In 1587, Raleigh dispatched a second group of 115 colonists to establish a colony north of Roanoke at the Chesapeake Bay. These settlers were likely malaria-free since they came from Devon, opposite England’s malarial expanse known as the Fenlands or simply the Fens, marshlands that interlaced the southeast counties radiating from the mosquito-assailed nucleus of Kent and Essex. Stopping at Roanoke to collect the small, forlorn English garrison, the new settlers found nothing but a single skeleton. The captain of the fleet ordered the colonists to debark and establish the colony at Roanoke and not at Chesapeake Bay as planned. Only the leader of the expedition, John White, a friend of Raleigh’s and also one of the original colonists rescued by Drake, returned to England to ensure a resupply for Roanoke that, again, never came.
War between Spain and England outweighed White’s concerns and the needs of Roanoke. All ships were sequestered to meet the threat posed by the mighty Spanish Armada. Roanoke was a lost cause. When White finally returned three years later, he found nothing but the word CROATOAN carved into the sole remaining fence post, and the letters C-R-O carved into a nearby tree. There were no signs of struggle, or of burning, and it looked as though everything had been systematically dismantled and removed. Rumors immediately began to swirl around England, some furtively planted by conniving financiers of mercantilist imperialism. No one would be willing to volunteer to pioneer future settlements if it meant certain death. For the English Crown and its commercial backers, colonization could not have the stigma of guaranteed suicide by starvation, disease, and torture at the hands of savage Indians. The truth would be bad for business.
Theories abound as to what happened to these lost colonists. While flamboyant documentaries litter TV channels and Netflix, only one explanation based on supporting archeological evidence passes the “Ancient Aliens” fiction test. Most died of starvation and disease, and the remainder, most likely only women and children, were adopted and absorbed by the local Croatan and Secotan peoples. This cultural practice of integration and assimilation was customary among indigenous peoples of eastern North America as we have already seen with French fur traders and their Métis offspring. Until the Lost Colony of Roanoke DNA Project, founded in 2007, unearths scientific genealogical proof, however, conspiracy theorists will still get airtime to poison the historical record with alleged Dare Stones, alien abductions, and fraudulent maps.
Although Raleigh never visited North America, between 1595 and 1617, he did lead military ventures against colonial Spain during the Anglo-Spanish War, piggybacking on his pirating expeditions, including his quest for the elusive golden temples of El Dorado in modern-day Venezuela and Guyana. All of his New World adventures were met with mosquito-borne failure. When Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, Raleigh was found guilty of orchestrating a coup against her successor, James I, who begrudgingly commuted his death sentence. Raleigh was imprisoned at the Tower of London until his pardon in 1616. Upon his release, he immediately gained approval to embark on his second attempt to find El Dorado, which turned out to be his last expedition.
In the process of treasure hunting in Guyana, Raleigh was sidelined by recurrent bouts of malaria. In his absence, a handful of Raleigh’s men raided a Spanish settlement against his direct orders. Not only was his son killed in the exchange, it was also in direct violation of his parole agreement and the larger 1604 Treaty of London ending the nineteen-year Anglo-Spanish War. With Spain furious and demanding Raleigh’s head, King James had no choice but to reinstate his death sentence. Raleigh’s last words before he was beheaded in London in 1618 were inspired not by pride in his exploits, nor anger at their end, but by the mosquito and his recurrent malarial fevers: “Let us dispatch,” he told the ax-wielding headsman. “At this hour my ague comes upon me. I would not have my enemies think I quaked from fear. Strike, man, strike!”
