Interestingly, although Barbados witnessed the first conclusive epidemic of yellow fever (spread by the Aedes mosquito) in the Americas in 1647, it remained free of the malaria-causing Anopheles species. Despite epidemics of yellow fever and other diseases, the absence of malaria quickly gained Barbados a reputation as a “salubrious” and hygienic colony, and was even prescribed as a sanatorium for malaria patients. I can imagine the colonial advertisements for settlers and all-inclusive beach vacations in Barbados: BARBADOS: FUN, RUM, AND EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN—EXCEPT MALARIA! or simply BARBADOS: THE BEST PLACE TO BE, WE ARE MALARIA-FREE! The apparent wholesome and healthy atmosphere of the island and anticipated economic opportunity enticed boatloads of immigrants. Indeed, prior to 1680, Barbados attracted more settlers than any other English New World colony. England finally made its long-desired entry into the profitable Caribbean market of sugar and tobacco. With the harrowing voyage of John Rolfe and the Sea Venture, England made economic inroads in the Caribbean but also entered deeper into the mosquito den and the tumult of her disease and death.
Following their nine-month shipwreck respite in Bermuda, when Rolfe and his 140 resourceful companions (and one resilient and loyal dog) finally made it to Jamestown in May 1610, they were confronted with a colony in ruins. The sixty starving and malaria-depleted residents pleaded for evacuation. There were no supplies left, and these new arrivals meant more mouths for the already starving colony to feed. The colonists had run out of options and Chief Powhatan was forcing their hand. For the first few years, he had permitted the colony to endure on worthless land if trade goods such as guns, axes, mirrors, and glass beads continued to flow. As long as these foreigners had popular products to offer, Powhatan kept them alive by funneling food their way. Given their low numbers and sickly state, the English were not a threat and could have easily been wiped out at a moment’s notice. Superior numbers and food were the deadliest weapons in Powhatan’s arsenal.
Following John Smith’s departure in October 1609, the English had worn out their welcome with the Powhatan, who tired of their thieving and boorish behavior. The colonists had also spent their value as they had nothing left to trade. Their usefulness sailed with John Smith. Both for the hardened veterans of Jamestown’s nightmare and for Rolfe’s exhausted new arrivals, it was time to abandon ship. Jamestown was sinking in its own stinking malarial cesspool. In June 1610, the two makeshift boats Rolfe’s party had sailed in on, and the only other two shoddy ships at Jamestown, were readied to sail to Newfoundland, where the fleeing settlers would beg Grand Banks fishermen for passage home. Like Roanoke, the colony at Jamestown would be forsaken.
As the ships solemnly weighed anchor and began their retreat down the James River, Lord De La Warr and his fortuitous relief fleet arrived with 250 colonists, military equipment, a doctor, and, most importantly, over a year’s worth of supplies. Jamestown was given a timely injection of hope and England’s ambitious economic aspirations of enduring settlement on the eastern Atlantic seaboard were whisked from the brink of abandonment and malarial ruin. As a token of appreciation, Lord De La Warr, the redeemer of Jamestown, was, as he put it, “welcomed by a hot and violent Ague” followed by “a relapse into the former disease, which with much more violence held me more than a moneth, and brought me to great weakenesse.” As settlers flooded into the resuscitated agricultural colony, De La Warr ensured that the mosquito, like John Rolfe and his starving expatriates, would never go hungry again.
Rolfe planted his first tiny tobacco crop inland of the dead marshes, and when it was exported to England in 1612, it fetched the current equivalent of $1.5 million. Rolfe named his sweeter strain of Trinidad tobacco “Orinoco” in honor of Sir Walter Raleigh’s introduction of tobacco to England and to commemorate his trekking expeditions along the Orinoco River in Guyana in search of El Dorado. For Jamestown and its offspring of English America, El Dorado was not some towering, jewel-encrusted golden city, it was the herbaceous nightshade plant, Nicotiana tabacum. Here, I will defer to Charles Mann’s concise commentary on the rapid maturity and vital importance of Virginia’s commercial tobacco industry: “Much as crack cocaine is an inferior, cheaper version of powdered cocaine, Virginia tobacco was of lesser quality than Caribbean tobacco but also not nearly as expensive. Like crack, it was a wild commercial success; within a year of its arrival, Jamestown colonists were paying off debts in London with little bags of the drug. . . . By 1620 Jamestown was shipping as much as fifty thousand pounds a year; three years later the figure had almost tripled. Within forty years Chesapeake Bay—the Tobacco Coast, as it later became known—was exporting 25 million pounds a year.” John Rolfe’s tobacco venture paid dividends in spades—and in farming settlers, indentured servants, and field slaves. Jamestown went from bust to boom.
