The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

  Following this sale of his North American assets, and with his navy in tatters after its resounding defeat by Admiral Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, Napoleon’s continental campaign in Europe was ended in 1812 by Generals Winter and Typhus and the methodical Russian scorched-earth retreat during his futile invasion of Russia. Of the 685,000 men of his Grande Armée who marched to war in June, only 27,000 were fit for duty upon his retreat in December. He left behind some 380,000 dead, 100,000 prisoners of war, and 80,000 deserters. His doomed Russian campaign was the turning point of the war and led to his eventual defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 by a British-led allied army under the command of the Duke of Wellington. Prior to this final defeat and exile, however, Napoleon is credited with having crafted the only purposeful and successful deployment of biological warfare in the nineteenth century.* The mosquito was his delivery system of choice to launch aerial malaria missiles against a colossal British invasion force.

  Encouraged by victories over the French in Portugal and Austria, in 1809 the British had decided to mount a raid against Napoleon in northern Europe to open a second front and relieve their beleaguered Austrian allies. The site chosen was Walcheren, a low-lying marsh in the Scheldt Estuary of the Netherlands and Belgium, where it was believed the French fleet had taken harbor. In July, the potent British expeditionary force consisted of 40,000 men and 700 ships—the largest force yet assembled by Britain. An undaunted Napoleon was aware of the impending invasion, as a fleet this size could not go unnoticed, and more importantly, he was also cognizant of the recurrent summer-fall fevers that annually besieged the Walcheren region. “We must oppose the English with nothing but fever, which will soon devour them all,” he told his commanders. “In a month the English will be obliged to take to their ships.” Taking a page from his Haitian adversary Toussaint Louverture’s playbook, Napoleon ushered in the worst epidemic of malaria that Europe had ever seen.

  Breaching the dikes to flood the entire area with brackish water, he created the perfect storm for mosquito breeding and malaria transmission. Eschewing the frustrated failures of Amherst and Cornwallis at premeditated biological warfare, Napoleon’s perverse effort was a feverish success. The word “Walcheren” has since become a synonym and byword for military blundering. By the time the British called off the expedition in October, after a cost of 8 million pounds, 40% of the British force had been rendered impotent by malaria. The “Walcheren Fever,” as it was dubbed, had killed 4,000 men, while another 13,000 were sweating it out in makeshift hospitals. Napoleon’s use of malaria as a biological weapon would be emulated by the Nazis against the American landings at Anzio, Italy, in 1944 during the Second World War.

  Where Britain and France bowed to the harsh retribution of the mosquito, the Spanish would stubbornly fight on for their imperiled and evaporating imperial possessions in the Americas, fruitlessly sacrificing thousands of lives to mosquito-borne disease. Like the British and French showdowns with Washington, Lafayette, and Louverture, the Spanish also faced a brilliant revolutionary leader in Simon Bolivar. Like the British and French, they also suffered the wrath of rebellious mercenary mosquitoes. Between 1811 and 1826, every Spanish American colony attained independence save Cuba and Puerto Rico. As J. R. McNeill states, the mosquito ensured that “Spanish America came untethered from Spain.”

  During the first forays of the Napoleonic Wars, Spain had been a French ally. The Spanish Navy was also irrevocably shattered by Nelson at Trafalgar, and Spanish maritime influence steadily eroded. After a successful Franco-Spanish occupation of Portugal in 1807, Napoleon turned on his ally and invaded Spain the following year. The British, now in command of the high seas, redirected Spanish colonial trade toward its own empire. This benefited the Spanish colonies, for it loosened restrictions on trade and allowed for relative access to a free market economy. Local revolutionary councils, or juntas, made up of Spanish or Casta/Mestizo “mixed race” elites sprang up across Spanish America. The privately motivated leaders of these quasi-freedom fighters understood the economic benefits of operating outside Spain’s mercantilist system.

