Mosquito empires: ecology and war in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 9780511670022, 9780521452861, 9780521459105

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
List of Maps (page xi)
List of Abbreviations Used in the Footnotes (page xiii)
Preface (page xv)
Acknowledgments (page xvii)
1 The Argument (and Its Limits) in Brief (page 1)
PART I. SETTING THE SCENE
2 Atlantic Empires and Caribbean Ecology (page 15)
3 Deadly Fevers, Deadly Doctors (page 63)
PART II. IMPERIAL MOSQUITOES
4 Fevers Take Hold: From Recife to Kourou (page 91)
5 Yellow Fever Rampant and British Ambition Repulsed, 1690-1780 (page 137)
PART III. REVOLUTIONARY MOSQUITOES
6 Lord Cornwallis vs. Anopheles quadrimaculatus, 1780-1781 (page 195)
7 Revolutionary Fevers, 1790-1898: Haiti, New Granada, and Cuba (page 235)
8 Conclusion: Vector and Virus Vanquished, 1880-1914 (page 304)
Bibliography (page 315)
Index (page 363)

Citation preview

MosQuItTo EMPIRES ECOLOGY AND WAR IN THE GREATER CARIBBEAN, 1620-1914.

This book explores the links among ecology, disease, and international politics in the context of the Greater Caribbean — the landscapes lying between Surinam and the Chesapeake — in the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries. Ecological changes made these landscapes especially suitable for the mosquito vectors of yellow fever and malaria, helping these diseases to wreak systematic havoc among invading armies and would-be settlers. Because yellow fever confers immunity on survivors of the disease, and because malaria confers resistance, these diseases played partisan roles in the struggles for empire and revolution, consistently attacking some populations more severely than others. In particular, yellow fever and malaria attacked newcomers to the region, which helped keep the Spanish Empire Spanish in the face of predatory rivals in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the late eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century, these diseases helped revolutions succeed by decimating forces sent out from Europe to stop them.

J. R. McNeill is University Professor in the History Department and School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. His books include The Mountains of the Mediterranean World (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (2000), co-winner of the World History Association book prize and the Forest History Society book prize and runner-up for the BP Natural World book prize; and The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (2003), co-authored with his

father, William H. McNeill.

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New APPROACHES TO THE AMERICAS

Edited by Stuart Schwartz, Yale University

Also published in the series: Arnold J. Bauer, Goods, Power, History: Latin America’s Material Culture Laird Bergad, The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1050 Junia Ferreira Furtado, Chica da Silva: A Brazilian Slave of the Eighteenth Century Sandra Lauderdale Graham, Caetana Says No: Women’s Stories from a Brazilian Slave Society

Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade Robert M. Levine, Father of the Poor? Vargas and His Era Shawn William Miller, An Environmental History of Latin America Susan Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America

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MosQuITo EMPIRES ECOLOGY AND WAR IN THE GREATER CARIBBEAN,

1620-1914

J. R. McNEILL Georgetown University

CAMBRIDGE “SE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

© Cambridge University Press 2010

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published in print format 2010 ISBN-13 978-0-511-66924-8 | eBook (Adobe Reader)

ISBN-13 978-0-521-45286-1 Hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-45910-5 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Julie, once again

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CCONTENTS

List of Maps page xi List of Abbreviations Used in the Footnotes x

Preface wy Acknowledgments xvi 1 The Argument (and Its Limits) in Brief x The Argument 2

The Limits of the Argument 5

The Limits of the Novelty of the Argument . Part |. SETTING THE SCENE

2 Atlantic Empires and Caribbean Ecology tS Atlantic American Geopolitics, 1620-1820 1S

1040-1750 22

Ecological Transformation in the Caribbean, Yellow Fever and Caribbean Ecology 32 Yellow Fever Transmission and Immunity 40 Epidemic Yellow Fever and Plantation Sugar Ay

Malaria, Mosquitoes, and Plantations of Sugar and Rice 52

and Epidemics 58

Climate Change, El Nifio, Mosquitoes, Conclusion 80

3 Deadly Fevers, Deadly Doctors 62

Early Yellow Fever Epidemics and Their Victims G4

Conclusion RS

A Virulent Strain of Medicine 68 1X

x CONTENTS ParT I]. IMPERIAL MOSQUITOES

4 Fevers Take Hold: From Recife to Kourou Oy The Dutch in Brazil, 1624-1654 Q2 The English in Jamaica, 1655-1660 oy)

The Scots at Darien, 1698-1699 LOS The French at Kourou, 1763-1764 123

Conclusion E35

1690-1780 139

5 Yellow Fever Rampant and British Ambition Repulsed, Yellow Fever and the Defense of the

Spanish Empire 139

The Deadly 1690s rad

Siege Ecology at Cartagena, 1741 149

Havana, 1762 16Q Conclusion rS8

The Seven Years’ War and the Siege Ecology of

Part III. REVOLUTIONARY MOSQUITOES

1780-1781 YQs

6 Lord Cornwallis vs. Anopheles quadrimaculatus, Introduction LOS

Slave Risings and Surinam’s Maroons rOs Revolution and Malaria in the Southern Colonies 198 Yorktown 220

Conclusion 232

and Cuba 238

7 Revolutionary Fevers, 1790-1898: Haiti, New Granada, St. Domingue, 1790-1804 236

New Granada, 1815-1820 209 Immigration, Warfare, and Independence, 1830-1898: Mexico, the United States,

and Cuba 289 Conclusion 303 8 Conclusion: Vector and Virus Vanquished, 1880-1914 304

The Argument Recapitulated 304 Vector and Virus Vanquished 306

Disease and Power 312

Index 363 Bibliography 3I5

List oF Maps

2.1. The Greater Caribbean page 22

4.1 Northeastern Brazil 9 4.2 Jamaica ey)

4.3 Panama and Darien ros 4.4 Guyana and Kourou 123 5.1 Fortified Points in the Spanish Caribbean (c. 1750) £3Q

5.2 Cartagena and Environs (c. 1741) rso 5.3 Havana and Environs (c. 1762) L732

6.1 The Carolinas and the Chesapeake (c. 1780) rag

7.1 St. Domingue (c. 1790) 236 7.2 The Viceroyalty of New Granada (c. 1810) ao 7.3 Cuba 2g6

x1

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List OF ABBREVIATIONS UsED IN THE FOOTNOTES

AGI Archivo General de Indias AGI AP Archivo General de Indias, Audiencia de Panama AGI SD Archivo General de Indias, Audiencia de Santo Domingo

AGS Archivo General de Simancas AHN Archivo Histérico Nacional

BL British Library

BL Add. MSS © British Library, Additional Manuscripts

BN Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid) CSP Calendar of State Papers MHS Massachusetts Historical Society

NLS National Library of Scotland

PRO Public Record Office

PRO ADM Public Record Office, Admiralty Papers PRO CO Public Record Office, Colonial Office Papers PRO PC Public Record Office, Privy Council Papers

PRO SP Public Record Office, State Papers PRO WO Public Record Office, War Office

SHM Servicio Histérico Militar

(A full listing of manuscript collections used in this book appears in the Bibliography.)

X11

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PREFACE

Few books can have had longer gestations than this one. I first became aware of the devastating lethality of yellow fever in the winter of 1979— 1980 when reading documents about eighteenth-century Cuba in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville. I was then a twenty-five-year-old

graduate student researching a dissertation, trying to live on $125 a month, lonely and often cold and hungry, aware that Seville had many

charms available in the hours after the archive had closed but that I could not afford any more costly than walking the avenues and visiting

the glorious cathedral. Reading about yellow fever was good for my shaky morale: At least I was not in searing heat, plagued by mosquitoes, and wracked with a deadly virus. My dissertation had a few references to yellow fever. In the two years after I completed that justly neglected document, I had the good fortune to be flamboyantly unsuccessful in the academic job market, providing

me with an informal post-doc financed by odd jobs. I learned more about the etiology of yellow fever and, over some months, wrote my first

conference paper on the virus’s impacts on warfare in the Caribbean, delivered (shakily) to an audience in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Eventually, my luck changed in the job market and I began to teach European,

Russian, and German history, which carried my mind far from the Caribbean. I gave yellow fever no more thought for three or more years.

In 1985, I moved to Georgetown University and began teaching international, world, and African history, which kept me too busy to think about anything not needed for my next class. Soon after my arrival, while walking through the stacks of Lauinger Library, my eyes chanced

on a black-jacketed book with an interesting title. ] pulled it off the XV

XVI PREFACE shelf, opened it while still walking, and scanned the table of contents. To my surprise, I appeared as author of chapter two. It was my Tuscaloosa conference paper, published without my knowledge and without any corrections. I cringed for a moment, aware of at

least some of the chapter’s imperfections. Then I scurried back to my office to enter a new publication on my scrawny C.V. I silently vowed one day to return to the subject and do it more carefully. Had I not accidentally spotted the black-jacketed book, I would never have tried to write this one. Years passed, devoted to teaching, other book projects, and raising

children (not necessarily in that order). In 1996, Richard Hoffman and the late Elinor Melville invited me to an environmental history conference at York University. In a feverish burst of scribbling and selfplagiarism, I wrote a rather better conference paper in thirty-six hours. | let the matter drop again, turning my attention to new projects and new

children. But soon Richard Grove traipsed into my office, introduced himself, and asked if I had anything he might want to publish in the journal he founded and edited, Environment and History. I turned over the York paper to him and, with my knowledge and a few corrections, he published it in 1998. But I knew it still wasn’t what it should be. Further imperfect renditions of this paper followed, deepening my unease. But since 2004, I have made this project the main focus of my scholarly ambitions. Several new ideas have bubbled up in the process of new research, several more formal presentations of the subject, and dozens of conversations with amicable and patient historians, geographers, biologists, friends, and relatives. At a certain point, authors must conquer their urge to do yet more research, and surrender to the inevitability that their work is imperfect. I have reconciled myself to the fact that there are archives I did not visit, others that I visited too briefly, and books and articles I should have read. But new projects clamor for my time as, happily, do the same children. So here it is, long in the making but, I hope, less imperfect for it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing this book has reminded me how fortunate I am. While conducting my research, I needed plenty of help and guidance. While trying

to form and sharpen my arguments, I needed many sounding boards. While struggling to put my ideas in clear prose, I needed several sharpeyed readers. Several dozen friends and colleagues, and a few relatives, answered my needs, giving me and my book their precious time. Helpful colleagues who answered amateurish questions or provided references about mosquitoes, diseases, and ecology include Peter Armbruster, Tim Beach, Heidi Elmendorf, Derwin Fish, David Krakauer, Todd Morell, Scott Norton, and Emilio Quevedo. Scholars who performed similar kindnesses, some of them so long ago they have likely for-

gotten, concerning historical matters include Andrew Bell, Lisa Brady, the late Philip Curtin, Alejandro de la Fuente, Luis Fajardo, Lil Fenn, Reinaldo Funes, Ignacio Gallup-Dfaz, Sherry Johnson, Wim Klooster, Peter McCandless, Phil Morgan, Jean-Francois Mouhot, Matt Mulcahy, Celia Parcero, Anne Pérotin-Dumon, Ernst Pijning, Lydia Pulsipher, Ben Vinson, Jim Webb, Xenia Wilkinson, and Drexel Woodson. My debt extends to my former students Juan-Luis Simal and Vikram Tamboli, who dug up documents on my behalf, as did Liz Shlala. I thank them all. Several historians, two political scientists, and one geomorphologist read all or parts of the manuscript and provided helpful sugges-

tions and sorely needed corrections. Those who read parts, in some cases most of it, include Trevor Burnard, Ronald Hoffman, Paolo Squatriti, and my Georgetown colleagues Tommaso Astarita, Tim Beach,

Carol Benedict, Jim Collins, David Goldfrank, Erick Langer, Chandra Manning, Bryan McCann, and Jim Millward. (Professor Burnard XVI

XVI ACKNOWLEDGMENTS also lent my family his house and car one summer while I worked in British archives.) Colleagues who made the sacrifice of reading the full manuscript include Alan Karras, Steve Wrage, and from Georgetown Alison Games, Charles King, Meredith McKittrick, Micah Muscolino, Aviel Roshwald, Adam Rothman, and John Tutino. No fewer than sixteen Georgetown colleagues read all or parts of the work, testimony to a generosity of spirit that I expect is not often equaled elsewhere. No less remarkable is that my father, William McNeill, my sister Ruth McNeill, and my brother-in-law Bart Jones read it in full as well. My father sped the completion of the project by asking frequently whether it was done yet. My sister, who twenty-five years ago told me my writing would be improved if I sprinkled ten additional commas on each page and it would hardly matter where they landed, excised scores of errant and unhelpful commas scattered throughout this text. Two anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press also provided useful suggestions

which I have heeded (and some others that I probably should have heeded). Audiences at several universities and conferences have politely sat through presentations on themes in this book, and in every case made comments or asked questions that refined my thinking. So I thank the patient souls at the following universities: Akron, Canterbury, Duke, George Washington, Harvard, Helsinki, Johns Hopkins, Lund, Maryland, Michigan, MIT, New Hampshire, Penn, Pittsburgh, Virginia, Wisconsin, Yale, and York. At various stages, I needed not only time and expertise from generous colleagues, but I also needed money. The MacArthur Foundation and the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown provided the necessary funds for overseas research. The greatest debt I save for last. Thank you, Julie.

CHAPTER ONE

THE ARGUMENT (AND ITs LimItTs) IN BRIEF

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee. Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green, That host with their banners at sunset were seen: Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown, That host on the morrow lay withered and strown. For the Angel of death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he pass’d; And the eyes of the sleepers wax’d deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still! — Lord Byron, “The Destruction of Sennacherib” (1815), verses 1-3

[The] whole damn war business is about nine hundred and ninetynine parts diarrhea to one part glory. — Walt Whitman‘

In 1727, the British Vice-Admiral Francis Hosier sailed with a naval squadron to the shores of what is now Colombia and Panama. His superiors had instructed him to blockade this coast in hopes of preventing a Spanish treasure fleet laden with South American silver from reaching ' Traubel (x906-61, 3:293). Whitman served as a nurse in the American Civil War; Byron died in the Greek War of Independence — of malaria.

I

2 MOSQUITO EMPIRES Spain. Yellow fever broke out on Hosier’s ships while they were cruising off Portobelo, killing almost the entire crew. Hosier soon scraped together another crew from Jamaica and returned to his duty, whereupon yellow fever killed the second crew along with the Vice-Admiral. Some

4,000 sailors died without a shot fired. Fourteen years later, Admiral Edward Vernon brought an amphibious strike force of about 29,000 men to the Colombia coast to besiege the Spanish stronghold of Cartagena. Within a few months 22,000 were dead, almost all from diseases, mainly yellow fever but probably malaria as well. The population of the Spanish colonies remained unaffected, and Spain’s grip on its American empire remained firm.

The enormous mortality of these expeditions and many more like them was remarkably one-sided. Yellow fever and malaria attacked some people much more often than others, which had political consequences.

Although always evolving, the ecological conditions that prevailed in

the Greater Caribbean after the 1640s reliably included these twin killers. Strictly speaking, they did not determine the outcomes of struggles for power, but they governed the probabilities of success and failure in military expeditions and settlement schemes. It is perhaps a rude blow to the amour propre of our species to think that lowly mosquitoes and mindless viruses can shape our international affairs. But they can. THE ARGUMENT

This book aims to show how quests for wealth and power changed ecologies in the Greater Caribbean, and how ecological changes in turn shaped the fortunes of empire, war, and revolution in the years between

1620 and 1914. By “Greater Caribbean” I mean the Atlantic coastal regions of South, Central, and North America, as well as the Caribbean islands themselves, that in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries became plantation zones: from Surinam to the Chesapeake. The book provides a perspective that takes into account nature — viruses, plasmodia,* mosquitoes, monkeys, swamps — as well as humankind in making political history. From the sixteenth century forward, the great powers of the Atlantic world — chiefly Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Britain — struggled > Plasmodia are parasites, a variety of protozoa. Certain species of plasmodia cause malaria in humans.

THE ARGUMENT (AND ITS LIMITS) IN BRIEF 3 among themselves for control over territories, resources, and peoples in the American continents and the Caribbean islands. Additionally, from the late eighteenth century onward some of the peoples of the Americas sought to achieve political independence from those great powers in a series of revolutions that created the United States, Haiti, and several republics in Spanish America. These were stirring events, the stuff of political history, replete with heroism and drama, providing stages for characters such as George Washington, Toussaint Lou-

verture, and Simon Bolivar. They were also the stuff of ecological history. A full and proper understanding of these events requires not only an appreciation of the social and economic forces at play — something historians have skillfully offered for a long time — but also an appreciation of ecological contexts and concurrent environmental trends, something historians have only lately tried to do. The geopolitical struggles of the

Greater Caribbean were fought out mainly in landscapes undergoing rapid environmental change, replete with deforestation, soil erosion, and the installation of plantation agro-ecosystems based on crops such as sugar and rice. The unstable evolving ecologies of the Greater Caribbean

provided ideal incubators for the species of mosquitoes that carry two of humankind’s most lethal diseases, yellow fever and malaria. The vector of yellow fever is the female of the species Aedes aegypti. Although several Anopheles species transmit malaria, in the southern colonies of

what would become the United States (where malaria helped turn the fortunes of nations) one species, Anopheles quadrimaculatus, communicated the disease.’ Ecological change resulting from the establishment of a plantation economy improved breeding and feeding conditions for both mosquito species, helping them become key actors in the geopolitical struggles of the early modern Atlantic world, if not, strictly speaking, dramatis personae.

The microbes behind yellow fever and malaria were also inadvertent

historical actors. Humans often have complicated and contradictory motivations. Microbes do not: they “want” to reproduce. The yellow fever virus and malarial plasmodia produced similar geopolitical effects,

and they often afflicted the same people at once, but were different organisms with different impacts. In populations without immunities, 3 Aedes aegypti appears in the specialist literature as A. aegypti or as Ae. aegypti. Anopheles quadrimaculatus appears as A. quadrimaculatus or An. quadrimaculatus.

