The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

  In Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, the seven-year-old protagonist, Pip, is orphaned after his parents and “five little brothers of mine—who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle,” succumbed to malaria in the Fenlands. The story begins with Pip mourning his dead kin in the local graveyard, while narrating the earthly contours of his home: “Ours was the marsh country . . . intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.” Later, Pip tells a quaking man who escaped the convict hulks moored in the Thames River, “I think you have got the ague. It’s bad about here. You’ve been lying out on the marshes, and they’re dreadful aguish.”

  As the miasmic, ill-natured reputation of the marsh country was realized, during the latter half of the seventeenth century, many “lookers” moved farther afield to the American colonies. In fact, embarkation nominal rolls and ship manifests reveal that 60% of these first-wave settlers and indentured servants came from England’s malaria belt. They left England to escape malaria and inadvertently acted as malarial agents for the Columbian Exchange. In their new world they suffered not only from their old-world malaria but also from a host of other varieties, including the more lethal falciparum. The tragic reality, as we will see, was that their new malarial landscape was worse than the one they had purposefully left.

  In addition to seeking malaria sanctuary in the American colonies, large numbers of marsh dwellers also fled the Fenlands to Ireland, giving rise to a popular proverb, “From Farm to the Fen, from the Fen to Ireland.” The current partition of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland is directly tied to the settlement patterns of these malaria-fleeing English Fenland farmers of the seventeenth century. The mosquito prepared the foundations for, and the underpinnings of, the twentieth-century ethnonationalist conflicts called “The Troubles.” This protracted violence between the Irish Republican Army and the Ulster Volunteer Force, in addition to the British Army, in Northern Ireland (with tremors across the British Isles), has only recently subsided.

  The mosquito forced over 180,000 Protestant English farmers to Catholic Ireland, where they settled among the landed English gentry and Protestant Scots who had fled the English Civil War that raged from 1642 to 1651. This motley crew of Protestants created what came to be known as the Early, Munster, Ulster, and Later Plantations during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their immigration, presence, and territorial expansion ignited a nationalist racial and religious war and the Troubles between English Protestants and Irish Catholics. These plantations have had obvious and profoundly violent effects on the history of Ireland ever since. And while the mosquito was busy carving up the “Emerald Isle,” she also bit directly into the territorial integrity of Ireland’s Scottish neighbor.

  During the religiously fueled English Civil War, the fanatically devout Protestant Oliver Cromwell led the Parliamentarians in the overthrow of King Charles I and the monarchy. The controversial Cromwell ruled for almost a decade as lord protector over the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, having conducted near-genocidal campaigns against both the Scottish and the Catholic Irish.

  During his short reign, Cromwell expanded English holdings in the Caribbean to include Jamaica. Fresh off a war with the Dutch over colonial trade and rival piracy, Cromwell was uneasy with the vast English Army and Navy sitting idle. With England, Ireland, and Scotland in a religious uproar, an underemployed military was an invitation for a potential, and not all that unlikely, rebellion against his zealous Protestant rule. Utilizing this force for far-flung imperial purposes might serve to unite the embittered factions, providing his military with an amphibious mission and Spanish plunder while distancing himself from possible revolution. Although Cromwell refused their quinine to treat his recurring bouts of malaria, a good old-fashioned war might be just what the doctor ordered.

  Cromwell’s “Western Campaign” was launched in 1655. At this point in time, it was the largest combined fleet (thirty-eight ships) ever dispatched to the Americas. Over half of the 9,000 troops came from England, with the majority described as “knights of the blade, with common cheats, thieves, cutpurses, and such like lewd persons who had long time lived by sleight of hand, and dexterity of wit, and were now making a fair progress unto Newgate [the notorious prison in London].” The remainder, some 3,000 to 4,000 broken men, pirates, and used-up indentured servants, were recruited from the malaria-free, unseasoned island of Barbados. To one senior officer of the expedition, these men were like “the most profane debauch’d person that I ever saw.” This ragtag force was put through a trial run in April 1655 during a quick sortie against the Spanish fort at Santo Domingo, Hispaniola. The English quickly abandoned their siege after losing 1,000 men, including 700 to mosquito-borne disease.

