The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

  Disney would have us believe that Jamestown, though a fledgling settlement, was a peaceful and promising one. In its vision, Pocahontas and Smith run barefoot through the utopian natural splendor of the New World, frolicking in its idyllic waterfalls. In truth, the situation at Jamestown was a cannibalistic, mosquito-ravaged mess. The early, improvident colonists were devoured by malaria. It was reported that a first-wave settler was burned at the stake for murdering and cooking his pregnant wife during the winter of 1609–1610, known as the “Starving Time.” Although Jamestown teetered on the precipice of disaster, unlike previous English attempts at colonization, including the legendary Lost Colony of Roanoke, it managed to survive, thanks to tobacco and, eventually, African slavery. It was not John Smith, but rather John Rolfe, who in 1610 planted the seeds for the United States of America. Tobacco seeds, that is.

  The English, who would eventually dominate the North American continent, were a late arrival to the Columbian Exchange and its mercantilist enterprises. When John Smith purportedly met the innocent, cartwheeling Pocahontas at Jamestown in 1607, other Europeans had already left footprints on half of what are now the forty-eight states of the continental United States. By the time the English and French finally entered the cutthroat colonial land grab in the Americas in the early seventeenth century, the Spanish had been playing solitaire for a century and had fleshed out a mighty southern empire, laying waste to thriving indigenous civilizations in the process.

  Left with limited territorial options, the first English and French colonies in Canada and the northeast corner of the United States offered little in the way of economic potential. Although spirited mobs of hungry mosquitoes plagued these early settlements in Newfoundland and Quebec, they were too northerly for disease-carrying species. These initial English and French outposts were also too inhospitable for the cash crops of tobacco, sugar, coffee, and cocoa that filled the Spanish coffers. Once these two European contenders secured a fragile foothold, they craved expansion and extractive colonies to reap the benefits of the rich resources and the lands of plenty afforded by the Americas. The economic mercantilist system was beckoning and inroads needed to be made into the lower tropics of the Western Hemisphere, through colonization or conquest, to secure profitable slave-labor plantations.

  Following a shaky start, the French and British eventually challenged Spain’s monopoly of the Caribbean in a steady stream of colonial wars that reshuffled the territorial spoils of the Americas. These imperialistic forays, fought against the backdrop of the maturing Columbian Exchange, were decided by waves of mosquitoes and their imported reapers of malaria and yellow fever. The early experimental settlements of both the French and English were consumed by desolation and disease, including their own imported and smuggled malaria, with many settlements disappearing or abandoned in the face of attacks from indigenous peoples, an absence of resupply, and a relentless parade of death. The mosquito actively dictated European imperial designs and settlement patterns in the Americas.

  The French had been mucking around the northeastern coast and penetrated the St. Lawrence River region of “Kanata” beginning with Jacques Cartier’s three expeditions between 1534 and 1542.* Nothing permanent came of it until 1608, when Samuel de Champlain set up his fur-trading headquarters at Quebec City. New France was not an attractive destination for settlers. The French presence in North America was kindled by a handful of young French adventurers who sought out peaceful relations with the indigenous Algonquian and Huron peoples to trade in furs. The French fur trade quickly expanded and soon monopolized the St. Lawrence River Valley and the Great Lakes region. The number of assimilated French traders, however, remained small. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the French had established a series of isolated but interconnected military garrisons and fur-trading outposts arching from the Atlantic maritime shores of Canada and the United States, west down the St. Lawrence River across the Great Lakes corridor, and then south through the Mississippi River delta to the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans.

  The French population of this vast horseshoe belt of New France, consisting of immigrants, those born in country, and Métis (the offspring of French men and indigenous women), was meager, counting only 20,000 by the year 1700. Young men with no prospects, and other forgotten members of French society, made up the bulk of French immigrants. Natural colonial population growth was minimal as French women were in short supply. It became common practice for French fur traders to take an indigenous wife and assimilate into indigenous societies. In time, this petite French population was at an economic and military disadvantage when competing with more robust British and Spanish colonial populations. As a remedy, the French Crown coerced 800 single women between the ages of 15 and 30, called “the King’s Daughters,” to make the journey to Quebec City and New Orleans. The Crown paid their passage and gave them supplies and money as a dowry. Given the dearth of females in New France, this wedding gift to their new husbands might have been an unnecessary, complimentary bonus.