The unseasoned colony, however, still required investments of capital, a self-reproducing population and labor force, and, most agnostically, land that belonged to others. Recognizing the profits in tobacco, the Virginia Company poured in resources and supplies to ensure the survival of Jamestown. The company also sponsored the passage of both male and female convicts as indentured servants to toil in the tobacco fields and reproduce a country-born, locally disease-seasoned, population. After fulfilling their seven-year obligation and, hopefully, spawning a bounty of seasoned offspring, these indentured workers or convicts were given fifty acres of land in Virginia. Although Jamestown was not established primarily as a penal colony like Australia, over 60,000 British prisoners were shipped to colonial America. The company also sent over nonindentured “Tobacco Brides,” for arranged marriages to independent men. As a result, the early 5-to-1 ratio of men to women in Virginia Colony slowly began to equalize. The investment was forthcoming, the labor force was trickling in, and a self-reproducing, seasoned population was emerging. All that was needed was precious land removed from the brackish mosquito-crawling bogs encircling Jamestown. Amplified conflict with the Powhatan was now, or perhaps had always been, inevitable.
Given his wealth, John Rolfe quickly became a de facto leader of Jamestown. As the balance of power was tilting toward the foreign settlers, Powhatan sensed an opportunity to rebuild peace and restore trade. His young, inquisitive daughter, Matoaka, was a frequent visitor to Jamestown. She played with the local children, learned English and Christianity, asked way too many questions for the colonists’ liking, and was generally getting into mischievous but good-natured trouble. Her nickname, Pocahontas, “annoying brat” or “little hellion,” was a no-brainer. As raids between the two camps intensified, Pocahontas was kidnapped in 1613 and used as leverage by the English. Rolfe was on the negotiating committee, and a deal was struck with Chief Powhatan. It was also agreed that Pocahontas, now seventeen, would remain with the English. More specifically, she would marry John Rolfe. This union certainly served as a pragmatic political tool to promote peace, similar to marriages among the monarchies of Europe. From all accounts, however, it appears that in the course of their three-year friendship, the two had genuinely fallen in love.
While he recognized their relationship served an economic and diplomatic contract, Rolfe’s personal correspondences do not shy away from their emotional bond. In a letter to the governor requesting permission to wed, he expressed that he was “motivated not by the unbridled carnal affection, but for the good of this plantation, for the honor of our country . . . Pocahontas, to whom my hearty and best thoughts are, and have a long time been so entangled, and enthralled in so intricate a labyrinth that I was even a-wearied to unwind myself thereout.” Apparently, John Rolfe was a hopeless romantic. They were married in April 1614, and their only child, Thomas, arrived ten months later. A colonial wedding crasher remarked about the union, “Ever since we have had friendly commerce and trade . . . so as now I see no reason why the colony should not thrive apace.” The marriage between John and Rebecca, as she was now known, created an unofficial eight-year period of peace often nicknamed the “Peace of Pocahontas.�
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The Rolfes returned to England with their son in June 1616. Pocahontas, “Princess of the Powhatan,” was received and entertained as a celebrity, with pomp and parade, although perhaps more out of curiosity than respect. A surprised Pocahontas and her husband even ran into John Smith at a dinner party (she having thought him dead), creating what I assume to be an awkward exchange of requisite courtesies between the two Johns. Pocahontas sat for an engraving, her only genuine likeness, which was sold as a “postcard” curio souvenir throughout the country. In March 1617, prior to embarking for their Virginia tobacco plantation, Pocahontas became deathly ill and died a few days later, at the age of twenty-one. The definitive cause remains a mystery although tuberculosis is most often blamed. According to Rolfe, she died uttering “all must die, but tis enough that her child liveth.”* Within a year, Chief Powhatan, too, was dead, and the Peace of Pocahontas was broken. The English claimed ascendancy in the balance of power. The tide had turned in their favor, propelling boatloads of settlers, adventurers, investors, and African slaves across the Atlantic.
