The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

  Her convincing role and performance as a war-winning battlefield weapon, steering surrender by terrorizing and subverting unseasoned British soldiers across the southern colonies, has been largely and speciously snubbed or overlooked. She was not a sideline spectator to the rumbling volleys of revolution that sounded across the swamps, valleys, river basins, and pitches of her own backyard. The mosquito, perhaps more than anything else, provided the Americans with a game-changing home-field advantage and would help to forge a nation. General Anopheles has been denied her praiseworthy and rightful place in the annals of American history.

  In his detailed investigation Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry, Peter McCandless dissects the role of mosquitoes in attaining American independence, in a meticulous chapter titled “Revolutionary Fever.” He argues that “reading the evidence in contemporary accounts, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the biggest winners in the Southern campaigns were the microbes and the mosquitoes that transported so many of them. . . . In terms of the outcome of the war, mosquito bites may have done more than partisan bullets to ensure an American victory.” The mosquito consumed British forces and ultimately decided the fate of the revolution and, by extension, the world as we now know it.

  At the onset of hostilities, the British dominated every portfolio of war. While they were certainly struggling financially in the cash-strapped aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, the British were still in a far superior economic position to the hapless colonies. The British Navy could attack anywhere along the eastern seaboard at will, while simultaneously blockading the colonies’ shipments of resources, starving out their war effort and will to fight. The British captured the major colonial ports of Boston at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775 and New York in 1776, tightening the noose of the naval blockade. The British military was battle-hardened, trained, and equipped with modern weaponry and military kit, and it was the most proven and potent fighting force on the planet. They complemented their formidable national contingent by contracting 30,000 German Hessians as mercenaries, including Sleepy Hollow’s legendary Headless Horseman, a practice demonized in the Declaration of Independence. “He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries,” decried Jefferson, “to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.” The Americans had few, if any, of these benefits.

  On the short list, they lacked a trained professional army, modern weaponry, artillery, industry to make these weapons of war or anything else for that matter, long-term financial backing, allies, and, most importantly, a blue-water navy to break the British blockade and begin importing these and other indispensable requirements of war. Although unaware at the outbreak of hostilities, they eventually acquired a war-winning mercenary army of their own, led by General Anopheles. Her battlefield appearance and influence, however, was not immediate. She doesn’t deserve a proper slap on the back until she starts biting into British blood. The mosquito finally took her rightful place on center stage only after the British shifted their supreme strategy to the mosquito-teeming southern colonies in 1780—a full five years into the conflict.

  At the outset of the war, given these severe military shortcomings and impediments, the best Washington could do was run. If he could keep his Continental Army afloat and avoid decisive pitched battles, the revolution would survive until help, either increased American participation or French assistance—or as it turned out, both—arrived. Two and a half years into the war, in October 1777 at Saratoga, the Americans, using French-supplied weapons, scored their first decisive victory. The setting for the battlegrounds at Saratoga, astride the Hudson River in the interior of New York, neutralized British naval supremacy, arming the Americans with a significant tactical advantage. Denied reinforcements, outnumbered nearly three-to-one, and surrounded, General John Burgoyne understood the futility of his position and surrendered. The Americans, led by General Horatio Gates and a fired-up, heroic Benedict Arnold, captured or killed 7,500 British troops against only 100 losses of their own. This show of force was enough to convince the French that the Americans had a fighting chance.

  France officially joined the American cause in 1778, with Spain aligning the following year, followed by the Netherlands a year later. It is doubtful that the Americans would have won the war without this timely French intervention. The French Navy broke the blockade, and 12,000 professional French soldiers and 32,000 sailors participated in the final campaigns of the war. The shockingly young, dazzlingly brilliant, and bilingual French general Marquis de Lafayette, a close friend and confidant of Washington, coordinated the combined Franco-American forces along with his comrade Count Rochambeau. Lafayette had joined the Continental Army independently prior to official French involvement. He was commissioned as a major general by the Continental Congress in 1777 at the age of nineteen. By 1780, the battlefields were resonating with both the buzzing of mosquitoes and the vernacular of his French comrades.

