1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

by Charles C. Mann

  The marshman laughed as he spoke, Defoe wrote, “but the fact, for all that, is certainly true.”

  In 1625 the bubonic plague engulfed England. More than fifty thousand people died in London alone. Many of the urban wealthy fled into the malarial eastern marshes, with results later described by the satirical poet George Wither:

  In Kent, and (all along) on Essex side

  A Troupe of cruell Fevers did reside:…

  And, most of them, who had this place [London] forsooke,

  Were either slaine by them, or Pris’ners tooke…

  As this nineteenth-century copy of a now-lost earlier drawing suggests, malaria was long a constant fear in England’s southeastern marshlands. (Photo credit 3.2)

  In the end, Wither explained, “poorest beggers found more pitty here [London], / And lesser griefe, then richer men had there.” The implication is mind-boggling: people who fled to vivax country would have been better off staying home with the bubonic plague.

  Data are sketchy and incomplete, but according to the Brandeis University historian David Hackett Fischer about 60 percent of the first wave of English emigrants came from nine eastern and southeastern counties—the nation’s Plasmodium belt. One example was the hundred-plus colonists who began Jamestown. Fifty-nine of their birthplaces are known, according to Preservation Virginia, the organization that backs Jamestown archaeology; thirty-seven were in malaria-ridden Essex, Huntingdonshire, Kent, Lincolnshire, Suffolk, Sussex, and London. Most of these men, one assumes, set off from higher, inland areas that were less malarial than the coastal wetlands. But many would have come from the marshes. Even those who didn’t come from the malaria zone usually passed through it just before departure, their ships waiting for weeks or months at Sheerness, a Kent harbor town near the mouth of the Thames that was a malaria center. Other ships waited at the almost equally pestilential Blackwall, east of London on the same river.

  People in malarial paroxysms would have been unlikely candidates for an arduous sea voyage. But Plasmodium vivax, one recalls, can hide itself inside the apparently healthy. Colonists could board a ship without symptoms, land in Chesapeake Bay tobacco country, and then be struck by the teeth-chattering chills and sweat-bursting fevers of malaria. At which point, alas, they could unknowingly pass the parasite to every mosquito that bit them.

  “In theory, one person could have established the parasite in the entire continent,” said Andrew Spielman, a malaria researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health. Almost certainly many of the tassantassas at Jamestown were infectious. At some point one of them was bitten by Anopheles quadrimaculatus, a cluster of five closely related mosquitoes that is the East Coast’s primary malaria vector. “It’s a bit like throwing darts,” Spielman told me before his death in 2006. “Bring enough sick people in contact with enough mosquitoes in suitable conditions, and sooner or later you’ll hit the bull’s-eye—you’ll establish malaria.”

  By 1657 the governor of Connecticut colony, John Winthrop, was recording cases of tertian fever in his medical journal. Winthrop, a member of the Royal Society, was one of the most careful scientific observers in New England. “If he said he saw tertian fever, he probably was seeing tertian fever,” said Robert C. Anderson, the genealogist who is transcribing Winthrop’s medical journal. More than that, Anderson told me, the existence of malaria in the 1650s suggests a date of introduction before 1640—after that year, political convulsions in England shut down emigration to New England for decades. “There were few colonists to bring it over,” Anderson said. If Plasmodium vivax had come to Connecticut by, say, 1635, I asked Spielman, could one make any inferences about Virginia? “New England is cold,” he said. “It’s hard to believe that malaria would have established itself there before Virginia.” Could the parasite have invaded Chesapeake Bay as early as the 1620s? “Given that hundreds or thousands of people from malaria zones came into the area, I wouldn’t have trouble believing that,” he said. “Once malaria has a chance to get into a place, it usually gets in fast.”