During his colorful life, perhaps most significant among his other “achievements” is that Sir Walter Raleigh popularized tobacco in England, acquired during one of his many swashbuckling raids against Spain. The rescued colonists of Roanoke also returned to England with tobacco-lined pockets and “with insatiable desire and greediness sucked in the stinking smoak.” Roanoke survivor and famed English mathematician and astronomer Thomas Harriot came home extolling the medicinal benefits of smoking tobacco, declaring that it “openeth all the pores and passages of the body . . . bodies are notably preserved in health, and know not many grievous diseases, wherewithal we in England are often times afflicted.” While the chain-smoking Harriot was eventually, and quite ironically, proven dead wrong (he succumbed to mouth and nose cancer caused by his smoking, chewing, and snuffing addiction), the Spanish monopoly on tobacco was so lucrative that selling tobacco seeds to a foreigner was punishable by death.
This Spanish tobacco cartel was soon undermined by one hardworking Englishman blending a taste for adventure and an entrepreneurial American spirit. Where Roanoke had failed, a young English tobacco farmer named John Rolfe and his Powhatan bride Pocahontas would ensure the survival of Jamestown and plant the seeds for the creation of English America and ultimately the United States. Tobacco was the lucrative cash crop and commercial currency that would breathe life into British America, originally filtered through Jamestown. Unwittingly, by cultivating tobacco, the British colonists also summoned mosquito-borne death.
After the initial shock and gossip associated with the failure of Roanoke subsided, plans for another English mercantilist colony surfaced. Following layovers in the Canary Islands and Puerto Rico, on May 14, 1607, with the combined financial backing of the London Company and the Plymouth Company (known collectively as the Virginia Company), three ships carrying 104 ill-equipped and undersupplied males, including John Smith, limped into the Chesapeake Bay. In keeping with the time-honored miasma theory of mosquito-borne disease, the written instruction of the London Company for choosing a settlement site was simple and straightforward. The colonists were ordered not to establish the English outpost “in a low or moist place, because it will prove unhealthfull. You shall judge of the good air by the people; for some part of that coast where the lands are low, have their people blear eyed, and with swollen bellies and legs.” The transports proceeded gingerly up the James River, its banks lined with freshly planted corn interspersed with stands of towering trees.
As the fleet’s manifest and cargo attest, they did not come to explore or to farm or even to erect an enduring settlement. There were no women, a dearth of provisions, few livestock, and no seeds, farming equipment, or construction materials. There was, however, a haughty group of predominantly upper-class men unaccustomed to manual labor but armed with tackle for the extraction of gold and the goal of exploiting the mineral wealth of Virginia. On an uninhabited swampy peninsula in the James River, these hundred-odd foolhardy Englishmen would, quite accidentally, give birth to English America.
It soon became apparent why no indigenous Powhatan lived near the crude English colony. Thanks to a beaver population forty times larger than it is today, much of eastern North America was smeared with boggy swamps, double the present-day coverage. For mosquitoes, these wetlands must have been a nirvana-like playground.* The near extinction of beaver populations during the aptly dubbed Beaver Wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries caused these marshes and floodplains to revert into fertile landscapes beckoning for English plows. These fur-trading wars, which pitted the Iroquois Confederacy and their British cohorts against various Algonquian nations and their French benefactors fractured long-standing indigenous relations. The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), known to Americans as the French and Indian War, was the culmination of this intermittent warfare in North America. It was also truly the first world war with far-reaching implications. The British and French finally came to decisive blows for supremacy in North America, and as we will see, mosquitoes stalked the encampments and battlefields as wanton warriors. English hunger for New France, however, was not immediate, as the survival of t
he original colonies of Jamestown and Plymouth was by no means a sure thing.
Jamestown, thanks to a busy beaver population, was not an ideal location to set up shop. The directive of the London Company was blithely ignored, and the consequences of this decision proved deadly. “No Indians lived on the peninsula because it was not a good place to live,” Mann wryly acknowledges. “The English were like the last people moving into a subdivision—they ended up with the least desirable property. The site was boggy and mosquito-ridden.” The brackish, salty water “full of slime and filth,” as one colonist griped, was not potable, and also rendered the soil unserviceable.* Tidewater swamps offered no forage for wild game and only seasonal fish habitats.