  The initial French Empire was restricted to North America. The fur trade did not require large numbers of Frenchmen, or any African slaves for that matter. Indigenous peoples furnished the manual labor, trapped and harvested the animals (primarily beaver), and delivered the furs in exchange for guns, metal goods, and glass beads. Given the French fancy for furs and the diminutive and assimilated French population, the local indigenous peoples held the balance of power. Farther south, in French Louisiana, however, the mosquito and the trickle of French immigration kept settler populations relatively small and scattered.

  When the city of New Orleans gained official title in 1718, yellow fever and malaria were already permanent residents in the region, and the French population of the entire Louisiana Territory numbered a mere 700. The French colony at New Orleans was the epicenter for yellow fever and malaria epidemics that raced up and down the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi River, wiping out numerous fledgling French settlements. New Orleans, with its cavalcade of endemic malaria and epidemics of vampiric yellow fever, was also doomed by the mosquito to fail. As a vital port, New Orleans was crucial to French economic designs. But as a place to live, New Orleans was a sinking, hurricane-pounded coastal swamp, drowning in mosquito-borne disease.

  Needing the French settlement at New Orleans to survive, the Mississippi Company arranged for French male prisoners to be set free on the conditions that they marry prostitutes and embark for New Orleans. These newly married couples were chained together until their vessels reached open waters. Between 1719 and 1721, three shipments of these altogether strange bedfellows were transplanted to New Orleans, where it was anticipated they would breed a new country-born, seasoned population. Despite the mosquito’s best efforts, New Orleans and its handful of disease-seasoned settlers survived and the port city became the entry point and epicenter for numerous catastrophic epidemics of mosquito-borne disease, chiefly yellow fever that surged up and down the Mississippi River, with historic consequences.

  Aside from the subsistence farming encircling New Orleans, mosquito-borne disease restricted any sizable sugar or tobacco plantation colonies. Small-scale indigenous slavery began in 1706 and was quickly replaced by African slavery, at first by raiding Spanish ships, and subsequently by direct import from Africa. The number of African slaves in New Orleans was small, as subjugation proved difficult. Slaves frequently escaped, revolted, fled to the swamps, or were adopted by local indigenous nations. By 1720, the Louisiana Territory had 2,000 African slaves, and twice that number of free Africans. Sugar found a home in Louisiana only as a consequence of the 1791 mosquito-sponsored slave revolt and independence movement led by Toussaint Louverture on the French colony of Haiti, which was then the largest sugar producer in the world. Importing the Haitian model, the first sugar plantation was finally established in Louisiana Territory in 1795, shortly before its purchase in 1803 by United States president Thomas Jefferson.

  While the early nor
thern colonial schemes of France purposefully tiptoed around the mighty Spanish Empire to the south, England had other strategic designs. The inner circle and financiers surrounding Queen Elizabeth I, who reigned from 1558 to 1603, were clamoring for a taste of the overseas wealth being gobbled up by Spain. In addition, newly Protestant England, as ordained by Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VIII and his 1534 Act of Supremacy, had a pious philanthropic duty to save “those wretched people. The people of America crye out unto us [to] bringe unto them the glad tidings of the gospell.”* Catholic Spain, they argued, had already converted “many millions of infidels,” and in reward, their god had opened “the bottomless treasures of the riches.” Spain was basking in the opulent waters of the Americas, while England was confined to “outrageous, common, and daily piracies.” As an antidote to this unequal balance of world power and profit, Elizabeth let loose, to be legal “privateers” in her service, two of the most famous pirates and merchants of terror—Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh. During their swashbuckling adventures in the Americas, both buccaneers and soldiers of fortune would square off against and be repeatedly bested by the greatest and most gifted menace the world has ever known—the mosquito.

