The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

  * The First Peoples of the Americas, like all cultures the world over, have their own creation stories and oral histories, which I do not presume to disparage or dishonor.

  * Ponce de Leon’s alleged quest for the fountain of youth in Florida is a vibrant and genuine fairy tale and has no credibility whatsoever.

  * Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) was an English Renaissance philosopher, humanist, author, politician, and civil servant. As a Catholic, he was opposed to the Protestant Reformation. Although serving as lord high chancellor of England, and as a top aide and counselor to King Henry VIII, More refused to endorse Henry as the head of the new Church of England or support the 1534 Act of Supremacy. After refusing to take the oath of fealty to Henry, believing it to be an infringement of the Magna Carta, More was charged with high treason and beheaded at the Tower of London in 1535. Four hundred years later, in 1935 he was canonized by the Catholic Church.

  * Aboriginal Australians and New Zealand Maori also suffered from the influx of European disease during the Columbian Exchange. From an estimated precontact population of roughly 500,000, by 1920 the Aboriginal population of Australia was counted at 75,000. Similarly, when James Cook landed at New Zealand in 1769, the Maori population is thought to have been around 100,000 to 120,000, reaching its nadir at 44,000 in 1891. Malaria and dengue were introduced to Australia by Malaysian traders in the 1840s. Australia has been malaria-free since the last outbreak in the Northern Territory in 1962. Dengue, which globally infects 400 million people a year, has made a troublesome resurgence in Australia over the last decade. Australia and Papua New Guinea also host unique, although rare and generally non-lethal, mosquito-borne viruses called Murray Valley Encephalitis and Ross River Virus.

  * The exchange of disease was a one-way street—Old World to New World—with perhaps one exception. Syphilis, although nonvenereal in the original American bacterial strains of Yaws and Pinta, may have been brought back to Europe with Columbus. The first European outbreak of the disease appears to have occurred in Naples, Italy, in 1494 shortly after the return of Columbus from his first voyage. Whether this is a connection, or a coincidence, is still hotly debated and is the subject of ongoing academic research. Within five years, the disease had slept its way across Europe, with each nation blaming its neighbor. In 1826, Pope Leo XII banned the condom because it prevented debauched people from acquiring syphilis, which he viewed as their necessary and divine punishment for their immorality and sexual transgressions.

  * By 1890, the total bison population in North America had been purposefully reduced to 1,100. American governmental policy authorized the systematic eradication of the bison to starve out indigenous peoples of the Plains, specifically the Sioux, to force them onto reservations.

  * Currently, 35% of foods consumed in the United States are derived from honeybee pollination. A mysterious sweeping occurrence known as Colony Collapse Disorder has been wiping out bees by geographic-dependent margins between 30% and 70% and threatening their survival. Recently, a noticeable marketing campaign has been directed at saving honeybees and fostering bee-friendly local environments. I recently bought a box of Honey Nut Cheerios, which was promoting the giveaway “Free Seed Packet Inside to Help ‘Bring Back the Bees!’” My insect-loving son urged his mother and me, and helped, to make all our gardens bee-friendly.

  * Mercantilism, or the Atlantic triangular trade, was an economic system practiced by the modernized countries of Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. It was designed to maximize profits for the imperialist European mother country. Overseas colonies were exploited for their natural resources, such as sugar, tobacco, gold, and silver, by way of African slave labor. These raw materials were shipped back to the home country to be turned into manufactured goods, which were traded for more African slaves, and also sold back at inflated prices to the colonial populations. A greater collection of colonies meant not only increased and more diverse resources but, given the monopoly of the European power on import/export, also a larger market/population for homespun manufactured goods. The unequal balance of mercantilism between country and colony was one of the causes for the revolutions and independence movements that engulfed the Americas, including the United States, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  * Given the devastation caused by Europeans and their diseases to the indigenous peoples of the Americas, New Zealand, Australia, and Africa through their colonial settler societies, it is hard to argue that the Columbian Exchange was favorable to indigenous peoples at all. One example I can give, with little solace or consolation, is the adoption of a thoroughly transformative horse culture by the peoples of the North American plains. Those First Nations of Canada and the United States quickly adopted a mounted way of life and society after the introduction of the horse by the Spanish.

  * The script for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now was a direct adaptation of Conrad’s book. Leopold’s Congo was substituted with Vietnam and Cambodia during the American Vietnam War.

  * The derogatory racial slur “coon” is derived from the word barracoon.

  * Charleston was also the leading port for exporting indigenous slaves. Between 1670 and 1720, over 50,000 indigenous slaves left Charleston bound for Caribbean plantations.

