The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

  On August 1, 1781, Cornwallis encamped his army among the rice fields and tidewater estuaries between the James and York Rivers at an insignificant hamlet called Yorktown. Home to no more than 2,000 people, Yorktown was only fifteen miles from Jamestown, as the mosquito flies. The creation of America started by settler mosquitoes at Jamestown would be completed by their more lethal country-born heirs at Yorktown. As the British, Americans, and French mustered their troops, armies of salivating mercenary mosquitoes collected in a gathering swarm in the verdant marshes surrounding Yorktown. It was both prime mosquito country and the right time of year for Washington’s Anopheles ally to attack. And attack she did, unleashing a storm of malaria upon her British guests and changing the course of history.

  General Clinton was stunned when the French fleet arrived at Yorktown in early September and not New York as expected. Learning of this French decision, Washington, in consultation with Rochambeau, was forced “to give up all idea of attacking New York” and hurried his combined Franco-American force south to Yorktown. Washington’s column arrived in late September, joining Lafayette’s blocking force for over 17,000 men positioned on the high ground surrounding Yorktown. “Cornwallis now had the worst of both worlds,” comments McNeill. “His army was entrenched on the coast, at maximum risk to malaria, yet the Royal Navy could not get through to relieve him.” Needing a British surrender before the end of the mosquito season and the onset of winter, on September 28, Generals Washington, Rochambeau, Lafayette, and Anopheles orchestrated a skilled and hasty siege by land and sea (and air).

  Realizing his inferior position, and with his men cowering before malaria, a desperate Cornwallis again tried his hand at biological warfare. He fruitlessly released smallpox-infected slaves into the Franco-American lines. Although Edward Jenner would not perfect smallpox vaccination until 1796, risky immunization techniques had been practiced since the 1720s. Beginning in 1777, Washington insisted that his soldiers receive the perilous inoculation. Some certainly died, but the rest of his army acquired herd immunity against smallpox. Cornwallis’s second failed effort to culture a premeditated smallpox epidemic brought British attempts at biological weaponry to a perfect 0 and 3.

  A desperate Cornwallis pleaded to Clinton for reinforcements, relief, and quinine. “This place is in no state of defense . . . if relief does not come soon you must prepare to hear the worst . . . medicines are wanted.” While the Franco-American force tightened its siege, the mosquito continued its unrelenting attack on the trapped British at Yorktown. David Petriello’s clinching remarks on Clinton’s ill-fated southern strategy sealed by the mosquito-fenced and malaria-fetid position of Cornwallis at Yorktown determine that “the English had been chased from the South not by the guns of the Patriots but by the proboscis of the Anopheles mosquito.”

  At the outset of the siege of Yorktown on September 28, Cornwallis commanded 8,700 men. By the time of his official surrender on October 19, he had 3,200 men (37%) fit for duty. Given that British casualties from combat were no more than 200 killed and 400 wounded, over half of his total force was too sick to fight. The British Army at Yorktown had been eaten alive by malarious mosquitoes. Reporting to Clinton the day after his surrender, Cornwallis credited his defeat and final capitulation not to the enemy but to malaria: “I have the mortification to inform your Excellency that I have been forced to give up the post. . . . The troops being much weakened by sickness. . . . Our numbers had been diminished by the Enemy’s fire, but particularly by Sickness. . . . Our force diminished daily by sickness . . . to little more than 3,200 rank & file fit for duty.” The commander of the Hessian mercenaries, holed up in Yorktown with Cornwallis, reported two days before the surrender that the British were “nearly all plagued with fever. The army melted away . . . among whom not a thousand men could be called healthy.” The mosquito had chased the British from the southern battlefields of revolution and won the long and bloody struggle for American liberty.

  J. R. McNeill emphasizes that “Yorktown and its mosquitoes ended British hopes and decided the American war.” He closes his chapter “Revolutionary Mosquitoes” saluting the tiny female General Anopheles, who “stands tall among the founding mothers of the United States.” Her American victory not only redirected the flight path of history and the heart of Western civilization away from Britain toward the United States; it also generated immediate shock waves with global reverberations.

  The British outpost of Australia, for example, was a by-product of both Yorktown and the mosquito. In the decades preceding the revolution, the American colonies received an annual import of 2,000 British convicts. In total, approximately 60,000 British convicts were dumped in the colonies. With American independence, British Parliament was forced to consider an alternative station to unload a swelling number of domestic felons. The fledgling colony of the Gambia was originally considered, but it was deemed that exile to Africa amounted to nothing more than a death sentence. Within one year of arrival, 80% of the British diaspora perished from mosquito-borne disease. This defeated the dual purpose of a penal colony: to punish and rid the mother country of criminals, while using these banished British subjects as the vanguard of colonization. If convicts could not survive, how could these colonies eventually thrive? The first 1,336 British convicts arrived at the substitute destination of Botany Bay (Sydney) in January 1788, and British Australia was born.