4 MOSQUITO EMPIRES yellow fever was much more lethal than malaria. It plagued urban areas, whereas malaria haunted rural ones. Yellow fever conferred full immunity upon survivors, whereas malaria victims built up resistance through repeated bouts. The next chapter will say more about yellow fever and malaria, but this much should suffice to understand their historical roles. This book will have more to say about yellow fever than about malaria because yellow fever more often and more powerfully shaped the history of empires and revolutions in the Greater Caribbean.

Mosquitoes and the diseases they carried wrought havoc in the Greater Caribbean, but not indiscriminate havoc. Some people carried no immunities to either disease and easily succumbed to sickness and death. Others, by virtue of having survived childhood in times and places where yellow fever or malaria were commonplace, enjoyed some resistance to either or both, and as a result as adults were much less

likely to fall ill or die. This distinction, which is at the heart of the argument, I| will call “differential immunity” or, when it refers only to malaria, “differential resistance.” I will explain the complexities of this concept in Chapter 2. Once yellow fever and malaria became common in the Americas, differential immunity gave both diseases political importance. They made it extremely hazardous for outsiders with unprepared immune systems to come to the Greater Caribbean, which in practice mainly meant people from Europe and North America. The hazard escalated if they came in large groups for reasons addressed in Chapter 2. Large-scale

settlement schemes, such as those at Darien and Kourou (Chapter 4) routinely collapsed amid searing epidemics. Large-scale military expeditions usually met the same fate. Before 1800, the great powers tried to take strategic or wealthy colonies from one another whenever suitable opportunity arose. Spanish possessions were especially favored targets because Spain (after 1580 or so) often appeared weaker than its rivals, and because its assets in the Americas, notably its silver mines, seemed especially worth taking. But by relying heavily on locally recruited men and on fortifications of key strongholds, the Spanish managed to retain their American empire despite frequent predatory missions undertaken by imperial rivals. If they could hold out for two months against an attacking force, they could expect yellow fever and malaria to destroy their foes — provided those foes had been recruited from regions of the world that could not prepare human immune systems

for the disease environment of the Greater Caribbean. Yellow fever formed a crucial part of Spanish imperial defense. Without it, Spain

THE ARGUMENT (AND ITS LIMITS) IN BRIEF 5 might well have lost much of her American empire in the eighteenth century.

After 1770, the tenor of geopolitics in Atlantic America altered. Imperial rivalries persisted but now revolutionary struggles also reverber-

ated throughout the Atlantic world, complicating the political picture. Populations mainly born and raised in the Americas began to agitate for their freedom from imperial control. Once again, differential immunity ensured that yellow fever and malaria shaped the outcomes of these contests. By and large, revolutionary forces enjoyed far greater immunity to these twin killers than did those sent out to quell revolutions, and they

learned to exploit that fact. If they could avoid losing quickly on the battlefield, the revolutionaries could prevail in the long run thanks to the systematically partisan attacks of epidemics. And prevail they did.

After successful revolutions between 1775 and 1825 created the United States, Haiti, and several republics in Spanish America, the geopolitical significance of yellow fever and malaria in the American hemisphere abated, mainly because the intensity of conflict subsided and the presence of foreign (and nonimmune) forces became rarer. But it did not disappear entirely. In a scattering of conflicts, especially the insurrections against Spain in late nineteenth-century Cuba, differential immunity still exerted considerable sway. But gradually armies and societies grew more adept at reducing the toll of infectious diseases. By the early twentieth century, when medical researchers had shown that mosquitoes spread both yellow fever and malaria, a new imperial power had arisen, the United States. With efficient mosquito control among its weapons, the U.S. quickly established a small empire of its own in the Caribbean in Puerto Rico, temporarily in Cuba, and most importantly in the case of the Panama Canal. Part of the reason that the U.S. acquired its Caribbean empire when it did was that it could more easily absorb the manpower costs of a tropical empire once its forces learned

to keep mosquitoes at bay. In short, this book will argue that those tiny amazons, the female Aedes aegypti and Anopheles quadrimaculatus,

underpinned the geopolitical order in the Americas until the 1770s, after which they undermined it, ushering in a new era of independent states. THE LIMITS OF THE ARGUMENT

On the first page of his artful polemic, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, published in 1852, Karl Marx wrote, “Men make their own

6 MOSQUITO EMPIRES history, but they do not make it as they please.”* He went on to explain

that the past powerfully constrains the present, shaping what people think and do, and indeed what they are capable of thinking and doing. While not disputing the wisdom of that lapidary phrase, this book argues that in the Greater Caribbean not only did conditions inherited from the intellectual past constrain human affairs but so did conditions inherited,

and evolving, in the ecological realm. People made their own history but they did not make it as they pleased because ecology would not let them. This book also argues that the reverse was true as well: mosquitoes

and viruses made history in the Greater Caribbean but they did so only because soldiers and statesmen, slaves and revolutionaries acted in certain specific ways. Ecology shaped history with unusual force in this context, but that it could do so was a result of both accidents of history

and environmental change brought about by human agency. Had the slave trade not brought yellow fever and malaria to the Americas, none of the story offered here would have happened. The disease environment

of the Caribbean was a cultural artifact. Had American or Haitian revolutionaries not taken their stands, malaria and yellow fever would have had no chance to undermine empires in the Americas. Had doctors not proven helpless in the face of yellow fever, they might have erased the effects of differential immunity. Humankind and nature make their own history together, but neither can make it as they please. This, then, is not quite an essay in mosquito determinism, or even environmental determinism, although at times it will seem just that. In trying to highlight what is novel in this argument, | will, as authors often do, underplay other considerations. I will make my case in bold and bald terms, and not repeat endlessly the relevant caveats and qualifications. Passages taken on their own will seem far too deterministic for some readers, with a simplistic sense of cause and effect. Some readers may take offense, finding my interpretations downplay the heroics of Spanish forces at Cartagena in 1741, of insurgent slaves in Haiti, or of George

4 Consulted at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ index.htm. There are various translations from the original German, the other leading one being: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it under conditions of their own choosing.” Translations in this book are mine, unless otherwise indicated. Where I think the original words might be important to some readers, they are provided.

THE ARGUMENT (AND ITS LIMITS) IN BRIEF 7 Washington at Yorktown. But, I hope, the book taken as a whole will seem to provide a blended perspective that emphasizes the mutual and reciprocal impacts of geopolitics and ecology. Each guided the other in an ongoing process, a cotillion of co-evolution. To some extent, almost all human history is really a co-evolutionary process involving society and nature. But the degree to which this is true varies greatly from context to context. Sometimes the two scarcely affect

one another: The mid-nineteenth century intellectual and theological debates surrounding the question of papal infallibility, for example, probably did not turn on any ecological considerations, nor did their resolution have any discernible ecological effects. But in other times and places, the links between human history and ecological history are robust, sometimes to the point where mosquitoes and viruses infringe on the fortunes of humankind in ways that seem unflattering to our species,

making us seem mere playthings in dramas wrought (not directed) by tiny, mindless creatures. ° This is difficult to appreciate today — fortunately. We have recently

experienced a golden age of health and longevity never before attained in human history. Certainly it has been much more golden for some than others, and lately in some countries the modern trend is now in reverse and life expectancies are in decline. If the AIDS pandemic goes

unchecked or is joined by other infections running rampant, it may be that the golden age will come to a close. But for the moment, we must recognize how unusual the last century or so has been for human health, and for our human ability to bend the rest of the biosphere to our will — within limits and not without unintended consequences — and remember that it was not always so.° It is not always easy to remember and to give yellow fever and malaria

their due. Mosquitoes and pathogens left no memoirs or manifestos. Before 1900, prevalent understandings of disease and health did not recognize their roles, and no one alive grasped their full significance. So they left scant trace in the archives. Subsequently historians, living in the golden age of health, normally failed to see their significance either. Historians, like other humans, typically prefer explanations for the course of human affairs that emphasize human roles and agency (and do not require forays into the domains of ecology or epidemiology). But 5 Cloudsley-Thompson (+97) pioneered insect-centric history. © McNeill (200: 194-211) explores this theme.

8 MOSQUITO EMPIRES the mosquitoes and pathogens were there, flitting around the Greater Caribbean, and in pursuit of their uncomplicated goals they had effects on human affairs that we can see reflected in archives and memoirs. THE LIMITS OF THE NOVELTY OF THE ARGUMENT

Two and a half millennia ago, Thucydides thought that an epidemic surging through his native city of Athens was important enough to warrant careful discussion in his account of the Peloponnesian War (Book I, chapters 47-54). Since that time, observers of events and subsequent historians have often recognized that epidemics can interfere in human affairs, including geopolitics, as Lord Byron’s stanzas atop this chapter attest. Contemporaries normally understood these cases as evidence of divine intervention, punishment for transgressions of a people or its leaders. Historians, often skeptical of such interpretations, tended to regard epidemics as random and therefore not worth deep investigation. Although their effects might be important, their causes seemed to lie outside the province of the historian. And, most historians supposed, their effects evened out over time, attacking one combatant force, then

another, and in the end carrying no consequences beyond the early deaths of those affected. As a result, it is possible to find histories of the

American Revolution or the Napoleonic Wars that make no mention of disease at all, even though diseases killed far more combatants than did combat.’ For that matter, although he noted that the epidemic in question struck Athens and spared its enemies, Thucydides gave it little weight in his effort to explain the Athenian defeat. However, in the last half century historians acquainted with epidemiology have demonstrated how crucial disease often was in intersocietal

encounters, as in all other aspects of human experience — often, but not always.” The reluctance to attribute importance to epidemic disease

in affairs of state had some basis as long as historians did not range too far afield. When neighboring populations fought one another, they

7 In both these wars, the British army suffered about eight times as many deaths from disease as from battle. Smallman-Raynor and Cliff (2ee«: 34). * Among the pioneers were Alfred Crosby (i972, 1986), Philip Curtin (1968), and William McNeill (x97). Medical authors with an interest in warfare preceded them, notably Prinzing (:9:8), Zinsser (:938), and Major (:94¢). The latest general treatment is Smallman-Raynor and Cliff (2e0.).

THE ARGUMENT (AND ITS LIMITS) IN BRIEF Q often carried roughly the same sets of immunities and susceptibilities, so while typhus and dysentery might carry off thousands, they had no systematically partisan effect and could safely be relegated to the footnotes or even neglected altogether — although that would miss the home

truth of Whitman’s observation at the outset of this chapter. When Europeans fought against other Europeans, or when Chinese fought against other Chinese, in most cases diseases did not serve as arbiters of prolonged struggles, even if they might destroy an army here and there. The significance of disease in warfare changed when armies fought

far from home in unfamiliar disease environments, or fought against people with sharply different immunities and susceptibilities to disease. For example, when armies of China’s Qing dynasty fought on the inner Asian steppe against Dzungar Mongols in the eighteenth century,

the Qing troops enjoyed a systematic edge because they usually carried immunity to smallpox and the Dzungars generally did not.” The Dzungars had been too isolated from the large populations of Eurasia through which smallpox circulated to encounter it in childhood (when it is usually a milder disease) and thereby acquire immunity. But almost every Chinese who reached adulthood was immune. Similarly, when Spanish conquistadors fought Amerindians in sixteenth-century Mexico or Peru, their immunities to smallpox, measles, mumps, whooping cough, and influenza gave them a potent advantage over their enemies. These were situations in which populations carrying fuller arrays of immunities to the so-called “crowd diseases” enjoyed persistent systematic advantages over more isolated populations who did not. Such situations were routine in world history before the twentieth century. ‘° The key to this phenomenon, the microbial sword of civilization, is that the crowd diseases were maintained as childhood infections by circulating among crowds, often millions, of people. They prevailed where populations were dense and interactive, and immunized survivors; they did not depend on specific environmental conditions.

9 Perdue (208: 47-8, 91-2). The Chinese met their match in the southwest, in Yunnan. The Qing dynasty had to scale back its expansionist ambitions in Yunnan because malaria was so lethal to its troops and administrators. As one Chinese diarist put it: “Its people are neither brave nor vigorous, their weapons dull. They fall far short of Chinese troops and preserved themselves only because of rugged terrain and virulent malaria.” Cited in Bello (25: 283). T° Crosby (s986); McNeill (x98).

IO MOSQUITO EMPIRES Less routine but common enough were situations in which armies and navies operated far from home in hostile disease environments for which their backgrounds did not and could not prepare them. The most conspicuous cases took place when invasion forces entered regions

with local diseases that could not spread around the world because they depended on specific environmental circumstances. Such diseases then served as shields for local populations. Malaria and yellow fever fall into this category because their spread requires mosquitoes, and the mosquitoes require certain conditions (particularly of temperature). Where those conditions held, malaria and yellow fever might reign. Populations living in such zones paid a considerable price, mainly in the form of high childhood mortality to malaria (and much lower to yellow fever). But in the bargain they acquired resistance (as adults) to lethal diseases that would help them against invaders. For example, most African societies between the Sahara and the Cape of Good Hope enjoyed a systematic edge over invading foreigners because of their resistance to malaria and (in some cases) to yellow fever — an edge that modern military medicine reduced by the 1890s, thereby making European colonialism in Africa much more affordable, tempting — and likely."

Yellow fever and malaria in the Greater Caribbean were not swords of civilization like smallpox and measles, scything down hitherto isolated populations. Nor were they in this case shields for indigenous popula-

tions in the sense that they were in Africa because in the Americas they were recently imported diseases. Their role in this context was unusual in several respects. First, conditions conspired to create sharply differential immunity and frequent epidemics, so their power to shape events was magnified to extraordinary proportions. Second, unlike the crowd diseases — which played a fairly consistent role in world history — their geopolitical significance shifted sharply in the late eighteenth century as aresult of new currents in Atlantic world politics. Third, with the exception of Haiti, yellow fever and malaria — both originally African diseases — mainly shaped political struggles among Europeans and people

'T Curtin (:a98). Even as late as the Second World War, malaria proved an important factor in campaigns in southeast Asia and the South Pacific, despite the best efforts of military doctors in the Japanese, British, and American armies. But in this case it was not systematically partisan, as all of these armies suffered severely from it because their manpower was mainly recruited from zones that did not provide soldiers with experience of and resistance to malaria.

THE ARGUMENT (AND ITS LIMITS) IN BRIEF II of European descent. This was true despite the fact that (and in some cases because of it) people of African birth or descent played prominent roles in nearly every case.

With that, let us turn to the tandem careers of two of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, war and pestilence, as they galloped along the coasts of the Greater Caribbean.

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PART ONE

SETTING THE SCENE

A n influx of European settlers and African slaves to the Greater Caribbean after 1620 steered ecological change onto new paths. In particular, changes took place that made the region especially hospitable

to the mosquito vectors of yellow fever and malaria. The next two chapters outline those ecological changes, the habits of the relevant mosquitoes, the character of those two diseases, and the ways in which people tried, almost always fruitlessly, to cope with yellow fever and malaria.

13

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CHAPTER TWO

ATLANTIC EMPIRES AND CARIBBEAN ECOLOGY

In the way of Nature there can be no evil. — Marcus Aurelius, The Communings with Himself of Marcus

Aurelius Antonius (C. R. Haines, trans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987[1916])

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 a.p.) liked to take a stoic stance on most matters, and viewed human death with detachment.

For the less detached among us, the yellow fever virus and its vector, the Aedes aegypti mosquito, might easily qualify as evil. Rarely, if ever,

did they do as much mischief as in the West Indies between 1647 and 1goo. Malaria and its vectors probably did less damage, but quite enough nonetheless. Mosquitoes and pathogens could not make history on their own: human actions set the stage.

This chapter aims to sketch the links between politics and warfare on the one hand and environmental change on the other, within the confines of the Caribbean basin of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. It leaves for later consideration of the theme of environmental change in the southern colonies of British North America (Chapter 6). In the Caribbean, the creation of a plantation system featuring sugar above all other crops fueled an ecological and demographic transformation, making the region conform more fully to the preferences of mosquitoes and requirements of pathogens. It also helped raise the stakes of imperial geopolitics in the Atlantic world. ATLANTIC AMERICAN GEOPOLITICS, 1620-1820

In the centuries after Christopher Columbus established regular contact between the Americas and the rest of the world, one of the great 15

16 MOSQUITO EMPIRES demographic catastrophes of human history befell the peoples of the Americas. Amerindians may have numbered 40 million to 70 million in 1492, maybe more, but had no prior experience with the crowd diseases of Eurasia and Africa, nor with malaria and yellow fever. After 1492, in addition to suffering relentless rounds of epidemics, their soci-

eties were hammered by war, forced migrations, and enslavement.’ By 1650, roughly ro percent of the Amerindian population of 1492 remained, no powerful Amerindian polity stood intact, and the resources of the Americas were primarily in European hands. The most important resources were the gold and silver mines of the Andes and Mexico, and the fertile soils suitable for growing sugarcane. In the Caribbean basin — both the islands and surrounding lowlands —

the demographic devastation was near total. Proximity to Europe and Africa meant that ships, cargoes, and crews introduced alien diseases more frequently to the Caribbean than to, say, Peru. Whereas in Mexico and Peru Amerindian people, language, and culture survived sufficiently

to contribute heavily to the formation of mestizo (mixed) societies, on most Caribbean islands and some mainland shores the indigenous component, both culturally and genetically, dwindled almost to the point of extinction.* The demography and culture of the Caribbean region became mainly a mixture of Western European and Atlantic African elements, with a much smaller indigenous imprint than in Mexico or the Andes. The demographic catastrophe of the Americas and the destruction of Amerindian polities created a vacuum of power that the states of Atlantic Europe aimed to fill. Spain, of course, got there first. Thanks to the crowd diseases and conquistadors, Spain quickly acquired a sprawling empire in the Americas.

