The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

  The disaster at Darien also signaled to English colonial plantation owners the danger of using Scots as indentured servants. There was no purpose and, more importantly, no profit in hiring a Scottish workforce if four of every five died within six months. Darien had made it all too clear that Scots, and other Europeans, died too fast of mosquito-borne disease to be of any use. “Individual Britons and their families continued to make their way to the Americas,” recaps Mann, “but businesspeople increasingly resisted sending over large groups of Europeans. Instead they looked for alternative sources of labor. Alas, they found them.” The English Civil War also cut the population of both Scotland and England by 10%, reducing the number of domestic workers, opening the job market, and driving up wages. As a result, the pool of prospective indentured servants was significantly drained. European indentured servitude as a form of mass labor was doomed by the mosquito. The replacement was found in African slaves, many of whom were immune to these very same mosquito-borne diseases. The demand that was fueling chattel slavery across the Americas was injected with a turbo-boost and was punched into hyperdrive.

  The English American colonies narrowly avoided abandonment, failure, and a Scottish Darien-like disaster. They barely scratched through their trials by mosquitoes, starvation, and war, and their settlement was by no means easy. I do not want to give the impression that simply because of tobacco and African slavery (which were inseparable), the eventual Thirteen Colonies grew and thrived instantaneously. Settlers plodded slowly down a treacherous and uncharted road. The diary entry of Mary Cooper sums up life in the early colonies. “I am dirty and distressed, almost wearied to death,” she bemoaned. “This day is forty years since I left my father’s house and come here, and here have seen little else but hard labor and sorrow.” With hard labor, eager capitalistic settlers cleared land for tobacco and created new habitats for mosquitoes with a summons to spread malaria, yellow fever, and misery.

  The colonies grew because settlers, including women, were continuously injected in such large numbers that a handful survived malaria, eventually yellow fever, and other diseases to spawn a seasoned, country-born population. This broke the stalemate and prevented Jamestown, Plymouth, and others from vanishing like Roanoke, while also sparing us from more misleading documentaries on other “lost colonies.” Colonial-born generations eventually survived, having become accustomed to, and a part of, their communal ecosystems. American-born generations and their local germs eventually reached a biological balance after an unremitting parade of death. This seasoning, however, took time. Initially, aside from clearing land and stirring up mosquito populations, the waves of English settlers, predominantly fleeing the mosquito-swamped Fenlands, were also their own worst malarial enemies.

  The problem for these colonists was they now faced an entirely new mosquito and malarial environment. Theirs was both an endemic and epidemic malarial stew with multiple gruesome seasonings. The English imported their own vivax and, to a much lesser extent, malariae parasites. In the malarial cauldron of the colonies, they morphed into new, expatriate-specific strains, while African slaves injected falciparum into this increasingly diverse American malarial landscape. In a repeated cycle of contagion, new arrivals from the Fenlands and West Central Africa continued to introduce foreign malarial varieties, while the colonists cultivated their own domestic breeds. The mosquito and her multiple, unique malarial offspring never went hungry.

  In his volume The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria, Randall Packard, director of the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, confirms that malaria “reached its peak in England around the middle of the seventeenth century. . . . One of the consequences of this outward movement may have been the transplantation of malaria infections to the emerging American English colonies, where many men and women from the southeast counties [Fenlands] traveled in order to find a new life.” James Webb adds to Packard’s observation by affirming, in his book on the global history of malaria, that the “establishment of denser settlements allowed infections to increase in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century when malaria emerged as the most important killer in the North American colonies.”

  For Virginia Colony, the numbers are staggering. In its first two decades of existence from 1607 to 1627, over 80% of new arrivals to Jamestown and Virginia died within a year! Most perished within weeks or months. Over this time period, of the roughly 7,000 immigrants to Virginia Colony, only 1,200 survived their first year. Tobacco planter and governor of Virginia George Yeardley counseled his London stakeholders in 1620 that they “must be content to have littell service done by new men in the ffirst yeare till they be seasoned.” Tobacco was so profitable, however, that the Virginia Company was willing to shell out enormous sums to send settlers, criminals, prostitutes, indentured servants, and eventually African slaves, to the colony to ensure its survival and its own accumulation of wealth. Tobacco farmers and plantation owners were making a mind-boggling 1,000% margin and taxable return on their initial investments. In Virginia, both profits and population continued to grow. A century after the death of Pocahontas, 80,000 Europeans called Virginia home, where they enslaved a further 30,000 Africans. The colony continued to prosper, so much so that for the British, it was a moneymaker worth fighting for. On the eve of the American Revolution, the population of Virginia touched 700,000, including almost 200,000 slaves.

