The Mosquito
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During the construction of the Rideau Canal, approximately 1,000 workers died of disease, including 500 to 600 from malaria. The canal malaria also spread to local communities, where it is believed to have killed 250 civilians. At the Old Presbyterian Cemetery in Newboro, a commemorative marker honors their sacrifice: “Buried in this cemetery are the bodies of sappers and miners who took part in the construction of the Rideau Canal at this isthmus during the years 1826–1832. These men laboured under appalling conditions and succumbed to malaria. Their graves remain unmarked to this day.” Prior to the work of Dr. Walter Reed in Cuba and Dr. William Gorgas in Panama at the close of the nineteenth century, canal building was a perilous enterprise. Large groups of close-quartered workers clearing land, digging trenches, and adding water is nothing short of a cordial invitation to mosquito-borne disease, even in the northern climes of Canada.
It is thought that seasonal malaria was introduced to Canada in the wake of the American Revolution when over 60,000 Empire Loyalists flooded across the border into British Canada. Historically, as we have seen and will continue to see, human migration, quick-stepping foreign armies, travel, and trade are prime conduits for the spread of contagion. In the 1790s, as the worst pandemics of yellow fever and malaria ripped through the American Atlantic states, another 30,000 “Late Loyalists” and refugees sought asylum from disease in Canada, inadvertently expanding the range of malaria into Ontario, Quebec, and the Atlantic maritime provinces.
In 1793, for example, the wife of John Graves Simcoe, the governor of Upper Canada and a prominent British officer during the revolution, contracted malaria in the provincial capital of Kingston. Located on the shores of Lake Ontario, the city also operated as the southern terminus for the Rideau Canal with its point of origin in Ottawa. Simcoe briefly led British troops during the Haitian Revolution ignited by Toussaint Louverture in 1791, which was eventually decided by the mosquito. In the recent television drama series Turn: Washington’s Spies, Simcoe is cast as the primary antagonist, much to my irritation with historical inaccuracy. Despite historical evidence to the contrary, Simcoe is portrayed as the sadistic and psychopathic commander of a murderous group of irregular British Rangers.*
The authentic and actual Simcoe, however, stood at the crossroads of colonialism. He was caught up in the winds of mosquito-swept historic change and the drift from European clamor and contest for colonies in the Americas to mosquito-sponsored independence movements forged in the crucible of the yellow fever and malarial fires of these same colonies. The unwavering prize worth fighting for was the wealth amassed through mercantilism and the plantation crops of sugar, tobacco, and coffee, among others, courtesy of the Columbian Exchange.
During the first two centuries of colonization, Spain, France, and England/Britain (and the Netherlands, Denmark, and Portugal to a lesser extent) initially squabbled and scrapped among themselves. Rich in natural resources, the Americas lured imperialist European nations to her shores. Colonists and slaves were dispatched to the wilds of the Western Hemisphere to secure territory and create economic empire. As part of this global transfer, early settlers were sacrificed to mosquito-borne disease until they, and their country-born descendants, became seasoned to their local environments and sicknesses.
This seasoning would initially help shield the established Spanish Empire from its two burgeoning predatory overseas rivals, France and Britain, as they tried in vain to seize mosquito-defended Spanish bastions during two centuries of economic competition and colonial warfare. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, yellow fever, dengue, and malaria attacked newcomers to these regions, which helped shelter the senior Spanish Empire from its plundering and covetous European challengers. During the colonial wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, these same diseases helped revolutions against European rule succeed.
A new breed of seasoned, country-born populations eventually jumped ship from their mother countries, yearning to sail into uncharted independent waters. After the colonists had bestowed enough blood sacrifice on the mosquito and paid their dues in death, she proffered the seasoned, independent-minded populations protection from the European armies of their colonial masters. Resident militias, even those of European descent, had been seasoned to local diseases. The armies of the various imperial powers sent directly from Europe to quell these rebellions were more prone to mosquito-borne disease. With the aid of ravenous mosquitoes, revolutionaries shrugged off the yoke of European subordination. The countries of South and Central America, the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States all owe a debt of gratitude to the mosquito for facilitating their ascent to self-governing nationhood. For the original English forebears and their offspring, they eventually completed the malarial crossing from Fenlands to freedom.