Large parts of it were only loosely held, but the important parts — the mines and the ports through which precious metals flowed — were firmly

in Spanish hands by 1650. Spain had only 7-8 million people in 1650 and modest domestic sources of wealth, but large ambitions. The House of Habsburg, Spain’s rulers until 1700, fought continually in pursuit of dynastic claims and in support of Catholic populations in Europe. Without the American mines, Spain could not afford to play the great power in Europe or the Atlantic world. From the late sixteenth century on, ' Livi Bacci (2008; 2006) reviews the data and emphasizes reduced fertility as well as the toll of epidemics and other disruptions.

> The effects of conquest in the Caribbean are reviewed in Whitehead (2000); the role of African diseases is summarized in Curtin (1993).

ATLANTIC EMPIRES AND CARIBBEAN ECOLOGY 17 when the mines of Latin America became the world’s most lucrative, the topmost priority of Spanish imperial policy was to defend the wealth of the Indies. That required investment in naval ships and in fortifications,

especially in the key ports of Callao, Cartagena, Portobelo, Veracruz, and Havana. The American empire, its silver and its trade, made Spain a great power.” Portugal acquired an American presence in Brazil beginning in 1500, part of aseaborne empire that soon stretched to outposts in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. There were fewer than 2 million Portuguese in 1650,

with no substantial domestic sources of wealth. Nonetheless, its rulers entertained world-girdling ambitions (from 1580 to 1640, Portugal’s rulers were the Spanish Habsburgs). Until the 1690s, when diamond and gold mines in central Brazil (Minas Gerais) changed the complexion of Brazil’s economy, the important parts of the territory were the

plantations of the northeast, where slave labor mainly from Angola raised sugarcane and other crops. Northeastern Brazil was lucrative enough that the Dutch went to considerable effort to seize and hold a good swathe of it early in the seventeenth century, departing only in 1653. The Portuguese had no colonial holdings and little trade in the Caribbean itself.

France, home to some 17 million people in the mid-seventeenth century, had a scattered empire in the Americas.* It did not depend on its empire financially because France itself contained much rich farmland, which formed the ultimate basis of most state revenues, and a growing textile trade. In the north, France claimed Quebec and parts of what are now the Canadian maritime provinces. In the Caribbean, France took and held a few small islands in the 1620s, and after 1697

added the western third of the large island of Hispaniola, called St. Domingue. By 1700, the French were installing themselves in Louisiana,

in the Mississippi, and the Great Lakes heartland of North America, but their imprint remained shallow and their control shaky. Before 1700, the Americas did not command much priority in French policy because

they did not add much to the wealth or power of the kingdom, and because civil wars until the 1650s and foreign wars consistently kept the government, its forces, and its finances fully occupied. France both garnered and squandered the lion’s share of its resources within Europe, 3 Of the countless tomes on the early Spanish Empire, an excellent one is Kamen

(200). 4 A most helpful survey is Boucher (2¢08).

18 MOSQUITO EMPIRES with scant concern for the Americas. Until St. Domingue became an important plantation colony, French traders became prominent in the Atlantic slave trade, and the northwest Atlantic cod fishery boomed — say, by the 1730s. The Dutch played a most improbable role in Atlantic and world his-

tory in the seventeenth century. They numbered only about 2 million, about the same as the Portuguese, and like them they engaged in trade, war, and colonization wherever ships could sail, from Japan and Taiwan to Java and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and South Africa — and the Americas. But unlike the Portuguese, they were almost constantly embroiled in land wars at home, first against the Spanish Habsburgs and then against

the French. In the Americas, the Dutch held New York (until the 1660s), Surinam (after the 1660s), and a dozen or so small Caribbean islands, mainly acquired between 1620 and 1640. None of this produced ereat wealth but it did provide bases for Dutch traders and raiders, and

a source of sea salt for the Dutch herring business, one of the foundations of the Dutch economy. They also held sugar-producing parts of northeastern Brazil from 1624 until 1653. With their trade-based economy and worldwide commitments, the Dutch (both the government and the quasi-governmental private companies entrusted with trade, privateering, and colonization) invested heavily in ships more than fortification in the Americas, although they built many fortresses at home in Europe.* As a result, they often lost little colonies and settlements, especially around 1650-1670, by which time their economy had begun to lose its remarkable verve. Financial constraints meant the Dutch had to stint on peripheral concerns in the Americas. It did not help that they had few friends and some powerful enemies. But even in the late 1650s they entertained ambitions of taking all of northern South America from Spain.* England, a nation of about 5 million in 1650 (nearly 8 million counting Scots and Irish),’ was in many ways becoming the most disruptive

power in the Atlantic world — a rogue state. As an island kingdom,

5 Around 1648, the Dutch had more ships than the rest of Europe combined according to Klooster (:9¢7:3). © Klooster (:g98:38). 7 The English and Scottish crowns were united in 1603 and their parliaments in 1707. Ireland was gradually brought under English control over the course of the seventeenth century. Both Scots and Irish mounted occasional rebellions, but many also made their careers in the service of the British crown.

ATLANTIC EMPIRES AND CARIBBEAN ECOLOGY 19

once it settled its civil wars by 1660 it needed little in the way of army and fortifications, and focused its military spending on the Royal Navy, which by the 1690s was the most formidable in the Atlantic world. As of 1650, trade and colonization mattered less to the English than to the Dutch or Portuguese or Spaniards, but far more than to the French. But in the two centuries to come England (after 1707, Great Britain) would acquire the second largest empire in the history of the world. In North America, it consisted of settlement colonies on the eastern seaboard, which by 1700 were growing fast in population. In the Caribbean, by 1630 England held a few small islands and, after 1655, Jamaica, a large one. None of this produced great wealth until well into the eighteenth century, when sugar plantations became especially lucrative. Seapower, both that of its Royal Navy and of its privateers, allowed England to play an. outsized role in Atlantic geopolitics — mainly as predator, attacking rivals’ shipping and territories. These five powers of the Atlantic world allied with one another and fought against one another in shifting patterns governed by dynastic interests, religious antagonisms, and balance-of-power considerations. Resort to arms was routine. Monarchs sponsored seaborne terrorists, patriotically known as sea dogs in the English case and sea beggars in the Dutch, who preyed upon ships and ports of all nationalities, usually excepting their sponsors. When it broke out, peace was normally merely a hiatus until one or another ruler felt strong enough to try their luck again.

In the latter half of the seventeenth century, the French and English

fared best. The Dutch and English fought three wars (1652-1674), which lowered the Dutch while raising England in the balance. The Dutch suffered further at the hands of the French (1672-1679), who emerged under Louis XIV as the strongest power in Atlantic Europe. As aresult, France soon had many enemies as, for example, in the Nine Years’ War (1688-1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1700— 1715), in both of which it fought against large coalitions. All these wars were primarily fought in Europe, but they all involved campaigns in the Americas. The American campaigns involved small numbers of men and ships. No state in the world before 1650 could effectively project force across

an ocean.’ The logistical and other challenges were still too great. Except for Spain’s, colonies in the Americas were not valuable enough 5 Fissel and Trim (2005).

20 MOSQUITO EMPIRES to justify heavy expense for defense. As a result, when one or another power did succeed in getting a sizeable force safely across the Atlantic, or managed to raise one from colonial populations and Amerindian allies, it often met with rapid success. But it rarely meant anything to Atlantic

geopolitics because before 1690 nothing in the Americas other than Spanish silver mattered much. As long as Spain held onto the mines and the key ports, war in the Americas was a sideshow.

Between 1690 and 1750 this situation changed. After the 1620s, plantations of tobacco and, after the 1640s, of sugar seemed promising

sources of wealth, worth claiming and, if the costs were not great, defending. European navies and naval capability grew very fast after 1660, especially their capacity to mount amphibious assaults across an ocean. In addition, the leading naval power by the 1690s, England, became a consistent enemy of Spain, the state with the most to lose in the Americas. So the incentive to conduct large-scale warfare in the Americas increased at the same time as did the capacity to do so.° A sea change in Atlantic geopolitics came when in 1700 the last of the Habsburg kings of Spain died childless. In his will, he awarded Spain to one of Louis XIV’s grandsons, thereby creating dynastic solidarity between France and Spain — frequent enemies over the previous centuries. The House of Bourbon henceforth ruled both countries, despite an effort (the War of the Spanish Succession) by other Euro-

pean powers to contest the inheritance. With this development, the confusing and shifting patterns of Atlantic geopolitics became more stable. France and Spain became consistent allies for a century, and in every major war fought against Britain. The big wars took place in:*°

¢ 1739-1748: The War of Jenkins’ Ear (merged in Europe with the War of the Austrian Succession) ¢ 1756-1763: The Seven Years’ War (also called the French and Indian War in U.S. history, beginning there in 1754) ¢ 1775-1782: The American Revolution (in which France and Spain joined in 1778) * 1792-1815: The Wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars 9 Rodger (2004); Glete (zoo). to A recent survey is Simms (2007).

ATLANTIC EMPIRES AND CARIBBEAN ECOLOGY 21 This series of contests paved the way for the rise of Russia and Germany

in European politics, but in their Atlantic dimensions amounted to a second hundred years war between Britain and France, which the British ultimately won.

In the eighteenth century, with the decline of the Dutch and the formation of a durable French-Spanish axis called the Family Compact, Atlantic geopolitics became simpler but not simple. In addition to states’ formal military operations, freebooters, pirates, and buccaneers engaged in their own escapades during both war and peace. They did the bidding of monarchs and ministers when it suited them, but followed their own

interests as well. The ongoing professionalization of war had not yet sidelined enthusiastic amateurs. Moreover, at least in certain times and places (not the Caribbean), Amerindian peoples managed to organize rebellions on scales large enough to weigh in the geopolitical balance. The largest took place in the Andes, where Tupac Amaru led a rebellion in 1780-1783 that temporarily shook Spanish control of the Indies. In addition, slave rebellions and maroon (i.e., escaped slave) communities occasionally entered the lists, especially in Brazil. So geopolitics

in the Atlantic American arena was still a maelstrom of competition among many parties, not merely imperial states. But increasingly, neither buccaneers, nor Amerindians, nor maroons could mount a durable challenge to European state power. The central reason for that shift was the Atlantic European powers’

increasingly efficient military machines. After 1650, they combined streamlined state finance (war machines were expensive) with increasingly large, bureaucratized, professionalized armed forces equipped with expensive weaponry — including, uniquely, oceanic navies. So in geopolitical terms, the Atlantic European powers dominated the Americas

in the eighteenth century. By and large, Britain proved the strongest because of its steadfast commitment to naval power and its resilient finances.

That European domination came to an end between 1776 and 1825 when some of the populations of the Americas successfully rose up in revolution. These revolutions all had their own causes and contexts,

which I will describe in later chapters. Revolutions in British North America, Haiti, and Spanish America each created new states, trimmed back European empires, and together ushered in a new era in Atlantic American geopolitics and world history. They all owed their success in part to yellow fever or malaria.

22 MOSQUITO EMPIRES

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FEVERS TAKE HOLD: FROM RECIFE TO KOUROU 93

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some 70,000—90,000 residents, by far the most populous part of Brazil, and the richest sugar zones.> Pernambuco’s ports were not well fortified, 3 Cabral de Mello (19098:454) indicates that Pernambuco in 1637 had 107 of Brazil’s 149 sugar plantations.

04 MOSQUITO EMPIRES and the Dutch assault soon succeeded. By 1635, they had expanded their domain to most of northeastern Brazil, although they could not

push the Portuguese out of Bahia. Under the leadership of Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen (1604-1679), a remarkable humanist, linguist, diplomat, soldier, and patron of the arts and sciences, the Dutch fared well militarily and politically. Among Maurits’ challenges was preserving the health of the Dutch forces under his command. They suffered from dysentery, scurvy, and

other ailments, and over a quarter century the Dutch lost perhaps 20,000 men in their Brazilian adventure.* But the forces arrayed against them, mostly Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian, suffered in roughly equal measure from the same diseases. A revolt in Catalonia and the secession of Portugal (both in 1640) severely hampered Habsburg efforts,

easing the pressure on Maurits and his successors. In these circumstances, and at no systematic disadvantage in health, the sea power, wealth, fighting skills, and leadership of the Dutch could prevail for a generation. They could not prevail forever. In 1640, the union of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns ended; the Dutch remained at war with Spain but made peace, followed by an alliance, with Portugal. Nonetheless, the Dutch declined to leave Brazil. They had invested in sugar production and intended to reap the rewards.” Portugal could do little about that. But in 1645 local planters, Luso-Brazilians (people of Portuguese descent

but born in Brazil), raised a revolt of local people against the Dutch, shortly after The Nineteen recalled Maurits for his failure to put profit ahead of glory and science. The locals were better acclimated to local diseases than were Dutch forces.’ They did not rely on imported food, as the

4 An assessment drawing heavily on Maurits’ correspondence is Gouvéa (:9¢8). 5 Guerra (:@79), citing Raphael de Jesus, Castrioto Lusitano (Lisbon, 1679). The “Dutch” included many Germans, Poles, locally recruited Indians, and others. Cabral de Mello (s998:244-5). © An excellent financial and economic history of Dutch sugar in Pernambuco is Souty (1988). Production spiked in 1640-1644. 7 A point made by the contemporary observer Pierre Moreau (:&81:197-8). In 1633, a Portuguese official, Vicente Campelo, wrote to King Philip IV that one soldier born in Brazil was worth more than two from Iberia (“Vale mais um homem

soldado e natural do Brasil que dois do Reino.”) He even pointed out that locals were better able to withstand mosquitoes: local soldiers “sofrem estarem ndgua todo o dia e noite e sofrem os mosquitos, o que ndo podem sofrer os do Reino.” Cabral de Mello (:@98:258), citing Livro primeiro do governo do Brasil (1633).

FEVERS TAKE HOLD: FROM RECIFE TO KOUROU Q5

Dutch still did. And they were not vulnerable to wavering commitments by The Nineteen, who by the late 1640s were unhappy with the financial

returns on the Brazilian venture. In 1648-1649, The Nineteen could scarcely pay their soldiers, who soon lost their devotion to the West India Company and lost battles against the Luso-Brazilian armies.” By 1652, The Nineteen and the entire Dutch Republic were also distracted by the immediate dangers of the First Anglo-Dutch War. Their willingness and ability to support Maurits’ successors dwindled. In 1654, the Dutch lost their last toehold in Brazil at Recife, their capital, where a garrison of 7,000 shrank to 1,300 before finally surrendering. DUTCH HEALTH IN BRAZIL

The Dutch in Brazil were lucky to last as long as they did. Unlike later would-be conquistadors, they did not suffer from yellow fever. In the sixteenth century, Brazil had been regarded as a healthy place for Europeans. It may have briefly hosted yellow fever from time to time, but the first major epidemic seems to have come only in 1685.” None of the detailed scientific works produced by Dutch scholars, some of which comment at length on diseases of Brazil, give any indication of yellow fever.’° The diary of Ambrosij Richshoffer, who spent nearly three years in Brazil as a soldier of the Dutch West India Company, mentions numerous desertions and some combat losses but says little of disease: He noted only that many newly arrived troops died because of the hot country and brackish water.'’ They probably suffered from malaria, even falciparum malaria, but not yellow fever. Scattered records of the Dutch West India Company give some sense of the health of Dutch troops in Brazil. For example, in 1630 at Olinda ® Detailed in van Hoboken (:9858). 9 Franco (r976:10). ‘© For example, Willem Piso, Historia naturalis brasiliae (Leiden, 1648). 'T Richshoffer (978) [1677]. The Portuguese translation of the sole passage mentioning disease (from the original German) is: “A 13 lof May 1631] entrou no porto o navio Amsterdam, bem carregado com toda a sorte de objetos necessarios, e no qual veio uma forte companhia de soldados . . . que, entre todos os demais oficiais e soldados, teve a honvra de trazer para esta terra o reumatismo. No dia seguinteos soldados foram desembarcados; eram todos bonitos rapazes e, queira Deus, suportem melhor o clima que as outras tropas novas que até agora tém chegado. Muitos morrem por ndo poderem se habituar a esta terra quente e a péssima dgua meio salgada.” Van

Hoboken (:988:74) says Dutch troops in 1648-1649 often fell sick upon arrival in Brazil, but generally recovered.

96 MOSQUITO EMPIRES 16 percent of Dutch troops were sick on any given day. Between 1631 and 1634 at Recife, Dutch forces lost about 6 percent of their complement annually. In Brazil as a whole in 1634, about 13-15 percent of Dutch troops were sick at any given time; in 1639, 13 percent; and in 1649, about 10 percent. They suffered from scurvy, dysentery, tetanus, and night blindness, among others diseases (including rheumatism, if

we can believe Richshoffer). They were often short of food. But on balance, their health was no worse than that of European armies stationed in North America a century later. They were far healthier than Dutch forces sojourning on the coasts of West Africa, where, for example, annual mortality among Dutch West India Company personnel was [I-21 percent in 1645 and 32 percent in 1646; or on the African island of Sao Tomé, which Dutch forces overran in 1641. In West Africa and on Sao Tomé, both malaria and yellow fever prevailed. But in Brazil, there was no yellow fever. **

The success of the Dutch in taking and holding parts of northeastern Brazil for nearly three decades rested in part on Dutch seaborne superiority, Dutch money, and the extraordinary talents of Maurits. But it also rested on the comparative good health of their military forces in the absence of yellow fever. Had the Dutch come a century later, or had yellow fever come a century earlier, then it is inconceivable that the West India Company could have succeeded as it did, for as long as it did, in Brazil. That the Dutch ultimately departed from Brazil was only in small part a matter of losses from disease. The larger geopolitical situation had so changed after 1640, and especially after 1652, that the logic of the effort in Brazil vanished. Their enemies in Brazil suffered less from disease, but not radically less.

