1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

  with boats plying to and fro, with Sails and oars, which carried commodities from place to place: so quick stirring, and numerous, as I have seen it below the bridge at London. Yet notwithstanding all this appearance of trade, the Inhabitants of the Islands, and shipping too, were so grievously visited with plague (or as killing a disease) that before a month was expired, after our arrival, the living were hardly able to bury the dead.

  Six thousand died on Barbados alone in those five years, according to one contemporary estimate. Almost all of the victims were European—a searing lesson for the island’s colonists. McNeill estimates that the epidemic “may have killed 20 to 50 percent of local populations” in a swathe from coastal Central America to Florida.

  The epidemic didn’t kill off the sugar industry—it was too lucrative. Incredibly, Barbados, an island of 166 square miles, was then on its way to making more money than all of the rest of English America. Meanwhile sugar had expanded to nearby Nevis, St. Kitts, Antigua, Montserrat, Martinique, Grenada, and other places. (Cuba had begun growing sugar decades before, but production was small; Spaniards were much too preoccupied by silver to pay attention.) A heterogeneous mass of English, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese was clearing these islands as fast as possible, sticking cane in the flatlands and cutting trees on the slopes for fuel. Deforestation and erosion were the nigh-unavoidable result; rainfall, no longer absorbed by vegetation, washed soil down the slopes, forming coastal marshes. In the not-too-distant future workers would be ordered to carry the soil in baskets back up the hills—“a true labor of Sisyphus,” McNeill remarked in Mosquito Empires. McNeill quotes one Caribbean naturalist marveling at “the inconsideration or rather stupidity of west Indian planters in extinguishing many useful woods that spontaneously grow on those islands.” Writing in 1791, the naturalist judged that many islands were “almost rendered unfit for cultivation.”

  Even the worst ecological mismanagement benefits some species. Among the winners in the Caribbean was Anopheles albimanus, the region’s most important malaria vector. A resident of the bigger Caribbean islands and coastal areas in Yucatán and Central America, A. albimanus is a reluctant malaria host, hard for falciparum to infect and slow to pick up vivax (many mosquitoes have bacteria in their gut that inhibit the parasite). It likes to breed in coastal, algae-covered marshes under the open sun. Erosion and deforestation are its friends. Field experiments have shown that albimanus can reproduce in huge numbers when it has favorable habitat. Given its preferences, the European move into the Caribbean must have marked the beginning of a golden age. As the mosquito population soared, P. vivax had more opportunities to overcome the mosquito’s reluctance to host it. (Indeed, it may have beaten the mosquito while traveling with Colón; in addition to the reference to çiçiones in the admiral’s second voyage, his son Hernán later claimed that “intermittent fever” appeared on his fourth voyage.) From the Caribbean, vivax malaria spread into Mexico. Falciparum came much later, the delay partly due to A. albimanus’s more complete resistance to the parasite.

  Sugar plantations denuded Barbados, as shown in the background of this photograph of workers’ huts in the 1890s. (Photo credit 3.5)

  Another beneficiary was Aedes aegypti, the yellow fever vector. A. aegypti likes to breed in small amounts of clear water near human beings; naval water casks are a well-known favorite. Sugar mills abounded with equivalent vessels: the crude clay pots used to crystallize sugar. Plantations had hundreds or thousands of these vessels, which were only used for part of the year and often broken. Today we know that aegypti likes to breed in the puddles that collect in the interior of cast-off automobile tires. Sugar pots were a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century equivalent. McNeill noted that the pots would have been full of sugary residue, fodder for the bacteria that aegypti larvae feed upon. Sugar plantations were like factories for producing yellow fever.

  Incoming Europeans didn’t know these details. But they were entirely aware that the Caribbean was, as historian James L. A. Webb wrote in a recent history of malaria, “a lethal environment for non-immunes.”