  Following in the wake of Ferdinand Magellan’s global circumnavigation from 1519 to 1522, Drake embarked on his own world tour between 1577 and 1580. He pillaged Spanish treasure ships and colonies along his merry way, seizing today’s equivalent of $115 million in plunder. Drake’s booty makes him the second-richest pirate of all time, trailing Samuel “Black Sam” Bellamy by roughly $5 million. He rounded South America and headed north along the Pacific shores of the Americas. After a respite at Drakes Bay/Point Reyes, thirty miles north of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, Drake spun west across the Pacific. At the expense of the Spanish Crown, the extremely wealthy privateer eventually found his way home to Plymouth, England. Spain was becoming increasingly angered by English and Dutch high-seas piracy on both sides of the Atlantic, and by English Protestant interference in the Spanish Netherlands.

  When war between Catholic Spain and Protestant England (and her Dutch Reformed allies) finally erupted in 1585, the recently knighted Drake would not be denied the spoils of war. Always the shrewd and cunning opportunist, he convinced Queen Elizabeth to appoint him head of a grand expedition to launch a preemptive strike on the money-spinning Spanish Caribbean colonies. For El Draque, as he was known in Spain, fame, glory, and riches awaited, steered by an immense pirate fleet legally authorized by his “Virgin Queen,” Elizabeth. Prior to crossing the Atlantic to “impeach the Spanish King in the Indies,” Drake made a brief stop to plunder the Portuguese Cape Verde islands off the coast of West Africa, unsuspectingly taking on an uninvited and fatal fugitive.

  As he launched his fleet toward the Caribbean, falciparum malaria soon began to atrophy his crews. “Wee were not many dayes at sea,” Drake recorded in the ship log, “but there beganne among our people such mortalities, as in a fewe dayes there were dead above two and three hundred men.” He also mentions that the deathly fever did not begin “until some seven or eight days after our coming from St Iago [Santiago, Cape Verde] . . . and then seazed our people with extreme hot burning and continual agues whereof very few escaped with life.” Drake’s fleet was shrouded with malaria prior to its arrival in the Caribbean, and the mosquito captained his fruitless six-week campaign. The Caribbean, wrote English trader Henry Hawks, “is inclined to many kinde of diseases, by reason of the great heat, and a certeine gnat or flie which they call a mosquito, which biteth both men and women . . . with some venimous worme. And this mosquito or gnat doth most follow such as are newly come into the country. Many there are that die of this annoyance.” Indeed, Hawks’s “mosquito” and malarial “worme” forced Drake and his newcomers back to England.

  The mosquito having coerced Drake and his pirates of the Caribbean to abort their mission, Drake quickly realized “who so is then abroad in the open ayre, shall certainly be infected with death.” Seeking redress and reluctant to head home empty-handed, in the spring of 1586 he ransacked the vulnerable Spanish colony at St. Augustine, Florida, transplanting another malaria epidemic to the local indigenous Timucua people for good measure. Drake mentions that the Timucua, “at first coming to our men died very fast, and said amongst themselves, it was the English god that made them die so fast.” Only twenty-one years after the Spanish founded St. Augustine in 1565, in the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the United States, a mere 20% of the precontact Timucua population survived.

  After raiding St. Augustine, Drake charted north toward Roanoke (South Carolina), where his fellow pirating privateer, Sir Walter Raleigh, had financed a now floundering colony. Drake had ample space to accommodate all the surviving first-wave colonists of Roanoke for passage back to England. Of Drake’s original crew of 2,300 only 800 were fit for service—950 had already perished from the ague and another 550 lay sick or dying. The mosquito repulsed Drake’s first attempt to plant the English flag in the Americas. For Queen Elizabeth, colonization of the Caribbean or the hijacking of Spanish settlements would have to wait for the time being.

  After receiving a conqueror’s welcome at home, Drake was promoted to vice admiral of the English fleet, which convincingly defeated the invading Spanish Armada in 1588. This resounding victory propelled him to national hero status. He used the notoriety to obtain official license to resurrect his mosquito-bitten piracy and his forays against Spanish Caribbean colonies that he had started a decade earlier. Although war with Spain was still ongoing, England held the advantage after their defeat of the Armada. A weakened Spain meant that her valuable Caribbean colonies were compromised. Who better to undertake this marauding mission than the dreaded pirate El Draque?