That the Dutch did not face yellow fever in Brazil was a matter of luck. Many of the slaving voyages to Brazil brought human cargoes from Angolan environments that did not host endemic yellow fever, limiting the frequency with which the virus and Aedes aegypti arrived in

"2 Ratelband (:983:157-300); further data from Prof. Wim Klooster, personal communication, 26 June 2006; from Guerra (:979:474); and from Cabral de Mello

(:998:255) citing a letter from Maurits to the States General of 18 February 1639. One Dutch diarist, H. Haecxs, who may or may not have had systematic data, reported 33% of Dutch forces in Brazil were sick in 1645 (Mello 1908:255). For comparison, in the autumn of 1757 the British Army in North America reported 16% of its 18,385 men sick (Brumwell 2o2:151). To judge from Guerra (:979:478), malaria was not prominent among the Dutch in Brazil, although I suspect it was present.

FEVERS TAKE HOLD: FROM RECIFE TO KOUROU 97

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Brazil.‘> But many other slaving ships came from West Africa and surely

brought both virus and mosquito to Brazil repeatedly, yet there is no unambiguous evidence of yellow fever in Brazil before 1685.'* Moreover,

the sugar plantations and port cities of Bahia and Pernambuco would have made ideal habitat for A. aegypti, just as did those of the Caribbean. Yellow fever could easily have been present in the 1620s, and could easily

have killed thousands of Dutch troops in short order, as in Sao Tomé, and ended the adventure in Brazil almost as soon as it began. But it did not. THE ENGLISH IN JAMAICA, 1655-1660

Eighteen months after the Dutch left Recife, the English attacked Spanish Jamaica. In 1654, fresh off a war with the Dutch, Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) found himself with an underemployed fleet and army and in an uneasy position within the cauldron of religious politics in England. Cromwell had emerged as generalissimo of a Puritan revolution in England that had dislodged the monarchy, beheaded a king, ravaged

the countryside, and divided the country most bitterly. A successful "3. Today, yellow fever exists in parts of Angola. It probably did in the seventeenth century as well, and some slaves from Angola probably were immune to it — but not all. Thus it is possible, as Schwartz (1985:188) says, that yellow fever “decimated” Brazil’s slave population between 1686 and 1691 even if the majority of slaves were Angolans. All depended on the local disease environment where they (and perhaps their ancestors) grew up.

' Guerra (1965; 1979).

98 MOSQUITO EMPIRES foreign war would be just the thing, keeping military men far away, suitably occupied and supplied with booty. It would also win further glory and sorely needed political legitimacy for Cromwell. By the 1650s,

the armed forces of England had acquired the logistical capacity to launch an amphibious assault an ocean away from home. CROMWELL’S ASSAULT ON SPANISH JAMAICA

Cromwell meant to conquer and colonize (with loyal Protestants) Spanish possessions, striking a blow for his faith, much as his legions were then doing in Ireland (and much as the Dutch West India Company had planned to do in Brazil). His ambition extended not just to the seizure of the silver fleets but to the mines and all of Spanish America. ‘*

This was not mere piracy or privateering, intent on sacking or looting. It was to be an invasion force, with instructions explicitly referring to “the Designe upon the Mayne land,” and advising the commander to take Cartagena and Havana once he had secured a useful base, preferably on Hispaniola or Puerto Rico.*® Cromwell had in mind a grand strategy that, although more religious in motivation and focused on the Caribbean rather than Brazil, bore strong resemblance to the unbounded ambition of The Nineteen. Cromwell and his council had found persuasive the arguments of one Thomas Gage (1597-1656), aformer Dominican priest who had studied in Spain and spent twelve years in the Caribbean and Central America before renouncing Catholicism, returning to England, and aligning himself with Puritans. Gage maintained that the Spanish hold on the Americas was weak, that England could easily prevail in the Indies, and that, indeed, religious duty required that Puritans rescue Spanish America from the grasp of wayward and corrupt priests. Gage was enthusiastic and optimistic about England’s chances: “The Spaniards cannot oppose much, being a lazy, sinful people, feeding like beasts upon their lusts, and upon the fat of the land, and never trained up to wars.”*?

'5 Capp (:@89:87-91). The best account of the expedition is Taylor (ra). See also Keevil, Lloyd, and Coulter (1957-1963, 2:55-67). "© BL Add. MSS 11,410, f. 41ff, “Instructions unto Generall Robert Venables given by his Highnes by Advice of his Councel upon his Expedition to the West Indies.” Printed in Firth :gga:111-15. ‘7 A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe (London: F. Gyles, 1742, 3:60), quoted in Rodgers (2004:22). See also Gage (848).

FEVERS TAKE HOLD: FROM RECIFE TO KOUROU 99

Meanwhile, Habsburg Spain had expended much blood and treasure

in a losing cause in the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). Its fleet had suffered reverses at the hands of the English, and its army had lost several

battles to the French. In the 1650s, further European wars and internal revolts made Spain’s commitment to its empire in the Americas difficult to sustain, and its navy, especially, was unequal to the task. Its diplomats and spies warned of an impending assault on the Indies from as early as 1647. The only tangible result was modest improvements to the defenses of Hispaniola.**

Cromwell’s Western Design, launched in early 1655, included 38 ships and some 9,000 men,** more than had ever before been dispatched in an expedition to the Americas. Gage was among them, as chaplain. Admiral William Penn, father of the founder of Pennsylvania, and General Robert Venables led its naval and land forces, respectively. They quarreled from the outset, blaming one another for shortages of supplies. Better than half the rank and file came from England, including contingents of “knights of the blade, with common cheats, thieves, cutpurses, and such like lewd persons who had long time lived by sleight of hand, and dexterity of wit, and were now making a fair progress unto Newgate.”*° The remainder, some 3,000 to 4,000 men, mainly indentured servants discontented with their lot, were recruited in Barbados and English settlements in the Leeward Islands. Venables referred to them as “the most prophane debauch’d persons that we ever saw.”*'

With this unpromising army, they attacked Santo Domingo in April 1655. They quickly failed, thanks to stout Spanish defense and incompetent English leadership, as well as to hunger and losses from unidentifiable diseases. A thousand Englishmen died, as did about forty defenders.*°

In May, the survivors attacked Jamaica, then home to about 2,500

Spaniards and African slaves. Jamaica was a minor outpost in the "8 Morales Padrén (2003:179-84). "9 Estimates range from 7,000 to 9,500. Firth (:900:xix—xxx) reviews the evidence. See also Taylor (: 96:19). 9 Firth (:900:xxiii), quoting an anonymous account from the Harleian Manuscripts, British Library. Newgate was a London prison. >t ‘There are two copies of Venables’ narrative of the expedition in the BL (Add. MSS 12,429, ff. 7-72 and Add. MSS. 11,140, ff. 56-143). The text is printed in Firth (:gea:1—-105).

2 A thorough account with published documents from the Spanish side is Rodriguez Demorizi (:986—1957).

100 MOSQUITO EMPIRES Spanish Empire, of strategic importance because it lay upwind of the sailing routes traced by the treasure fleets. Its economy consisted mainly

of hunting wild hogs and cattle. Hides were the island’s chief export. Sugar production remained negligible. The island remained almost unfortified. The invading English army outnumbered the entire population of Jamaica by 3:1 and managed to overwhelm the handful of

Spanish militia forces and take it in a week with almost no losses. Spaniards fled to Cuba or into the mountainous interior, taking their portable wealth (such as livestock) with them. Guerilla resistance flick-

ered on until 1660, but Spanish efforts to retake the island came to naught.*°

This was no pin-prick of the sort inflicted by pirates and privateers such as Raleigh, Hawkins, or Drake. The English had come to stay, although their bickering commanders quickly returned to England

where Cromwell had them both cast into the Tower of London. The English consolidated their position on Jamaica, built fortifications, imported thousands of beggars, vagrants, and prisoners from the British

Isles, and banished Spanish and maroon resistance to the mountainous interior. England had acquired a base from which to mount further attacks on Spanish coasts and shipping. Cromwell had no intention of quitting after a single conquest. THE TOLL FROM DISEASE

But Jamaica came at a cost that stymied Cromwell’s larger ambitions.** Venables arrived as the seasonal rains began (having spent seven weeks in Barbados rounding up debauch’d men and inadequate supplies). His

men complained of having to sleep in the rain while their commander stayed on shipboard. Predictably — at least Venables foresaw it — disease set in.*> Within three weeks some 3,000 men were sick, and in six months the original force of g,ooo men had dwindled to 3,720, of whom more than 2,000 were “sick and helpless.”®* Major-General

73 Morales Padrén (2003:192-216); Taylor (x989:146-96); Wright (:93e). *4 Veterans of the Jamaica campaign did sack Santiago de Cuba and occupy it for two weeks in October 1661. 5 Venables to Mr. Noel, 13 June 1655 (Firth x9e0:49), in which he writes of the rains “which would kill us all.” 26 Anonymous letter of 5 November 1655, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MSS, D1208, printed in Firth (:90:142); and see Firth (:900:xxxii). “Never did my

FEVERS TAKE HOLD: FROM RECIFE TO KOUROU IOI

Robert Sedgwick, an experienced soldier who arrived in October 1655

with a fresh regiment, found it “strange to see young lusty men, in appearance well, and in three or four days in the grave, snatch’d away in a moment with fevers, agues, fluxes and dropsies...”*’ He did not know it, but Sedgwick was witnessing the birth of a new ecological-military order in the West Indies. Sedgewick at first thought the failing lay with the men, who were “so unworthy, so slothful [and] desired rather to die than to live.”** Sedgwick himself died of fever within seven months of his arrival. By early 1656, most of the English on Jamaica, roughly 5,000 of the original 9,000, were dead, Thomas Gage among them. Cromwell — a frequent sufferer from

vivax malaria himself** — thought God was punishing the pride and avarice of his men, and sent 1,200 more veteran and presumably more virtuous soldiers from his regiments in Ireland and Scotland. Virtuous or not, they fared little better. By 1660, when the English hold on the island was secure and the army’s health finally sound, only some 2,200 troops remained of the roughly 10,000 committed to the Jamaica campaign. A

few hundred were killed in action. Others deserted and a few, mainly officers, managed to get sent back to England. Probably 6,000 to 8,000 died of disease.** Soldiers who had survived every infection known to England fell to Jamaica’s “flux and feavors.”>'

Flux and fevers did not spare the few civilians who took part. Cromwell wanted to settle Jamaica with farmers, and do it quickly enough to feed the hungry occupying army. Efforts to recruit Massachusetts Puritans failed, but the small island of Nevis provided about 1,500 bold pioneers who landed on Jamaica in December 1656. By March 1657, two thirds of them were dead.** Despite living in the Caribbean, these unfortunate pioneers, most of whom grew up in Eng-

land rather than Nevis (which was settled beginning twenty years before), lacked sufficient resistance to the infections raging on Jamaica. eyes see such a sickly time, nor soe many funerals, and graves all the towne over that it is a very Golgotha.” ?7 'Thurloe Papers, vol. IV, pp. 153-4, quoted in Taylor (:969:91).

8 Ouoted in Long (774, 1:254). 79 Cromwell was raised in the Cambridge Fens, a low-lying and swampy part of England, at a time when vivax was common in such environments. His death in 1658 may have been due at least in part to malaria. 3° See Taylor (1 989:205-6); Wright (s930:122). 3" The figures are from Dunn (:972:153) and Taylor (1 @69:92).

3 Taylor (:96¢:116-18).

102 MOSQUITO EMPIRES CLUES AND DIAGNOSIS: CATTLE, MOSQUITOES, ENGLISHMEN, AND MALARIA

Although descriptions of the diseases in question do not permit confident diagnosis, falciparum malaria and dysentery are the prime suspects.*> The main malarial mosquito in Jamaica is Anopheles albimanus. It likes to breed in water with abundant vegetation, scum, and algae. Any size from puddles in wheel ruts and hoofprints to ponds and lakes will do. Its larvae tolerate salt water well, and do best in full or partial sunlight. However, it is normally a poor vector of human disease

because it prefers cattle blood and on average only 2 percent of An. albimanus live long enough to transmit malaria. So it can sustain an epidemic only when mosquito strength is very high (so weather is crucial) or when cattle are scarce.**

Cromwell’s centurions inadvertently did everything they could to raise the chances of suffering a malaria epidemic. Venables got to Jamaica as the rains began, ensuring that his men would soon encounter many mosquitoes out for blood. They stayed through the dry season, when An. albimanus are more likely to shift their feeding focus from cattle to humans. Spanish Jamaica’s economy had featured cattle promi-

nently, an ideal situation for An. albimanus reproduction. But having exhausted their scant provisions, Venables’ troops killed and ate the island’s remaining cattle and hogs, so presumably in desperation the mosquitoes turned their attentions to men, the only other goodsized mammals around.** The English soldiers by and large kept to the 33, An anonymous letter of 15 July 1655 mentions “flux and feavors (the usual diseases).” Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MSS D1208, printed in Firth (:9e0:140); Henry Whistler’s journal implies dysentery: “... lieing in the raine did case most of them to haue the Bluddie-flux, and now thayer harts wore got out of Thayer Dublates into Thayer Breeches, and wos nothing but Shiting, for thay wose in

a uery sad condichon, 50 or 60 stouls a day...” BL Sloane MSS 3926, Henry Whistler, “Journal of Admiral Penn’s Expedition to the West Indies 1654-55” (rg April 1655), partially printed in Firth (:900:156). 34 Komp (3942); Pan-American Health Organization (1993); Molez (1998). According to Trapham (:&79:103-10), the ponds that Jamaicans used for drinking water in the 1670s were infested with mosquito eggs.

35 According to Sedgwick, the island was “full of several sorts of cattle” until the English killed 20,000 head (Long : 4, 1:248). Keevil, Lloyd, and Coulter (1957-1963, 2:62) says undisciplined men “wantonly killed the cattle” on Jamaica. The presence of cattle can mean more mosquitoes survive to maturity and high rates of malaria, but under some conditions can mean the opposite. See Chapter 2 for discussion of the pitfalls of zooprophylaxis.

FEVERS TAKE HOLD: FROM RECIFE TO KOUROU 103

low-lying and often swampy coastlands, as the interior mountains remained dangerous because of Spanish guerillas. The English occupiers often slept outdoors, among anophelines (which feed at night) recently deprived of their usual sources of blood. In short, the English ate the cattle, so the mosquitoes bit the English. El Nifio may have compounded English misfortune. The early 1650s featured an unusual run of El Nifio events (1650, 1652, 1655). ENSO ordinarily brings extra warm and wet weather to Jamaica so even the dry season is good for mosquitoes.*° Other things being equal (which we

cannot know), this ought to have generated bumper crops of An. albimanus in Jamaica, peaking in 1655-1656 just after the English arrived. Jamaican mosquitoes were thirsty and numerous enough with or without El Nifio. John Taylor, who visited in 1687, found “Jamaica in most parts... miserabley plauged with stinging and tormenting insects which swarm in great aboundance everywhere, but chiefly near the watterside and uncleared places...”°? As Edward Long, planter and historian of Jamaica, put it, “lilt is dangerous to pass the night in such places, and it is at such time that these insects collect in swarms, and make war on every daring intruder.”** Venables’ soldiers might have had yellow fever, which had ricocheted

around the region in 1647-1652, but the ecology of Jamaica in 1655, with no real cities or sugar plantations, makes falciparum malaria a more likely suspect despite the unusually high mortality. So do the imprecise accounts of illnesses, none of which mention the signature symptoms of yellow fever.*”

Long suspected malaria. “It is probable,” he wrote, “the original distemper was an ague and fever, the consequence of heavy autumnal rains. At this time, the Jesuits Bark, the specific remedy in that disease, was unknown to them. Bleeding was generally administered; which seldom 3© Quinn (1982). 37 Taylor (2008:174-5). 38 Long (2774, 2:506—-7). Long did not refer to anophelines specifically, but in

general to “muskeetos, which seem as if placed by the hand of Providence, to assault with their stings, and drive away, every human being, whom may ignorantly venture to fix his abode among them.” Lady Maria Nugent (26¢2:22) in 1801 complained of the “innumerable musquitoes that have almost eaten us up... my face, neck, hands and arms have been martyrs.” 39 Guerra (3 994:264—5) favors a yellow fever diagnosis. His view commands respect, as he is the foremost student of medical history of the West Indies, but I find the textual evidence and environmental circumstances support a different view. Taylor (:@69:90) votes for malaria.

104 MOSQUITO EMPIRES failed of rendering the complaint more obstinate, if not mortal.”*° Long

wrote more than a century after the events in question, but he was probably on the mark. The extraordinary mortality likely reflects a combination of falciparum malaria and other infections. Like HIV, malaria suppresses the human immune system. Thus, a malaria epidemic can raise mortality from other infections, such as typhus or dysentery, killing people who would otherwise survive. Typhus and dysentery were common diseases wherever soldiers were on campaign, and correspond with some of the descriptions of symptoms plaguing the army in Jamaica. Malaria made them much more deadly than they were normally. Many things had to fall into place to permit the disaster that befell

the English army on Jamaica. Venables blamed Penn, Penn blamed Venables, and some officers blamed Venables’ new wife for distracting him from his duties.*‘ But the English conquered the island with ease, regardless of the deficiencies of their commanders. Had they been the equals of Julius Caesar and Lord Nelson, Venables and Penn could

not have prevented the epidemics that followed. Bringing 9,000 outsiders within range of Caribbean mosquitoes in the rainy season almost guaranteed calamity. A NEW REGIME

Despite the loss of most of the men involved, the English managed to hold Jamaica after 1655.°° That was the last occasion on which one European power took a large Caribbean possession from another and held it (unless one counts Surinam, which changed hands by treaty not by invasion in 1667) until the British seizure of Trinidad in 1797. On the other hand, small and poorly fortified islands would continue to be easy targets, and therefore attracted attention in almost every war. For example, St. Lucia shuttled back and forth between British and French control fourteen times between 1651 and 1814 — neither had an advantage over the other in terms of resistance to the Caribbean disease

4° Long (i774, 1:247). 47 Firth (xgoo:xl) quotes Edmund Hickeringill, Jamaica Viewed (1661, p. 67): “He is unfit... to ride admiral of a fleet that cannot carry the flag at home but is forced

to lower his topsail to a petticoat.” Many women apparently accompanied the expedition, serving as nurses, to judge from Venables’ remarks (Firth :goe:102). 4° It remained a graveyard for Englishmen (among others), especially new arrivals, for a long time to come (Burnard :¢a9).

