The Mosquito
Page 32
Haiti, however, was only one operation in Britain’s larger Caribbean campaign. The British tried in vain to capture other French, Spanish, and Dutch holdings. Every expedition was met by stalwart flights of mercenary mosquitoes, ending in heaping ruins of British dead. By the time the British finally gave up in 1804 to concentrate their forces against Napoleon in continental Europe, the mosquito had killed 60,000 to 70,000 British servicemen (roughly 72%) in the Caribbean. The British were “fighting to conquer a cemetery,” says McNeill. “St. Domingue was the biggest part, but only a part, of this graveyard of the British army.” The potential of economic bounty and enterprise seemed to outshine, even eclipse, all logic of vainly funneling a persistent parade of unseasoned soldiers into the mosquito’s suffocating chamber of horrors recounted by Royal Navy lieutenant Bartholomew James. “The dreadful sickness that now prevailed in the West Indies is beyond the power of the tongue or pen to describe,” James recorded from Martinique in 1794. “The constant affecting scenes of sudden death [were] in fact dreadful to behold, and nothing was scarcely to be met but funeral processions.”
In the Caribbean, the British and their imperialist European counterparts certainly clung to philosopher and poet George Santayana’s original, and often misquoted, maxim: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” During the first wave of the British Caribbean campaign in 1793, for example, an initial dispatch from Guadeloupe affirmed, “That dreadful malady the yellow fever, which, though it had subsided when we first came to the West Indies, was now, as it were, awakened by the arrival of fresh victims.” Gluttonous tropical mosquitoes gorged on a smorgasbord of unseasoned European fodder continuously fed into her jungle furnace of disease across the Caribbean, most notably in war-ravaged Haiti. These localized epidemics, however, soon found an amenable international host audience. They spread from the Caribbean like a deathly shadow, skulking and stalking across the Americas and beyond.
The revolution in Haiti and imperial conflicts across the Caribbean expedited the movement of troops, refugees, and yellow fever across the Atlantic world. Troops and refugees fleeing these tropic thunders to Europe were escorted by mosquito-borne disease. Yellow fever stormed through the coastal Mediterranean, including southern France, before making guest appearances as far north as the Netherlands, Hungary, Austria, and the Germanic principalities of Saxony and Prussia. In Spain, 100,000 people died of the dreaded yellow fever or vómito negro between 1801 and 1804, adding to the 80,000 who had already perished from the disease during previous outbreaks. In Barcelona alone, yellow fever took the lives of 20,000 people in three months, representing 20% of the city’s population.
Having amassed enormous wealth at the expense of African plantation slaves, European imperialist powers were now reaping a transatlantic whirlwind of disease and death imported directly from their mercantilist American empires and the mosquito ecologies they themselves created. In an ironic twist of fate, or perhaps even karma if you prefer, the mosquito was now biting back at the mother countries of Europe for their reshuffling of global ecosystems during the Columbian Exchange. Their colonies in the Americas, however, were by no means passed over or pardoned from the bloodcurdling terrors of yellow fever.
Between 1793 and 1805, the disease ricocheted through the entire Western Hemisphere like a poison dart, gaining strength during one of the most intense El Niño oscillations of the millennium. Outside of the Haitian horror show, the hardest hit were Havana, Guyana, Veracruz, New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia, which was home to an epidemic every year of this twelve-year run of yellow fever.
Vómito Negro: An epidemic of the dreaded “Black Vomit,” or yellow fever, rearing its ugly head in the streets of Barcelona, Spain, 1819. (Diomedia/Wellcome Library)
Prior to the historic epidemic of 1793, Philadelphia had not seen yellow fever for thirty years. The population, therefore, was relatively unseasoned and ripe for infection. In July 1793, the Hankey, dubbed the “Ship of Death,” docked at the nation’s capital, carrying roughly 1,000 French colonial refugees fleeing Haiti. A few days later, in a brothel next to the pier in a seedy area known as Hell Town, a prowling scourge of yellow fever was let loose on Philadelphia’s unsuspecting population of 55,000. In total, 20,000 people fled the city, including most politicians and civil servants who were not already dead.