  Undaunted, a month later, the English initiated the invasion of their primary target, Jamaica, home to 2,500 vastly outnumbered Spaniards and slaves. Within a week, the English had overrun the island with minor losses, and the Spanish fled to Cuba. The mosquito, however, did not abandon her post. She was flourishing on the island since an El Niño season had provided her with extra warm and wet weather—perfect conditions for stalking over 9,000 newly arrived, unseasoned, and enticing Englishmen, as one witness explained, “at such time that these insects collect in swarms, and make war on every daring intruder.” Within three weeks, malaria and yellow fever were killing 140 men per week. Six months after landing in Jamaica, of the 9,000 original troops, only one-third remained standing. Robert Sedgwick, a crafty veteran, left an eyewitness testimony describing this massacre by mosquito: “Strange to see young lusty men, in appearance well, and in three or four days in the grave, snatch’d away in the moment with fevers, agues, fluxes.” Sedgwick died of yellow fever seven months after his arrival in Jamaica.

  Eventually, by 1750, enough soldiers and settlers were sacrificed on the altar of mosquito-borne disease to secure the island and to establish a seasoned, sugar-producing population of 135,000 African slaves and 15,000 English planters. A burgeoning British slave-plantation mercantilist economy began to thrive. The English commandeering of Jamaica from Spain also marked the last time a large Caribbean island permanently shifted between European imperialist hands by force of arms.*

  Jamaica joined the growing list of English possessions in the Caribbean, including Bermuda, Barbados, Bahamas, and half a dozen smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles. To reap the profits of this expanding English empire, and to promote domestic prosperity, Cromwell passed the first of a series of Navigation Acts designed to strengthen England’s mercantilist economy. Cromwell’s initial act required all English freights of trade—raw resources from the colonies and manufactured goods from England—to enter and exit through English ports. To appease English traders and secure investment for overseas enterprise, Scotland was barred from this covenant and was forbidden to trade with English colonies. Cromwell, however, did not live long enough to collect the personal economic kickbacks of his arrangements.

  His reign of tyranny—or liberty, depending on which side of the historical debate you’re on—and his life were ended by a malarious mosquito. His doctors begged him to take cinchona quinine powder. He flat-out refused. Given its discovery by Catholic Jesuits, Cromwell insisted that he did not want the “Pope-ish remedy” or to be “Jesuited to Death” or poisoned by the “Jesuit’s Powder.” In 1658, twenty years after quinine first voyaged to Europe on the later winds of the Columbian Exchange, Cromwell died of malaria. Two years after his death, the monarchy, under Charles II, was restored. Unlike Cromwell, Charles was begrudgingly saved from malarial death by sacramental cinchona bark.

  The exclusionist economic policies and sadistic campaigns of Cromwell during the English Civil War ha
d left Scotland in a shambles. To make matters worse, a decade of drought had scorched the countryside, ravaged crops, instigated catastrophic famine, and otherwise crushed an already fragile Scottish economy. During the Great Famine that devastated Scotland and Scandinavia between 1693 and 1700, the Scottish oat harvest failed every year but one. It is estimated that as many as 1.25 million Scots, nearly 25% of the population, died as a result of this drought. As food shortages and starvation gripped the nation, thousands of Protestant Scots established themselves in Northern Ireland, as mentioned, forming the smoking tinder for a firestorm of cultural and religious violence that endures to this day. Others became mercenaries for the monarchies of Europe. In England, throngs of Scottish refugees begged for work, money, and food. During this time of hunger and hardship, the English contemptuously scoffed that their northern neighbors needed only eight of the ten commandments because in Scotland there was nothing to steal or covet.

  There was an increasing demand for indentured servants in the American colonies, and these Scottish transients were obvious applicants, and in generous supply. “English farmers had employed indigent Scots for centuries,” notes Charles Mann. “Yet at the very time the supply of desperate Scots was increasing the colonists turned to captive Africans. . . . Why?” The answer lies half a world away, cloaked by mosquitoes in the jungle wilds of Panama.