  Malaria percolated from the Caribbean into South America, and thence up the Amazon. The river has a plenitude of hosts: a 2008 survey of the Madeira River, an important Amazonian tributary, found no less than nine Anopheles mosquito species, all of which carried the parasite. The first Europeans to visit Amazonia described it as a thriving, salubrious place; malaria and, later, yellow fever turned many rivers into death traps. By 1782 the parasite was sabotaging expeditions into the upper reaches of the river basin. For two centuries the disease was a sometime, scattered thing: big stretches of Amazonia, depopulated by smallpox and slavery, had too few inhabitants to sustain the parasite. It may have been more common in the far western tributaries like the Madeira, because they experienced fewer Dutch and Portuguese slave raids, and thus had more people to infect. Malaria nearly killed French naturalist Alcide d’Orbigny in 1832 in the Madeira region, but a decade later another naturalist, the U.S. amateur William Henry Edwards, “encountered but one case” of it on the river, despite camping for days near its mouth.

  Much worse was the northeastern bulge of South America, the region the geographer Susanna Hecht has called the Caribbean Amazon. Bounded to the south by the Amazon River in Brazil and to the west by the Orinoco River in Venezuela, it was a watery place that Arawak and Carib people controlled with sprawling networks of dikes, dams, canals, berms, and mounds. Large expanses of forest were managed for tree crops, especially the palms that in tropical places provide fruit, oil, starch, wine, fuel, and building material. Beneath the palms lay scattered patches of manioc (cassava). This landscape of gardens, orchards, and waterways served for centuries as a bridge between the interior and the islands. Such complex arrangements typically are supervised by strong, well-organized governments. Europeans certainly thought the Indians had them—it explained why their repeated efforts to seize this rich agricultural land were repelled. Only in the eighteenth century did the foreigners gain a foothold, aided by the introduction of European diseases: smallpox, tuberculosis, and influenza cleared the way for malaria. Indians retreated into the interior as Europeans seized the coast, creating sugar plantations in what eventually became, after much international squabbling, Guyane (French Guiana), Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana), and Guyana (formerly British Guiana).

  Archetypical may have been Guyane, which was formally acquired by France in a treaty in 1763. Initial colonization efforts proved so disastrous that the nation almost forgot its existence until three decades later, when a military-backed coup overthrew the parliament established by the French Revolution. The new dictatorship piled 328 unwanted deputies, clergymen, and journalists into small vessels and dumped them in the colony. P. falciparum greeted them on the shore. Within two years more than half were dead, either killed by malaria or sufficiently weakened by it to be slain by other ailments. Undeterred, the French state kept sending over criminals and undesirables. French prisoners had in the past served as galley slaves on special prison ships in the Mediterranean. After the steam engine made galleys obsolete convicts were dispatched to Guyane. Violent offenders ended up in the infamous prison on Devils Island, seven miles off the coast; the rest joined chain gangs of agricultural labor. Disease claimed so many that Guyane became known as a “dry guillotine”—a blade that killed without needing to wet itself with blood. Perhaps eighty thousand Frenchmen made the passage. Very, very few returned.

  Unable to settle in disease zones, Europeans never established communities there. The ideal was offshore ownership. Europeans would remain in the safety of the home country while small numbers of onsite managers directed the enslaved workforce. Because captives would outnumber captors, intimidation and brutality would be necessary to keep the sugar mills grinding. In the realm of falciparum and yellow fever, sugar despotism became the rule: tiny bands of Europeans atop masses of transplanted Africans, angry or demoralized or stoic according to their characters.

 
Nothing is wrong with offshore ownership per se. If French wine makers buy wineries in California or U.S. wine makers buy wineries in Bordeaux or Burgundy, the acquisitions may sting local pride but are unlikely to have any larger effect on either nation. It is different if foreign wine makers buy every winery—or, stronger yet, if people thousands of miles away dominate every industry. One all-too-representative example: a single Liverpool firm, Booker Brothers, controlled three-quarters of British Guiana’s economy for almost a century. All the profits ended up on the other side of the ocean. So did all of the entrepreneurial, managerial, and technical expertise. Locals provided only labor. Indeed, they were punished if they tried to do anything else.