The heroes of the wars of liberation in the Americas, such as Simon Bolivar and Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, and the legendary enemies that are forever paired in history, such as James Wolfe and Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, Chief Pontiac and Jeffery Amherst, George Washington and Charles Cornwallis, and Napoleon and Toussaint Louverture, were all born into Simcoe’s world of flux. Their destinies, played out on the chessboard battlefields of the Americas, would all be decided by mercenary mosquitoes.
CHAPTER 11
The Crucible of Disease: Colonial Wars and a New World Order
They are devils,” General Jeffery Amherst muttered under his breath. “They must be punished, not bribed. . . . Punish the delinquents with Entire Destruction.” Although the British had just won the Seven Years’ War and expelled the French from North America, the commander of British forces was in no mood to celebrate. He had a rebellion on his hands and was desperately short of troops and funding. Amherst was furious. Odawa chief Pontiac, and the 3,500 warriors of his pan-Indian coalition of over a dozen nations, was ruining his reputation. Anticipating a deluge of British settlers into these recently vacated French lands, Pontiac leaped on the opportunity to create a unified indigenous homeland. “Englishmen, although you have conquered the French, you have not yet conquered us!” Pontiac declared. “As for these English—these dogs dressed in red,” he exhorted his people, “you must lift the hatchet against them. Wipe them from the face of the earth.” By June 1763, only a month into the rebellion, Amherst was desperate. Pontiac’s warriors had already overrun eight British forts in the Ohio River Valley and Great Lakes region. Fort Pitt in the western wilds of Pennsylvania was under siege. Reports from inside were grim: “We are so crowded in the fort that I fear disease. . . . The Smallpox is among us.” Starved of men and resources, Amherst deployed an innovative weapon to turn the tide of Pontiac’s Rebellion in his favor.
Amherst questioned Colonel Henry Bouquet, commander of a relief expedition to Fort Pitt, “Could it not be contrived to send the small pox among the disaffected tribes of Indians? We must on this occasion Use Every Stratagem in our Power to Reduce them.” Bouquet responded, “I will try to inocculate [sic] [infect] them with some blankets that may fall in their hands and take care not to get the disease myself.” Amherst officially endorsed the scheme. “You will Do well to try to Innoculate [sic] the Indians by means of Blankets,” he replied, “as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race.” Both men were obviously unaware that five days earlier, Simeon Ecuyer and William Trent, militia officers holed up in Fort Pitt, had already utilized just such a weapon. “Out of our regard to them,” they recorded identically in their diaries, “we gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the Small pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.” Although it is generally believed that nothing came of these biological smallpox-blanket weapons, their use reveals the grave deficiency of men, materials, and money at Amherst’s disposal on the heels of the Seven Years’ War.
In 1756, while war clouds were gathering over the Americas, British secretary of state Philip Stanhope warned the king, “In my opinion, our greatest dange
r arises from our expense, considering the present immense National Debt.” As Stanhope anticipated, when the chaotic dust of war settled in 1763, Britain was economically crippled, militarily bankrupt, and could not afford protracted Indian campaigns on its newly defined North American borders. Spiraling debt and Pontiac’s initial success forced the British hand.
While the passing of the 1763 Royal Proclamation placated Pontiac, creating an Indian Territory by barring colonial expansion west of the Appalachian Mountains, it also sowed the seeds of discontent among American colonists and ignited the slow-burning fuse of rebellion. Britain’s bankruptcy and military woes, and these revolutionary historical events, were created by nearly a century of mosquito-ravaged colonial conflicts in the Americas, crowned by the Seven Years’ War.
These military campaigns in the Americas prior to the Seven Years’ War were sparked by a series of imported European confrontations and mercantilist rivalries. For a century, France and Spain teamed up to turn back rising British power. Minor possessions in the Caribbean changed hands and British designs on Quebec were thwarted. A British force of 4,500 sent to take both Martinique and Canada in 1693, for example, was broken by yellow fever. After 3,200 deaths, the skeletal force docked at Boston in June at the onset of mosquito season. An observer recorded that “there was an English fleet of our good friends with a direful plague aboard ’em.” Resultant yellow fever epidemics, the first to definitively visit the American colonies, killed 10% of the populations of Boston, Charleston, and Philadelphia.