FEVERS TAKE HOLD: FROM RECIFE TO KOUROU 105

environment. When one or another imperial power held command of the sea in Caribbean waters, it could quickly rack up several small conquests of unfortified ports and islands. The British lost more than half a dozen small islands in 1780-1781 (although all were recovered soon). But fortified strongholds or big, populous islands proved nearly invulnerable once yellow fever and malaria had become endemic in the region. Thereafter, despite dozens of attempts, all efforts proved in vain,

although a few, such as Havana in 1762, met with initial success only to be followed by such appalling disease mortality that the victors chose to part with their new and pestilential conquests.** A new eco-military regime was forming.

The campaigns and colonization efforts in Pernambuco and Jamaica resulted in temporary success but ultimate failure for the Dutch, and enduring if costly success for the English. The Dutch enjoyed more than two decades of revenues from sugar production in Brazil, but in the end could not hold the region because of determined local resistance coupled with urgent threats closer to home. That they lasted as long as

they did is testament to the relative health of the troops of the West India Company. The English could hold Jamaica because local resistance amounted to little. No equivalent of the Luso-Brazilian campaign against the Dutch could develop. Jamaica was on the fringes of Spanish

America with a tiny population, whereas Pernambuco was the heart of Portuguese America. The English prevailed despite losing the great majority of their forces to disease, whereas the Dutch lost their colony despite staying comparatively healthy. These episodes represent a transitional time when large expeditionary forces could already be shipped

across the Atlantic, but when yellow fever had yet to become established. In Brazil, yellow fever probably did not exist yet, and malaria and other infections played only a modest role in ousting the Dutch. In Jamaica, malaria and dysentery ruined an English army, but too late for Spain. The Spanish had left Jamaica almost undefended in 1655, allowing a quick conquest before diseases prevented one.

THE Scots AT DARIEN, 1698-1699 The civilians accompanying or following English soldiers to Jamaica

suffered acutely from disease, too. Whether connected to military invasions or not, colonization efforts ran the risks attendant on bringing

43 Buchet (: 991) offers the most complete description of imperial expeditions.

i \:

106 MOSQUITO EMPIRES

/(| / } i aE oa Nyy |

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a nie ° N ‘ 190° North f Hecartagena icee —— fen 2 ae, fr Portébelem . ——. : Pe es

AS a rN rybarien) XS) Map 4.3. Panama and Darien

thousands of nonimmunes within range of disease vectors. Two disastrous examples are the Scottish attempt to found a colony at Darien in Panama and the French effort to rejuvenate one at Kourou in French Guyana.*4 THE COLD AND HUNGRY 16908 IN SCOTLAND

Seventeenth-century Scotland was a miserably poor country in the best of times, and in the worst was visited by strife, famine, and English armies.*° In an age when the Dutch, English, and others seemed to be 44 Another example, about which too little is known, is the English attempt to colonize Amazonia and Guyana in the early seventeenth century. The Guyana colony apparently lost two thirds of its population to some pestilence in 1665— 1666, “a violent feavor” which affected mainly Europeans. “The Description of Guyana,” BL, Sloane MSS 3662. The sickness “cutt of [i-e., killed] about 200 of our Men, and very many women and children and so universall and raining was the Contagion at one time that wee could not make a hundred sound men in the Country to oppose an enemie....” So wrote Lt. General Byams in “An Exact Narrative of the State of Guiana As It Stood Ano 1665 Particularly of the English Collony of Surynam,” BL, Sloane MSS 3662, ff. 27-37. See Williamson (1923:164).

45 Useful general accounts of the Darien debacle and its Scottish background include Barbour (1907), Prebble (1968), Insh (1932), and Hart (1929). All are epidemiologically unaware. For example, Hart in a chapter entitled “The Causes

FEVERS TAKE HOLD: FROM RECIFE TO KOUROU 107

getting rich through colonial trade, especially around the shores of the Atlantic, the Scots were by law excluded from such lucrative commerce. (After 1603, their kings were also kings of England, and usually more devoted to the bigger, richer kingdom.) Scots whose loyalty to the king was open to question were sometimes massacred, as at Glencoe in 1692.

Poverty and neglect peppered with oppression grew even harder to stomach in the hungry 1690s, when cold weather brought consecutive

harvest failures in 1695-1696 and another in 1698.*° As much as a sixth of the Scottish population starved to death, or died from diseases amplified by malnutrition.*’ Tens of thousands of desperate young men poured out of the country to fight for the monarchs of Europe in return for a few square meals. The English said Scotland needed only eight of the Bible’s ten commandments because the people had nothing to covet or steal.

William Paterson aimed to change all that. He was born in 1658 on a humble farm in the Lowlands, but from age seventeen had rambled the wider world in search of his fortune. He visited the West Indies as a young man and heard tales of buccaneers who had crossed the isthmus

of Panama (then often called Darien). Henry Morgan and a band of 1,200 adventurers in 1670-1671 had spent several piratical weeks on the isthmus and sacked the Spanish colonial city of Panama. In addition, Paterson noted how successful small Dutch Caribbean colonies were as

entrepdts, and he became a zealous convert to the eccentric notions of free trade and freedom of religion. He was himself a good Presbyterian, a teetotaler to boot, and through luck and industry became a wealthy merchant and financier in London in the 1680s. He played a central role in the foundation of the Bank of England (1694). But Paterson

of Failure” (pp. 148-69), does not mention disease. Helpful context is in Forrester

(2004), Smout (r903), Armitage (x98), and Watt (2068). Crucial Scottish and English documents appear in the collections edited by Insh (ze2.4) and Cundall (:926). Hart and Cundall also provide translations of Spanish documents. The most valuable and insightful eyewitness account is Borland (: 738). 4° Smout (1963:245-9). 47 Flinn (:977:7) gives 15% as the population decline in Scotland in the 1690s. Detailed figures (pp. 164-86) range from 5% to 15%, but the most vulnerable parts of the country left no records behind, so the reality may conceivably have been worse. Harvests failed widely in northern Europe, so the prospects of importing grain to make up for local shortfalls were poor. In Finland, where record-keeping was better, bad harvests brought early death to 23% of the population in 1696-1697 (Jutikkala x:as3s).

108 MOSQUITO EMPIRES nurtured grander dreams. He thought a settlement at Darien could become a global emporium, a “key to the universe,” as he sometimes put it, uniting the trade of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, unlocking the trade of China and Japan.** If Morgan and his pirates could plunder Spanish outposts in Panama, how much more might sober Scots achieve through peaceful commerce? Surely, they could realize the dream of Columbus and tap the riches of China. Paterson contemplated a road across the isthmus and even a canal. He had never seen Panama himself. In the 1680s and 1690s, Paterson shopped his Darien scheme in the

ports of northern Europe, finding no takers. He acquired a reputation as a talkative, humorless bore. His powers of persuasion found a willing audience mainly among his fellow Scots. In 1693, anxious to salve anger over Glencoe, King William HI and Parliament sanctioned a law that permitted Scots to organize a trading company. Two years later, the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies was born, with monopoly rights to trade between Scotland and Asia, Africa, and the Americas for thirty-one years. Originally, its investors were both Scots and English but pressure from established English traders, fearing for their monopoly, forced the fledgling company to rely exclusively on Scottish funds. Paterson and the other moving spirits behind the Company left London for Edinburgh and opened their subscription books. More than 1,400 Scots signed up, pledging some £400,000, estimated variously at a quarter or a half of the liquid capital in Scotland.**

During the course of 1696-1697, the directors of the Company, who initially had many other schemes in mind, agreed to Paterson’s proposal for a settlement at Darien. He had come into possession of the manuscript of Lionel Wafer, a buccaneer and ship’s surgeon who

had spent three months in the isthmus in 1681, and who wrote of gold gathered from the riverbeds.*° Paterson used this text to bolster

his view that Darien could be the salvation of a poor and hungry Scotland. He claimed the plan would lay “the foundation of our trade,

and improvement as large and extensive as his Majesty’s empire.”

4° For example, in his “A Proposal to Plant a Colony in Darien; to Protect the Indians against Spain and to Gain the Trade of South America to all Nations, 1701.” Printed in Bannister (3888, 1:117). 49 Insh (1932:65) says half. These figures are mere guesswork, perhaps based on Adam Smith’s (1976 [1776], 315) guess that Scotland at this time contained £1,000,000 in circulation. 5° Wafer’s manuscript is in BL, Sloane MSS 3236. A slightly revised version was published in 1699 (see Wafer r93«).

FEVERS TAKE HOLD: FROM RECIFE TO KOUROU 10Q

Darien’s trade would “become bonds of union to the British kingdoms.” Moreover,

[t]he time and expense of navigation to China, Japan, the Spice Island and the far greatest part of the East Indies will be lessened more than half, and the consumption of European commodities and manufactories will soon be more than doubled. Trade will increase trade, and money will beget money, and the trading world

shall need no more to want work for their hands, but will rather want hands for their work. Thus, this door of the seas, and the key of the universe, with anything of a sort of reasonable management,

will of course enable its proprietors to give laws to both oceans, and to become arbitrators of the commercial world, without being liable to the fatigues, expenses, and dangers, or contracting the guilt and blood, of Alexander and Caesar.*'

A vision such as this, of lucrative empire on the cheap, equality with England, and fulfillment of the ambitions of Columbus two centuries before, easily appealed to the imagination in 1690s Scotland. In a decade

with July frosts, dreams of Darien must easily have warmed many a Scottish heart. The directors consulted Lionel Wafer in the spring of 1698, paid him to delay the publication of his manuscript lest the English

get to Darien first,** and then called in a quarter of the subscriptions, built ships, purchased supplies, and recruited volunteers. They would find Darien a nightmare. THE FIRST VOYAGE

In mid-July of 1698, the Company’s five ships set sail for Panama. Three were well-armed, and altogether they mounted 175 cannon. On board were about 1,200 men, and a very few women and children.*° Each man was entitled to fifty acres of cultivable land, an irresistible 5' Quoted in Hart (:929:46-7). 5? Working for the Board of Trade and Plantations, John Locke, the political philosopher, had recommended that England settle Darien to block the Scots. The directors of the Scottish company when spiriting Wafer from London to Edinburgh equipped him with a false identity (“Mr. Brown”), lest the English get wind of their plans (Insh :932:110). 53 A captive, Benjamin Spenser, under interrogation in Havana, said five women departed for the Darien colony. Massachusetts Historical Society, Hart Papers,

Box 3, Item 48. Spanish documents say three women arrived alive (Hart 49201305).

IIO MOSQUITO EMPIRES lure to most Scots, and a plot in the main town settlement. William Paterson and his family were among the colonists. So were hundreds of younger sons of the Scottish gentry, hundreds more footloose soldiers and sailors home from King William’s war with France — the king had

removed about 20,000 Scots from the military payroll in 1698 — a few physicians, clerks, four clergymen, and one interpreter who knew Spanish. A third of the eager colonists were highlanders who spoke only Gaelic. Presumably, many of the Scots were malnourished in the summer of 1698, with weakened immune systems that months at sea were unlikely to strengthen. Thousands of other hungry or adventurous Scots had wanted to go too but could not secure a place in the expedition. Spanish documents claim the company also included six Italian and three French mercenaries. **

The fleet sailed with a year’s worth of supplies (biscuit, beef, beer, brandy, and Bibles) and stocks of trade goods, including wigs, woolen hose and tartans, 25,000 pairs of shoes, 14,000 needles as well as axes, knives, saws, weapons, and much more, including a printing press with which to print treaties with the Indians. Remembering Lionel Wafer’s description of the long-haired locals, they also brought thousands of combs.

The Scottish armada stopped at Madeira before crossing the Atlantic

to the Danish island of St. Thomas, where it paused for a week, and thence to the Caribbean coast of Panama. The whole voyage took until early November, a crossing of 102 days, by which time forty-four of the waytarers had died, twenty of “fever,” twenty-three of “flux,” and one of “decay.” By the standards of the time, it was a healthy transatlantic crossing, especially considering the likely condition of the passengers upon departure. The secretary of the Scottish Trading Company, who recorded these deaths, noted that still more might have died had they stayed in Scotland.** November was a good season to arrive, comparatively dry and cool. The coast around Darien looked green.*” Tall trees lined the shore. Rain forest here had grown up, as throughout the Caribbean region, after 54 Gallup-Diaz (200.4:134), citing AGI, AP, legajo 161, fol. 230, and AGI, AP 164, ff. 604-18.

55 Mackenzie (xa). This extraordinary single-page document indicates that of the 44 who died on shipboard, 43 were men and one, listed only as Lt. John Hay’s wife, was a woman.

5° What the Scots and subsequent historians called Darien is not the current Panamanian province of Darien, but rather an ill-defined coastal region in today’s

province of San Blas, around 9°N latitude and 78°W longitude. A description

FEVERS TAKE HOLD: FROM RECIFE TO KOUROU III

the depopulation of the sixteenth century. To the Scots, accustomed to nearly treeless landscapes, it looked like forest primeval. They saw endless timber and hoped to find lucrative dyewoods. One of the colonists, the churchman Francis Borland, wrote: “The Countrey is wholly clad with thick & tall Woods, being a continued Forrest... . The trees here are many of them of a vast bigness... .”°’ The riot of plant life included delicious pineapples, bananas, cassava, yams, and other edible fare. Just as Wafer had promised, it teemed with wildlife of every description, including tasty creatures such as peccaries, tapirs, red deer, rabbits, and “oreat Droves of Monkeys, which are extraordinary fat and good to eat.”°° The coast and lagoons hosted platoons of turtles, easily caught and cooked, as well as shoals of edible fish and herds of manatees, giant slow-moving sea-cows that must have seemed heaven-sent to hungry Scots. Less agreeably, there were also “monstruous adders,” and plenty of mosquitoes that “suck the Blood till they can no longer fly.”*°

The local population, Cuna (Kuna, San Blas Kuna, and Tule are other terms for them) and Choco Amerindians, whom at least one Scot regarded as “civil and sagacious,” turned out to be hospitable to anyone not allied with the Spanish.*° For nearly 200 years they had of the isthmus about 1680 is Wafer (393.4); an account of the local population and their uses of flora and fauna is Ventocilla, Herrera, and Nufiez (1995). 57 Borland (:7x8:6). Borland was a prominent clergyman who had lived in Dutch

Surinam in his youth and may thereby have acquired helpful immunities to diseases prevalent in Panama (Insh :932:172). Wafer, who saw the coast twenty years previously, wrote of “extraordinary large woods with stately timber trees which overrun the whole Coast like a continual forest.” The extract of Wafer’s manuscript from which this is quoted is in Insh (:92.4:52). 58 Philo-Caledon (3:89:47). According to another Scot, tree-dwelling monkeys “squirt their Excrements upon our Heads and Cloaths.” Anonymous, A Letter giving a Description of the Isthmus of Darian (1699:10).

59 On adders and mosquitoes, Anonymous, A Letter Giving a Description of the Isthmus of Darian (1699:6).

6° The quotation is from a diary printed in Hart (:929:68). Borland (3 7%5:13) was less charitable, regarding them as “slothfull” as they “subdue & plant but small parcels of land....” Captain Richard Long, an Englishman who visited the colony in February 1699, also described the Cuna as “slothfull” because they did not plant much, and women did most of the agricultural work. Long to the Duke of Leeds, 15 February 1699, British Library, Additional MSS, 47,132, ff. 54-7, printed in Insh (x92.4:100—6; quot. p. 101). Long was described by another ship captain, Robert Pennicook as “a most ridiculous shallow pated fellow... [and| continually drunk” (British Library, Additional MSS, 47,132, fol 49bis). Scottish attitudes toward the Cuna are treated in McPhail (:a94). Anonymous, A Letter Giving a Description of the Isthmus of Darian (1699:16—24) gives considerable

II2 MOSQUITO EMPIRES successfully resisted intermittent Spanish attempts to collect tribute and convert them to Christianity. By 1698, the population of the isthmus was probably well under 20,000, and — despite Scottish beliefs — no Amerindian kingdom existed.*' Instead, political units were small and mobile. Remarkably, they seem to have welcomed a settlement of near-helpless strangers in their midst, and did their best to restore ailing newcomers to health, sharing their corn, plantains, and cassava.°* They presumably initially took the Scots for buccaneers — they had plenty of experience with French and English buccaneers — and hoped for help from them against their enemies. They welcomed trade goods, especially when offered at prices lower than those Spaniards wanted.°? When it

became clear the Scots intended to stay forever, the Cuna sought to use this to their advantage in their diplomacy with Spanish authorities, with other Amerindian groups, and of course with one another. Although they showed interest in axes and knives, the abundant cargoes of shoes, wigs, and tartans left the Cuna cold. Local trade possibilities disappointed the Scots. The Scots had not come just to trade with the Indians but to build a colony, Caledonia, that would handle the trade of two oceans. They set about clearing away the forest. Shortly after arrival, one diarist wrote

of the colony’s location: “In short it may be made impregnable, and there is bounds enough within it, if it were all cultivated, to afford 10,000 Hogsheads of sugar every year. The Soil is rich, the Air good and temperate, and the Water is sweet, and everything contributes to make it healthful and convenient.”°? Although some of them clearly had visions of sugar plantations dancing in their heads, the Scots did not in fact do much planting. Their first priority was defense for their intended entrepét.

detail on the Cuna, although its reliability is open to question. Gallup-Diaz (2004) is the best modern source on the Cuna.

°t This figure is a scholarly guess based on Spanish documents. Gallup-Diaz (soo4:xiv); Jaen Sudrez (xa@8).

2 Philo-Caledon (:699:43-60). 63 “Captain Pennijcook’s Journall from the Madera to New Caledonia” (1698), British Library, Additonal MSS, 40,796, ff. 1-16. The same text appears as “Capt. Robt Pennicock’s Journal,” in British Library, Additonal MSS, 47,132, ff. 44bis—53.

