Despite this nightmare, the colony remained a French “curse to the King,” as no one else wanted it or would dare take it. Lingering on as an orphan of imperialism, it was put to good use as a fleeting penal colony during the French Revolution, caging political dissenters and other radical troublemakers. A full-scale, multisite penal colony opened in 1852. Devil’s Island was converted into a brutal French version of Alcatraz. Convict mortality rates from barbaric treatment, starvation, and insidious mosquito-borne disease reached upwards of 75%. Devil’s Island did not close its doors until 1953.* Kourou, and much of the former penal colony, is now home to the European Space Agency’s spaceport and launch site. This original French, Darien-like disaster in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, however, further crippled an already bankrupt French economy. The silver lining, perhaps, was that Britain’s economy was even more unhealthy.
The Seven Years’ War and the mosquito had consumed the British fighting spirit and the treasury. At the onset of Pontiac’s Rebellion in the shadows of European peace, General Jeffery Amherst summed up his military position: “A vast diminution for a regiment . . . since the regiment came from the Havana, and some of the officers as well as the men have yet frequent relapses of their disorder.” Havana’s guerrilla mosquitoes influenced events far beyond their own tropical dining halls. They helped chart a world-altering collision course between Britain and her colonies, headed straight for revolution. “As Amherst well knew,” acknowledges Fred Anderson in his 900-page tour-de-force account of the conflict, Crucible of War, “the measures he could take—appealing to the provinces for militiamen or drafting invalids from the Havana Regiments to replace soldiers in garrisons, freeing what healthy men he could find to aid in the relief of Fort Pitt or Detroit—were only stopgaps, and at most they could buy time.” The British could not afford time.
Caribbean mosquitoes had helped suck the British dry of both money and manpower, and what Anderson refers to as “gruesome losses to disease at the end of the war.” Of the 185,000 men deployed to the Caribbean during the Seven Years War, 134,000, or 72%, were, according to government records, “lost to disease and desertion.” The war had also doubled the British debt from 70 million to 140 million pounds (today’s equivalent of over $20 trillion). The interest alone consumed half the annual government tax revenue. The British response to the rebellion was as much a penny-pinching strategy as it was a reactionary solution to appease Pontiac and his warring parties after smallpox blankets failed in their macabre mission.
In October 1763, with Pontiac’s coalition dominating the battlefield, the Royal Proclamation took effect, prohibiting colonial settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. This middle ground, the lands west of the Proclamation Line, to the Mississippi River and Spanish-held Louisiana Territory, was legally and exclusively reserved for “the occupancy and use of the Indians.” The entrenched hatred the colonists had for indigenous peoples would surely drag Britain into a parade of never-ending, futile, and expensive conflicts on the borderlands, wars that the British could ill afford. The Proclamation Line, which was as much a cost-saving measure as anything else, cleaved a divide between colonists and indigenes with the intention of restoring peace on the western frontier. Only Americans styled (and still do) the Seven Years’ War by a distinguishing name, the French and Indian War, that reflects their hostility toward the perceived indigenous obstruction to their own heaven-ordained westward expansion, recloaked in the mid-nineteenth century as Manifest Destiny. Given this American colonial rancor, with the ratification of the financially pressured Royal Proclamation, Pontiac was appeased and the colonists were punished.
Many American colonists were outraged by this tyrannical betrayal. The country-born population was booming, with eyes trained west, and immigrants were still sailing for land, but the only avenues for expansion were now legally restricted. Colonial militiamen, or provincials, had fought alongside the British Redcoats in the Caribbean and North American campaigns of the Seven Years’ War, with many lives frittered away or fed to the mosquito by British arrogance and hubris. The colonies aided in a British victory yet were denied these former French lands on their western frontier as a spoil of war. To add insult to injury, they were expected to pay for the patrolling and protection of the Proclamation Line. The annual cost of colonial security was roughly 220,000 pounds, and Britain expected the colonists to shoulder some of the financial burden for their own defense. They recouped these expenditures through a series of now famous taxes and tariffs from the Sugar Act of 1764 to the Intolerable Acts a decade later. In hard currency, however, the taxes themselves were not really an issue.