Yellow fever shut down the federal government of the United States (and the Pennsylvania state government, both of which resided in Philadelphia). President Washington endeavored to govern from his perch in Mount Vernon but, in his hurried flight, remarked, “I brought no public papers of any sort (not even the rules which have been established in these cases), along with me. Consequently, am not prepared at this place to decide points which may require a reference to papers not within my reach.” He was advised that he did not have the power to relocate the capital and convene Congress at an alternate location because that “would clearly be unconstitutional.” By late October, as mosquitoes succumbed to the onset of winter chills, the city was described by First Lady Martha Washington as having “suffered so much that it can not be got over soon by those that was in the city—almost every family has lost some of their friends—and black seems to be the general dress of the city.” The 1793 yellow fever epidemic killed 5,000 people in roughly three months, nearing 10% of the capital city’s population. To match this mortality rate, two million metropolitan New Yorkers would have to perish in a horrific modern-day equivalent outbreak, like a mutated virulent strain of West Nile. This certainly puts into perspective the cataclysmic death caused by the mosquito.
Yellow fever continued to stalk the city. During the epidemic of 1798, for example, the virus killed 3,500 in Philadelphia and another 2,500 in New York. “Yellow fever,” whispered a disheartened Thomas Jefferson, “will discourage the growth . . . of our nation. The yellow fever epidemics spelled the doom of large cities.” Although the Residence Act of 1790 endorsed the relocation of the capital to a purposefully constructed centerpiece of the country, Philadelphia had been lobbying to be that showpiece. The yellow fever epidemics beginning in 1793 ended any deliberation about the final location and hastened the construction and completion of the new capital. In 1800, Washington, DC, opened for business. Ironically, seeing as it was built at the confluence of the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers, it was an actual mosquito-toured swamp before it became a so-called political swamp. Washington, however, did not live long enough to see the architectural marvel named in his honor.
In December 1799, as 1,200 more yellow fever victims were being mourned in Philadelphia, sixty-seven-year-old George Washington died. That autumn he had suffered another bout of his reoccurring malaria, leading to a string of other complications.* By December, with his health failing, the catchall cure of bloodletting was administered. More than half of his total blood volume was drained in less than three hours! He died the following day. Napoleon ordered a ten-day period of mourning throughout France, as he circulated battle orders to crush the Haitian slave revolt and threaten the United States, the very nation that George and his own French countrymen helped to create.
Where the British had failed, Napoleon was determined to succeed in preserving the slave-produced wealth of Haiti for France. He unknowingly thrust unseasoned soldiers headlong into a maelstrom of mosquito death and into the clutches of the brilliant strategist Toussaint Louverture, who effectively used yellow fever and malaria as a potent ally. Louverture had been fighting with various factions since the early part of the revolution. When the British evacuated in 1798, he quickly became the undisputed leader of the revolution through shrewd diplomacy and military acumen. His nickname “Black Napoleon,” used by both his adversaries and his allies, was a tribute to his reputation. He confiscated coffee plantations and used the black-market coffee trade to finance his revolution.* Upon learning of this bootlegging, a furious Napoleon burst out, “Damn Coffee! Damn Colonies!” This particular colony, however, was
too valuable to French economic designs to simply walk away.
Napoleon had a lofty vision of resurrecting the former French glory in the Americas. Haiti was critical, not only for its capital but also as a staging area for establishing Napoleon’s envisaged North American empire. Given Napoleon’s thirst for war and power, rumors swirled as to his intentions in the Americas, ranging from an assault on British Caribbean possessions, to a march on Canada, and even to an invasion of the United States from his recently obtained Louisiana Territory.
During the American Revolution, colonial products flowed, unencumbered by Spanish taxes or tariffs, up and down the Mississippi River. To fund the rebellion, Spain had allowed the Continental Congress to store and export goods at the port of New Orleans duty-free. In 1800, in a backroom deal, an economically depleted and globally distressed Spain ceded the Louisiana Territory to Napoleon’s France. American shipping and export privileges at New Orleans were immediately suspended. Spain was also on the verge of handing over Florida as well. President Jefferson rightly understood that American access to the Gulf of Mexico would be cut off, and American trade would be dealt a severe blow, one that the financially fledgling republic could ill afford. At the time, roughly 35% of American exports were dispatched from New Orleans. Purposeful leaks circulated that America was prepared to send 50,000 troops to take New Orleans, when in fact the entire United States military numbered just 7,100. The Americans, not wanting to be sucked into war with France, nervously watched as events unfolded in Europe and the Caribbean.