°4 On Cuna diplomacy, Gallup-Diaz (2e04:77-116). 65 “A Journal kept from Scotland by one of the Company who sailed on board the ‘Endeavour’ pink,” printed in (Insh r924:74).

FEVERS TAKE HOLD: FROM RECIFE TO KOUROU 113

Despite unseasonable rains in November and December (1698),°” they began to build a fort, called St. Andrew, and the makings of a town, called New Edinburgh, on the shores of a broad and secluded bay. A neck of land fronted by cliffs guarded the eastern half of the bay, and

submerged rocks in its entrance made it hazardous to the unknowing sea captain. It was a defensible place, with adequate fresh water. It was a good choice from the military point of view, difficult to assault from the sea. Spanish forces learned of the fledgling colony, recognized it as a threat to their interests, and attacked from the landward side in February 1699. The Scots fended them off at the cost of two dead.” Spain could not tolerate a foreign colony on the isthmus. Most of Spain’s South American silver — on which the monarchy depended —

passed overland to Portobelo before being shipped to Havana and Seville. So it is no surprise that upon learning of the Scots’ intentions, Spanish authorities took action. Indeed, they would have attacked

before February 1699 had not an outbreak of sickness among newly arrived ships’ crews left their naval vessels short of manpower.” The Scots’ choice of location made military sense but it was a dubious choice in other respects. Borland noted: “It was a spot of low ground where our men settled and built their Fort, a sort of Earth mixed with sand. It was wet marish [marshy] ground about it... ”°° In other words,

good malaria country. Borland (at least in retrospect) recognized the

6° “Journal or Diary of the Most Remarkable Things that Happened during the Scots Affrican and Indian fleet, in their Voyage from the Island Madera to their Landing in America, and since that Time.” NLS, Darien MSS, Item 52. This is the journal of Hugh Rose, printed in Hart (:929:192—-216); and in Burton (:849:98-

116). Entries concerning November 12-19, 24-29, and December 1-9. Rose’s journal appears based on the record kept by Capt. Robert Pennycook (Pennicuik), which is printed in Insh (:924:78-06). °7 Many documents indicate Spanish authorities were well acquainted with the Scots’ scheme, e.g., Consejo de Indias al Rey, 12 febrero 1699, AGI, AP, legajo 160; “Memorandum Real, Apuntamiento de las providencias que S. Magestad ha mandada dar para el desalojo de Escozes del Darien,” 30 octubre 1699, AGI, AP, legajo 161 summarizes Spanish knowledge and policy with respect to the Scots’ settlement.

65 Canillas al Rey, 6 mayo 1699, AGI, AP legajo 162. A translation appears in Hart (:920:261ff). Canillas al Rey, 25 abril 1700, AGI, AP 164, emphasizes the religious worries of the Spanish, who feared the fire of heresy could spread in Panama because of the large numbers of “blacks, mulattoes and Indians who desire to live in license.” See also Storrs (: 993).

69 Borland (:7:8:7).

114 MOSQUITO EMPIRES dangers: “The Rains here are sometimes very heavy and last severall days together, being accompanied with much Thunder and Lightning: This wet season is the most sickly time of the year, which is probably caused through the great stillness and calmness of the Air in this time; whence proceed sulphureous damps and vapours, arising from the Marish

and Drowned ground, which render it very unhealthy especially to Strangers.”’° In the first seven weeks, to Christmas Day 1698, thirty-two Scots died. Among the first was Paterson’s wife, who succumbed to “fever” on November 14th. Two boys and twenty-nine men died from fever (seven), flux (nineteen), drowning (four) and, in the case of Capt. Thomas Fullerton,

“suddenly after warm walking.”’' The Scots were dying at the rate of five per week in the healthiest time of year, and at about ten times the pace typical of European populations at home.’* They probably suffered from ordinary shipboard complaints carried ashore with them, perhaps typhus and dysenteries. In the remaining dry months, January through March, their health improved — or so some colonists claimed:

As to the Country, we find it very healthful; for though we arrived here in the Rainy season, from which we had little or no shelter for several weeks together, and many sick among us, yet they are so far recovered, and in so good a state of health as could hardly anywhere

be expected among such a number of Men together; nor know we anything of those several dangerous and mortal distempers so prevalent in the English and other American Islands.??

But more deadly sickness soon haunted the settlement. By April 1699 the rains returned, and with them the fever season. By late May, 7° Borland (:738:11). 7* Mackenzie (1&9). Also in Colin Campbell’s diary, in the National Library of Scotland, Ms 846. An excerpt is printed in National Archives of Scotland (:g98:10). 7? T estimate that rate at 30 per 1,000 per year. [hat figure was typical for populations

including the very old and the very young; had they stayed at home, the 1,200 headed to Darien would probably have had a lower death rate because so many were in the prime of life. 73 Letter of 28 December 1698 from the council in Caledonia to the directors of the Company, quoted in Hart (:929:79). On 18 February 1699, another letterwriter, perhaps Paterson, wrote “The country is healthful to a wonder; insomuch that our own Sick, which were many when we Arrived, are now generally cured.” Quoted in Hart (:929:237). Bear in mind these authors were boosters.

FEVERS TAKE HOLD: FROM RECIFE TO KOUROU I1l5

three hundred had died and each day ten more perished. Construction ceased, and planting too. The Scots never harvested much, only a little in the way of “yams, Indian corn, and Jamaica pease.”’* Food brought from Scotland rotted quickly, obliging the Scots to resort to eating birds and monkeys and, when fortunate, turtles. One noted, “it was a mercy we had a good many Highlanders in our legion who were not used to feed on much of God’s creatures that’s hallowed.”’* The friendly Amerindians visited less frequently, perhaps having concluded that the Scots would not prove a useful ally after all. Hope withered; beer, brandy,

and Madeira wine soon ran short,” and argument and recrimination flourished. The feuds, class resentments, and clan rivalries of Scottish politics resurrected themselves on the Panama coast. Men who had once thought fifty acres here would suit them nicely now wanted only to find

gold and get home alive. Paterson fell ill with “intermitting feaver,” probably malaria, but survived.’? Efforts to secure relief from nearby English settlements came to grief through shipwreck.

Then a rude blow came: word that King William II had instructed all English colonies and settlements in the Americas to have no truck with the Scots. Concerned about his vulnerability to threats posed by Louis XIV’s France, the King sought to improve relations with Spain, and preventing any relief from reaching the Scots in Panama fit his larger geopolitical calculation.” Trained in Realpolitik since childhood, William III could scarcely have been expected to do otherwise: Spain could help him more against France than Scotland could. But Paterson

74 Memorandum of the Company Directors, 28 November 1699, printed in Insh (xQ24@:110).

75 Walter Herries, quoted in Prebble (:988:144). 7° A memorandum of 28 November 1699, recording a meeting of the Company directors, indicates that the fleeing Scots thought that “their sickness and mortality happened through want of fresh provisions and strong liquors, which they said was the occasion of their coming away.” Printed in Insh (192.4:108—12; quot. p. 109). 77 “Report by William Paterson to the Directors,” 19 December 1699, printed in Burton (:849:178—98). Paterson says he came down with “intermitting feaver” about 5 June 1608. 7% Sir Walter Scott, in Tales of a Grandfather, wrote that those “who perished for want of provisions for which they were willing to pay, were as much murdered by King William’s government, as if they had been shot in the snows of Glencoe.” Quoted in Cundall (:926:55). This lays too much at the King’s door: fever and fluxes killed the Scots, not starvation.

1160 MOSQUITO EMPIRES and his fellow enthusiasts had imprudently hoped for more from their King.

Prospects for the colony looked dim. Grumbling turned into insubordination and whispers of mutiny. In June 1699, further bad news arrived: A new Spanish assault force had assembled in Cartagena harbor and had targeted the Scots at Darien. After rancorous debate, the colony’s leaders chose to abandon the settlement and head home. Still wracked by fever, Paterson dissented, but when the ships weighed anchor, he was on board. Three ships left the broad bay in late June with perhaps 700 men. Six others stayed behind, preferring to die of fever than subject themselves to sea voyages. A few weeks later, there was no trace of them when a Spanish captain arrived and burned what remained of the settlement. He reported finding about 400 graves.’” As one survivor saw it three months later, “The reason of their comeing away... was want of provisions and liquors, being forced to eat yams &c., which broght sickness amongst

them... dying 10 or 12 aday...”*° Misadventure dogged the fleeing colonists in the form of continuing epidemics that killed several hundreds, mast-snapping storms, and hos-

tility from English officials in the West Indies and the North American mainland. The captain of one of the fleeing vessels wrote that sickness was “so universal,” and “mortality so great that I have hove overboard 105 Corps.”*! The Governor of Jamaica, who rebuffed the Scots’ requests for succor, wrote: “The Scotch are quite removed from Callidonia, most of them dead and the rest in so lamentable a condition

that deserves great compassion....”°? New York authorities showed more compassion, and let the Scots stop there for a few weeks, where many of them recovered their health. A single ship sufficed to carry the survivors, fewer than 300 people, back to Scotland. Paterson again was on board. 79 His report is in AGI, AP 160, and cited in Gallup-Diaz (2e04:139). Scottish sources put the total of deceased on shore from this expedition at around 300. 8° John Borland to Daniel McKay, 7 September 1699 (writing from Boston). Printed in Burton (:846:152).

’t Letter of 11 August 1699, National Library of Scotland, Darien Manuscripts. Quoted in Hart (:929:93). 2 Sir William Beeston, 24 August 1698, quoted in Cundall (:926:91). Jamaican planters were not inclined to help the Scots colony because they feared that if it prospered, their Scottish indentured servants would flee to Darien (Insh ra3a:148n, 160). Captain Long reported this sentiment: Long to the Duke of Leeds, 15 February 1699, printed in Insh (+92.4:105).

FEVERS TAKE HOLD: FROM RECIFE TO KOUROU I1l7 THE SECOND VOYAGE

Only a few days before Paterson and his remnant colonists saw Scotland

again, a second expedition had set sail for the Darien coast. Buoyed by optimistic (and dishonest) letters*? written by the first colonists in their first days at Caledonia, the Company sought 500 further colonists. Eager volunteers exceeded demand, and the Company organized four more ships and 1,300 more settlers, including 100 women. After a swift voyage during which 160 died, “* they anchored in the Caledonia bay in November 1699, just one year after the first settlers. They expected to find a flourishing colony of compatriots and kinfolk. They found, wrote Borland, “nothing but a vast howling Wilderness, the Colony deserted and gone, their Hutts all burnt, their Fort most part ruined, the Ground which they had cleared adjoining to the Fort all overgrown with Shrubs

and Weeds....”°5 Despite this keen disappointment, the new settlers resolved to stay.

History then repeated itself, both as tragedy and farce. Rains came and fevers followed. Supplies rotted and squabbles flourished. Rather than wait to be attacked, a party of Scots mounted a surprise assault on the nearest Spanish position in February 1700. That went well for them, but fever proved a more formidable foe. “Sickness and Mortality... was now become epidemical and raging, whereby many even of our Officers

and chief Men were taken away, which was a sore discouragement to us.”*° By March, several died each day. Survivors dumped the dead in a collective grave on a marshy shore of the bay.

At least a third of the surviving Scots were too sick to walk when the Spanish attack finally came. Despite suffering themselves from yellow fever in the ports from Veracruz to Cartagena, the Spanish

had landed a force of more than 1,000 men, mainly militia, in an inlet a few hours’ march from Caledonia, and besieged the Scots’ settlement.°? A brief war of attrition followed. By late March, fevers killed the Scots at the rate of 100 a week, and at the month’s end only 83 For example, Anonymous (1a). The History of Caledonia, pp. 18-20, which paints a picture of a land of milk, honey, and gold. 84 Borland (:735:30).

85 Borland (28:30). 8° Borland (3 °735:49).

87 A narrative appears in Canillas al Rey, 14 Abril 1700, AGI, AP legajo 164. Canillas reports using five militia companies and two of garrison soldiers. The militiamen presumably carried greater resistance to local diseases than did the Scots.

118 MOSQUITO EMPIRES 300 could stand to their posts.°° Borland recorded the mood: “The hand of the Lord was heavy upon us at this time, our sickness and mortality much increasing, and many dying daily, most of our able officers were

taken away by death....”°° His colleague Alexander Shields interpreted the Scots misfortune in the conventional fashion, as “the anger of God plagueing us for our sins, and threatening to cause our Carcases to fall in the Wilderness, wherein many are fallen already....”°* The diary of the Spanish commander, Don Juan Diaz de Pimienta, shows that the Spaniards suffered heavily from fever as well, but new ships brought more men from Cartagena to make good their losses.*’ With a Spanish fleet anchored offshore, no relief was likely for the Scots. (Although the Scots did not know it, a much larger Spanish fleet was sailing from Spain with instructions to oust them from the isthmus. )°* They could only surrender or wait to die from fevers. The Scots surrendered, and by mid-April 1700 had left their American Caledonia for good.**

More horrors awaited the fugitive colonists. Fevers and fluxes carried off a dozen or more each day, 250 in all, en route to Jamaica.** There, in May and June, still more died of disease. A hurricane “staved to pieces” one refugee ship off the coast of Carolina in September, drowning 112.°° Of the 1,300 who had left Scotland nine months before, some 160 died

on the outward voyage, about 300 in the Darien colony, about 450 in fleeing the Darien colony, and fewer than 100 made it home.*” In all,

88 Borland (1:73:71). 89 Borland (:7158:64).

9° Letter of Shields, Borland and Archibald Stobo, 2 February 1700, printed in Borland (:738:55). Borland says the letter was written by Shields, although it was signed by all three men.

°' Diaz de Pimienta’s diary is in the Archivo General de Indias, AP, legajo 164. It is translated and printed in Hart (:929:353-93). Borland (:35:17—18) also mentions Spanish ill health. 9 Storrs (r999:25—-6). It arrived after the Scots had departed. °3 Borland’s (1715:65) explanation of the decision to give up is instructive: “Shortly

after our Councellors and chief Officers being sensible they were not in a Condition and Capacity to hold out long against the Enemy, the contagious sickness raging so among us from within... .”

4 Borland (:728:79). 95 Borland (+738:83). °° This leaves about 290 unaccounted for, who presumably washed up in Jamaica and the mainland colonies but did not continue home to Scotland. One who stayed in South Carolina was Jean Stobo, the great-great-great grandmother of Theodore Roosevelt. Hart (:929:143-4); Cundall (:¢26:99—-100).

FEVERS TAKE HOLD: FROM RECIFE TO KOUROU I1Q

the Darien venture killed about 2,000 of the 2,500 Scots who had sailed to the isthmus.”’ It also cost the entire capital invested. AFTERMATH AND DIAGNOSIS

Thousands of Scots had lost all their money. Angry mobs besieged the Company’s offices in Edinburgh, and Scots the length and breadth of the country blamed the King for the settlement’s failure. A blizzard of pamphlets blanketed the country, accusing all and sundry of incompetence and worse.** The Company and its captains tried further ventures

in the spice trade, slave trade, and even a little piracy in the Indian Ocean. Unaccountably undaunted, Paterson tried to pitch a new Darien

settlement venture to authorities in England in 1701,*’ but nothing could make good the loss of £219,000 on the Darien scheme.**” When

England offered to pay off the entire debt of the Scottish Parliament and reimburse the shareholders of the Company in the proposed union of the parliaments of England and Scotland, many Scots found this offer

irresistible. Even some committed Scottish patriots such as Paterson endorsed the Act of Union of 1707.'°) Thus Great Britain was born, with assistance from the fevers of Darien.'**

Just what fevers were involved is impossible to say with certainty. Patrick MacDowall, part of the 1699 relief flotilla, wrote of his bout with fever:

It was a very severe spotted fever, my whole body being entirely

pale red....I had, in the beginning, an extraordinary desire of vomiting, and accordingly drunk warm water which did make me °7 According to the deposition of the prisoner Spenser in Havana, one of the five women who went to Darien survived. MHS, Hart Papers, Box 3, Item 48. ® Insh (1932:235) has details. 99 William Paterson, “Proposal for Settling on the Isthmus of Darien releasing the natives from the tyranny of Spain and throwing open the Indies of America to all nations” (1701), British Library, Additional MSS, 12,437. t0° Of the £400,000, only £219,000 had been called in before the scheme failed (Hart :929:41). tor After recovering his health, Paterson stood unsuccessfully for the British Parliament, and made his living for some years in London as a mathematics tutor before in 1718 winning a settlement of £16,000 from Parliament for services to the nation. He died in 1719 (Forrester 264). to2 The Act of Union contained many other provisions that sweetened the loss of independence for the Scots, notably the freedom to trade anywhere in the King’s dominions. But many Scots could not cheerfully accept these terms, and fought in doomed rebellions in 1715 and 1745.

120 MOSQUITO EMPIRES vomit up some base, yellowish, bitter, unpleasant choleric sort of stuff of which I found great ease. I continued very ill for four or five days. I took with it a great headache, soreness of my eyes,

and weariness of all my joints and bones, which continued all the time with me. I was very inclined to fainting all the while of my sickness, and a considerable time afterwards it brought me so extraordinary weak that Iam not yet able to walk alone now.**’

MacDowall asked to be bled and purged, but instead was given blistering plasters on his temples and neck. He survived. Borland wrote of “malignant fevers and fluxes” and noted that “men were very speedily taken away by this wasting sickness some in tolerable health to day and

cut off by sudden violent Fevers and Fluxes in a very few days.”'“*

The Council in Darien mentioned “head and belly-aches, fevers, fluxes...”'°> Regrettably, the textual evidence is slender and inconclusive.