  Tracing the past movement of malaria parasites is difficult—their existence was not discovered until 1880, so all previous data are indirect. By combining health records, estimates of past wetland extent, and early-twentieth-century malaria surveys by the British military, one can see that southeast England must have been seething with malaria. Of the fifty-nine birthplaces of the first Jamestown colonists that have been tracked by the historic-preservation group Preservation Virginia, thirty-five occurred in the regions the military identified as “extremely” or “more” favorable to Plasmodium. In addition, all the colonists passed through London and the malarial Thames delta en route. It seems almost certain that some brought the disease with them to Chesapeake Bay.

  Click here to view a larger image.

  Indeed, malaria may have come in before 1620. Conditions for the disease were perfect between 1606 and 1612, when tidewater Virginia was struck by drought. (I mentioned the drought in the last chapter.) A. quadrimaculatus is happy when wet areas get dry. “In drought years little tributary streams turn into a series of pools,” explained David Gaines, public-health entomologist at the Virginia Department of Health. The larvae “thrive in that kind of environment.” Quads, as entomologists call them, prefer to breed in open areas rather than shaded forests. After the peace created by Pocahontas’s marriage in 1614, colonists cleared land for tobacco—making the environment, Gaines told me, “more quad-friendly, because it would have created those little open pockets of water they love.” The tassantassas were issuing “an invitation for malaria,” he said. “In my experience, malaria takes up invitations right away.” If Plasmodium arrived with the first colonists, it could help explain, along with salt poisoning, why they were so often described as listless and apathetic; they had malaria.2

  Malaria’s precise date of arrival will always lie in the realm of speculation. What is clear is that malaria rapidly made itself at home in Virginia. It became as inescapable there as it was in the English marshes—a constant, sapping part of life.

  When London investors shipped people to Virginia, Governor George Yeardley warned in 1620, they “must be content to have littell service done by new men the ffirst yeare till they be seasoned”—seasoning being the term for the period in which newcomers were expected to battle disease. The prolonged incapacitation of recent migrants was taken for granted. Jamestown minister Hugh Jones wrote a pamphlet in 1724 describing Virginia to Britons. The colony’s climate, he incorrectly explained, causes chills and fever, “a severe Fit of which (called a Seasoning) most expect, some time after their Arrival in that Climate.” Seasoning often was a path to the cemetery; during Jamestown’s first half century, as many as a third of new arrivals died within a year of disembarking. After that, Virginians learned by trial and error to live with vivax, avoiding marshes and staying indoors at dusk; those with acquired immunity carefully tended the sick, most of whom were children as in Africa today. Seasoning deaths fell from 20 or 30 percent around 1650 to 10 percent or lower around 1670—a considerable improvement, but still a level that represented much suffering.

  Landon Carter had a prosperous Virginia plantation about sixty miles north of Jamestown. A devoted father, Carter agonized as malaria repeatedly hit his family in the summer and fall of 1757. Worst affected was his infant daughter Sukey, racked by chills and fever in the classic tertian pattern. Like Samuel Jeake, Carter recorded her struggle in a diary:

  Dec. 7: Sukey lookt badly all this evening with a quick Pulse.

  Dec. 8: ’Tis her usual Period of attack which is now got to every Fortnight.… Seems brisk and talkt cheerfully. Her fever not higher.

  Dec. 9: Continues better though very pale.

  Dec. 10: Sukey a fever early and very sick at her stomach and head ach. This fever went off in the night.

  Dec. 11: The Child no fever to day but I thought her pulse a little quick at night.

  Dec. 12: Sukey’s fever rose at 1 in the night.… This Child dangerous i
ll at 12, dead pale and blue.…

  Dec. 13: Sukey’s fever kept wearing away Yesterday till one in the night when she was quite clear.

  To live in Virginia, a heartworn Carter wrote that day, “it is necessary that man should be acquainted with affliction, and ’tis certainly nothing short of it to be confined a whole year in tending one’s sick Children. Mine are now never well.”

  Sukey died the following April, short of her third birthday.