During these forays, American colonial troops received their trial by fire and mosquitoes in the Caribbean. These deployments of colonial troops outside of North America shaped future opinion about raising American colonial forces for use in the Caribbean. The most notable was the British campaign in April 1741 to capture Cartagena, Colombia. A hub of Spanish trade, this port city was the release point for the full menu of the Columbian Exchange, including precious metals and gems, tobacco, sugar, cocoa, exotic timbers, coffee, and quinine, collected from across Spain’s southern empire. A prior attempt to capture Cartagena in 1727 was aborted without firing a shot after 4,000 of the 4,750 men, a staggering 84% of the British invasion party, died of yellow fever while cruising off the mosquito-laced coast. The expedition of 1741, however, dwarfed that of its predecessor. A total of 29,000 men were readied to invade Cartagena under Admiral Edward “Old Grog” Vernon, including 3,500 American colonists described as “all the Banditry the colonies afforded.”* For the mosquito, this massive unseasoned force was fodder for yellow fever.
Within three days of the soldiers’ landing, the mosquito had slaughtered almost 3,500 British troops. The operation was a lost cause as “the sickness amongst the Troops increased to so great a Degree, that any longer Continuance in that unhealthy Situation, seemed to threaten no less than their total ruin . . . the whole Fleet set sail for Jamaica.” Vernon decided to cut and run after only a month: “Thus ended the fatiguing part of the Campaign & it certainly was the most disagreeable one that has been known . . . universal Sickness & Death. . . . Everybody was taken alike; they call this distemper a bilious fever, it kills in 5 days; if the patient lives longer it’s only to die of greater agonies of what they then call Black Vomit.” The mosquito killed 22,000 of Vernon’s total force of 29,000, an astounding 76%. The majority of the seasoned Spanish defenders, who had been stationed at Cartagena for five years, survived the onslaught.
One of Vernon’s colonial survivors was Lawrence Washington, the older and admired half brother of George. Upon his return to Virginia, Lawrence carved out a plantation on a piece of the family’s extensive property holdings. In honor of his commander, he named it Mount Vernon. Upon Lawrence’s death in 1752, twenty-year-old George inherited the sprawling estate. During the Cartagena campaign, Lawrence’s colonial cohort fared no better than their British comrades. The disaster was widely covered in colonial newspapers and left bitter scars across the collective consciousness of the American colonies. When the British tried to raise troops for another Caribbean adventure during the Seven Years’ War, this time to take Havana, colonial volunteers were not as forthcoming. The mental images of Cartagena hung harshly in the hallways of colonial legislatures.
Given these isolated, intermittent, but comparatively diminutive imperial campaigns in the Caribbean, including the British succubus mosquito nightmare at Cartagena, it was inevitable that European empires and mercantilist economies would collide in a global conflict. Fought in Europe, across the Americas, India, the Philippines, and West Africa, the Seven Years’ War was this first world war. Although mosquito-borne diseases ripped through British, French, and Spanish troops battling for colonial possessions in India, the Philippines, and West Africa, they did not tip the battlefields to aid the British victories. All European soldiers were relative newcomers to these foreign theaters of war, sent directly from their temperate homelands. Without local seasoning, the soldiers of these competing imperial powers were visited fairly equally by mosquito-borne disease. The mosquito’s military and historical manipulation was generally confined to the multiple campaigns, and the corresponding manpower determinations and troop deployments, in North America and the contested Caribbean colonies.
In the Americas, the team player benches had been selected during the preceding wars. Team Britain included the American colonies and the aggressive Iroquois Confederacy. The rival underdog, Team France, was joined by relatively small numbers of uninterested Canadiens and a handful of Algonquian allies. Eventually, in 1761, Spain decided to get into the game on the side of France. The British bench, however, had more depth. Manpower and available substitutions favored Team Britain.