  Like its Commonwealth cousin of Australia, British Canada was also conceived by the mosquito-manipulated outcome of the American Revolution. While Canada remained a British colony after the revolution, it was the influx of postrevolutionary American Loyalists that swung the demographic profile and prevailing culture from French to British. By 1800, over 90,000 Loyalists landed in Canada, fleeing the United States to uphold personal political loyalties, to escape persecution, or as asylum seekers from yellow fever epidemics that consumed the coastal states between 1793 and 1805. Twenty-five years after the mosquito helped secure American autonomy, British Canadians outnumbered French Canadians by a ratio of ten-to-one.

  Retaining Canada, however, was the only solace for the British at the signing of the Treaty of Paris in September 1783, which officially ended what had become not just America’s war of independence but also a global conflict. British Florida was handed over to Spain, and France acquired Senegal and Tobago. All British lands east of the Mississippi River between Florida and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River were surrendered, marking the national boundaries of the new, and internationally recognized, country of the United States of America. With the Proclamation Line now null and void, America more than doubled in size. Triggered by the American Revolution, a wave of rebellions against European rule swept the Americas. Decided by the mosquito’s dealings in yellow fever and malaria, these colonial insurrections and conflicts, while determining the fate of freedom for numerous nations, also inadvertently augmented the westward-tilting landmass of the United States.

  While the mosquito had helped Generals George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette secure American independence, she had not yet completed the finishing touches on her masterpiece designs of American Manifest Destiny and territorial annexation. General Anopheles and her compatriot General Aedes, as we have seen, are fickle friends and allies. The birth of the United States came at the expense of the mosquito-bitten British. American westward expansion into Louisiana Territory, and the subsequent escapades of Lewis and Clark, resulted from the mosquito’s merciless attacks on Napoleon’s unseasoned French troops struggling to quell their own insurgency in Haiti within the larger French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.

  Just as American mosquitoes had aligned with and respected Washington’s mutineers, Haitian freedom-fighting mosquitoes reinforced the slave revolt and protracted rebellion led by Toussaint Louverture against draconian French rule. She also buttressed seasoned revolutionaries during the budding wars of liberation against Spanish authority across South and Central America driven by
the dazzling Simon Bolivar. “The separation of America from the Spanish Monarchy resembles the state of the Roman Empire,” Bolivar proclaimed in 1819, “when that enormous structure fell to pieces in the midst of the ancient world.” Mirroring her ruin of the Roman Empire 1,500 years earlier, the mosquito also gnawed the mighty Spanish-American Empire into autonomous, independent pieces. “Historians for generations have brilliantly illuminated this age of revolution. . . . These were stirring events, the stuff of political history, replete with heroism and drama, providing stages for characters such as George Washington, Toussaint Louverture, and Simon Bolivar,” acknowledges J. R. McNeill. “One thing that has escaped their spotlight is the role of mosquitoes in making the revolutions victorious.” Beginning with the American Revolution, across crumbling European colonial empires the mosquito apportioned and dispensed liberty and death. Both consummations delivered a new birth of freedom.

  CHAPTER 13

  Mercenary Mosquitoes: Wars of Liberation and the Making of the Americas

  In the spring of 1803, President Thomas Jefferson commissioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to lead the Corps of Discovery Expedition to explore and map the newly acquired Louisiana Territory. It was imperative that the thirty-four resourceful trailblazers of this cross-country excursion travel light—only indispensable gear and equipment suited for survival in the exotic, undiscovered wilderness of the American West. While carefully choosing and bundling the bare necessities, the voyagers made sure to pack 3,500 doses of quinine bark, a half pound of opium, over 600 mercury pills they nicknamed “Thunder Clappers,” liquid mercury, and penile syringes, among other essential supplies. Swallowing mercury or injecting it into the urethra did not cure their dysentery, gonorrhea, or syphilis, or fend off Smokey Bear. The mercury-laden feces and mercury dribbles they left behind, however, have enabled modern researchers to meticulously pinpoint the locations and track the exact route of the Sacagawea-led expedition. “Despite dysentery, sexually transmitted diseases, snake bites, and the occasional bear attack,” writes Petriello, “the expedition returned relatively unscathed” after a successful trek of more than two years.

  The main goal of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, as ordered by Jefferson, was to find “the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent, for the purpose of commerce.” Among the secondary objectives was the establishment of trade relations with indigenous peoples and an examination of the flora and fauna to price economic potential. In short, its purpose was to generally figure out what the hell Jefferson had just bought from Napoleon, who needed a quick injection of capital to help fund and front his unfinished European campaign.

  The American mosquito-brokered purchase of the Louisiana Territory was a by-product of both the larger international affairs surrounding the tumultuous and confused French Revolution and Napoleon’s subsequent quest to restore the French Empire in the Americas, tarnished by the Seven Years’ War, to its former glory. Within this upheaval, the fledgling American nation suffered through one of the worst outbreaks of disease in its history. French colonial refugees fleeing a vicious slave revolt against French rule in Haiti swamped Philadelphia in yellow fever. As we will see, in the wake of the American Revolution, the mosquito connected four seemingly unrelated events over the span of fourteen years: the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, the rebellion launched in Haiti in 1791 led by Toussaint Louverture, followed by the appalling 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, and, finally, the completion of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.

