The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

  In the Americas, Britain launched two geographically distinct but strategically welded campaigns against French holdings—Canada and the Caribbean. By 1758, the British under General Amherst had captured French maritime holdings along the Atlantic coast, called Acadia. Roughly 12,000 Acadians were rounded up and deported. We will pick up the shockingly grizzly story of the expelled Acadians and their mosquito death sentence on Devil’s Island off Guyana at the end of the war. In January 1759, the British launched an unsuccessful invasion of the French Caribbean island fortress of Martinique. This task force was redirected to Guadeloupe, which was captured in May 1759. The mosquito, however, made them pay for their hard-earned victory, killing 46% of the 6,800-man British force. Of the tiny garrison of 1,000 men left behind, 800 died of yellow fever and malaria by the end of 1759. The British threat to the lucrative French sugar islands set off alarm bells. At this point, France’s war against Britain was being buoyed by enormous loans from neutral Spain. The loss of these moneymaking plantation colonies would doom the French war effort, not only in the Americas, but also in the main European theater. At the expense of Canadian defense, unseasoned French reinforcements were continuously shoveled into and burned in the mosquito-stoked furnace of the tropics, leaving Canada exposed.

  The fragile dominion of the French over Canada came undone in September 1759. Major General James Wolfe, the young, talented, and arrogant British commander, was determined to take Quebec by any means necessary. “If, by accident in the river, by the enemy’s resistance, by sickness, or slaughter in the army, or, from any other cause, we find that Quebec is not likely to fall into our hands (persevering however to the last moment),” a feverishly ill Wolfe submitted to his superior, General Jeffery Amherst, “I propose to set the town on fire with shells, to destroy the harvest, houses and cattle, both above and below, to send off as many Canadians as possible to Europe and to leave famine and desolation behind me; belle résolution & très chrétienne! but we must teach these scoundrels to make war in a more gentleman like manner.” Such militant and uncompromising tactics were not necessary. Wolfe’s swift victory over the Marquis de Montcalm’s beleaguered and outnumbered French forces on the Plains of Abraham at Quebec City paved the way for an influx of British settlers and the creation of modern Canada. Although Wolfe was killed (as was Montcalm) on those nation-defining plains, Amherst took up the gauntlet, forcing the surrender of Montreal the following year. With backing from Caribbean mosquitoes, Canada was now officially British.

  Following the conquest of Canada, British resources were funneled to the Caribbean. Spain officially entered the war in 1761 to protect prized colonial property and to back her militarily and economically exhausted French ally. Britain now had additional targets, chiefly Havana, the linchpin of Spanish enterprise in the Americas. A second attempt at French Martinique, however, came first. Following its capitulation in February 1762, the British went on to take the French islands of St. Lucia, Grenada, and St. Vincent. British planners reckoned these smaller colonies could serve as diplomatic leverage and brokering chips during the anticipated peace negotiations. These strategists now set their sights directly on Havana, “the key to the Indies.”

  The massive British force assembled at Barbados counted roughly 11,000 soldiers. Amherst also expected an additional 4,000 “Provincials” from the colonies. While he had been urged to specifically recruit from the American colonies on the recommendation that “they would be very acceptable and necessary, to shorten and ease our Work, as the season of the Year is not favorable to the health of Europeans,” these numbers failed to materialize. The mosquito-borne disease awaiting colonial conscripts in the Caribbean was a bone-chilling visual, a distressing probability or at least expectation, which intimidated volunteers. The governor of New Hampshire reported he would not be able to meet his quota unless, he wrote, “I could assure the men that they were to serve in regiments at Halifax, Quebec, or Montreal, but the people in general entertain terrible thoughts of serving in the West Indies.” Representatives from New York also stressed that volunteers demanded “to be Employed on the Continent of North America only, & that they shall be Returned to the Province, as soon as Service is over.” Eventually, after threats from General Amherst, 1,900 unseasoned colonial provincials, mainly from the northern colonies, and 1,800 British regulars sailed for Cuba.