The American colonists paid the least amount of tax of anyone in the British Empire, ten times less than the average Englishman.* When combined, the supplementary tolls and tariffs imposed on the colonies in the decade prior to the revolution raised taxes by an average of only 2%. Taxation without democratic representation in British Parliament, however, was an issue. William Pitt, the influential leader of the House of Commons, was aware of the dangers of this mounting debt: “And when we consider that such immense issues of money, out measuring any experiment of past time, are to be supplied by new loans, heaped upon a debt of eighty millions, who will answer for the consequence, or insure us from the fate of the decayed states of antiquity?” The British themselves would have to answer for the consequence—the loss of their lucrative American colonies.
For many colonists, the Seven Years’ War and its immediate aftermath, including Pontiac and the Royal Proclamation, was a turning point, marking the beginning of a new era of America. Colonists, along with their political assemblies, began to reevaluate their position within the empire and their connection to the mother country. If anything, these contributions fostered increased expectations for a more equal and balanced relationship with Britain. The opposite turned out to be true. As Anderson so pertinently states, “American leaders—men like Washington and Franklin, who otherwise would have liked nothing better than to pursue honor, wealth, and power within the British imperial framework—were compelled to confront these issues of sovereignty in ways that imparted new, universalistic meaning to an inherited language of rights and liberties. . . . Americans who would have been imperialists in any case became Revolutionaries.” Britain’s increasing political and financial interference in the colonies without colonial consent dominated American discourse in the decade following the passage of the Royal Proclamation. American disenchantment about their status and citizenship eventually ignited open rebellion against the authoritarian British administration of their colonies. Although neither party wanted war, revolution came anyway.
Unexpectedly, in the words of Richard Middleton, “the umbilical cord of maternal union was threatening to become a noose.” Successive and uninterrupted generations had been country-born and seasoned, not just in America but also in Cuba, Haiti, and a host of other colonies. For these populations, their lifeline no longer stretched to the mother country. Their umbilical cord was attached to their home and native land, whether that be Boston, Port-au-Prince, Philadelphia, or Havana. Many, perhaps without even realizing it, had become Americans, Cubans, and Haitians. When seasoned, this nationalism was a powerful instrument of revolution.
James Lind, physician in chief to the British Royal Navy, warned his superiors in his groundbreaking 1768 Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates, “The recent examples of the great mortality in hot climates, ought to draw the attention of all the commercial nations of Europe. . . . Unhealthy settlements require a constant supply of people, and of course drain their mother country of an incredible number.” To this he added an ominous revolutionary disclaimer: “Merchant, farmer, or soldier, thus constitutionally naturalized to the country, becomes more useful, and his services may be more depended upon there, than ten new arrived unseasoned Europeans.”*
The evolution to revolution in the American colonies was born during and in the immediate aftermath of the S
even Years’ War. “Overall, disease helped to both conquer and secure North America for the English,” contends David Petriello. “At the same time though, the British victory was achieved at a dreadful cost, both in treasure and lives . . . animosity began to fill the void. Disease was both to win and lose a continent for England.” During the Seven Years’ War, Caribbean mosquitoes helped secure British hegemony in North America. Their northern cousins breeding in the backwaters of the Carolinas and Virginia, however, would soon assure victory for the rebellious Americans.