  The decision of France (and Spain and the Netherlands) to enter the conflict, however, turned the revolution into a second global serving of the Seven Years’ War as engagements spread to Europe, the Caribbean, and India. This benefited the Franco-American alliance, as Britain was drawn into a larger war with more complex strategic imperial considerations. Troop commitments were now required elsewhere, and Britain could not replace losses as easily or as quickly as the Americans. British forces were spread thinly across the empire from Bournemouth and Bengal to Barbados and the Bahamas to Boston. The British fielded no more than 60,000 army personnel during the entire revolution, making the losses sustained at Saratoga, and the ensuing casualties inflicted by mosquitoes in the southern colonies and Nicaragua, even more impactful.

  As the war went viral across the globe, British forces in the Caribbean were, as usual, cut to pieces by mosquito-borne disease. The mosquito-tutored lessons so callously taught and horrifically learned at Cartagena in 1741 and Havana in 1762 apparently were all but forgotten or blithely ignored. In 1780, a British fleet under twenty-two-year-old Captain Horatio Nelson sailed to upend the Spanish domain on the Mosquito Coast, and to establish naval bases on a slice of Nicaragua with access to both the Caribbean and the Pacific. Nelson’s 3,000-man contingent opened a gift-wrapped disaster: yellow fever, malaria, and dengue. When the retreat was finally sounded after six miserable months, only 500 survivors stumbled out of the jungle. In manpower, this was the single costliest military action of the entire Revolutionary War. “Nicaragua’s mosquitoes killed more British soldiers,” stresses J. R. McNeill, “than the Continental Army did at the battles of Bunker Hill, Long Island, White Plains, Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, King’s Mountain, Cowpens, and Guilford Courthouse combined. In political terms, however, the siege at Yorktown fifteen months later cost far more.”

  Mosquito-borne disease, though, was nothing new to Horatio Nelson. He had first contracted malaria on service in India in 1776. While Nelson cheated malarial death again four years later during his mosquito-directed nightmare in Nicaragua, he never fully recovered and was haunted by countless serious relapses and reinfections for the remainder of his life. He lived long enough, however, to gain immortality on his flagship, HMS Victory, at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 when his outnumbered fleet annihilated a combined Franco-Spanish flotilla during the Napoleonic Wars. Nelson was killed in the engagement, but his unconventional tactics and unexpected victory reconfirmed and elevated Britain’s command of the seas.

  As the final British mosquito-bitten southern campaign commenced in the colonies in 1780, Nelson and his crew were being devoured by a mosquito-sprung trap in the wilds of Nicaragua. They were quite literally shredded to pieces. While the historical spotlight was focused north on the events transpiring in the American colonies, in Nicaragua the British suffered the single worst lo
ss of any belligerent or nation during the revolution, which by now was a global war. During Nelson’s Nicaraguan fiasco, nearly 85% of his force succumbed to dengue, yellow fever, and malaria, dwarfing all other casualty figures for the entire conflict, fettering available British manpower.

  Britain’s siphoning of troops to her Caribbean commitments, including Nelson’s fateful and costly campaign in Nicaragua, came at the expense of the American theater. By 1780, when the British placed their largest force yet of 9,000 men into South Carolina (which annually spawned twelve generations of mosquitoes), over 12,000 British troops had already perished of mosquito-borne disease during His Majesty’s Caribbean adventures to secure economic cash-crop colonies. Ships bound for the West Indies lost upwards of 25% of their human cargo before docking at their destination. British replacements could not be recruited or trained fast enough to replenish these losses. Mercenary mosquitoes continuously punched death tickets for unseasoned British reinforcements in both the Caribbean and during the final southern campaign in America.