  ABOUT-FACE

  Malaria had impacts beyond the immediate sufferings of its victims. It was a historical force that deformed cultures, an insistent nudge that pushed societies to answer questions in ways that today seem cruel and reprehensible. Consider the seventeenth-century English entrepreneurs who wanted to make money in North America. Because Chesapeake Bay had no gold and silver, the best way to profit was to produce something else that could be exported to the home country. In New England, the Pilgrims depended on selling beaver fur. In Chesapeake Bay, the English settled on tobacco, for which there was huge demand. To satisfy that demand, the colonists wanted to expand the plantation area. To do that, they would have to take down huge trees with hand tools; break up soil under the hot sun; hoe, water, and top the growing tobacco plants; cut the heavy, sticky leaves; drape them on racks to dry; and pack them in hogsheads for shipping. All of this would require a lot of labor. Where could the colonists acquire it?

  Before answering this question make the assumption, abundantly justified, that the colonists have few moral scruples about the answer and are concerned only with maximizing ease and profit. From this point of view, they had two possible sources for the required workforce: indentured servants from England and slaves from outside of England (Indians or Africans). Servants or slaves: which, economically speaking, was the best choice?

  Indentured servants were contract laborers recruited from England’s throngs of unemployed. Because the poor could not afford the costly journey across the sea, planters paid for the voyage and servants paid off the debt by working for a given period, typically four to seven years. After that, indentured servants were free to claim their own land in the Americas. Slavery is harder to define, because it has existed in many different forms. But its essence is that the owner acquires the right to coerce labor from slaves, and slaves never gain the right to leave; they must work and obey until they die or are freed by their owners. Indentured servants are members of society, though at a low rank. Slaves are usually not considered members of society, either because they were born far away or because they somehow have forfeited their social standing, as in the occasional English practice of turning convicts into slaves.

  During the last quarter of the seventeenth century, England chose slaves over servants—indeed, it became the world’s biggest slaver. So well known nowadays is the English embrace of slavery that the idea of another path is hard to grasp. But in many respects the nation’s turn to bondage is baffling—the institution has so many inherent problems that economists have often puzzled over why it exists. More baffling still is the form that bondage took in the Americas: chattel slavery, a regime much harsher than anything seen before in Europe or Africa.

  On the simplest level, slaves were more expensive than servants. In a well-known study, Russell R. Menard of the University of Minnesota tallied up the prices in Virginia and Maryland of slaves and servants whose services had to be sold after their masters’ deaths. In the last decades of the seventeenth century, the average price of a prime-age male African slave was £25. Meanwhile, the servants’ contracts typically cost about £10. (Technically, I should say that Menard discovered the price was equivalent to £25 and £10, because coins were scarce and even illegal in colonial Chesapeake Bay, and people paid their bills with tobacco.) At that time, £25 was a substantial sum: about four years’ pay for the typical hired worker in England. The servant was substantially cheaper.

  To be sure, servants would eventually be able to leave their master’s employ, lowering their value (attempting to take this into account, Menard looked only at servants with more than four years remaining on their contracts). But the longer period of service one could expect from a slave still would not justify slavery economically, the great economist Adam Smith argued. An inherent flaw with slavery, he maintained, is that slaves made unsatisfactory workers. Because they were usually from distant cultures, they often didn’t speak their owners’ language and could be so unfamiliar with their owners’ societies that they would have to be trained from scratch (Africans, for example, knew only tropical forms of agriculture). Worse, they had every incentive to escape, wreak sabotage, or kill their owners, the people who were depriving them of liberty. Indentured servants, by contrast, spoke the same language, accepted the same social norms, and knew the same farming methods. And their contracts were for a limited time, so they had little reason to run away (unless they thought the planter was going to cheat). Because willing hands are more likely to do their jobs well, Smith reasoned in The Wealth of Nations, “the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.” All else being equal, he argued, economics suggests that planters should have chosen the cheaper, easier, less threatening alternative: servants from Europe.