  In 1814, Spain sent over 14,000 troops, its largest force ever engaged in the Americas, to restore order and trade with the colonies of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama (collectively called New Grenada). Mercenary mosquitoes quickly displayed a “decided preference,” as one Spanish combatant noticed, “for Europeans and new-comers.” By 1819, as Colombia rolled out its red carpet of independence, less than a quarter of the Spanish Army remained alive. With surprising accuracy, the Spanish minister of war was notified that across the embattled Spanish colonies, “the mere bite of a mosquito often deprives a man of his life . . . this contributes to our destruction, and to the annihilation of the troops.” Undaunted, a financially floundering Spain, in possession of nothing more than a bathtub navy, dispatched another 20,000 soldiers on rented Russian transports to crush Bolivar and preserve its American empire.

  Bolivar, who had visited Haiti in 1815 and 1816 and discussed tactics with veterans of the revolution, incorporated mosquito-borne disease into his strategy just as his predecessor Louverture had done. It was a proven war-winning strategy, and it worked for Bolivar as well. The Spanish, the first to import African slaves, mosquitoes, and their maladies to the Americas, were eaten alive, undermined, and ultimately destroyed by their own former dark deeds, repaying in disease and death for the unatoned sins of their fathers. The mosquito assailed, infected, and killed unseasoned soldiers delivered directly from Spain without any measure or quality of mercy. Like Napoleon’s French troops in Haiti, Spanish soldiers also suffered the wrath of their own Columbian Exchange environmental constructions. Yellow fever and malaria killed between 90% and 95% of all Spanish forces sent to the Americas to defend economy and empire.

  Like Louverture, Bolivar died of tuberculosis in 1830. Unlike Louverture, he witnessed the realization of his dreams. By this time, Bolivar and his mercenary mosquitoes had gnawed the Spanish Empire in the Americas into numerous independent nations. All that remained of this once glorious and vast domain was Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, all of which would eventually be gobbled up by rough-riding mosquitoes and by the inaugural volleys of American imperialism in 1898.

  The seasoned slave and colonial rebellions against imperial European rule, which rumbled across the Americas, shattered the old order and ushered in a new age of independence. Unforgiving mosquitoes rallied in support of their seasoned country-born comrades, exacting hellfire retribution on their former European masters. With a fierce loyalty to the struggles of freedom unfolding in their midst, mosquitoes violated and killed unseasoned British, French, and Spanish soldiers, forcing the last clumsy, feverish retreat of European imperialism in the Americas. She severed the main economic and territorial arteries connecting Europe to colonial America. The biological consequences of the Columbian Exchange struck directly at the hearts of their European creators, who now reaped the disease and death they themselves had sown.

  Imported mosquitoes and disease once benefited Europeans by killing indigenous peoples at unrivaled rates, enabling and expediting territorial expansion and a European labyrinth of lucrative slave-powered extractive mercantilist colonies. During these revolutions, ruthless mosquitoes steeped unseasoned European soldiers in yellow fever and malaria and destroyed their institutions. European dominion over the Americas, empowered by African mosquitoes and slaves, was also doomed by these same elements of the Columbian Exchange. Although the United States was the first to be born of revolutionary mosquitoes, her battlefield prowess in support of the slave rebellion in Haiti forced Napoleon to sell his North American lands.

  With the mosquito acting as the real estate agent for Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory, and with Lewis and Clark’s subsequent cartographic and economic mission to the Pacific Ocean, the young country was one step closer to its ocean-to-ocean-and-everything-in-between dream of Manifes
t Destiny. The United States continued its westward expansionist drive, battling, slaughtering, and forcefully removing indigenous peoples and the bison, their livelihood, and solidified its continental landmass and global status by declaring war on British Canada, Mexico, and, eventually, Spain. Opportunist mosquitoes roamed and reaped the bloody harvest of these conflicts of American nation building.