  By 1779, both sides had achieved victories in the American colonies, and so the war marched on. Britain controlled the major ports and key cities. The Americans roamed the countryside, and the newly appointed British commander in chief, General Henry Clinton, could not lure Washington into major engagements. Frustrated by the lack of success in the northern campaigns and by Washington’s refusal to commit to a final all-or-nothing showdown, Clinton endorsed a new southern strategy to end the war, which for fiscal reasons was becoming increasingly unpopular in Britain. The war for America was supplementing an already staggering and suffocating debt accrued before and during the Seven Years’ War.

  A change from northern to southern scenery to silence these demurring British voices by finally crushing the rebellion in one swift stroke was just what Clinton ordered. It was also believed, based upon spurious reports from American exiles or spies in London, that the rice plantation slave colonies of Georgia and the Carolinas, being the youngest colonies with more recent British arrivals, housed a large population of Loyalists who at the sight of British liberators would flock to the Union Jack and take up arms in aid of the mother country. Clinton hoped this would alleviate British manpower concerns.

  The British captured the port of Savannah in 1778. The annual wastage rate from mosquito-borne disease at Savannah’s defensive garrison was 30%. Reports indicate sickness “beyond anything you can conceive . . . our suffering from sickness in this vile climate is terrible and continuous in a very great degree.” Savannah’s suffering was soon replicated at Charleston, the linchpin of Clinton’s southern strategy. A previous attempt to take this “key to the south” in 1776 was aborted by Clinton, who reasoned, “I had the mortification to see the sultry, unhealthy season approaching us with hasty strides, when all thoughts of military operations in the Carolinas must be given up.” In May 1780, however, as the first documented outbreak of dengue in the colonies unfurled in Philadelphia, the British stayed the course and quickly captured the mosquito bastion, Charleston.*

  Expecting an attack on New York from General Washington, Clinton returned to the prized port city, leaving his second-in-command, General Charles Cornwallis, to direct the 9,000 troops of the southern regiments. Prior to the revolution, the devastating disease environment of the southern colonies was no secret. Cornwallis immediately recognized this danger, reporting to Clinton in August that “the climate is so bad within one hundred miles of the coast, from the end of June to the middle of October, that troops could not be stationed during the period without a certainty of their being rendered useless for some time for military service, if not entirely lost.” Cornwallis shrewdly moved his army into the interior to show a strong British presence to rally Loyalists, to secure British forward operating bases and outposts, and, of course, to abstain from the deathly hallows of Charleston during peak mosquito season. Cornwallis was fully aware of Charleston’s reputation as a wretched hive of mosquito scum and villainy.

  His movements inland from Charleston initiated a series of battles with American forces under Generals Gates and Greene, which for the most part favored the British. As Greene put it, “We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again.” Greene received an intelligence report painting British forces as “the emaciated picture of disease.” Fighting the American rebels was one thing, fighting the marauding armies of mercenary mosquitoes was quite another. A frustrated Cornwallis repeatedly, and quite fruitlessly, relocated his forces to avoid “miasmic diseases” during his southern campaign.

  Subverted and thwarted by General Anopheles at every turn, Cornwallis continued to move his forces, fleeing not from the Americans but from mosquito-borne disease. He zigzagged across the Carolinas in hopes of finding respite at locations that were promised by resident Loyalists to be healthy. “And if that will not keep us from falling sick,” reported Cornwallis, “I shall despair.” These bivouacs, reasoned the British commander, had “the appearance of being healthy, but it proved so much the contrary and sickness came on so rapidly.” Establishing his ailing army at Camden, Cornwallis noted that 40% of his troops were crippled by “fevers and agues and rendered unfit for service.” After scattering Gates’s army at Camden in mid-August, Cornwallis appealed to Clinton, “Our sickness is very great, and truly alarming.” Malaria, yellow fever, and dengue gnawed at British manpower and morale and would continue to erode Cornwallis’s ability to fight. Thomas Paine portrayed the revolution as “the times that try men’s souls.” In this case, the mosquito devoured and collected British souls.

