminished the mosquito’s historical influenc
e across the Asian Pacific expanse.

  In the Americas, however, these same diseases were leading agents of history. Malaria and yellow fever had evicted and emptied indigenous peoples from large swaths of land. European settlers clamored to occupy these same, vacant mosquito-infested and compromised regions. Charles Mann notes that “after malaria and yellow fever, these previously salubrious areas became inhospitable. Their former inhabitants fled to safer lands; Europeans who moved into the emptied real estate often did not survive one year. . . . Even today, the places where European colonists couldn’t survive are much poorer than places Europeans found more healthful.”

  The southern British American colonies, for example, “[were] no country for old men, or rather for men who wished to become old,” writes Peter McCandless in his study of disease in low-country America. “Observers often noted how quickly people aged and died. . . . Along with the human migrants came their microbes, funneled through the tiny Charleston peninsula into the continent like an injection from a hypodermic needle.” Colonists in the South were ruined, as one resident noted, by “the numerous fevers which every summer and autumn so generally prevail.” Much to the chagrin of investors, the southern colonies and eventually the southern United States quickly gained an unwelcoming reputation as realms of mosquito-borne disease. Countless diaries, letters, and journals echo the observation of a German missionary who noted that these regions are “in the spring a paradise, in the summer a hell, and in the autumn a hospital.” While the American colonies offered early European settlers a new life and financial opportunities in the form of land, it also offered them the opportunity for an early grave, courtesy of the mosquito.

  The British colony of South Carolina, for instance, was shredded by yellow fever and malaria. Prior to 1750, in its hardest-hit regions of rice and indigo plantations, an astonishing 86% of European American babies died before they reached the age of twenty, with 35% dying before the age of five. A typical youthful South Carolina couple married in 1750 represents the norm. Of their sixteen children, only six survived into adulthood. In the southern colonies, wealth was spent quickly on lavish lifestyles. You can’t take money to the grave, and theirs was a “live fast, die young” existence. Alternatively, those who could afford it retreated to their northern abodes during the sickly season. A ship captain recounted to his passengers headed for Charleston, South Carolina, that on a previous voyage to the city in 1684, of the thirty-two “vigorous Puritans” he transported from Plymouth Colony, within a year only two remained alive. His alarmed audience ordered him to turn the ship around. Such was the fate of a Franco-Spanish invasion fleet that was beaten back by a yellow fever epidemic in the late summer of 1706 during Queen Anne’s War. Charleston’s reputation as a center of malaria and yellow fever is not surprising. It is estimated that 40% of the current African American population are descendants of slaves who entered through the port of Charleston with their imported mosquito-borne diseases.*

  Although English privateer-turned-full-pirate Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, blockaded the port of Charleston in 1718, he kept his fleet anchored at a distance for fear of Yellow Jack. He did stop all vessels leaving or entering the port, holding the passengers, including a group of prominent residents, for ransom aboard their own ships. The dreaded pirate Blackbeard, however, was not after valuables or treasure. His instructions were simple. He would release the hostages and depart peacefully when all the medicine in Charleston was safely aboard his ship Queen Anne’s Revenge. His rotten swashbuckling crew was festering with mosquito-borne disease. Within a few days, his demands were met by the frightened citizens of Charleston. When the chests of drugs were furnished, Blackbeard honored his word. He released all ships and captives without harm, albeit only after relieving them of their valuables and fine festoons and frocks.

  While Charleston was a buzzing hive of mosquito-borne disease, thanks in part to its trading in slaves, it was not flying solo in the Columbian Exchange of colonial British America. Stepping back, Charleston’s preeminent status as a slave port, a den of malaria and yellow fever, and a lair of death was the direct result of the sprawling British settlement, plantation, and slavery patterns on the Atlantic coast, stemming from the first successful colony at Jamestown. The 1607 British settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, as we will discover, was awash with mosquitoes, disease, misery, and death. Its sister colony raised at Plymouth by the Puritans in 1620 fared no better.*

  These inaugural British satellites set the precedent for and initiated the sequence of mosquito-influenced historical events that spawned the Thirteen Colonies and the United States. British settler societies in the Americas were also colonized by mosquitoes and their malaria and yellow fever. Daring settlers, powerless slaves, and instinct-driven mosquitoes were all lead actors in their own tragedy they helped write. For the Americas, the rabbit hole dug by the connection between the mosquito and slavery is deep and dark. As the accidental conquerors of the Columbian Exchange, mosquitoes and slavery transformed every aspect of the United States from Pocahontas and Jamestown to the politics and prejudice of the present day.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Seasoning: Mosquito Landscapes, Mythology, and the Seeds of America

  Poor Matoaka. The eleven-year-old daughter of Chief Powhatan would hardly recognize herself in the fictional plot of her star-crossed romance with John Smith unfolding on the screen in the 1995 Walt Disney animated movie. Her cinematic caricature looks more like a voluptuous Kim Kardashian look-alike than a prepubescent indigenous girl. The well-preserved and prevailing mythology that surrounds the English colony of Jamestown, John Smith, and the youthful Matoaka, known to history and Hollywood as Pocahontas, allows for these fabricated narratives to persist.