In the wake of the Seven Years’ War, and its rearrangement of the colonial checkerboard, revolutions swept across the Americas, beginning in 1775 with George Washington and his ragtag crew of colonial civilian soldiers. J. R. McNeill’s brushstroke summary of his 2010 masterpiece book, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914, paints the scene for what follows. Mosquitoes, he proves, “underpinned the geopolitical order in the Americas until the 1770s, after which they undermined it, ushering in a new era of independent states.” McNeill strengthens this reasoning by emphasizing that “European domination came to an end between 1776 and 1825 when some of the populations of the Americas successfully rose up. . . . Revolutions in British North America, Haiti, and Spanish America each created new states, trimmed back European empires, and together ushered in a new era in Atlantic American geopolitics and world history. They all owed their success in part to yellow fever or malaria.” Seasoned American, Haitian, and South American revolutionaries fought for independence with courage and bravery. It was feverish mosquitoes, however, that granted them their freedom.
CHAPTER 12
Unalienable Bites: The American Revolution
A month after the opening salvos of the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, the newly appointed commander in chief of the Continental Army, George Washington, had a request for his political masters in the Continental Congress. He urged them to buy up as much cinchona bark and quinine powder as possible. Given the dire financial pressures of the squabbling colonial government, and the dearth of pretty much everything needed to fight a war, his total allotment was a paltry 300 pounds. General Washington was a frequent visitor to the quinine chest as he suffered from recurrent bouts (and reinfection) of malaria since first contracting the disease in 1749 at the age of seventeen.*
Luckily for the Americans, the British were also drastically short of Peruvian Spanish-supplied quinine throughout the war. In 1778, shortly before they entered the fray in support of the American cause, the Spanish cut off this supply completely. Any available stores were sent to British troops in India and the Caribbean. At the same time, the mosquito’s merciless, unrelenting strikes on unseasoned British troops lacking quinine during the final British southern campaign—launched in 1780 with the capture of Charleston, the strategic port city and mosquito sanctuary—determined the fate of the United States of America.
As J. R. McNeill colorfully contours, “The argument here is straightforward: In the American Revolution the British southern campaigns ultimately led to defeat at Yorktown in October 1781 in part because their forces were much more susceptible to malaria than were the American. . . . [T]he balance tipped because Britain’s grand strategy committed a larger proportion of the army to malarial (and yellow fever) zones.” A full 70% of the British Army that marched into this southern mosquito maelstrom in 1780 was recruited from the poorer, famished regions of Scotland and the northern counties of England, outside the malaria belt of Pip’s Fenland marshes. Those who had already served some time in the colonies had done so in the northern zone of infection and had not yet been seasoned to American malaria.
General Washington and the Continental Congress, on the other hand, had the advantage of commanding acclimated, malaria-seasoned colonial troops. American militiamen had been hardened to their surroundings during the Seven Years’ War and the turbulent decades heading toward open hostilities against their king. Washington personally recognized, albeit short of scientific affirmation or medical endorsement, that with his recurrent malarial seasonings, “I have been protected beyond all human probability or expectation.” While they did not know it at the time, this might well have been the Americans’ only advantage over the British when, after twelve years of seething resentment and discontent since the passing of the Royal Proclamation, war suddenly and unexpectedly came. The opening clash at Lexington and Concord was not sanctioned by the newly confirmed Continental Congress. Colonial politicians did not want and were not prepared for war. The Congress, the colonists it represented, and the consequent Continental Army had next to nothing and they knew it. Introducing Washington’s ill-equipped, rag-wrapped amateur militia as the underdog is an arrant understatement.
The Continental Congress was first convened in Philadelphia in the fall of 1774, prior to the outbreak of war, in response to the Boston Tea Party and the taxing Intolerable Acts. Fifty-six delegates from twelve of the thirteen colonies assembled to negotiate a unified stance of solidarity in relation to the mother country.* Essentially, it was the “All for one and one for all, united we stand, divided we fall” motto of the Three Musketeers, or Article 5, “an attack against one ally is an attack against all allies,” of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).* The central question surrounding this inaugural caucus was confrontation or compromise.
This issue was not new to 1774, for it had been discussed at length by the Sons of Liberty, a secret, loosely organized group of radicals led by Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, Benedict Arnold, and Patrick Henry. In the wake of the Stamp Act of 1765, these future insurgents met in the dank basement of Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern and Coffee House, which gained the historical reputation as the “Headquarters of the Revolution.” I like to envisage the Green Dragon as something akin to the Prancing Pony tavern from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, where scheming, shifty-eyed, cloaked and hooded colonists sip on bitter tea or coffee while sneeringly conspiring to plot revolution.