  In 1595, he set his sights on San Juan, Puerto Rico, to establish the first permanent English settlement in the Caribbean. General Anopheles and her resilient Spanish allies quickly ended this imperialist dream, and Drake’s life. Within a few weeks of Drake’s arrival, malaria had reduced his crew by 25%, which was magnified by a disastrous round of dysentery. After the unsuccessful siege of San Juan, and with Drake and his men in the throes of this combined epidemic, he anchored in Mosquito Gulf (aptly named in October 1502 by Columbus during his fourth and final voyage), not far from the present-day northern entrance to the Panama Canal.* In January 1596, Drake succumbed to this lethal blend of malaria and dysentery; he was buried at sea. Responsible for Drake’s defeat and death, the mosquito again dashed English colonial hopes in the Caribbean, for the time being, forcing English imperial eyes further afield. While Drake was being bested by the mosquito, England struck its first overseas colony 2,200 miles north of the sun, rum, and mosquito-patrolled warm waters of the Caribbean.

  In 1583, the first successful English overseas colony was established on the island of Newfoundland. As a repellent against the eclipsing hordes of mosquitoes and blackflies, the resident indigenous Beothuk people covered themselves in a red ocher/animal fat paste, dying their skin a deep maroon-red color. Numbering no more than 2,000, the Beothuk quickly became known to Europeans as “Redskins.”* A series of unfortunate events led to the Beothuk demise. While some historians hint at a possible genocide, no such thing happened. Smallpox and tuberculosis were the biggest stalkers, followed by starvation caused by a lack of access to traditional coastal fishing, tailed by “sport hunting” by murderous settlers. The combined outcome was the inability to reproduce and sustain an already small population. As a result, the Beothuk became extinct in 1829 when the last, a young woman named Shanawdithit, died of tuberculosis.

  While St. John’s, Newfoundland, is one of the preeminent natural harbors, and the island’s Grand Banks was the most bountiful fishery in the world, the Newfoundland Colony was too far north to produce plantation profits.* It was also too remote to be used as a port from which to raid the galleons charted for Spain, weighed down with the riches coursing out of her colonial mines. With N
ewfoundland economically barren and the Caribbean stonewalled by seasoned Spanish defenders and stubborn mosquito fevers, Drake’s contemporary Sir Walter Raleigh sought to reverse this situation and status with the founding of his colony at Roanoke.

  The Roanoke venture was originally financed and organized by Sir Humphrey Gilbert. A fellow privateer, Gilbert drowned (quoting Thomas More’s Utopia with his last words) on his return voyage after founding the Newfoundland Colony. The Roanoke mission passed to his younger half brother, Sir Walter Raleigh. As a favorite of Elizabeth, “the Pirate Queen,” Raleigh inherited the seven-year royal charter and blank check to colonize any “remote, heathen, and barbarous lands, countries and territories, not actually possessed of any Christian Prince or inhabited by Christian people.” In other words, any available and obtainable land not already occupied by Spain. In return, the Crown laid claim to 20% of the ill-gotten gains. Privately, Elizabeth instructed Raleigh to set up a base north of the Caribbean from which privateers could raid Spanish treasure fleets bound for Europe. History knows this pirate cove as the Lost Colony of Roanoke. Consumed by “gold fever” and possessed with his pursuit of a gilded El Dorado in South America, Raleigh never actually stepped foot on North American soil. He simply funded the original Roanoke colonists to carry out his bidding.

  The first set of 108 colonists arrived at Roanoke Island in August 1585. The ships departed for Newfoundland with the hollow promise of resupply by April the following year. By June 1586, with no relief fleet forthcoming, the withered survivors were starving and fending off retaliatory strikes by the local Croatan and Secotan peoples. You will recall that, in mid-June, as luck would have it, Drake checked in on the colony after his malaria-addled adventures in the Caribbean. The straggling Roanoke survivors clambered aboard his ships, which were in need of the helping hands since two-thirds of Drake’s crew was either dead or rotting of malaria. Roanoke, round one, was abandoned. When the resupply finally came, and found the colony deserted, a small detachment of fifteen forsaken men was left behind, sacrificed to maintain an English stamp on the region.