As settlers fanned out to farm tobacco along the more fertile lands of the James and York Rivers, the cycle of punitive raids dramatically increased, as did the spread of disease to indigenous peoples. In 1646, a boundary was established demarcating the lands belonging to the Powhatan, signaling the inauguration of the Indian Reservation system in America. Following Bacon’s Rebellion, the Treaty of Middle Plantation established an official Indian Reservation in 1677.* The colonists simply ignored the treaties that guaranteed indigenous peoples their homeland, hunting and fishing rights, and other territorial protections, signaling the inauguration of the treaty-making and treaty-breaking system in America.
In the end, disease, war, and starvation defeated the Powhatan Confederacy. The remnants drifted west, joined other nations, or were captured and sold into slavery. Disease, including malaria, writes Petriello, “brought about the final conflict between the English and the Native which cleared the way for the further development of Virginia. The defeat of the coastal Chesapeake tribes allowed for generations of Englishmen to push further west, deeper into the New World.” The original “American Dream” was the ownership of land. Property equaled opportunity and prosperity.
Land, or wealth accrued from land in the form of tobacco, was the central issue of the 1676 rebellion of heavily taxed, smallholding tobacco farmers, newly arrived settlers, and indentured servants, led by Nathaniel Bacon. The rebels scoffed at the corrupt colonial regime’s protection of Powhatan land and the restrictive limitations placed on western expansion at the expense of land-hungry settlers, a contentious issue that would also fan the embers of revolutionary fire a century later.
A handful of large plantation owners had carved out a monopoly on the production and transportation of tobacco through the use of indentured servants and by lining the pockets of the long-standing governor, William Berkeley, to restrict the doling out of new land grants. For their cartel owners, these sprawling tobacco plantations located in the fertile lowlands brought wealth and political power to Berkeley’s inner circle. They also caused a staggering malarial death toll for indentured servant field hands. In the end, the rebellion itself failed and Bacon died of a combination of malaria and dysentery after weeks of rain-soaked fighting.
This uprising, however, did have two grimly important consequences. The first, as mentioned, was the failed reservation system and the final removal of the Powhatan Confederacy, opening up land for unbridled tobacco production. The second was the dramatic increase of African slavery in Virginia. Africans were introduced to Jamestown in 1619 by English pirates sailing on the White Lion under the Dutch flag. The ship was carrying a cargo of Africans stolen from a Portuguese slaving vessel bound for Mexico. As reported by John Rolfe, the White Lion, a former decrepit pirate ship of Drake’s fleet, “brought not anything but 20. and odd Negroes.” A few days later, a damaged second ship requiring patchwork and restoration traded its cargo of thirty African slaves for much-needed repairs. The slave trade between Africa and the English colonies had not been formally established, and early colonists had no model for chattel slavery. Although the status of these Africans remains unclear, it is likely that they were purchased and put to work on tobacco plantations, first as indentured servants and later rebranded as slaves.
At the outbreak of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, there were roughly 2,000 African slaves in Virginia. Bacon’s rebellion revealed the limitations of an expanding labor force made up of indentured servants. For starters, on the expansive mosquito-plagued large plantations, they died too easily from malaria. It was also rightly assessed after the rebellion that they were too hard to control and subjugate. As their numbers increased so, too, did the threat of larger rebellions. Moreover, many simply ran away, squatted on a piece of vacant land, and planted tobacco of their own. Lastly, as mercantilism improved the economy of England, increased job opportunities, and decreased unemployment, fewer people were willing to indenture themselves. Thirty years after Bacon’s Rebellion, the African slave population of Virginia topped 20,000. In short, as indentured servitude decreased, the labor ranks were filled with African slaves, signaling the inauguration of African chattel slavery, and its broader dissemination of mosquito-borne disease, into the American economic, political, and cultural landscape. English America, with its settlers, tobacco, slaves, and mosquitoes, was open for business. The triumph of John Rolfe’s Jamestown tobacco experiment ignited a rush of commercial and territorial mercantilist expansion, the proliferation of mosquito-borne disease, and eventually a seasoned country-born colonial population.