  The second colony, the Puritan settlement at Plymouth, Massachusetts, fared no better at its outset than its older Virginian sister. Eventually, like its twelve other siblings, a country-born, seasoned population crested the wave of malaria and other diseases. Having been persecuted in both England and the Netherlands for their extreme Protestant beliefs, a group of English Puritans, later known as Pilgrims, sought to start a religious commune in the New World. Even after Martin Luther and his Ninety-Five Theses kindled the Protestant Reformation in 1517, the Puritans still believed that the Church of England retained too many elements and dogmatic compounds of Catholicism. Busting the common mythology, this group of 102 people who sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 were a portion of an exceptionally small minority of settlers who came to the Americas for religious freedom. The lion’s share came for land, or alternatively, were cajoled into passage as indentured servants, convicts, or slaves.

  A rough sea voyage diverted the Mayflower 200 miles north of their intended target, the Hudson River. Just in time for a nasty New England winter, on November 11, 1620, the damaged Mayflower hobbled into a small cove roughly two miles north of the four-ton granite boulder known as Plymouth Rock. This tourist attraction of mythology is viewed by more than one million sightseers each year.* Bestselling author Bill Bryson scoffs at the idea, noting, “The one thing the Pilgrims certainly did not do was step ashore on Plymouth Rock.” During this first winter, the Puritans split their time between their ship and a few crudely constructed buildings. When the Mayflower sailed for England in April 1621, only 53 of the original 102 Pilgrims were still alive. Of the 18 adult women, only 3 survived this five-month freeze.

  Malaria soon found a home in the settlement, and as entomologist Andrew Spielman confirms, “Given that hundreds or thousands of people from malaria zones [Fenlands] came into the area, I wouldn’t have trouble believing that. Once malaria has a chance to get into a place, it usually gets in fast.” The governor of Plymouth Colony, William Bradford, penned a short note following the sickly mosquito season of 1623: “The question which has been brought up against the Colony was that the people are much annoyed by mosquitoes.” Bradford recognized the benefits of seasoning, deducing that new arrivals “are too delicate and unfit to begin new plantations and colonies that cannot endure the biting of the mosquito. We wish such to keep at home until at least they be mosquito proof.” Although it is widely reasoned that malaria became endemic immediately in the Massachusetts colonies, epidemics ravaged the region every five years from 1634 to 1670.

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bsp; Their god had instructed the Puritans to “be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it.” The Puritans, never ones to shirk responsibility or to sidestep the proverb of an honest day’s work, diligently set forth to follow this command. And they did just that, at a prolific, indefatigable rate. It is estimated that 10–12% of Americans today are direct descendants of this small group of Puritans. Like Jamestown, after their initial malarial seasoning, the Puritan population began to stabilize and eventually grow. By 1690, their population reached 7,000, when their expansive colony was annexed into Massachusetts Colony with a total population nearing 60,000 people. Again, like Jamestown, expansion off the beachhead settlements of Massachusetts into the westward frontiers resulted in conflict with local indigenous populations, who died of disease, war, and starvation. The survivors straggled farther west or were rounded up and sold into slavery.

  This native-newcomer cycle of malarial and yellow fever seasoning, country-born population growth combined with a continual influx of immigrants, westward expansion, war with indigenous peoples, and their eventual defeat, exodus, forced removal, or captivity played itself out across the evolution of all Thirteen Colonies. Beginning in 1700, each new country-born seasoned generation doubled the population of the colonies. For example, the combined colonial population, excluding slaves and indigenes, was roughly 260,000 in 1700. It reached 500,000 by 1720 and topped 1.2 million by 1750. Six years later, on the eve of the Seven Years’ War, this English colonial population had increased by 300,000, while New France housed a measly total of 65,000 who by this time viewed themselves as distinct peoples rather than “French.” When the “shot heard ’round the world” ignited the American Revolution at Lexington in April 1775 the colonial population was nearing 2.5 million, set against a British homeland population of 8 million.

  Mosquito landscapes were an integral part of this colonial progression and framework. Across the Western Hemisphere, however, not all environments of mosquito-borne disease were created equal. They differed by regions, coupled to their unique blends of mosquito species. These distinct mosquito-borne disease landscapes were shaped by multiple factors that included climate, geography, farming habits and crop selections, and population densities, including that of African slaves. These differences would be decisive in the upcoming imperial hostilities and wars of independence that rocked the Americas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The fates and fortunes of these conflicts would largely be decided by the mosquito and her marching columns of malaria and yellow fever.

  For our purposes, and to identify the areas of operation for the upcoming mosquito-prejudiced hostilities and happenings, we can carve the Americas into three distinct geographic zones of mosquito-borne disease or zones of infection. We will start with the first and worst, in the southern colonies, then progress through the middle colonies, and on to the last and best (only relative to the suffering farther south) in the northern colonies.