  The name John Smith is synonymous with the lore of the founding of Jamestown and the misrepresented frontier glamour of America. As it turns out, he was really just a shameless self-promoter. Smith was the architect of so much disinformation, personal propaganda, and outright deceit that it is hard to take his five autobiographies, published in less than eighteen years, seriously. According to his own testimony of wild tales, Smith’s fanciful adventures began when he was orphaned at thirteen. By the time he was a mere twenty-six years old, he had fought the Spanish in the Netherlands, spent months living in a lean-to immersing himself in Machiavelli, Plato, and the classics, before becoming a pirate on the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas. He went on to act as a spy in Hungary, lighting torches on mountaintops to signal the approach of the Ottoman enemy, and continued to battle the Turks in Transylvania, Romania, where he was captured and sold into slavery. He escaped this bondage when he cunningly murdered his tormentor by, as he claims, “beating out his braines.” Wearing the dead man’s clothes, Smith wandered across Russia, France, and Morocco, where he returned to piracy, raiding Spanish ships off West Africa. Eventually, in 1604 he drifted home to England. Two years later, Smith enlisted for the Jamestown expedition that set sail for Virginia in December 1606. That, my friends, is the epitome of “youth gone wild” and one hell of a way to spend thirteen years! Most experts agree that John Smith was a con man and a fraud. None, however, doubts that he was fleetingly familiar with Pocahontas during his two-year tarriance at the miserable, mosquito-infested colony of Jamestown.

  It is true that Smith made peace with the Powhatan upon the establishment of Jamestown in May 1607, to secure much-needed provisions and to keep the vastly outnumbered colonists from being annihilated in this extremely lopsided balance of power. In December, Smith was captured while foraging for food and brought before Chief Powhatan. What happened next remains the stuff of legend. Smith claims that after running the gauntlet of club-wielding warriors, he was to be put to death in the central longhouse but only after a great feast was held in his honor. An eleven-year-old Pocahontas intervened; “at the minute of my execution,” boasted Smith, “she hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save mine; and not only that, but so prevailed w
ith her father, that I was safely conducted to Jamestown: where I found about eight and thirty miserable poor and sick creatures.” The allegedly smitten Pocahontas then “brought him so much provision, that saved many of their lives, that els[e] for all this had starved with hunger.” Since its first publication in 1624, Smith’s account has also been put through a rigorous academic gauntlet and has buckled under the immense weight of research.

  There are numerous problems with his story. The first is timing. Smith’s earliest report in 1608, written a few months after his abduction, contains no trace or hint of his later story of rescue by a lovesick Indian princess. In fact, he claims that they first became acquainted some months after his capture. He does, however, mention the great feast followed by a long conversation with Chief Powhatan, or “good wordes, and great Platters of sundrie Victuals,” as he put it. This testimony was written for a private audience and, therefore, unlike in his ego- and profit-driven autobiographies, there was no obvious need to embellish or exaggerate what actually happened. We later find out through his memoirs that the undersize and homely Smith relished the story line of being rescued by a besotted maiden, for this scenario plays out on four separate occasions.

  Second, culturally, the Powhatan did not hold feasts for prisoners of war prior to execution, nor were children like Pocahontas allowed to be present at official banquets. Trapped in his own lies, Smith got the traditional practices of the Powhatan completely backward. Anthropologist Helen Rountree, who has published a dozen books on the topic, argues, “None of the story fits the culture. Big meals are for honored guests, not criminals to be executed. It’s hard to see them killing an intelligence asset.” Smith was run through the gauntlet and honored with a feast not because he was going to be killed by Chief Powhatan but because, as the leader of Jamestown, he was being initiated and adopted by the Powhatan as a medium for trade and peace with the English settlers. Pocahontas was absent and irrelevant. Smith would rewrite this history with her inclusion only after she became a household name. Not to be bested in a contest for fame with John Rolfe, who was the true English husband of Pocahontas, John Smith put the finishing touches on his romantic tale as an early American idol only after she had attained celebrity status in England in 1616. He creatively exploited her newfound notoriety to increase his own.