Wrapped up in the chaos of the Columbian Exchange and the clamor of colonization, Drake, Raleigh, Smith, Pocahontas, and Rolfe all played their own part in establishing an English presence in the New World, and ultimately acted as the vanguard for the eventual creation of a mighty English mercantilist empire. These memorable but often misrepresented and mythologized historical characters were supported in the creation of English America by an ensemble cast of mosquitoes, settlers, and African slaves, all tied to the lucrative and addictive enterprises of tobacco and sugar. With each new English footprint from Plymouth to Philadelphia, mosquito-borne disease was stamped on an ever-transforming map of the Americas. The mosquito and her diseases were caught up in these winds of change blowing from Europe through Africa to the Americas by way of the Columbian Exchange.
Global English dominion and the escalating imperial domination of Pax Britannica would be both encouraged and, at times, discouraged by the mosquito. She carved out the union of a greater Britain itself by crafting the English annexations of Northern Ireland and Scotland. English tenancy over Northern Ireland was arranged by mosquitoes from the Fenland peat bogs of England, while mosquitoes basking in the jungle canopy of Panama dashed Scottish dreams of sovereignty and self-determination. Conversely, while she helped Britain attain control of French Canada, she also expelled the British from her American colonies, poking and prodding the United States down its path to independence.
While Pocahontas would certainly not recognize her mythical Disney adaptation, the New World as it stood a century after her death would also have been unrecognizable to her. “Jamestown was the opening salvo, for English America, of the Columbian Exchange,” reiterates Charles Mann. “In biological terms, it marked the point when before turns into after.” Yet Pocahontas, along with her husband, John Rolfe, her cartoon lover, John Smith, and boatloads of other conquistadors, convicts, pirates, and colonists, including many from England’s malarial mosquito-infested Fenland marshes, planted the seeds for the creation of this “after” and its future.
CHAPTER 10
Rogues in a Nation: The Mosquito and the Creation of Greater Britain
The malarial epicenter of England, called the Fens or Fenlands, stretched for three hundred miles along the east coast from Hull in the north to Hastings in the south. Radiating from the nucleus of
Essex and Kent, marshlands awash with malarious mosquitoes consumed the seven southeastern counties of the country. During the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, England began to recover from the devastation wrought by the Black Death. Its population more than doubled during the seventeenth century, reaching 5.7 million by its close. London’s population grew from 75,000 in 1550 to 400,000 a century later. Migrant drifters, smugglers, and the land-hungry poor flooded into the Fenlands unclaimed by humans but fully utilized by mosquitoes.
The inhabitants of the Fens, often called “marsh dwellers” or “lookers” due to their malaria-modeled jaundice and drawn appearance, braved malarial death rates upwards of 20%. The survivors eked out a living and suffered through their miserable malarial existence. Novelist Daniel Defoe, famous for his shipwreck castaway tale, Robinson Crusoe, wrote a shocking exposé, Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, in 1722. Defoe informally chatted with numerous marshmen and discovered that “it was very frequent to meet with men that had had from five or six to fourteen or fifteen wives . . . there was a farmer who was then living with the five-and-twentieth wife, and that his son, who was but about thirty-five years old, had already had about fourteen.” Since pregnant women possess a magnetism for both the mosquito and the malaria parasite, one “merry fellow” nonchalantly explained to Defoe that when young women “came out of their native air into the marshes among the fogs and damps, there they presently changed their complexion, got an ague or two, and seldom held [survived] it above half a year, or a year at most; ‘And then,’ said he, ‘we go to the uplands again and fetch another.’” Children also died disproportionately.
Ague and Fever: A frenzied fever beast stands racked in the center of a room, while a blue monster representing ague (malaria) ensnares its victim by the fireside. To the right, a doctor writes a prescription for quinine. Colored etching by Thomas Rowlandson, London, 1788. (Wellcome Images/Science Source)
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