By the late seventeenth century, tea had become the preferred British and colonial beverage. Following the Townshend Acts of 1767, which imposed tariffs on numerous items, including tea, and the subsequent Tea Act sanctioned six years later, it became a patriotic American duty to shun the drink. In December 1773, shortly after the ratification of the Tea Act, a strategic yet spiteful band of the Sons of Liberty disguised only in blankets and lampblack (not in the mythical Mohawk Indian regalia commonly portrayed) heaved 342 chests containing 90,000 pounds of tea into Boston Harbor during their Tea Party. The Continental Congress legitimized this hostile act by passing a resolution “to oppose the vending of any tea sent . . . with our lives and fortunes” the following year. “Tea must be universally renounced,” barked the cantankerous John Adams to his brilliant wife, Abigail, “and I must be weaned, and the sooner the better.” The American switch to coffee, argues Antony Wild, “now became a patriotic imperative.” When Americans forswore tea, “they made up the loss with one of the principal products of the slave colonial system in the hemisphere—coffee.”
Not only was it cheaper due to its plantation proximity, coffee was also highly touted as a cure for malaria, which at the time, as we have seen, was percolating throughout the colonies, specifically in the southern zone of infection. Peddled as a wonder drug against “agues and fevers” by legitimate doctors and snake-oil salesmen alike, coffee seeped into American colonial culture, and its consumption increased dramatically. “Physicians long suspected that coffee-drinking had antimalarial properties,” confirms malaria researcher Sonia Shah in The Fever, “which seemed to explain why coffee-drinking French colonists suffered less malaria than tea-drinking English ones, and may have helped inspire a nation of American tea drinkers to switch allegiances.” Given that Americans currently consume 25% of the world’s coffee, Starbucks ought to raise a toasting glass to the tiny mosquito. “Malaria even explains how the nation of the 1773 Boston Tea Party,�
�� affirms Alex Perry in Lifeblood, “became today’s land of the latte.”
With the debate over confrontation or compromise moving from the coffee-stimulated conversations of the Green Dragon to Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia, the speeches favoring compromise carried the day. Any foolhardy notions of revolution (there were not many, nor were these taken seriously) were dismissed. The prominent opinion and guiding political principle was the attainment of equal rights as Englishmen within the British imperial framework through negotiation, including the right to send elected colonial officials to Parliament in London. When Congress was reconvened in May of 1775, this question of confrontation or compromise had already been settled by musket shot at Lexington and Concord a month earlier. Now the fundamental issues were the actual objectives and strategic aim of this armed rebellion. An unassuming British-born troublemaker who had failed at everything from rope making to tax collecting to teaching answered this question. He had immigrated to Philadelphia in 1774 under the sponsorship of Benjamin Franklin only a few months before the opening volleys of the war.
Thomas Paine published his short pamphlet “Common Sense; Addressed to the Inhabitants of America” in January 1776, and it sold 500,000 copies in its first year. It remains in print and is the all-time bestselling American-authored title. Paine, offering “nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” made a persuasive argument for independence and the creation of a democratic republic as “an asylum for mankind.” His short appeal not only caught the attention of France, it fueled colonial support for the war and ultimately ended the deliberations of the Second Continental Congress. Having prodded and provoked the lion this far, there was no turning back.
A letter to King George III proclaiming the colonies’ sovereignty, and a groundbreaking philosophical and political statement, was drafted by Jefferson, Franklin, and John Adams—the stirring words of the Declaration of Independence. A constitution, the Articles of Confederation, was ratified in 1777, officially uniting the colonies and retaining the Continental Congress as the governing body. All that was left to do was win the war, with collaboration and military service from the mosquito of course.
The Mosquito Page 29