  The British armada reached Havana in June 1762 and laid siege to the city of 55,000 people. The roughly 11,000 guardians were aware that a successful defense hinged on mosquito-borne disease, as “fevers and agues [were] enough to destroy a European army division.” Cuba had a long, brutal history with its mosquitoes. Outside of Africa, the island’s ecosystem was one of the finest for the proliferation of Aedes and Anopheles mosquitoes. Malaria had been rife since the arrival of Columbus. After its first appearance in 1648, yellow fever was also an annual event, although certainly some years were worse than others. Distinctly worse than the typical yearly staining of yellow fever were twelve savage epidemics that had hunted the island, with the worst outbreaks killing upwards of 35% of the total population.

  During early British operations in June and July 1762, however, Havana’s mercenary mosquito defenders were absent without leave. They simply did not show up. The rainy season that usually began in early May and peaked in June had been deferred by an El Niño effect. This delay meant that mosquitoes took a rain check for breeding, so the usual epidemic season was postponed. For the British, this abnormally dry spring allowed relatively healthy forces to secure a beachhead and capture Havana’s suburbs. Nevertheless, a British victory would still require a race with death. At the end of July, “the arrival of the American reinforcements,” wrote a participant of the siege, “has with very great reason cheered our drooping spirits.” The arrival of colonial reinforcements awoke the hungry mosquito from her hibernation. She immediately went on a feeding frenzy.

  Havana’s governor, however, had already evacuated the city, and without the usual defensive perimeter manned by mosquito-borne disease, he knew the game was up. “Timing—even of rains, mosquitoes, and viruses—is everything. . . . Had he known that the late rainy season, finally underway in August, ensured an abundant and active mosquito population and a yellow fever epidemic, he might have held out longer than he did,” asserts J. R. McNeill in his brilliantly thorough depiction of the events. “But he did not know . . . he chose to seek terms and on August 14th, 1762, he surrendered the city.” Two days after the capitulation of Havana, only 39% of British soldiers were fit for duty. “Our sickness instead of diminishing increases daily,” reported a senior officer at the beginning of October. “We have buried upwards of 3,000 men since the capitulation, and I am sorry to say there are many Men in Hospitals.” Still not satiated, by mid-October, the mosquito had achieved a body count bordering on the absurd. From a total force of 15,000, only 880 men, a measly 6%, were alive or healthy enough to stand to post. In total, she consumed two-thirds of the entire force, killing 10,000 men in less than three months. Combat claimed fewer than 700 British/colonial lives. Although doctors did their best to fight this contagion, medical knowledge was not really knowledge at all; it was more guesswork and superstition.

  The altogether strange, and at times barbaric, medical treatments reflect the complete ignorance of the causes for mosquito-borne diseases, or most diseases for that matter. Knowing what so-called remedies awaited them, most sufferers steered clear of the crude hospitals and their attending physicians. When ordered to go to the hospital by his superior, one soldier who was drenched in Havana’s yellow fever replied, “Indeed I am not bad, and if I was, I would rather stab myself at once, than go where so many are dying.” His knife remained sheathed, for he was dead before the day was out. Common treatments included ingesting animal fats, snake venom, mercury, or pulverized insects. The ancient Egyptian practice of bathing in fresh human urine was still practiced. Drinking one’s own urine was now also widespread. Bleeding, blistering, leeche
s, and cupping glasses were also staples in the medicine chest. Although no more effective than the popular remedy of using poultices and dressings of freshly killed pigeons or chipmunk brains, copious amounts of alcohol, coffee, opium, and cannabis at least offered some numbness and pain relief from the ghastly symptoms. Quinine was also used, but it was expensive. As a result, it was consistently understocked, administered at low, ineffective doses, or reserved for officers. It was often cut with other substances, much like cocaine and other street drugs are today, downgrading its active ingredient and effectiveness.