  Smith, who hated slavery, was trying to prove that something he detested was not only immoral, but foolish economically. Slavery, in his view, was largely the irrational product of humankind’s “love to domineer.” But he also believed that people try to find ways around economic problems that stand in the way of their desires. Just as one would expect, slave owners throughout history have created incentives for their slaves to work efficiently: paths to liberty. Work hard and true, masters in effect said, and you will eventually be allowed to walk away. Often, too, slaves were assigned tasks that brought some satisfaction, as in the case of African or Roman armies made up of captive soldiers—the slaves had switched sides, so to speak, but their lives were unchanged in many ways, and there was always the prospect of earning glory.

  Slavery in the Americas, though, was something else: a lifelong sentence, in most cases, to awful work in brutal conditions without hope of winning freedom. Every one of Smith’s disincentives for effective work was present as rarely before; none of the workarounds developed in the past were employed. The regime was so brutal that it should have generated constant shirking, sabotage, and strife—and, indeed, slaveholder records are endless threnodies of complaint and fear. Why did it arise?

  Of all the nations in western Europe, moreover, England would be the last that one would expect to take up this especially brutal form of bondage, because opposition to slavery was more common there than the rest of Europe. If the continent had an antislavery culture, in fact, it was England. This was less a tribute to the nation’s moral advancement than an enraged response to the constant targeting of her ships by Barbary pirates, who from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century enslaved tens of thousands of English sailors, soldiers, and merchants. Based in northwest Africa, these Muslim corsairs prowled as far north as the English Channel, ransacking seaside villages and seizing ships at anchor; in just ten days, the mayor of Plymouth complained in 1625, buccaneers lurking outside the harbor took twenty-seven vessels. (Inviting charges of hypocrisy, England lionized Francis Drake, who terrorized Spanish colonies in a similar fashion.) Most English captives were sent to the galleys; many were forcibly converted to Islam; others disappeared into slave caravans bound across the deserts to Ottoman Egypt or sub-Saharan Africa. In those days Algiers alone often held 1,500 English slaves; the Moroccan town of Salé had 1,500 more. Some were sold to Spain and Portugal. Escapees published lurid memoirs of their years under the lash, inflaming the public; churchmen denounced Muslim slavery in the pulpit and took up collections in church to ransom captives. Political leaders, Protestant ministers, and legal experts alike vehemently proclaimed freedom as an English birthright and condemned the pagans and papists (Moroccans and Spaniards) who enslaved them.

  Slavery had been widespread in En
gland in medieval times, as it was in the rest of Europe. In Spain and Portugal, beset by conflict with Islam and short of labor for sugar plantations, it continued to be a useful enterprise. (I discuss this further in Chapter 8.) In England, though, it became exceptional—not actually illegal, but rare—for political reasons, for the economic reasons described by Smith, and because slavery as an institution had little appeal in a nation aswarm with mobs of unemployed workers. Publicly outraged by bondage and with no domestic slave industry to protect, the English were Europe’s least likely candidates for slavemasters.

  In consequence, the English colonies initially turned to indentured servants and largely avoided slaves. Indentured servants comprised between a third and a half of the Europeans who arrived in North America in the first century of colonization. Slaves were rare—only three hundred lived in all of Virginia in 1650. By comparison, the few Dutch in New Amsterdam, the colonial predecessor to New York, had five hundred slaves. As more English ships came to North America, slaves slowly became more common.

  Then, between 1680 and 1700, the number of slaves suddenly exploded. Virginia’s slave population rose in those years from three thousand to more than sixteen thousand—and kept soaring thereafter. In the same period the tally of indentured servants shrank dramatically. It was a pivot in world history, the time when English America became a slave society and England became the dominant player in the slave trade.

  What accounts for this about-face? Economists and historians have mulled it over for decades. It was not the lure of profits from the trade itself: the slave business was incredibly important as a historical force and moral stain but not all that important as an economic industry. At its height at the end of the eighteenth century, according to the historians David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, slave shipments “accounted for less than 1.5 percent of British ships, and much less than 3 percent of British shipping tonnage.” Caribbean sugar, the main slave crop, then accounted for a bit less than 2.5 percent of British GDP, large but not overwhelmingly so; the textile industry, for instance, was more than six times bigger. (Slaves were producing raw materials, not the far more valuable finished industrial goods.)