  CHAPTER 14

  Mosquitoes of Manifest Destiny: Cotton, Slavery, Mexico, and the American South

  There was trouble brewing in the heart of the fledgling United States. Indigenous peoples west of the former Proclamation Line skirting the Appalachian Mountains were violently resisting American expansion and the aggressive encroachment of hostile settlers onto their lands. William Henry Harrison, the governor of Indian Territory, warned President James Madison in October 1811 of the grave threat posed by Shawnee chief Tecumseh and his mounting, British-backed pan-Indian coalition. “The implicit obedience and respect which the followers of Tecumseh pay him, is really astonishing, and more than any other circumstance bespeaks him one of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions, and overturn the established order of things. If it were not for the vicinity of the United States, he would, perhaps, be the founder of an empire that would rival in glory Mexico or Peru [Maya, Aztec, and Inca civilizations]. No difficulties deter him . . . and wherever he goes he makes an impression favorable to his purposes. He is now upon the last round to put a finishing stroke on his work.”* The call to action boisterously chirped by the “War Hawks” in Congress was answered by a declaration of war on Britain, which was signed into effect by Madison in June 1812 to uphold the notions of sovereignty outlined in the 1783 Treaty of Paris and to seize the Canadian Great Lakes transportation routes to stimulate trade.

  The economic expansionist convictions of many immigrants and settlers seeped into American political and military policy under the cultural ideology and media-driven ruse of the preordained right destined by the Almighty itself to spread American refinement and democratic governance from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. This vision of Manifest Destiny was epitomized by the painting American Progress by John Gast. It depicts the angelic figure of Columbia, personifying both the United States and the “Spirit of the Frontier,” cloaked in a streaming white gown as she virtuously floats from the east to deliver civilization and its modern trappings to the untamed wilds of the west.

  Beginning with the War of 1812, this fulfillment of American Manifest Destiny was anything but benevolent or altruistic. Aggressive and combative American territorial expansion stood in sharp contrast to the benign and serene image of the innocently drifting Columbia. Manifest Destiny, and its driving force of plantation cotton production, thrust the United States headlong into a series of wars against its northern neighbor, British Canada; internally against indigenous peoples in America; and, eventually, against Mexico to the southwest to secure the coveted Pacific ports of California. The mosquito was an active participant in these American wars of conquest and helped consolidate the landmass of the continental United States.

  The Mexican-American War represents a departure from the historical norm of mosquitoes devouring foreign invaders and deciding the outcome of wars. During this imperialist conflict, American military planners and commanders deliberately dodged Mexican mosquitoes. By purposefully sidestepping her swampy miasmatic death traps, they circumvented her deadly diseases and secured the rest of the west. With California statehood established in 1850, the American flag, born of the blood of revolution seventy years earlier, was hoisted from shore to shore across the vast continent and stretching domain of the United States.

  Following American independence, a vanquished Britain realized the threat a growing American economy posed to her self-interest. Britain used its war with Napoleon’s France to undermine American trade. Beginning in 1806, the British not only placed a trade embargo on American exports to starve Napoleon’s war effort, they blockaded the middle passages of the Atlantic and boarded American merchant ships, hunting for British deserters. By 1807, the British had stolen or “impressed” roughly 6,000 American seamen into service in the Royal Navy. To keep America preoccupied in its own backyard, the British also funneled weapons and supplies from Canada to a powerful and surging indigenous coalition, led by the esteemed Shawnee warrior Tecumseh, that stretched from southern Canada to the southern United States. Like Pontiac before him, Tecumseh envisioned a sprawling pan-indigenous homeland.

  Seeing as the United States was in no military or financial position to directly invade the island fortress of Britain (something that had not happened since William the Conqueror’s Norman invasion of 1066), Canada was the closest and most valuable target of opportunity. During the War of 1812, often referred to as the Second American Revolution, numerous American invasions of Canada were repulsed by indigenous coalitions, British regulars, and Canadian militias, although both Tecumseh and British commander Sir Isaac Brock were killed.

  In 1813, American forces looted and burned York (Toronto), the capital of Upper Canada, before evacuating the smoldering city. In retaliation, battle-hardened British regulars who arrived from Europe after defeating Napoleon in Spain, landed at Washington, DC, in August 1814. They proceeded to put the White House, Capitol, and other administrative buildings to the torch. First Lady Dolley Madison, who incidentally had lost her first husband and young son in Philadelphia’s crushing yellow fever epidemic in 1793, is heroically credited with saving numerous priceless artifacts from the blazing White House.