  If the disease didn’t kill them, often the cure would. Thomas Jefferson jested, “The patient, treated on the fashionable theory, sometimes gets well in spite of the medicine.” Most sufferers just took their chances with the sickness rather than seek treatment. Given the medical inaccuracy and the miasmic miscalculations of the causes of mosquito-borne disease, European campaigns in the Americas during the Seven Years’ War were swallowed by sickness. Areas with high rates of malaria, yellow fever, and dengue, including the Caribbean and the southern United States, remained mosquito-infested sinkholes of humanity.

  Although the British now controlled Cuba, manpower and resources were so taxed that any further designs on the Spanish domain or the envisaged campaign against French Louisiana were abandoned. Benjamin Franklin remarked that the victory at Havana was “the dearest conquest by far that we have purchas’d this war when we consider the terrible Havock made by the sickness in that brave Army of Veterans, now almost totally ruined.” English poet, writer, and lexicologist Samuel Johnson mourned, “May my country never be cursed with another such conquest!” From a military and monetary standpoint, Britain, like her enemies, was drained. British politician Isaac Barré voiced the opinion that the “war dragg’d thro’ the Streets more like a funeral than a triumph. We are drain’d of money & our resources are mostly stopp’d.” Unseasoned soldiers and replacements continued their rotations through the Caribbean colonies of all nations. They continued to die of mosquito-borne disease at rates exceeding 50% or even 60%. The mosquito had seized the initiative from the warring nations of Europe. Although the British were victorious on paper, they were just as depleted as their rivals by war’s end and could not press their advantage. Posturing and bravado were hollow threats when backed by mosquito-bitten soldiers and empty bank accounts. The only way out of this mess was negotiation and compromise.

  In the end, the mind-boggling suffering and the mountain of lives lost at Havana, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and other islands were all in vain. I suppose the only real winners were the gluttonous Caribbean mosquitoes, who pulled up their own chairs to the catchall “Taste of Europe” dinner-party buffet and extravaganza. In February 1763, the Treaty of Paris was signed, sorting out the spoils of war. Europe maintained its prewar boundaries. Throughout empires, the antebellum status quo ruled the day and little prewar territory changed hands.

  The real deliberation among British negotiators was what to do with France. It was quickly realized that Britain did not hold the leverage cards to keep both Canada and the conquered French Caribbean islands. They were gambling with a weak hand, and they knew it. France knew it as well. In the end, the British cut deals in the Caribbean to retain Canada. Protecting the northern flank of the American colonies took priority over Caribbean and overseas possessions. The islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, on which the British had fed the mosquito so many lives, as well as tiny St. Lucia, were returned to France. Britain acquired three small islands of the Lesser Antilles in the southern Caribbean and Spanish Florida. Havana was given back to Spain. Spain also acquired the Louisiana Territory from France, although it would be secretly returned to Napoleon’s France shortly before its purchase by the United States in 1803. France forfeited to Britain all colonial rights in India in exchange for custody of two minuscule islands sixteen miles south of Newfoundland, to retain fishing rights to the Grand Banks. St. Pierre and Miquelon, 95 square miles combined, were the last vestiges of French territory in North America. Currently, these islands, which by all territorial and economic logic should be Canadian, officially remain a self-governing overseas possession of France.

  Canada, however, became a British colony in name only. Following the Seven Years’ War, the diminutive and colonially distinct Canadien population, who had not taken up arms with any prodigious patriotic zeal and felt no unwavering affinity for France anyway, retained the rights to their seigneurial land system, civil law, language, Catholic faith, and culture. Aside from swearing allegiance to the British Crown, for the Canadiens, or “Quebecois,” life remained relatively unaffected and the status quo prevailed. Canada’s small population remained predominantly French until the mass influx of British Loyalists that would occur after the American Revolution.