A likely interpretation is as follows. The original expedition, which lost only forty on the long voyage from Scotland, apparently lost most of them between St. Thomas and the Darien coast. The initial spate of mortality in the colony in November and December of 1698 was probably the residual result of the combination of some infections picked up during the week spent in St. Thomas plus whatever illnesses already reigned on shipboard. But then, it seems, in January and February health improved. With the rains in April, May, and June, sickness returned, this time more severely. The Darien coast in general made good habitat for An. albimanus, the chief malaria vector in the Caribbean, and the mangrove and salt-marsh shores around the fort and settlement provided ideal breeding grounds. They fed eagerly on the settlers, as there were rather few mammals to choose from. But malaria alone, even falciparum malaria, is highly unlikely to kill so many so quickly. It is more likely to have been either yellow fever, which could plausibly have killed the majority of 1,200 strangers to the region, or some combination of several simultaneous diseases, probably including yellow fever, falciparum malaria, and dysentery.’ 3 Prebble (:968:183). The original is in the National Library of Scotland, Darien Papers, 49/353—60.

4 Borland (:7358:64, 78). °5 Letter of 23 December 1699 to Company directors, quoted in Hart (:929:129). 06 Men who stayed on board ship apparently enjoyed better health than those who went ashore, which the Scots attributed to the easier availability of “Rum and

FEVERS TAKE HOLD: FROM RECIFE TO KOUROU I21I

The second expedition suffered heavy mortality from soon after its arrival in November 1699, which continued on shipboard as survivors fled the isthmus. Very few died in combat with Spanish forces. As with the first expedition, yellow fever in concert with dysentery and malaria, and possibly dengue as well, is the likeliest explanation. It matches the textual evidence as well as any other explanation. It is consistent

with the ecological conditions of the colony, and with the fact that high mortality persisted on the refugee ships. It is supported by the fact that in the 1690s yellow fever ricocheted around the ports and coasts of the greater Caribbean in the first widespread epidemic since that of

1647-1652. And it can account for the high death rates among men who had weathered the perils of years at sea or in Flanders’ camps and barracks, both fine environments for improving one’s portfolio of disease immunities. Yellow fever is normally found in cities, and New Edinburgh was not

much of a town. But mosquitoes had surely joined the fleet in St. Thomas. And within a few months of landing at Darien the Scots had built the necessary barrels, casks, and cisterns to store water for the dry season and thereby created good habitat for A. aegpyti larvae. It is also possible that the “many monkies” of the Darien coast already served as a reservoir of the virus, which mosquitoes (imported or not)

then transmitted to the Scots.'°’ One diary indicates the Scots had taken a monkey as a pet by November 4, 1698.‘°° It is uncertain if the virus lay in wait for the Scots or if they brought it with them from St. Thomas. But that it found them suitable hosts seems supported by several sorts of evidence, most suggestively the appalling mortality and the virus’ undoubted presence throughout the Greater Caribbean at that time. Something, either yellow fever or some combination of infections, killed maybe 70 percent of the 2,500 Scots who went to Darien.’

strong Liquors” on ship. Lesser exposure to mosquitoes is a likelier explanation. Memorandum of the Company Directors, 28 November 1699, printed in Insh (xg24:110). McSherry (ra8&) favors dengue, using MacDowall’s description to make his diagnosis, but considers yellow fever and malaria possible alternatives. '°7 Borland (°758:15). t08 “A Journal kept from Scotland by one of the Company who sailed on board the

‘Endeavour’ pink,” printed in Insh (:92.4:75); also quoted in Hart (:929:67). The monkey might have been from St. Thomas, or from Darien. And it might or might not have carried the yellow fever virus. t09 This figure comes from National Archives of Scotland (:998:9).

122 MOSQUITO EMPIRES The Scots were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were both geopolitically and epidemiologically naive in their ambition to bestride the isthmus of Panama. But they were also unlucky. The 1690s presented a trifecta of adverse circumstances for a venture of this sort.

First, famine in Scotland, a result of the coldest weather of the Little Ice Age, meant that some of the colonists were already in poor physical

shape when setting out, and that the Company would have difficulty providing the financial support and supplies that the Darien colony needed because provisions in Scotland were scarce and dear. Second, a yellow fever epidemic raging throughout the Caribbean meant that newcomers to the region were almost assured of falling prey to one of the most deadly viruses on earth. The 1690s also witnessed plenty of extreme weather in Mexico and the Caribbean — droughts, floods, frosts — and the

alternation of drought and flood probably helped boost populations of disease vectors.’ '° And third, the larger geopolitical situation of Europe and the Atlantic world meant that not only would Spain necessarily resist anyone’s attempt to settle the isthmus but that, in addition, the Scots’ king, in his more important roles as king of England and defender of the Netherlands, would necessarily take a hostile view of the Scots’ ambitions. Had the Scots made the attempt in another decade, some of these adverse circumstances would not have obtained, and their chances of success might have been better. As it was, they were both naive and unlucky, and suffered the consequences. Even had the geopolitical conditions been favorable, the Scots would have died from fever. Borland, after recounting the health problems at

Darien at the outset of his book, wrote: “So it seems it may be said of Darien, thou Land devourest Men, and eatest up the Inhabitants. No wonder then though our Colonie neither did, nor could thrive there, suppose no other Enemy in the World had molested them.” He returned to his lugubrious theme at the close of his book: “Our Settlement in Darien, was in a very sickly and unwholesome Climate as is marked above, therefore the Spaniards deserted it long ago, and could our People of a far more Northerly Latitude than Spain is, expect here long to thrive and prosper, this Consideration alone, would soon

have made our People weary of it, as a Place too hot for them, and

‘lo Cn weather: Endfield (2e0a8). On weather and disease vectors, Acufia-Soto

et al. (2e02) and Chapter 2, in which the argument is made that drought followed by heavy rains is a pattern most favorable for A. aegypti.

FEVERS TAKE HOLD: FROM RECIFE TO KOUROU 123

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Map 4.4. Guyana and Kourou

too costly and chargable to maintain.”''' Whereas at healthier latitudes from New Zealand to Nova Scotia, millions of descendants of Scots walk the Earth, at Darien today nothing remains of the Scots but faint traces of Fort St. Andrew and the place name Punta Escoces, sometimes used for the promontory beside the broad bay. THE FRENCH AT KOUROU, 1763-1764

Kourou is a modest town in French Guyana, situated where the broad Kourou River meets the Atlantic. Today it is known chiefly as the launch

site of the European Space Agency. From 1852 until 1952, it formed part of a penal colony collectively known in the Anglophone world as Devil’s Island. In 1763-1765, it was the scene of the most spectacularly deadly colonization effort in the history of the Americas.'’” " Borland (1715:19, 100). 12 "The most complete modern account is Michel (1989). A medical account (to my mind unconvincing) is Chaia (1958). Survivors’ accounts include Bajon (1777). Campet (1802) is a military doctor’s report on the disaster. The French government in 1842 published an account of the failed settlement with excerpts from contemporary documents (Ministére de la Marine et des Colonies, 1842), the

124 MOSQUITO EMPIRES KOUROU IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The region that is now French Guyana has hosted human population for some 6,000 years. It became French only in 1664, after some six decades of desultory competition among handfuls of Dutch, English, and French

pirates and settlers. The French settlement centered on Cayenne, but included tiny clusters at the mouths of the main rivers. Cayenne fell briefly to English forces in 1667 and Dutch in 1676. The indigenous population of French Guyana, as everywhere in the Americas, had declined quickly under the impact of Eurasian and African diseases. By 1700, some 30,000 remained, and by 1800 only 2,000.'** Few people came to take their places. In 1716, only 3,000 Europeans and Africans lived in French Guyana, and in 1737 about 4,800, of whom 89 percent were of African descent, almost all slaves. Yellow fever epidemics swept through every twenty years or so in the eighteenth century.''* Because of a shortage of females and the lethal disease environment, birth rates trailed death rates in French Guyana, and only continued immigration

kept it alive — normal in the plantation zones of the Americas. The colony was a backwater, neglected by French authorities and badly run by a single family with good political connections. In 1749, an official report concluded that Guyana had “made little progress since its inception and, consisting of an inert group of derelict colonists, has generally been a curse to the King.”***

The land struck most of those who saw it as unpromising, if not accursed.''” The coastal plain, which extended 10 to 60 kilometers originals of which are mainly in the Bibliothéque Nationale, nouvelles acquisitions frangaises, MSS 2,571—-2,583 and in the Collection Moreau de St. Méry, Archives Nationales, Série Colonies, C14. A full sense of the context is provided by Polderman (2e0.4), which also (pp. 596-698) prints many of the original documents. The most helpful recent articles are Pouliquen (2e02), Rothschild (z006), and Hodson (2007), but see also Epstein (1984) and Lowenthal (:¢s2). T3 Polderman (2e04:166) has lower figures for Amerindians in French Guyana: about 17,000 for 1676 and only a few hundred in 1763. "4 Cardoso (1999:336). Artur (2002:581, 693) noted an outbreak of measles in 1747 and smallpox epidemics in 1717 and 1760. Demographic data from Thurmes (z000:81-90). Thibaudault (:998:37) has similar data. TS “Mémoire concernant la colonie de Guyane,” 27 Mars 1749, quoted and translated in Epstein (1984:85). 1 Michel (xQ8o:28-34) for geographic description based on eighteenth-century sources. Bajon (3777-1778, 2:177-402) describes flora, fauna, and agriculture in French Guyana of the 1760s and 1770s.

FEVERS TAKE HOLD: FROM RECIFE TO KOUROU 125

inland, consisted mainly of tidal salt marshes covered with grasses and mangroves. The soils along the coast, coated with alluvium from the Amazon brought around the shoulder of South America by ocean currents, often contained excessive sulfur and salt. They did not support cultivation well. The coastal plain was so flat that the tide washed in to a distance of 15 or more kilometers from the coast. The climate was always hot and unrelentingly humid. Rain fell, often in torrents, on 200— 250 days of the year; March to June were the wettest months. August,

September, and October might be entirely rainless.'‘? Strong winds and currents, and the lack of conspicuous landmarks, made the coast hard to navigate. However, for all its uninviting features the coastal plain was a flourishing corner of the biosphere, with a plethora of plant

species,'‘° throngs of birds, fish, shellfish, reptiles, turtles, monkeys, tapirs, peccaries, jaguars, alligators, caymans, snakes galore, and many other creatures, most of them unfamiliar to European naturalists who risked life and limb to inspect them.’ ‘* Equally flourishing, and equally unfamiliar to Europeans, was the inland forest, which began where the

coastal marsh grasses ended and extended southward into Amazonia. The coast and the forest both were good mosquito country. *** The only town of consequence was Cayenne, about 150 or 200 wood

or earthen buildings in 1760, standing on an island just off the coast, one of the few outcrops of higher ground. A few plantations surrounded the town, growing sugar, indigo, annatto (a source of dye), cacao, and cotton. They, too, stood just above the tidemarshes. The sugar plantations went into decline from the 1740s, and by 1760 only eight or nine remained.'*' French planters lacked the capital and expertise that their Dutch counterparts used to dike and exploit coastal tidemarshes in nearby Surinam, and consequently found most of the landscape useless except for hunting and fishing. They had learned from experience to build their homes at a distance from the swamps. As a veteran planter noted, “...it would be very imprudent to situate the house in such a way that it would receive the exhalations from these stagnant places.”**"

'™7 Cardoso (1909:46—-50) has climate details.

8 Aublet (2778) catalogued and illustrated hundreds of them. 'T9 Touchet (ace¢); Cardoso (1999:53-60). 0 Aublet (: 378, 4:xv—xviii) complained of mosquitoes, among much else. He collected plants there in 1762-1764. "1 Cardoso (3999:217). On cotton and cacao, Cardoso (1999:231-4). 22 Préfontaine (1764:7), quoted in and translated by Lowenthal (:982:26).

126 MOSQUITO EMPIRES The few French settlers had come to live well, not to labor. An English visitor who enjoyed their hospitality in the 1750s reported: “Their principal business is to find pleasures, and if they have any disquietude it is for the lack of them.”*** In 1763, almost all the French population of Guyana, about 575 people in all, lived in and around Cayenne, as did the majority of Africans, who numbered about 7,000. '**

Almost no one lived at Kourou. A Jesuit mission had been founded there in 1713-1714. At times, it found itself at odds with the colonial government in Cayenne, but more often than not it was left to its own devices, a tiny world apart: a handful of Jesuit priests and a few Indians and Africans in various stages of conversion to Christianity, perhaps 200 people in all. Kourou was on the fringes of a backwater.'** Geopolitics would soon change that. CHOISEUL’S PLAN

The Seven Years War ended badly for France. In Europe, its coalition against Prussia had fallen apart; in India, it had lost almost everything to Britain; on the high seas, its navy had suffered crushing defeats to the Royal Navy; and still more bitter disappointments came in America. British forces had taken Canada, Cape Breton Island, the Louisiana territory, and three small Caribbean islands, Dominica, Grenada, and Tobago. In the Peace of Paris in 1763, the British got Spanish Florida, and France had to donate Louisiana to Spain. Only St. Domingue, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and two tiny islets off of Newfoundland remained to France, aside from the struggling colony of alleged pleasure-seekers in Guyana. The minister responsible for French grand strategy, the Duc de Choi-

seul (1719-1785), noticed that thousands of colonists had fought in Britain’s victories in North America. With the loss of Canada, France had no loyal populations to draw on in the Americas. Slaves, presumed politically unreliable, dominated demographically in St. Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. Choiseul feared that the

23 Jefferys (:760:234). The officers of the French garrison lived “en orgie,” according to Aublet. Cited in Thibaudault (:9958:75). 24 Michel (x98:3 7-9); Cardoso (1999:329); Polderman (2e04:269—453) on plantations, and p. 281 on population.

"5 Polderman (2004:232-53) and Thibaudault (:998:33-9) on the Kourou Jesuit mission. An eyewitness account is Artur (2002:555-6).

FEVERS TAKE HOLD: FROM RECIFE TO KOUROU 127

latter two islands would easily fall to Britain when war next broke out, which everyone expected would be soon. His solution to this strategic quandary was Kourou. ‘*°

Choiseul secretly planned a new colony for Guyana, something along

the lines of a tropical Quebec. He wanted it composed of white settlers, with no slaves, and rejected proposals for a more conventional sugar-and-slave colony.'*’ This preference for white settlers came not so much from moral objections to the inhumanity of slavery,‘** but from the view that Europeans became lazy where they had slaves to do all the work, and most importantly that a slave colony could not provide loyal military manpower in the way that Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, among others, had done for Britain in the Seven Years War. A robust colony of hardy white settlers would safeeuard Martinique and Guadeloupe and, in time, allow France to take revenge on Britain, conquering some of her American possessions. Given the difficulties the French navy experienced against Britain in the war, it seemed especially prudent to have a military population already across the Atlantic. Choiseul thought a thriving colony might also provide a market for French manufactures. He hoped to recruit 18,000 settlers and get them set up in Guyana quickly, lest the British interfere. While Choiseul schemed to restore French power in the Americas, a planter, the Chevalier Antoine Briéletout de Préfontaine (1717-1787),

had come to the conclusion that the time was ripe for state-sponsored

colonization in Guyana. A military man, Préfontaine had lived in Guyana for two decades since age twenty-two, and knew conditions well. He retailed them in Physiocratic salons in Paris in 1762 and in an interview with Choiseul at Versailles. He detailed them in a book that Choiseul and his advisors consulted.'*’ Choiseul thought he had found the man to bring about his geopolitical dream, awarded the planter a 126 Ministére de la Marine et des Colonies (1842:3—4).

'27 Ministére de la Marine et des Colonies (1842:3, 6-12). He also rejected the idea, advanced by a baron from Alsace, of creating a lord-and-vassal society in Guyana. Ibid, 12-14 Larin (2808:70). Choiseul’s plans: Daubigny (82); Marcus (x98).

8 Choiseul did write that his plan was in line with “the view of justice and humanity that animates His Majesty...” Choiseul memorandum quoted in Daubigny (2:82:42); and in Ministére de la Marine et des Colonies (1842:4). "9 Préfontaine (1763). By some accounts (e.g., Chaia ras8:6), the book was published by Choiseul’s order.