  The French artist Édouard Riou, now best known for his illustrations of Jules Verne, traveled to France’s colony of Guyane in 1862–63. A visit to the prison islands produced this image of the sea burial of a convict, presumably a victim of malaria or yellow fever. (Photo credit 3.4)

  As the economists Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson noted, distant and disconnected owners had little interest in building the institutions necessary to maintain complex societies: schools, highways, sewers, hospitals, parliaments, legal codes, agricultural-extension agencies, and other governmental systems. In places with a full array of functioning institutions, locals can compete economically with foreigners by developing new technologies and new business methods. In extractive states, locals never got the chance. Most of the English colonists who went to Virginia or Australia were servants or convicts, the lowest tiers in the social pyramid. But despite their bottom ranking their status as citizens gave them some ability to use the institutions of the homeland to push back when their leaders tried to oppress them. (Australia’s convicts, for example, began winning lawsuits against their would-be abusers almost as soon as they landed.) The slaves in extractive states had no such ability to tap into these institutions. Indeed, elites actively sought to cut off their access. A particular worry was education; echoing many in British Guiana, Booker president Josiah Booker denounced the notion of teaching his company’s employees to read because it would encourage them to aspire “far above their station in life.” Wrong ideas in the wrong people’s hands could put the elites’ political power at risk.

  History suggests, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson wrote, that industrialization cannot occur without “both investments from a large number of people who were not previously part of the ruling elite and the emergence of new entrepreneurs.” Both are next to impossible in extractive states. Over the decades, reformers tried to counteract the system’s effects. Missionaries provided education for Guyana’s children; the British Anti-Slavery Society thundered unceasingly against mistreatment, launched investigations, and provided aid. “Jock” Campbell, the visionary head of Booker Brothers’ corporate successor, spent decades improving sugar workers’ conditions. The reformers did everything but change the basic extractive system. When Guyana gained formal independence in 1966, 80 percent of its export earnings were controlled by three foreign companies, one of them Campbell’s. The new nation had just one university, a night school established three years before.

  WAR AND MOSQUITOES

  In malaria zones, the primary victims are children. Adults as a rule have already had the disease and become immune upon survival. The adults who have most to fear are recent arrivals—a lesson that was learned in the Americas again and again, perhaps most dramatically during the U.S. Civil War. Much of the war was fought in the South by troops from the North. Crossing the Mason-Dixon Line, Yankees broke an epidemiological barrier. The effects were enormous.

  In July 1861, three months after the conflict began, the Union’s Army of the Potomac marched from Washington to the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. It was repulsed at what became known to Yankees as the Battle of Bull Run and to Confederates as the Battle of Manassas. After fleeing to Washington, the generals dragged their feet about further action. President Lincoln railed against their pusillanimity, but they may have had a point. In the year after Bull Run, more than a third of the Army of the Potomac suffered from what army statistics describe as remittent fever, quotidian intermittent fever, tertian intermittent fever, quartan intermittent fever, or congestive intermittent fever—terms generally taken today to mean malaria. Union troops in North Carolina fared still worse. An expeditionary force of fifteen thousand landed at Roanoke Island in early 1862, and spent much of the war enforcing a naval blockade from a fort on the coastline. The air at dusk shimmered with Anopheles quadrimaculatus. Between the summer of 1863 and the summer of 1864, the official annual infection rate for intermittent fevers was 233 percent—the average soldier was felled two times or more.

  From the beginning the Union army was bigger and better supplied than the Confederate army. As at Bull Run, though, the North lost battle after battle. Incompetent generalship, valiant opponents, and long supply lines were partly to blame. But so was malaria—the price of entering the Plasmodium zone. During the war the annual case rate never dropped below 40 percent. In one year Plasmodium infected 361,968 troops. The parasite killed few directly, but it so badly weakened them that they succumbed readily to dysentery or measles or what military doctors then called “chronic rheumatism” (probably a strep infection). At least 600,000 soldiers died in the Civil War, the most deadly conflict in U.S. history. Most of those lives were not lost in battle. Disease killed twice as many Union troops as Confederate bullets or shells.