  To alleviate the economic recession in Scotland and boost financial prospects, in 1698, Scottish investors launched a daring colonial undertaking. Scotland’s financial woes were aggravated by her lack of access to the English mercantilist system. The obvious solution, at least according to Scottish nationalist, entrepreneur, and a founder of the Bank of England, William Paterson, was for Scotland to take up the sword of imperialism and create a mercantilist realm of its own. Panama, he reckoned, would be the commercial heart of a money-pumping Scottish empire, or as he put it, “the key to the universe . . . arbitrator of the commercial world.” Paterson had visited the area as a young man and was enthralled by the spicy, rum-soaked stories of pirates such as Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, and Henry “Captain” Morgan.

  Carving a trade route through the jungle isthmus of Panama at Darien was not a novel idea. As you may recall, the Spanish erected a settlement at Darien in 1510 that was visited by the priest Bartolome de las Casas, who recorded the open-pit mass graves demanded by the unrelenting deaths from malarious mosquitoes. The Spanish attempted to blaze a trail across Panama as early as 1534 and were rebuffed by the mosquito. Subsequent attempts were also mosquito-afflicted fiascos. An estimated 40,000 Spanish died, mostly of malaria and yellow fever, during these fruitless attempts to unlock the passage to commerce. Where the Spanish had failed, Paterson was sure his hardy highland Scots would succeed.

  He envisioned a road, and eventually a canal, spanning the Panama isthmus at Darien, “seated between the two vast oceans of the universe. . . . The time and expense of navigation to China, Japan, and the Spice Islands, and the far greatest part of the East Indies will be lessened by more than half. . . . Trade will increase trade, and money will beget money.” Such was Paterson’s pitch to potential wealthy English investors who rejected his solicitations, fearing for their tight-knit English monopoly on trade. A dejected Paterson left London to float his business proposition on the damp winds of his independent home country, Scotland. He rallied 1,400 Scottish investors, including the Scottish Parliament, to his cause with a total pledge of 400,000 pounds, estimated between 25% and 50% of the total liquid capital of the already smarting, cash-strapped country. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and the spectrum of adventure capitalists spanned the classes of Scottish society from the Edinburgh elite to the poor and landless.

  Paterson’s vision became a reality in July 1698 when five ships ferrying Paterson and 1,200 Scottish settlers weighed anchor to create the colony of New Caledonia and its commercial capital, New Edinburgh, at Darien, Panama. Envisioned as a trading settlement at the crossroads of global commerce, the ships destined for this providential Scottish station were stuffed with exchangeable goods that included the finest wigs, pewter buttons, doily frocks, combs inlaid with mother-of-pearl, warm woolen blankets and socks, 14,000 sewing needles, 25,000 pairs of stylish leather shoes, and thousands of Bibles. Lastly, a Gutenberg-style printing press made the voyage to record Indian treaties and to compile financial ledgers tracking the immense volume of trade and wealth accumulated by dealing in a foreign god and woolen Scottish winter-wear in the sweltering tropics. To make room for these impractical items, food and farming rations were cut in half.

  Paterson’s outbound Scottish armada of fortune stopped at Madeira and then paused for a week at the Danish Caribbean island of St. Thomas before tracking along the Mosquito Coast to Darien. By this time, yellow fever, which first arrived in the Americas in 1647 aboard a slave ship docking at Barbados, as detailed earlier, was already firmly established across the Caribbean expanse. And yet, during the voyage of three months, even as epidemics rippled north through major port cities, including Charleston, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and even as far north as Quebec City, only forty-four passengers bound for Darien died of malaria and yellow fever, stowaways picked up at the two previous ports of call. I say “only” because, as we have seen with other voyages, like Drake’s for example, the body count could have been much worse. It was actually less than average for a seventeenth-century transatlantic voyage, which usually consumed about 15% to 20% of the commuters and crew. It was also probably far less than the number that would have died had they remained in famine- and recession-stricken Scotland. Their luck, however, would not hold.