  * Plymouth was not the first English settlement in New England. That honor belonged to Fort St. George in Popham, Maine, founded in 1607 a few months after Jamestown. Prior to this, a small English outpost was established in 1602 on Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts, to harvest sassafras. Although it is the main ingredient in traditional root beer, at this time it was believed to be a cure for gonorrhea and syphilis. Following the voyages of Columbus, there was a growing, and profitable, demand for sassafras in Europe. Both of these colonies, however, were abandoned within a year.

  * Kanata is an Iroquoian word meaning “settlement” or “village” as told to Jacques Cartier. He took the word to mean the entire region, which he dubbed “le pays des Canadas” (the country of Canadas).

  * The common portrayal of Henry as an overweight, slovenly, crazed monarch is not entirely accurate. In his younger days, Henry was extremely attractive, tall and well-built, intelligent, multi-lingual, and a hopeless romantic. He was also an accomplished athlete and musician. He was a true Renaissance man. Like Alexander, it is thought that the sudden change and rapid decline in Henry’s appearance and mental health beginning in 1536 was due to CTE sustained by repeated concussions from his avid love of jousting. He died morbidly obese in 1547 at 55 years old.

  * The Mosquito Coast, also christened during Columbus’s fourth voyage, starts farther north, encompassing the coastline of Nicaragua and Honduras and continuing south to Panama. The Mosquito Gulf is specific to a body of water on the Panamanian coast.

  * Other common indigenous insect repellents, aside from smoke, were animal fat lotions, ideally “bear grease.” Ocher also acted as a natural sunscreen.

  * Newfoundland gained independence from Britain in 1907 and became the last territorial addition to Canada, joining the Confederation in 1949.

  * Weighing up to ninety pounds, beavers (which are giant rodents) reside in dome-shaped lodges made by blocking waterways with trees, mud, and stones and creating a checkerboard of smaller channels and wetlands. There can be as many as twenty dams per mile of stream or river. The largest beaver dam on record, almost a kilometer long (0.62 miles), is in northern Alberta, Canada. When the English colonists arrived at Jamestown, there were more than 220 million acres of wetlands in the United States, more than double the current total of roughly 110 million acres, including Alaska!

  * The staggering inertia of the original colonists is exemplified by the fact that it took two years to solve this problem with the most obvious solution—digging a well.

  * Matoaka was buried at the Parish of St. George in Gravesend. The exact location has been lost to time, as the church was destroyed by fire in 1727 a
nd rebuilt. A life-size statue in the church garden honors her memory and unknown final resting place. Today, there are hundreds of direct descendants of Pocahontas through her son, Thomas, and this continued lineage.

  * The treaty required indigenous people to wear an identification tag when leaving the reservation, very similar to the late-nineteenth-century “Pass Laws” in the United States, Canada, and apartheid South Africa.

  * Between 1651 and 1814, for example, St. Lucia went back and forth fourteen times between the British and French as a result of conquest. Smaller, less valuable, and lightly defended islands like St. Lucia and St. Kitts were easier targets and teeter-tottered between imperial powers.

  * There is some evidence to suggest that dengue first landed in the Americas with imported African slaves and/or mosquitoes in Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1635, twelve years before the first recorded case of yellow fever in the Americas. There are also clues and hints pointing to a dengue epidemic ravaging Panama in 1699.

  * As ludicrous as this sounds, upon his return home from Panama, Paterson tried to persuade investors to finance a third Darien expedition in 1701.

  * The first recorded instance of this random rock as the landing site of the Mayflower was in 1741 (121 years after the Puritans arrived). The two most trusted firsthand accounts of the founding of Plymouth Colony, from Edward Winslow and William Bradford, do not mention any rocks.

  * Although Maryland was a slave state, it opted not to join the Confederacy. In fact, five slave states refused to secede, and generally fought on the side of the Union during the Civil War: Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland.

  * Simcoe was the first governor of Upper Canada, from 1791 to 1796. He founded the city of York (Toronto), instituted standing courts and common law, trial by jury, freehold land ownership, opposed racial discrimination, and abolished slavery. He is celebrated and revered by many Canadians as a founding father and his name adorns streets, cities, parks, buildings, lakes, and schools across the country. The irregular British Ranger regiment he commanded during the American Revolution is still operational as the Queen’s York Rangers, an armored reconnaissance regiment of the Canadian Armed Forces.

  * The slang term for alcoholic spirits, “grog,” is attributed to Vernon. Originally, it was rum diluted with water and citrus juice to help prevent scurvy. Vernon soon acquired the loving nickname “Old Grog.”