Malarious mosquitoes, on the other hand, thrived in these conditions. Both imported foreign and receptive local Anopheles mosquitoes vectored malaria to the recently landed colonists, many of whom also arrived with the parasite roosting in their veins or hibernating in their livers. Nathaniel Powell, an early Jamestown settler, reported in a letter that “I have not yet lost my quartane Ague. But as I had him yesterday so I expect him on Thursday next.” Jamestown was situated on one of the worst pieces of real estate for farming, hunting, and health you can imagine, and, to make matters worse, the gold, silver, and precious gems the languishing colonists clamored for were nowhere to be found.
Instead, there was starvation, disease, and stealthy attacks from indigenous peoples who awed the English with their physical stature and prowess. They were also armed with bows and arrows that were nine times faster to fire and reload than an English musket. Unlike the small numbers of assimilated sojourner French who came to trade in furs, the English came for land and to set up expansionist colonies spreading from beachhead fringes to inland frontiers. Conflict with indigenous peoples was inevitable. The sickly English settlers, however, were both outgunned and outmanned. The sprawling Powhatan Confederacy surrounding Jamestown was made up of over thirty smaller allied nations and boasted a total population of 20,000. Within eight months, only 38 miserable Englishmen were left at Jamestown, roasting in the fires of malarial fevers, their own private hell on earth.
Although two separate resupplies in 1608 brought batches of settlers, including a handful of women, the colonists were dying faster than they could be replaced. “Our men were destroyed with cruell diseases, as Swellings, Fluxes, Burning Fevers,” wrote demoralized colonist George Percy. “In the morning their bodies trailed out of their Cabines like Dogges to be buried.” The initial lack of females also hampered any in-house population growth. A message was relayed to England to prepare new arrivals for “fevers and agues, which is the country distemper, a severe fit of which (called a Seasoning) most expect, some time after their arrival.” The colony of Jamestown moldered within its mosquito-besieged surroundings. By the winter of 1609–1610, the Starving Time, only 59 of the original 500 colonists remained. It was summarily dispatched that “the Seasoning here, as in other parts of America, is a Fever or Ague, which the Change in Climate and Diet generally throws new Comers into.” The first clumsy steps and initial swampy footing of Jamestown were jolted by unshakable malarious mosquitoes and gut-wrenching famine.
In his book Bacteria and Bayonets, tracking the impact of disease in American military history, David Petriello is careful to point out, “The problems that buffeted the small settlement could have easily sent Jamestown the way of Roanoke and delayed if not doomed further English exploration. The tale of the colony is a well-known one. How the settlers battled the Natives, food shortages, greed, and each other to eventually emerge as a sustainable settlement. The troubles that beset the colony during its first few years in which the majority of the population died has historically been termed the Starving Time. Yet once again this is an oversimplification if not an outright misnomer. What almost doomed Jamestown and Virginia was not a lack of food, but disease.” Throughout the literary record, the original settlers to Jamestown have been pigeonholed as lazy and apathetic by historians and commentators. They probably were; they had chronic malaria. Jamestown starved because the occupants were too sick, and perhaps unwilling, to perform manual labor to farm, forage, or even steal food. The Starving Time should be rechristened the Mosquito Time. Malaria, typhoid, and dysentery came first and proceeded to shadow the subsequent period of starvation.