  The first geographic area extended from central South America along the Amazon River basin to the southern United States, or as J. R. McNeill succinctly states, “the Atlantic coastal regions of South, Central, and North America, as well as the Caribbean islands themselves, that in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries became plantation zones: from Surinam to the Chesapeake . . . the establishment of a plantation economy improved breeding and feeding conditions for both [Aedes and Anopheles] mosquito species, helping them become key actors in the geopolitical struggles of the early modern Atlantic world.” This zone was a mosquito sanctuary and was ravaged by both endemic and epidemic vivax and falciparum malaria. It was also simultaneously swamped by yellow fever and dengue. Infection (and seasoning) and mortality rates across this zone, such as those witnessed on our earlier visit to South Carolina and its slave trader haven, Charleston, were extremely high, convincing insurance companies to charge higher life insurance premiums to clients in the mosquito-addled South. Unlike the northerly tobacco colonies, in South Carolina, given its high volume of slave trafficking and its main industry of rice cultivation, mosquito-borne diseases hit especially hard. Falciparum became the overriding killer. Georgia became a miniature version of South Carolina’s “rice kingdom.” In fact, around the planet, from Japan to Cambodia to South Carolina, rice husbandry was chaperoned by malarious mosquitoes.

  Safety Net: A woodcut print from 1797 depicting a typical scene of Japanese women dressing under mosquito netting with the aid of servants. (Library of Congress)

  In North America, we have a handy, well-known cultural symbol to mark the northern limit of this first deadly zone of infection. The Pennsylvania-Maryland border, surveyed in 1768 by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon to resolve a boundary dispute among these two colonies and Delaware and Virginia (now West Virginia), serves as the northerly border of this lethal mosquito landscape. While vivax malaria blighted both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, as the boundary is commonly known, this frontier was the northern endemic threshold for both falciparum malaria and yellow fever. Infrequent and sporadic epidemics of both diseases did occur north of the line, but they came, killed, and left. In Maryland, for example, during a malaria epidemic in 1690, a visitor commented on “the washed countenances of the people standing at their doors . . . like so many standing ghosts . . . every house was an infirmary.”

  The Mason-Dixon Line has come to represent the division between slave states and free states, although this is not entirely accurate. Maryland lies north and east of the line, and although opting not to join the Confederacy during the Civil War, Maryland did not abolish slavery until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.* Its ratification in 1865, following the Union victory in the Civil War, legally certified, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The Mason-Dixon Line runs like a scar across the cultural landscape of the United States. It snakes through American history like a main circuit cable plugging straight into the differences and enduring divisions between Dixie South and Yankee North.

  The association of the Mason-Dixon Line with chattel slavery, plantations, and mosquito-borne disease is not a coincidence. Tobacco and cotton did not grow in the northern states; therefore, the plantation-slave system was nonexistent. These crops grew in the warmer climes of the South, where mosquitoes thrived. These plantations also needed slave labor to produce profit. The imported slaves added to the robust mosquito landscape by introducing falciparum and yellow fever, and perhaps vivax. The endemic and epidemic mosquito-borne disease environments south of the Mason-Dixon Line flourished. Plantation colonies, African slavery, and deadly mosquito-borne diseases were intertwined, and as it turned out, so was the seemingly arbitrary Mason-Dixon Line.

  Traversing north along the Atlantic shore from our southern colonies and crossing the Mason-Dixon Line, we enter the second zone of mixed mosquito-borne infection, the middle colonies. This region stretched from Delaware and Pennsylvania to New Jersey and New York. Here, vivax was generally entrenched, and, from time to time, some of America’s worst epidemics of falciparum and yellow fever would materialize. These epidemics cut a swath through the unseasoned populations. In then US capital Philadelphia in 1793, as we will see, yellow fever killed over 5,000 people in three months. An additional 20,000 fled the city in terror, including President George Washington. The government ceased to function. Whispers of moving the nation’s capital to a safer location quietly entered political dialogue and casual conversation.

  The third and final zone of infection is the northern colonies, including the Canadian portion of New France which, as a result of the Seven Years’ War, became the British colony of Canada in 1763. This region was too cold for yellow fever or endemic malaria of any form. With suitable summer climates, however, merchant and naval vessels, as well as soldiers and transient
s, introduced sporadic outbreaks of mosquito-borne disease. The American colonies, stretching from Connecticut to Maine, witnessed periodic outbreaks of vivax and yellow fever. Mosquito-borne disease popped up in Toronto and the Great Lakes region of southern Ontario, in Quebec, as evidenced by a nasty yellow fever outbreak in 1711, and was a relatively common visitor to the bustling Atlantic port of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

  While researching this book, I was surprised to learn that malaria went on a rampage in Canada’s northerly capital of Ottawa during the construction of the 125-mile Rideau Canal between 1826 and 1832. Each year, from July through September, known to the builders as “the sickly season,” roughly 60% of the workforce contracted malaria. Following the malaria season of 1831, chief contractor and engineer John Redpath wrote that “the exceeding unhealthiness of the place from which cause all engaged in it suffered much from lake fever and fever & ague, and it has also retarded the work for about three months each year.” Redpath himself “caught the disease both the first and second year missed the third but this year had a severe attack of Lake Fever—which kept me to bed for two months and nearly two months more before I was fit for active service.” Not to worry. Redpath survived his malarial fits to create Canada’s largest sugar company in 1854. Still in existence today, the headquarters of Redpath Sugar is a landmark of Toronto’s harbor front and bustling port.