In December 1801, Napoleon finally launched his looming and ambitious campaign in the Americas. Under the command of his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc, an initial French detachment of 40,000 soldiers was dispatched to discipline the insubordinate and defiant slaves of Haiti. Standing to post with Toussaint Louverture, the mosquito had other ideas in mind. Using guerrilla tactics and a policy of scorched earth, Louverture lured the French into an unwinnable insurgent quagmire of mosquito-imposed death. He practiced hit-and-run tactics from the hills during the peak mosquito months, confining the French to the mosquito-plagued coast and low-lying miasmic marshes.
Louverture’s forces whittled away at the French while his mosquito allies attacked with fury. Following the sickly season, with French forces weakened and thinned by yellow fever and malaria, Louverture launched fierce counterattacks. He explained his brilliantly simple strategy to his followers: “Do not forget that while waiting for the rainy season, which will rid us of our enemies, we have only destruction and fire as our weapons. The whites from France cannot hold out against us here in St. Domingue. They will fight well at first, but soon they will fall sick and die like flies. When the French are reduced to small, small numbers, we will harass them and beat them.” Not only was Louverture aware of the impact of seasoning and the divergent immunities between his men and his enemies, he used it as a war-winning strategy.
Louverture allowed his mercenary mosquito allies to win the war for him. “If my position has changed from very good to very bad, what is to blame is only the sickness that has destroyed my army,” Leclerc reported to Napoleon in the fall of 1802. “If you wish to become master of Saint-Domingue, you must send me twelve thousand men without wasting a single day. If you cannot send me the troops that I have asked for, and by the time I have requested, Saint-Domingue will be forever lost to France. . . . My soul has withered, and no joyful idea can ever make me forget these hideous scenes.” A month after penning this dark vision and morose premonition, Leclerc died of yellow fever. More than twenty other French generals who were deployed to Haiti followed him to a mosquito-hollowed grave. The French invasion, like so many other ambitious would-be conquerors with delusions of grandeur, also fell to the succubus mosquito mistress of the Caribbean.
Napoleon was one of the most brilliant military minds in history, but even he could not defeat Generals Aedes and Anopheles. While his French forces were dominating the battlefields of Europe, in the Caribbean, Napoleon yielded and conceded to the mighty mosquito in November 1803. “Happy were the French soldiers who died quickly,” wrote a victorious revolutionary. “Others suffered from cramps, aching heads that seemed about to blow up, and insatiable thirst. They would vomit blood, as well as a substance dubbed ‘Black Soup,’ then their faces turned yellow, and bodies were encased in malodorous phlegm, before death happily intervened.” With French soldiers drowning in a bloodbath of yellow fever and malaria, Napoleon’s Haitian campaign was abandoned after less than two years. The fate and future of Haiti and its independent-minded slaves was dictated by the mosquito.
In total, of the roughly 65,000 French soldiers sent to Haiti, 55,000 died of mosquito-borne disease, a jarring and mind-blowing death rate of 85%. Generals Aedes and Anopheles unveiled Haiti’s official independence two months later. “Haiti’s slave revolution was the only such rebellion to lead to a free and independent nation,” acknowledges Billy G. Smith in his book Ship of Death. “Born out of one of the most brutal slave regimes in history, midwifed by yellow fever, it was a spectacular achievement. The slaves of Saint-Domingue had defeated the best troops that European nations could send against them.” Freedom, however, came at a terrible price. Roughly 150,000 Haitians, including a considerable number of noncombatant civilians, were killed by British and French forces. Louverture, who was captured under confusing and suspect circumstances in the spring of 1802, died in martyr-like fashion of tuberculosis in a French prison a year later. Toussaint Louverture and his freedom fighters, like George Washington and his American civilian soldiers, undeniably deserve credit. Smith, however, is careful to affix the disclaimer that “it was the fever that enabled them to do it.” Altogether the British, French, and Spanish lost a staggering 180,000 men to Haiti’s mosquitoes.