  What unfolded when they arrived at Darien was nothing short of the script for an apocalyptic horror movie. The words that are repeated to the point of nausea in the diaries, letters, and accounts of the Scottish settlers are mosquitoes, fever, ague, and death. Within six months of arrival, nearly half of the 1,200 colonists were dead of malaria and yellow fever (and possibly also from a first appearance of dengue in the Americas), with as many as a dozen dying each day.* As word of Darien’s desperation reached England, King William III forbade any relief for fear of offending Spain and France, and his wealthy English subjects. And so the Scots at Darien continued to die of mosquito-borne disease, decaying among their stores of woolen blankets, wigs, warm socks, Bibles, and, of course, their idle printing press.

  With rumors of a looming Spanish attack, the 700 survivors loaded three ships after six months of hell. Those too sick to walk the boarding plank were left on the beach to die. One ship found Jamaica, losing 140 passengers on the short trip. The other hobbled into Massachusetts after witnessing a fever “so universal,” wrote the ship’s captain, “mortality so great that I have hove overboard 105 Corps.” Observing the king’s orders and paranoid about the “spread of the Scottish fever,” the English authorities in the Caribbean and North America gave no quarter to the sick Scots. Eventually, one ship shuttled the entire lot of fewer than 300 survivors, including Paterson, back to a tattered Scotland. Darien, round one, was abandoned.

  Ironically, or tragically as it turned out, just days before Paterson’s pitiful party arrived home, a second fleet of four ships carrying 1,300 Scottish reinforcements, including 100 women, sailed for Darien. Losing 160 people during the voyage, this second serving of Scots for the mosquitoes of Darien landed exactly one year after their mosquito-doomed predecessors. Like the second arrivals at Roanoke, they found next to nothing. The Spanish and local indigenous Guna had torched the makeshift tiki huts and looted everything, except the printing press, standing memorial-like on the beach, surrounded by fragmentary sand-blasted gravestones. The script for the first horror movie was recycled for the showing of “Darien: The Sequel.”

  By March 1700, four months after the party landed, malaria and yellow fever were killing Scots at a rate of 100 per week, with Spanish raids filling any unused graves. In mid-April, the surviving Scots surrendered to the Spanish. A
s a parting gift, the mosquito’s toxic twins continued to ravage the fleeing Scots, killing an additional 450 on the Atlantic crossing. Of the 1,200 settlers that made up the second colonization attempt at Darien, less than 100 returned to Scotland. Darien was abandoned. This time for good. The mosquitoes of Darien remained undefeated against unseasoned Europeans.

  When consolidating the numbers, of the 2,500 Scottish settlers who sailed for Darien, the mosquito made a death-row last meal of 80%.* As Mann is quick to point out, “Lost with the dead was every penny invested in the venture.” Panamanian mosquitoes bit at the heart of Scottish independence, mocking William Wallace’s bloodcurdling cries of freedom.

  Already fiscally floundering, Scotland was bankrupted by the mosquito-liquidated Darien venture. In the jungle wilderness of Panama, the mosquito had quite literally eaten away the Scottish treasury. Thousands of Scots lost their savings, riots filled the streets, unemployment rates hit the ceiling, and the country was in financial chaos. At this time, although England and Scotland shared a monarch, they were two independent countries with distinct parliamentary legislatures. England was wealthier, more populous, and generally much better off, and had been badgering its poorer northern neighbor for unification for centuries.

  The Scots, including a claymore-wielding William Wallace in the late thirteenth century, had fiercely resisted every English entreaty until now. “When England offered to pay off the entire debt of the Scottish Parliament and reimburse the shareholders,” explains J. R. McNeill, “many Scots found this offer irresistible. Even some committed Scottish patriots such as Paterson endorsed the Act of Union of 1707. Thus, Great Britain was born, with assistance from the fevers of Darien.” Lamenting the loss of Scottish independence, Robert Burns, lionized as the national poet of Scotland, chastised the corrupt politicians and wealthy merchants for selling out the Scottish people by endorsing the Acts of Union. “We’re bought and sold for English gold,” Burns chided. “Such a parcel of rogues in a nation.” While the Acts of Union and the forfeiture of Scottish independence were not popular among the Scottish masses, the economy began to rebound, riding on the coattails of England’s booming mercantilist and extractive colonies in the Americas.