  The French maritime Acadians, however, faced an entirely different and markedly divergent strategic situation. They had fought in larger numbers, refused the oath of fidelity to their new overlords, and in the immediate peace were viewed by the British as likely insurgents. Deemed a disloyal threat, the undesirable Acadians were forcibly removed during the “Great Expulsion,” leading to one of the most altogether strange and scandalous side stories of colonialism, courtesy of the mosquitoes basking in the infernos of Guyana.

  After bouncing around the Americas from Charleston to the inhospitable Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, a sizable contingent of refugee Acadians were permitted by Spain to settle in Louisiana, where they remain today. With time and isolation, these Acadians evolved and fostered the modern-day Cajun culture. The word itself morphed from “Acadian” into “Cajun.” A smaller group of Acadians, however, was sent to colonize a new French settlement in Guyana on the northern coast of South America in 1763. This colony is commonly known as Devil’s Island.

  France was disheartened with the territorial results of the Seven Years’ War. Of tangible flags on the global map, Britain gained, Spain remained, and France was drained. It was recognized after the war that France’s inferior position in the Americas was the result of so few, if any, loyal colonial populations. British American colonists fought in relatively large numbers, as did Spain’s Caribbean defenders. With the loss of Canada, France’s remaining Caribbean populations consisted largely of slaves that were rightly presumed to be politically unreliable at best, and at worst spitefully rebellious. These colonies, largely devoid of French nationals, were also easy prey for the British in the next hand of colonial warfare just as they had been during the Seven Years’ War. They needed to be protected by a local source of robustly seasoned French settlers. Guyana was projected to be this bastion, a tropical reincarnation of Quebec or, even better, a rebirth of Canada’s Acadia itself.

  Although France established a small outpost in Guyana in 1664, the colony had, it was reported, “made little progress since its inception and, consisting of an inert group of derelict colonists, has generally been a curse to the King.” At the end of the Seven Years’ War, the population consisted of 575 French and roughly 7,000 free and enslaved Africans, all living at the settlement of Cayenne. The wallowing colony was a mosquito utopia consisting of brackish tidal marshes and manatee-hosting mangroves. A preliminary French survey in 1763 candidly testified that for the current inhabitants, “their primary business is to find pleasures, and if they have any disquietude it is for the lack of them.” In its current state, Guyana was deemed an orphaned backwater colony. Comically, the only colonists outside of Cayenne—a handful of Jesuit priests and a few indigenous and African converts—were cloistered thirty-five miles away in a church mission at Kourou.

  With promises of land, bountiful harvests of sugar and tobacco procured by slaves, and the riches of El Dorado, 12,500 settlers set out for Kourou. These dreamers mostly came from the war-torn regions of France and Belgium, with smaller numbers of Acadians, Canadiens, and Irish. Half were under the age of twenty, and single male and female settlers were shrewdly urged to marry local indigenous pe
oples to get the population up and running as quickly as possible. On Christmas Day 1763, the first settlers disembarked with their utopian visions of paradise. They were to be the vanguard of a mighty, seasoned French colonial population that could tackle the British and avenge the French humiliation of the Seven Years’ War.

  Boatloads of settlers poured into Kourou along with the first shipment of supplies. While this delivery did not include a printing press, its contents were just as bizarre as those at Darien. Given that Canada was now in British hands, French authorities saw an opportunity to unload crates of ice skates, woolen toque hats, and other essential, everyday Canadian-closet winter items on the unsuspecting tropical settlers at Kourou. Classic colonial bumbling. To accommodate the influx of new arrivals, and their ice hockey gear, they were settled on an offshore island already bearing the name Devil’s Island. Kourou quickly descended into a hellish paradise lost. In June 1764, the island lived up to its name and to the evil gods of the ancients, as the mosquito conjured up one of history’s deadliest three-headed Cerberus epidemics—yellow fever, dengue, and malaria—killing 11,000 settlers (90%) within a year.