  Malaria affected the course of the war itself. Sick soldiers had to be carried in litters or shipped out at considerable cost. With so many sick for so long the resource drain was constant. Confederate generals did not control malaria or even know what it was, but it was an extra arrow in their quiver. Plasmodium likely delayed the Union victory by months or even years.

  In the long run this may be worth celebrating. Initially the North proclaimed that its goal was to preserve the nation, not free slaves; with few dissenting votes, Congress promised rebel states that “this war is not waged” for the “purpose of overthrowing or interfering with [their] rights or established institutions,” where “established institutions” was taken to mean slavery. The longer the war ground on, the more willing grew Washington to consider radical measures. Should part of the credit for the Emancipation Proclamation be assigned to malaria? The idea is not impossible.

  Plasmodium’s contribution to the birth of the United States was stronger still. In May of 1778 Henry Clinton became commander in chief of the British forces during the Revolutionary War. Partly on the basis of inaccurate reports from American exiles in London, the British command believed that the Carolinas and Georgia were full of loyalists who feared to announce their support of the home country. Clinton decided upon a “southern strategy.” He would send a force south, which would hold the region long enough to persuade the silent loyalist majority to declare its support for the king. In addition, he promised, slaves who fought for his side would be freed. Although Clinton didn’t know it, he was leading an invasion of the malaria zone.

  Although almost forgotten today, yellow fever was a terror from the U.S. South to Argentina until the 1930s, when a safe vaccine was developed. This cartoon illustrated a magazine article about an 1873 outbreak in Florida. (Photo credit 3.6)

  English troops were not seasoned; indeed, two-thirds of the troops who served in 1778 were from malaria-free Scotland. To be sure, many British soldiers had by 1780 spent a year or two in the colonies—but mostly in New York and New England, north of the Plasmodium line. By contrast, the southern colonists were seasoned; almost all were immune to vivax and many had survived falciparum.

  British troops successfully besieged Charleston in 1780. Clinton left a month later and instructed his troops to chase the Americans into the hinterlands. The man he put in charge of the foray was Major General Charles Cornwallis. Cornwallis marched inland in June, high season for Anopheles quadrimaculatus. By autumn, the general complained, disease had “nearly ruined” his army. So many me
n were sick that the British could barely fight. Loyalist troops from the colonies were the only men able to march. Cornwallis himself lay feverish while his Loyalists lost the Battle of Kings Mountain. “There was a big imbalance. Cornwallis’s army simply melted away,” McNeill told me.

  Beaten back by disease, Cornwallis abandoned the Carolinas and marched to Chesapeake Bay, where he planned to join another British force. He arrived in June 1781. Clinton ordered him to take a position on the coast, where the army could be transported to New York if needed. Cornwallis protested: Chesapeake Bay was famously disease ridden. It didn’t matter; he had to be on the coast if he was to be useful. The army went to Yorktown, fifteen miles from Jamestown, a location Cornwallis bitterly described as “some acres of an unhealthy swamp.” His camp was between two marshes, near some rice fields.

  To Clinton’s horror and surprise, a French fleet appeared off Chesapeake Bay, sealing in Cornwallis. Meanwhile, Washington marched south from New York. The revolution was so short of cash and supplies that his army had twice mutinied. Nonetheless an opportunity had arisen. The British army was unable to move; Cornwallis later estimated that only 3,800 of his 7,700 men were fit to fight. McNeill takes pains to credit the bravery and skill of the revolution’s leaders. But what he wryly referred to as “revolutionary mosquitoes” played an equally critical role. “Anopheles quadrimaculatus stands tall among the Founding Fathers,” he said to me. With Cornwallis’s troops falling to the Columbian Exchange in ever-greater numbers, the British army surrendered, effectively creating the United States, on October 17, 1781.