  The exhaustive research of McCandless reveals, “The most commonly used terms in the British correspondence relating to the soldiers’ sickness are ‘intermittents,’ ‘agues and fevers,’ ‘malignant fevers,’ ‘putrid fevers,’ and ‘bilious fevers,’ all of which point to malaria and possibly yellow fever and dengue.” Frequent references were also made to “break-bone fever,” a nickname for dengue, and to the telltale signs of yellow fever. British reports from 1778 noted, “The French have brought the Yellow Fever.” Given the high mortality rates, it is doubtful that vivax and even falciparum malaria, both of which made the rounds, could have gone it alone. It is worth mentioning here that American soldiers also suffered from these same mosquito-borne diseases during the southern campaign. The same phrases are echoed in the American correspondences as well. But, and this is the big but, seeing as the Americans were seasoned and somewhat shielded, they did not contract, or die from, mosquito-borne diseases at the same rate as their unseasoned British counterparts. As a result, the Americans retained their punching power and combat effectiveness.

  By the fall of 1780, Cornwallis, who was himself fighting a nasty bout of “the ague,” reported that his army was “nearly ruined” by malaria, and numerous units were “so totally demolished by sickness [and] will not be fit for actual service for some months.” Following his pyrrhic victory over Greene’s larger American force at Guilford Court House in the spring of 1781, Cornwallis moved his shrinking army to Wilmington on the coast of North Carolina. Despite advice from seasoned locals to the contrary, he soon realized no location was safe from the clutches of mosquito-borne disease. “They say go 40 or 50 miles farther and you will be healthy,” complained Cornwallis. “It was the same language before Camden. There is no trusting to such experiments.” It was time to flee the strangling grip of mosquito-borne disease and head north to shelter from her impending swarm.

  With mosquito season approaching, Cornwallis realized that he did not have enough men to hold the interior and, much to his dismay, the anticipated recruitment of throngs of Loyalists never materialized. Many southerners may well have internally harbored pro-British political views, but they simply refused to outwardly commit to any side so long as the outcome of the war hung in the balance. They, like nearly 40% of all colonists, sat on the fence or remained neutral, wanting simply to be left alone. At its peak, roughly 40% of colonists supported the revolution, while 20%
rallied to their British king. In this instance, however, General Anopheles was a staunch revolutionary.

  Having been denied his decisive victory in the Carolinas, and with malaria season bearing down, Cornwallis staffed a few vital garrisons, including Charleston, then marched the bulk of his army north toward Jamestown “to preserve the troops, from the fatal sickness, which so nearly ruined the army last autumn.” Although not satisfied, he was prepared to consolidate with other British columns, sit out the mosquito season in the supposed safety of Virginia, and resume campaigning in the late fall. Lafayette, however, had different plans.

  In Virginia, the French general played a productive and crafty game of Tom and Jerry–style cat and mouse with Cornwallis, by continuously harassing British forces without committing to pitched confrontations. Luring the British into brief skirmishes, Lafayette denied them the rest they desperately sought. During this war game of hide-and-seek, like Amherst before him, Cornwallis tried his hand at biological warfare, substituting slaves for blankets. He raided the home of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, nabbing thirty slaves to infect with smallpox and use as biological weapons. Jefferson commended the plan, as it “would have done right, but it was done to consign them to the inevitable death from smallpox and putrid fever.” Like Amherst, Cornwallis also failed to deliver his anticipated plague of pestilence. British attempts at biological warfare were now an unconvincing 0 and 2.

  Despite Cornwallis’s objections and trepidations concerning the health of his troops, Clinton ordered him to find a suitable encampment on the Chesapeake Bay, from where his army could be summoned quickly to New York. Clinton still clung to the idea of an inevitable Franco-American assault on the strategic port city and was willing to risk Cornwallis’s soldiers to ensure its defense. Cornwallis repeatedly questioned the judgment of his superior officer. “I submit to your Excellency’s consideration whether it is worth while to hold a sickly defensive post in this bay.” He reported to Clinton that his current position “only gives us some acres of an unhealthy swamp” and that he already had “many sick.” Cornwallis nevertheless followed his orders, knowing full well that, as McCandless calculates, “Clinton’s southern strategy seriously undermined the health of his forces and may have cost the British the war.”