  Throughout this period, from France to the far reaches of the Americas, the mosquito spliced and plaited a tangled web of infamous and influential historical episodes. She tore at the heart of colonial empires by encouraging revolution, pressed US Manifest Destiny west, and otherwise toppled the balance of power in the Americas. The mosquito turned the darker and more sinister sides of the Columbian Exchange against its own European creators and custodians by unleashing a torrent of yellow fever and malaria against unseasoned imperial soldiers attempting to subdue slave revolts and country-born independence movements in their American colonies. They were the inadvertent biological architects of their own imperial demise. In the process, the mosquito reconfigured the map of what was by now a not-so-new or small world after all. The economic, political, and philosophical foundations of revolution fermented in colonial America, advocated by General Anopheles, roused the miserable and bedraggled subjects of France to shrug off the yoke of subordination fastened by an oppressive and supercilious monarchy.

  Stirred by the statutes of liberty carved by their American compatriots, the French steered their own revolution against the tyranny of King Louis XVI and his bride, Marie Antoinette, initiated by the celebrated Storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. Although the French monarchs were put to the guillotine in 1793, the revolution gained momentum and spread to French colonies. In 1799, the genius thirty-year-old general Napoleon Bonaparte executed a bloodless coup against the leaders of his own republican revolutionary government. Napoleon established himself as the head of a more authoritarian regime, effectively ending the French Revolution. Craving absolute rule, in 1804 he colluded for his election as emperor of France in an imperial system based on the Roman Empire. His lust for power and war ignited the Napoleonic Wars, the largest European and international conflict yet witnessed. Napoleon’s bid for global domination and a resurrected French Empire in the Americas, including frontier interests and stakes in the United States, would be devoured by Haitian mosquitoes.

  France had acquired Haiti, the western portion of the island of Hispaniola, in 1697 during the colonial wars preceding the Seven Years’ War. At the onset of the slave revolt in 1791, Haiti (called Saint-Domingue until the expulsion of the French) had 8,000 plantations and produced half of the world’s coffee. It was also a leading exporter of sugar, cotton, tobacco, cocoa, and indigo, which was used as a posh purple-blue fabric dye. The petite island colony accounted for an astounding 35% of France’s total mercantilist economic empire. Predictably, it was also the leading destination for African slaves (and imported mosquitoes), with 30,000 arriving annually. By 1790, Haiti’s half a million slaves, two-thirds of which were born and seasoned in Africa, made up 90% of the total population. Most African-born Haitian slaves arrived preseasoned to malaria and yellow fever.

  In August 1791, over 100,000 slaves revolted against a handful of brutally repressive and harsh French plantation owners. A former slave turned revolutionary summed up the horrors underpinning the causes of the rebellion:

  Have they not hung up men with heads downwards, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat shit? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man-eating dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?

  Mark Twain cynically remarked, “There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.” The same ideals championed by the coffee-fueled enlightenment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that had sparked the American and French Revolutions also triggered the Haitian War of Independence against their French masters. Initially, the violence was sporadic, confused, and incoherent. Coalitions were vague and continuously reshuffled, and alliances shifted across battlefields. Widespread atrocities, however, were committed by all factions.

  While this chaotic and muddled uprising in Haiti gained momentum, the widening of a general European war united a coalition against Napoleon’s France that included (at various times) Rus
sia, Austria, Prussia, Portugal, the Dutch Republic, and Britain, among other, smaller nations or princely states. The French Revolution went global and spread to the Caribbean. Britain viewed the slave rebellion in Haiti as a dangerous inspiration for slaves in its own Caribbean colonies. Fearing a domino effect of slave revolts, the British intervened in 1793. Already at war with France, the British aimed to both quell the insurrection and capture the undersize but exceedingly lucrative French colony.

  Unseasoned British troops sent to Haiti, relates J. R. McNeill, “died with astonishing quickness, seemingly disembarking from ships straight to their graves.” The disease-bitten British stayed on in Haiti for five years, accomplishing very little aside from feeding mosquitoes and dying in droves. “The symptoms as they appeared,” wrote a British army surgeon in 1796, “were prostration of strength; heavy, sometimes acute pain of the forehead; a severe pain of the loins, joints, and extremities; a glazy appearance of, with a bloody suffusion of the eye; nausea or vomiting of bilious, sometimes offensive black matter, not unlike coffee grounds.” Of the roughly 23,000 British troops deployed to Haiti, 15,000, or 65%, died of yellow fever and malaria. A British survivor later recalled that “death presented itself under every form an unlimited imagination could invent, some died raving Mad. The putridity of the disorder at last arose to such a height that hundreds almost were absolutely drowned in their own Blood, bursting from them at every pore.” In 1798, the mosquito chased the once mighty and now aching British Army from Haiti.