Early arrivals expected to trade for food with the local Powhatan and not grow it for themselves. After trading everything they owned for sustenance, and with nothing left to barter, they began stealing scarce Powhatan crops. The year 1609 had been a drought harvest, and food and game were in short supply. This precipitated larger indigenous raids and punitive expeditions, forcing the skeletal, malaria-trembling survivors to hole up in the stewed muck of Jamestown, cloistered by a wooden palisade. As true starvation set in, their gourmet meals consisted of tree bark, mice, leather boots and belts, engorged rats, and each other. It was later reported that ravenous colonists clawed at the earth to “dig up dead corpse out of graves and to eat them.” One starving settler, as we’ve seen, killed his pregnant wife and, as an onlooker recorded, “salted her for his food.” To make matters worse, John Smith, the skillful English leader who had brokered a tenuous peace and reciprocal trade with the Powhatan, returned to England in October 1609, shortly before the Starving Time and the ensuing conflict with the Powhatan. Smith was seriously injured after accidentally and quite clumsily igniting a bag of gunpowder dangling from his breeches. Badly burned, he left for England, never to return to Virginia.
Shortly after Smith’s departure, another John arrived at Jamestown with a pocketful of tobacco seeds, determined to start a new life in Virginia. In the process, he would also unknowingly plow the future for a new nation—the United States of America. While John Smith has been glorified by Hollywood and history, the genuine celebrity of Jamestown is John Rolfe, the authentic English husband of our Disney darling, Pocahontas.
Rolfe sailed from England with his wife, Sarah, and 500 to 600 other passengers on board nine ships of the third supply fleet to Jamestown in June 1609. Seven of the nine transports reached Jamestown that summer, unloaded their supplies and settlers, and in October returned to England with news of the Starving Time, a few unwanted criminal colonists, and an injured and seared John Smith. The two Johns never met, at least not in Virginia.
Rolfe’s ship, the Sea Venture, was thrashed by a hurricane on the crossing and eventually foundered on the northern shoals of Bermuda. Marooned on the island for nine months, the survivors—which group did not include Rolfe’s wife and their newborn daughter, Bermuda, who were buried on the island—constructed two small vessels from local timbers and the wreckage of their derelict ship. The two hand-fashioned ships limped into Jamestown in May 1610, seven months after the departure of Smith and the other convoy.
For all of you Shakespeare lovers, the unlikely and intrepid voyage of the Sea Venture was the source and provided the setting for The Tempest (written in 1610–1611), which is loaded with references to slavery and agues. Shakespeare was conversant with malaria since the Fenland marshes of eastern England were already infamous for their pale, sallow, ague-stricken populations during the bard’s lifetime. In The Tempest, the slave Caliban curses his master, Prospero, with malaria: “All the infections that the sun sucks up / From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall and make him / By inch-meal a disease!” Later in the play, a drunk Stephano stumbles across Caliban and Trinculo shivering under a cloak while sheltering from a storm and mistakes them for “some monster . . . with four legs, who / hath got, as I take it, an ague.” There was, however, another spin-off of the improbable passage of the Sea Venture in addition to what is thought by many critics and historians to be the last play fully penned by Shakespeare himself.
The misfortune of the Sea Venture was England’s gain. Although no one from Rolfe’s party stayed behind in Bermuda save the dead, the English flag was now planted on this strategic subtropical island in the North Atlantic. L
ocated 1,000 miles north of Cuba and 650 miles east of the Carolinas, Bermuda was officially incorporated into the charter of the Virginia Company in 1612. It served as a rest stop for English ships of war and imperialism in transit to their final objectives. As one contemporary commentator wrote, Bermuda could serve as a springboard for England’s larger colonial concerns, “as for the present they bee even as a new life and a seminarie to Virginia. The planting of them ‘our countrimen’ must needs adde much to the strength, prosperitie, and glorie of this kingdome, would proove a singular benefit to the native inhabitants of Virginia, and also to such our countrimen as should go over.” By 1625, as the Puritans were converting Massachusetts, the colonial population of Bermuda far outnumbered that of Virginia. While other plantation crops such as sugar and coffee were still a pipe dream, tobacco fueled the English economies of both colonies. Colonists from Bermuda, however, fanned out to settle both the Bahamas and Barbados by 1630, and English sugar production found a home. Barbados became the leading edge of English Caribbean sugar commerce, and the population quickly soared, reaching 70,000, including 45,000 slaves, by 1700.
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