  Following the assault on Washington, the British commander, Admiral Alexander Cochrane, requested to take leave, fearing the onset of malaria and yellow fever season sponsored by the congress of mosquitoes basking in the American capital’s vast labyrinth of rivers and swamps. “Cochrane had wanted to remove the entire fleet from Chesapeake Bay in late August to avoid the onset of yellow fever and malaria,” reports David Petriello, “preferring instead the pestilence-free harbors of Rhode Island.” Although he pleaded with his superiors that mosquito season would repulse further offensive actions, he was overruled. Mosquitoes or not, Cochrane was persuaded to assault Baltimore. His initial strike directed at its harbor bastion, Fort McHenry, inspired a defining cultural moment for the United States. In the dawn’s early light of September 14, after a perilous twenty-seven-hour British naval bombardment of Fort McHenry, Francis Scott Key was still able to see the oversize American flag gallantly streaming over the wreckage of the fort. He scribbled down a poem, “Defence of Fort M’Henry,” to be better known with musical accompaniment as “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  By the close of 1814, neither side wanted to prolong a costly war that had devolved into stalemate. With Napoleon defeated and exiled to Elba, the causes of the war disintegrated. America now had open access to foreign markets, including Britain, and sailors were no longer being kidnapped. As President Madison lay bedridden with malaria, the Treaty of Ghent was signed on Christmas Eve 1814, ending the small war with no decisive winner. Of the 35,000 total deaths during the War of 1812, including indigenous allies and civilians, 80% were caused by disease, predominantly malaria, typhoid, and dysentery. No territory changed hands, and as a result, for all intents and purposes, Canada and America became lifelong best friends.

  After the Rush-Bagot Treaty of 1817, and the subsequent Treaty of 1818, demilitarized the border and its waterways (among other cordial covenants), Canada would never again pose a so-called national security threat to the United States. The two countries remain close military allies, and they partner and reciprocate in fair and free trade. Today, within this mutually beneficial marriage, 70% of Canadian exports head south across the longest international border in the world, spanning an astounding 5,525 miles (with 350,000 people crossing daily), while 65% of Canadian imports arrive from its southern neighbor. For 2017, commerce between the two nations totaled roughly $675 billion, with an American take-home surplus of $8 billi
on.

  Ironically, the largest battle of the War of 1812 occurred after the official peace. It was at the Battle of New Orleans that General Andrew Jackson, commanding a motley crew of militiamen, pirates, outlaws, slaves, Spaniards, newly liberated Haitians, and anyone else that he could threaten or groom into service, became a household name. In January 1815, as news of the peace was sailing across the Atlantic, Jackson and his ragtag army of 4,500 men staved off a British force three times its size. Jackson, a poor backwoods kid who had been taken prisoner at age thirteen during the American Revolution, rode his fame to the presidency.

  To his supporters, Jackson was the defender of the “common man.” He was touted as a war hero, a self-made man, and a champion of the underdog. To his adversaries, he was uncouth, volatile, and mentally unhinged. He was an uneducated barroom brawler prone to volcanic outbursts.* He frequently caned men in the street for, in his opinion, being dishonorable or insulting him or his wife, and challenged men to duels at the drop of a hat after dueling had become passé. As a result, for most of his life, he permanently carried two bullets lodged in his body, along with recurrent infections of malaria. His detractors commonly referred to him as “Jackass” or “Jackass Jackson.” In true Jacksonian spirit, he embraced the name and the ass/donkey became the symbol for the Democratic Party. Jackson, whom Jefferson described as “a dangerous man,” was elected president in 1828. The first order of business for General Jackson, as he demanded to be called rather than Mr. President, was the removal of all indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi River to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). Their homelands were needed for the establishment of slave-labor cotton plantations to energize a flagging American economy.