Finally, after three centuries of mind-boggling losses to mosquito-borne disease, European powers also lost the desire to contest Caribbean mosquitoes. They were forced to reconsider and retool their larger imperial ambitions and strategies in the face of relentless and murderous mosquito-borne disease. With her blood-tipped proboscis, the mosquito was writing the unforgiving finale, and forever closing the book on the era of European colonialism in the Americas. The vanquished, however, still had a few economic cards up their sleeves. They vowed to commercially cripple the former slaves of Haiti for their insubordination and hijack of imperial wealth.
The slaveholding nations of Europe and the United States spitefully punished the renegade Haitians to discourage similar revolts. A blanketing economic embargo was placed on Haiti for decades, sending the nation into an economic tailspin, delivering the Haitian people into abysmal poverty. Once the wealthiest economy in the Caribbean, Haiti is now the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere and the seventeenth poorest nation in the world. Although yellow fever no longer stalks the country, Haiti currently hosts the full gamut of mosquito-borne diseases, including endemic falciparum malaria (and malariae), dengue, Zika, chikungunya, and its recently evolved cousin the Mayaro virus.
Following their horrific experiences, not just in Haiti but across the Caribbean over two centuries of mosquito ridicule, the British never again mounted a large-scale campaign in the Caribbean. Britain’s imperial eye shifted east to Africa, India, and central Asia. More importantly, the successful Haitian Revolution ignited the abolitionist movement in Britain, and domestic public opinion soured on the institution of imperial African slavery. This outcry convinced Parliament to ban the slave trade in 1807. In 1833, slavery itself was abolished across the British Empire.
The French also gave up their futile struggle with Caribbean mosquitoes following their embarrassment in Haiti. With his hopes for a New World empire shattered by mosquito-borne disease, Napoleon turned his back on the whole bloody mess in 1803. Without Haiti (and its vast resources), New Orleans served no purpose and was defenseless against attacks by the powerful British Royal Navy or even by the weaker but aggrieved United States. Napoleon also feared
that without economic concessions in Louisiana the United States would, in Jefferson’s words, “marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” Haitian mosquitoes had emptied the economic veins of France. With finances and resources increasingly needed for his war in Europe, Napoleon understood the futility of pursuing his crippled North American strategy. The stinging success of Haiti’s mosquito-succored slaves had unintended historical implications that would eventually broker the Louisiana Purchase and quickly scatter and steer Lewis and Clark, and Sacagawea, across the United States.
Napoleon’s dream of rekindling the French Empire in the Americas had been bitten in the cradle by Haiti’s mosquitoes. By default, he enacted what he called the Continental System. “In former days, if we desired to be rich, we had to own colonies, to establish ourselves in India and the Antilles, in Central America, in San Domingo. These times are over and done with,” Napoleon decreed to his chamber of commerce. “Today we must become manufacturers. We shall make everything ourselves.” Kicked out of the Caribbean by mercenary mosquitoes, the French initiated modern innovations in industry and agriculture. French botanists, for example, replaced the loss of Caribbean cane sugar by extracting sweetener from European sugar beets.
Following the loss of Haiti, Napoleon had no use for New Orleans or his vast, relatively barren Louisiana estate. Seeing as France was at war with both Spain and Britain, the sale of not just New Orleans but the entire 828,000 square miles of Louisiana Territory to the United States was the only option. Jefferson had given his negotiators permission to spend up to $10 million on New Orleans alone, and they were dumbfounded by, and immediately accepted, Napoleon’s offer of $15 million ($300 million today) for the entire French property holdings. The vast territory stretching from the Gulf of Mexico in the south to southern Canada in the north, from the Mississippi River in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west, included land from fifteen current US states and two Canadian provinces. The 1803 Louisiana Purchase, brokered with the pressure of Haiti’s mosquitoes, doubled the size of the United States overnight at less than three cents an acre. Given her immeasurable impact in shaping the United States, including the addition of the Louisiana Territory, the mosquito deserves a place on Mount Rushmore with her protuberant face tucked in between the grateful glances of the indebted Washington and Jefferson.