  * One of the most famous prisoners was Alfred Dreyfus, who during the infamous Dreyfus Affair was convicted of treason in 1895 for passing military secrets to the Germans. Another was Henri Charrière, who served time at Devil’s Island for murder in the 1930s. His book, Papillon, detailing his experiences and the horrific, inhumane treatment at the penal colony was published in 1969. It was turned into a blockbuster movie of the same name in 1973, starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. A 2017 Hollywood remake of the same name stars Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek. Historical analysis of Charrière’s “memoir” debunked almost all of what he wrote. His work is now deemed to be mostly fictional or, at best, highly embellished and based on the experiences and accounts of others, much like The Travels of Marco Polo.

  * Individual colony tax rates varied. Taxes in Massachusetts for example, were 5.4 times less than those levied in England, while those in Pennsylvania were an astounding 35.8 times less than the taxes assessed in the mother country.

  * Lind was the first to conclusively demonstrate, using clinical trials, that citrus fruit prevented and cured scurvy. He was also the first to propose that potable water could be obtained by distilling seawater. His research drastically improved the overall health and quality of life for British sailors.

  * It is known that eight presidents suffered from malaria: Washington, Lincoln, Monroe, Jackson, Grant, Garfield, T. Roosevelt, and Kennedy.

  * Georgia, the last of the Thirteen Colonies to be established, did not send representatives for fear of alienating the British. Georgians needed the support of British soldiers who were trying to quell the fierce Cherokee and Creek resistance to colonial expansion.

  * The origin of this concept dates back to Aesop’s fables around 600 BCE. The Gospel of Mark also alludes to it: “And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.” Lincoln paraphrased this passage in the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates. Cultures around the planet have similar creeds, from the Iroquois Confederacy to the Mongols to the “Little Red Hen” children’s fable of Russian origin.

  * Dr. Benjamin Rush was the attending physician in Philadelphia. He recorded the symptoms of the disease as “break-bone fever,” now a common nickname or synonym for dengue.

  * Malaria was a mainstay in the Washington household. In July 1783, shortly before the Treaty of Paris was ratified solidifying international recognition of American independence, Martha Washington came down with a serious case of malaria. George reported to his nephew, “Mrs. Washington has had three of the Ague & fever & is much with it—the better, having prevented the fit yesterday by a plentiful application of the Bark—she is too indisposed to write to you.”

  * There is still a strong connection between revolution and the illicit smuggling of narcotics and other goods, including the opium poppy production in Afghanistan and the Taliban/Al-Qaeda, cocaine and Maoist revolutionaries in South America, and pirated petroleum in the case of ISIS, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and Al-Shabaab in Somalia.

  * Ironically, during Napoleon’s final exile, his prison island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic, where he died in 1821, was patrolled by the British cruiser HMS Musquito.

  * Elected president in 1840, Harrison died, likely of typhoid, thirty-two days after taking office.

  * Jackson’s pet parrot Poll had to be removed from his state funeral to end its persistent tirade of obscenities, no doubt learned from its former master.

  * The Second Seminole War (1835–1842) alone cost American taxpayers a staggering $40 million, an enormous expenditure for that time period.

  * In 1835, Lieutenant Jefferson Davis married Sarah, the daughter of his commanding officer, General Zachary Taylor. Three months into their marriage, they both contracted malaria and yellow fever while visiting family in Louisiana. Sarah didn’t survive.

  * During this same period, it is estimated that between 500,000 and 600,000 people contracted yellow fever, putting the overall mortality rate at 25–30%.

  * It was later revealed that of Mrs. Bixby’s five sons, two survived the war, two were killed in action, and one likely died a prisoner of war.

  * After scoring a victory at Second Bull Run, Lee invaded the North and clashed with Union forces at Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862. Although the battle was really a draw, it was spun as a Union victory as Lee’s forces retreated from the North back to Virginia. Combined casualties during the single-day battle totaled almost 23,000, including 3,700 killed (another 4,000 would later die of wounds). Antietam remains the bloodiest single day of combat in American history.

  * The Proclamation applied only to slaves in Confederate-held territory and did not include the non-Confederate slave states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, nor Tennessee, which had been previously occupied by Union forces.

  * Grant was just shy of five feet eight and 135 pounds, while Lincoln was all of six feet four and weighed 180 pounds.

  * The Andersonville commandant, Captain Henry Wirz, was executed for war crimes in November 1865.

  * The Monroe Doctrine, opposing any further European colonialism in the Americas in order for the US to attain a monopoly on trade in the Western Hemisphere, was written by President Monroe’s secretary of state, John Quincy Adams.

  * The true cause of the sinking, an accidental boiler-room fire, was not made public until many years later.

  * Hence the terms pasteurization for removing pathogens from liquids and foods and for Listerine brand antiseptic products.

 
* King was in the audience at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, when Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. He was one of the first physicians to treat the dying president and helped carry Lincoln across the street to the Petersen House, where he died the following morning.