While the professional European armies were relatively even, the number of American colonists dwarfed that of French colonists by a ratio of 23 to 1. The British also fielded stronger indigenous allies. During the Beaver Wars of the late seventeenth century, the Iroquois Confederacy went on a sequence-repeating military campaign to reap trapping grounds and secure fur to trade for British guns for exacting revenge on traditional enemies. These conquests gained more trapping lands to secure more fur to acquire more guns to extend these reprisals. Up to this point, within this long-standing traditional warfare, the Algonquian and Huron nations, having gained access to French firearms almost a century earlier, had been getting the better of the Iroquois. Now, having acquired British weapons for furs, the Iroquois launched retaliatory campaigns across eastern North America before turning their wrath across the wide swath of the Great Lakes. The Beaver Wars marked the last of the Mahican, Erie, Neutral, Tobacco, and Huron nations or confederacies. Others, like the Shawnee, Kickapoo, and Odawa, simply fled the fierce Iroquois onslaught. Although promoting their own punitive agenda, not only did the Iroquois inadvertently clear out land for future British/American settlement, they wiped out most of France’s indigenous allies, some to the point of extinction.
The Seven Years’ War was truly a global conflict. Strategy, manpower considerations, and territorial priorities were intertwined, and troop allocations were prioritized and packaged accordingly. For France, the war in Europe and the defense of her lucrative Caribbean plantation colonies far outweighed the security of Quebec’s commercial contributions of fish, timber, and fur. France’s concerns for her Caribbean sugar and tobacco colonies, however, were costly. Within the first six months, yellow fever and malaria killed half of newly arrived unseasoned French defenders. Mosquito-borne disease ravaged French garrisons in Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and other smaller islands. French troops were siphoned and reinforcements were redirected from Quebec to these besieged outposts. As a result, Caribbean mosquitoes starved Canada of men and munitions and all payments on Canadian invoices were shelved. These indispensable necessities of war—soldiers, weapons, and money—were diverted to Europe and the Caribbean. The ability of French commander Marquis de Montcalm to coordinate any meaningful defense of Canada was stymied by Caribbean mosquitoes.
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At the same time, a smallpox epidemic ripped through Quebec, killing Frenchmen, Canadiens, and their residual indigenous allies with reckless abandon. By 1757, 3,000 were hospitalized at any given time, with 25 dying daily. Within a year, 1,700 French soldiers had perished. This epidemic drained precious manpower from an already undersize French coalition force in Canada. With this smallpox outbreak in Quebec, and with mosquito-borne disease in the Caribbean consuming all available French reinforcements, Canada was left vulnerable.
Conversely, wanting to secure the northern flank for their precious and profitable Thirteen Colonies, the British afforded a greater number of soldiers and resources to the Canadian theater of war. British and colonial commanders and soldiers petitioned to be sent to North America for fear of mosquito-borne illness in the Caribbean. Stories of ordinary soldiers and sailors taking 1,000 lashes from a cat-o’-nine-tails rather than accept a Caribbean cruise were common. Others mutinied, officers bought their way out or resigned their commission, and naval convoys got “lost” in transit. Casualty rates inflicted by mosquito-borne disease could not be ignored, and the British high command refrained from sending elite units to the tropics. Instead, Caribbean assignments were detailed as a punishment.
American colonial assemblies dithered when summoned to raise regiments for expeditionary forces. Voluntary enlistments all but dried up when recruiters pitched Caribbean campaigns. Until the final conquest of Canada in 1760, most colonial troops, including militia colonel George Washington, were employed in North America strengthening the British position in this theater. “Raising troops in America for service elsewhere was uncommon,” points out Erica Charters in her detailed work on disease during the Seven Years’ War. “The last expedition in which this had occurred was the disastrous expedition to Cartagena in 1741. . . . The experience at Cartagena encouraged the development of a ‘self-conscious Americanism.’” Given the death rates from mosquito-borne disease during this botched mission, British officer William Blakeney ominously warned that the American colonists “seem to set a great value on themselves, and think a regard is due to them, especially in the assistance they are able to give to the mother country on such occasions; and, as they are a growing Power, should they be disappointed in what is promised them and which they expect, future Occasions of the like Nature may suffer for it.” Blakeney astutely recognized the gradual shift in American self-confidence and that revolution flickered on the horizon.