128 MOSQUITO EMPIRES medal, and charged him with finding the right location in Guyana. But Choiseul did not heed Préfontaine’s detailed suggestions: small numbers of colonists, sent out in increments over many years, together with imports of African slaves. Préfontaine had wanted an ordinary West

Indian slave colony, but was entrusted with the salvation of French power in the Americas. He chose a spot on the banks of the Kourou River, which had a passable anchorage, a few livestock kept at the Jesuit mission, and about a hundred slaves. ‘3°

Choiseul chose a forty-two-year-old cavalry man and botany enthusiast, who had spent fifteen years on the Mediterranean island of Malta

but knew nothing of Guyana, to lead the settlement as its governor. Etienne Francois Turgot (1721-89) came from a prominent family; his younger brother would later ascend to the highest ranks of Louis XVI's bureaucracy. It was Turgot connections that had helped Préfontaine gain entry to Parisian salons and political circles. Turgot’s first task was to recruit 18,000 settlers. He and his agents met with remarkable success. With extravagant promises of free land, bounteous harvests, government support for thirty months, and so forth,

they found over 15,000 men, women, and children ready to take a chance on life in Guyana.'*' Most came from Alsace and the Rhineland (lands recently ravaged by competing armies in the Seven Years War), some from Belgium, and a few from Switzerland, Malta, Ireland, Austria,

and Canada. A tiny few were Acadian refugees, families of French descent, language, and culture, expelled from Nova Scotia in 1755 and living off government largesse in France. Choiseul regarded them as hardy colonists. ***

Documents in French archives preserve the names of more than 13,000 luckless souls who passed through St.-Jean d’Angély (near Rochefort) en route to Kourou. A large proportion of the family names

are German; many of the migrants appear to be young families. ‘*° "3° Préfontaine’s life is recounted in Thibaudault (:998:47-56). Michel (x989:44) says he may have chosen Kourou because it was far from Surinam and unlikely to arouse the ire of the Dutch. The royal instructions given Turgot indicate that French settlers were intended as a bulwark against possible Dutch incursions. Ministére de la Marine et des Colonies (1842:15). '3! The official text explaining the conditions of recruitment and settlement appears in Artur (2092:713-15). '32 On Canadians and Acadians, Larin (2e0%). Hodson (2007:109—16) details the recruitment of Acadians and Germans. "33 Thibaudault (:9¢8:248-503) lists the names and sometimes the occupations of some 15,000 recruits whose names appear in the seven official registers, housed

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Choiseul approved the recruitment of foreigners because he shared the prevailing notions that state power lay in population, and he worried that French population might be in decline (it was not). Jews and Protestants were also welcome to go. Choiseul sought miners, in hopes that useful minerals would be found, tobacco-growers, and others with specialized skills, including bakers, carpenters, and, strangely, ten families of musicians, a few actors and jesters, and even an economist. With admirable attention to detail, the French foreign minister specifically asked for six tambourine players to keep up the spirits of settlers in the light of the homesickness he expected they might face. A French naval official, the youthful Baron Malouet, who reviewed a contingent of settlers gathered in the chief embarkation port, Rochefort, thought it “a deplorable spectacle... to see this crowd of imbeciles of all classes who counted on making a fortune overnight, and among whom, in addition to agricultural workers, there were capitalists, youths of good family, entire families of artisans, city folk, gentlemen, a crowd of civil and military servants, and finally a troup of clowns and musicians... .”'** Some 40 percent of the 13,000 or 14,000 who sailed for Kourou were under eighteen years old.'*5 Kourou settlers outnumbered the maximum annual European emigration to all of French America before 1763 by about 20:1, and roughly equaled the annual number of slaves imported into all French colonies put together (c. 1749-1777).°°° SETTLEMENT AND SICKNESS

Choiseul and Turgot wanted their new colony up and running ina hurry. In February 1763, Choiseul explained that the king “proposes to send a in four archives (p. 243). Larin (200%:179-232) lists Canadians recruited for Kourou (not all went) and gives brief biographies of many. 34 Malouet (1862, 1:5). A slightly different translation from mine appears in Lowenthal (x982:29). On musicians and clowns, see also Ministére de la Marine et des Colonies (1842:5). Rothschild (29e5:79) mentions an economist; Thibaudault’s lists show the great majority were laborers, with a leavening of bakers, carpen-

ters, masons, and the odd wigmaker or two. On tambourine players, Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Colonies, B 117, Choiseul 4 de Fraignes, 13 février 1763. I owe this reference to Jean-Francois Mouhot. "35 Michel (:989:56, 89). Many were foundlings and bastards (ibid, pp. 66-9). Thibaudault’s (1995:248-334) list of nearly 8,000 names of colonists destined for Guyana show large numbers of children and young families. Estimates of the total number of migrants vary from 10,000 to 16,000. Malouet (x82, 1:6) wrote 14,000. See also the review in Larin (2008:74-5). '3© French slave trade data from Stein (:979:211). See also Klein (:999:211).

130 MOSQUITO EMPIRES large number of families incessantly to clear and cultivate the land.”'?? Prefontaine and some 300 woodsmen arrived in October 1763 to prepare the chosen site. His instructions urged him to assemble the local Indians and persuade them to marry their daughters to French colonists, in hopes of maximizing population. ‘** The first eight shiploads of colonists (1,429 people) began to arrive at Kourou on Christmas Day after seven weeks

at sea. They were led by Jean-Baptiste Thibault de Chanvalon (172585), civil governor (intendant) of the colony. Officially, he was second in command to Turgot, who stayed in France. Chanvalon found a half-built town, which he referred to as a camp, with a few acres cleared but full of waist-high tree stumps. Initially, he waxed cheerfully about immense

and beautiful prairies with fertile soils on which settlers would need only to “build their homes and release some livestock” to prosper.'*° Chanvalon surveyed some suitable sites for settlers’ estates along the banks of the Kourou as far as go kilometers upriver during the winter and early spring of 1764. But in February, another 413 settlers arrived, and Chanvalon complained he had no space to put them. '*” Soon, another 1,650 settlers disembarked. Chanvalon, who was born and raised in Martinique and knew something of the Greater Caribbean,

complained that too many people were coming too soon to a colony still unprepared to receive them, and that those sent were malcontents unwilling to work without the threat of imprisonment or firing squads. **'

But Chanvalon’s letters arrived late and legions of further volunteers were piling up in French ports, where they proved unpopular with the locals. So the ships kept sailing. Between February and June of 1764, some 7,000 more landed before any crops could be harvested.'** They subsisted on supplies brought from France. Each convoy was a latterday Noah’s ark with cattle, sheep, pigs, horses, donkeys, goats, chickens,

37 Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Colonies, B 117, Choiseul 4 de Fraignes, 13 février 1763. 38 Ministére de la Marine et des Colonies (1842:29).

39 Correspondance de l’intendant (Chanvalon), lettre numéro 4 (quoted in Ministére de la Marine et des Colonies 1842:37). The original, written in December 1763: “il ne s’agit que d’y construire leurs logements et d’y jeter des bestiaux.”

'4° Ministére de la Marine et des Colonies (1842:40, 44-5). '4™ Chanvalon au Ministre, 18 février 1764, quoted in Michel (:¢8:63); and Chanvalon au Ministre, 29 Mars 1764, quoted in ibid (p. 79). Chanvalon (2e04) even published a natural history book about Martinique in 1763. "42 Michel (s98o:81). Ministére de la Marine et des Colonies (1842:51) gives 9,000 for the year 1764.

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ducks, geese, and more. Intended to breed flocks and herds to sustain the future colony, most of these unwilling creatures were eaten within days

or weeks of disembarking in Guyana. Chanvalon asked for clothing, tools, and wine, but got more mouths to feed. He also got wool caps and ice skates intended for Canada but sent to Guyana, while promised medicine chests never arrived.'*? One contingent of settlers, described as the “scum of eastern France,” was turned away by the authorities at Cayenne, normally the first port of arrival in Guyana.'** The few patches of cleared land at Kourou could not accommodate them all, so Chanvalon parked new arrivals on three offshore islets known as the Iles du Diable, which he deviously rebaptised the Iles du Salut. In April 1764, Chanvalon reported 150 colonists were sick. Deadly epidemics took hold in June 1764. According to the French doctor Jacques Francois Artur, the rainy season had lasted longer than

usual. Thousands had to live and sleep outdoors owing to a lack of buildings and tents, thus maximally exposed to what was likely a bumper

crop of mosquitoes.'*® No hospital had yet been built on the Iles du Salut, and that on the mainland was incomplete, overstuffed with the sick, and bereft of medical supplies — not that most medicines could have helped.'*° Almost all the apothecaries and surgeons at Kourou fell ill.‘¢? The remainder bled the sick, following normal practice, so the lack of medical care probably proved a mercy. Chanvalon himself fell sick by late June 1764. The crisis prevented planting until August. Chanvalon tried to bolster spirits by sponsoring weddings and banquets, and by building an open-air theatre, and by appealing to authorities in

his native Martinique to send young women of good family but poor fortune to be brides in Kourou. He suppressed a small rebellion.'**”

But his greatest enemy remained microbial. In July 1764, allegedly only 50 fully fit men could be found at Kourou. By December, some 6,000 were ill with “fhévres malignes.” Food ran short, as too few healthy ™43 Larin (2000:72).

44 Ministére de la Marine et des Colonies (1842:48).

'45 Cn the rainy season and tent shortage, Artur to Turgot quoted in Artur (2902:68). 4° A document cited in Polderman (2004:483) indicates Turgot ordered medicines for Kourou in June 1764, including licorice powder, absinthe, rosewater, flower of the elder tree, and others of equal uselessness. ‘47 According to a letter from Artur to Turgot, quoted in Artur (2002:47). 48 Ministére de la Marine et des Colonies (1842:53—5). No evidence suggests any demoiselles of Martinique actually went to Kourou.

132 MOSQUITO EMPIRES men remained to hunt.'** His immune system primed by two decades of prior exposure to Guyana’s infections, Préfontaine remained among the living. ‘°°

Governor Turgot, who had sailed as far as Cayenne but prudently came no closer to Kourou, quarreled with Chanvalon — they both knew someone would be held responsible for the budding fiasco — and had him arrested on Christmas Day 1764. Turgot stayed for three months, long enough to secure title to 12,000 hectares for himself, before deciding early in 1765 that Kourou should be abandoned. Abandonment came too late for almost all concerned. The first and only census at Kourou, conducted in January 1765 by a certain Chevalier de Balzac, counted 918 living souls among the ghosts. ‘5’

Somewhere between 10,400 and 10,900 European settlers came to

Kourou in 1764-1765. Together with military personnel, the total number of migrants came to at least 12,000, and some sources prefer 14,000 or more. About 1,200 civilians survived Kourou and returned to France, including Chanvalon. A few others washed up on Martinique, St. Domingue, and elsewhere. About 11,000 Europeans died in Kourou and its environs, mainly between June 1764 and April 1765.'°* Presumably, some Amerindians and Africans died as well, although the French sources do not mention them, and they were few in number to begin with at Kourou.'*> Among Europeans, the death rate came to 85 or go percent. Thus ended the single most abysmal failure, in terms of total lives lost, in the annals of American colonization. DIAGNOSIS AND AFTERMATH

As usual, no certain retrospective diagnosis is possible. But as with the settlers at Darien, the likeliest explanation is that a few infections raged "49 Ministére de la Marine et des Colonies (1842:62—3); Thibaudault (:a¢s:121). '5° Michel (z98q:82—-4). See also a letter from a royal doctor in Guyana printed in Michel (:989:171-2). Thibaudault (:998:56) indicates Préfontaine fell ill in August 1764, contrary to Michel, but has him reconnoitering nearby districts in September. Thibaudault’s book is a strange one, with imagined dialogue mixed with long (unsourced) quotations from archival documents. '5t Ministére de la Marine et des Colonies (1842:72). Balzac, a relative of Turgot who lost his health at Kourou but lived until 1777, probably missed some. 5? Larin (200%129). Raynal (3770, 1:26-9) gives 10,000, saying 12,000 arrived and 2,000 returned while 60 families stayed. '53 Michel (x98¢:89—-91); Eymeri (39¢2:236) says 10,000 Europeans died and about 14,000 altogether. The latter figure at least is likely to be high.

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simultaneously, yellow fever chief among them. The textual evidence fingering yellow fever is strong. A botanist and royal physician, JeanBaptiste Patris, who as Inspector General of Hospitals helped inventory the dead at Kourou, wrote of “a fever, accompanied by black and bloody vomit, which kills within five days.”'°* He referred to this as analogous

to “mal de Siam,” a frequent term for yellow fever. This could have been hemorrhagic dengue, or more likely yellow fever itself. Dengue alone could not plausibly cause the mortality recorded at Kourou, although it could well have been present. Patris also mentioned “ftévres

tierces et quartes” (tertian and quartian malaria, to be expected in a marshy landscape), typhus (a normal companion on ocean voyages), and “benign” dysentery. The chief surgeon at the French military hospital at Cayenne, Pierre Campet, who treated hundreds of refugees from Kourou in November 1764, found they suffered from “an epidemic disease in which one vomits material black like ink,” which also strongly suggests yellow fever.’°* Campet also noted that a colleague in Cayenne died of “vomissement noir” in early 1765.°>”

Another doctor who treated the sufferers at Kourou, Bertrand Bajon, denied the infection in question was yellow fever. But Bajon was some-

thing of a promoter of French Guyana, and was concerned to make it sound healthy. Quite implausibly, he claimed it never had yellow fever, smallpox, or measles. However, he noted the epidemic of 1764—

1765 included symptoms such as hemorrhage and jaundice, copious vomiting, and the facts that it affected the most robust, and that it disappeared completely by 1766. These details caused the French poly-

math Alexandre Moreau de Jonnés, who had witnessed several epidemics in the West Indies, to conclude that Bajon had either accidentally or deliberately failed to identify the epidemic properly as yellow fever.°>!

'54 Letter of 2 mars 1766, printed in Michel (:989:171-2); and quoted in part in Thibaudault (:99s:119). The original: “Les flévres aigués accompagnées de vomissements noirs et sanguins qui emportent en cing jours....” Patris noted this fever had not recurred since April 1765. 55 Campet (:802:73). The original: “une maladie épidemique dans laquelle on vomit une matérielle noir comme Vl encre.”

5° Campet (:8o2:78). "57 Moreau de Jonnés (:820:75—-80); Bajon (1777-1778, 1:58-71). Bajon also noted

that almost all those who suffered “hemorrhages par le nez” (p. 69) died very soon. This argues against dengue, which like yellow fever often involves nasal bleeding, as in hemorrhagic form it (today) kills only about 10% of its victims.

134 MOSQUITO EMPIRES Beyond these textual clues, there is circumstantial evidence that implicates yellow fever but not acting alone. Apparently, the epidemic attacked only the newcomers, not the tiny local population. ‘** Préfontaine and Chanvalon’s survival in the midst of the pestilence is another argument for a diagnosis of yellow fever because it alone of the likely infections confers full immunity, and they had each spent decades in the region. Yellow fever, the most deadly of all the plausible diseases, might alone have killed 85 to go percent of a highly vulnerable population, although it is more reasonable to assume, especially because many children died at Kourou, that more than one ailment scythed down the unlucky thousands. *>”

The Kourou catastrophe naturally had reverberations in France. Some 30 million livres, as well as about 11,000 lives, had been squandered. Charges of incompetence and financial mismanagement were

brought against Chanvalon, and in 1767 he was thrown into the Bastille, and later confined to a room at Mont St. Michel. His wife was sent to a convent. Turgot, whom Choiseul now called a “madman and a scoundrel,” also faced charges, and was exiled from Paris.'°° His brother, serving the crown as intendant of Limoges (he later was a promi-

nent economist and finance minister), used his connections at court to soften the punishment. Choiseul managed to shunt all blame for Kourou onto his underlings, and remained in power until 1770. After he passed from the political scene, judgments on Chanvalon and Turgot were revised, and Chanvalon was freed and awarded damages. Turgot settled Bajon (p. 70) wrote that the epidemic killed old and new colonists alike, which seems unlikely in the case of malaria but plausible for dengue or yellow fever, if it had been absent for many years, as Bajon claimed. Finally, Bajon (p. 63) wrote that the epidemic typically killed people 13—16 days after they fell sick, consistent

with yellow fever (see Chapter 2). Campet (:8o2:74) mentions “fevers, scurvy, dysenteries” at Kourou. 88 Thibaudault (xggs:121). '59 Bancroft (1 76a:396—-7) gives an account of malaria and yellow fever in Guyana. Polderman (2004:564-6) shows that in 1764 French Guyana was reconnected with the West African disease pool after six years’ isolation. In the half century after 1709, French Guyana typically received one or two ships annually from West Africa, packed with slaves. None at all came in the war years 1758-1763.

But in 1764, three ships (and 420 slaves) arrived at Cayenne, reconnecting the colony with West Africa’s Guinea coast. These ships might have brought infections and vectors with them. 6° Choiseul (1904:410), cited in Rothschild (2608:84).

FEVERS TAKE HOLD: FROM RECIFE TO KOUROU 135

quietly in Normandy, his family’s base, and followed his interests in agriculture and botany by planting Guyanan pepper trees on his estate. Préfontaine, whose property had been confiscated, returned to Guyana in 1770 and lived amid the ghosts on his rice and indigo plantation until his death in 1787. Choiseul died in 1785, leaving a mountain of debt. For decades after the Kourou catastrophe, French Guyana held a reputation as a death trap for Europeans, which made it a suitable destination for the French state to ship criminals and political dissidents, begun on a modest scale during the most turbulent years of the French Revolution and then more consistently after a penal colony opened in 1852. The penal colony lasted a century. Like the settlers before them, most prisoners lasted only months.**' (CONCLUSION

Darien and Kourou are now forgotten. Only a few historians have any idea of what happened there. But in their time, these were major disasters that brought political turmoil in Scotland and France, and helped shape future events in the Americas. They also represent the power of imported diseases, after the 1640s establishment of yellow fever in the region, to prevent new large-scale European settlement in the Greater Caribbean. Before the entrenchment of yellow fever, European settlements and conquests proceeded in the Americas with only modest obstacles from the microbial world. Like the Dutch in Brazil, the settlers and conquerors suffered little if any more from disease than those whom they aimed to displace. This situation endured (barely) through the middle of the seventeenth century, when the English took Jamaica before malaria (and dysentery) laid them low. Had Jamaica been fortified or more stoutly defended, the conquest would not have succeeded before malaria made it impossible. Had the English sent their army in 1647 or 1648, rampant yellow fever would likely have killed most of its men even faster than did the diseases circulating in 1655-1656. But Cromwell had the good

fortune to launch his assault just a few years after yellow fever had burned its way through the Greater Caribbean. 6t The official inquests and aftermath of Kourou are treated in Michel (:98:10751), and in Rothschild (2ee8). For the effects on French approaches to Guyana,

Mam-Lam Fouck (1996:66). Toth (20) explores the history of the penal colony.

136 MOSQUITO EMPIRES By the 1690s, when yellow fever was again raging throughout the Greater Caribbean (and as far north as Boston in summertime), even unfortified landscapes such as Darien’s were well-defended from European settlers by mosquitoes and virus. Subsequent attempts to settle on a large scale came to grief, as at Kourou. The Spanish hold on the region, shaky for most of the seventeenth century, was now inexpensively buttressed by mosquitoes and microbes. Fever had taken hold.

CHAPTER FIVE

YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH

AMBITION REPULSED, 1690-1780

If my soldiers began to think, not one would remain in the ranks. — Frederick the Great’

From the 1690s, yellow fever again and again hampered military operations as well as settlement schemes in the West Indies. Malaria did too, but much less so. The largest armed expeditions were those mounted by Britain in attempts on Cartagena in 1741 and Havana in 1762. The siege of Cartagena involved the largest amphibious operation in history

until the 1790s, and represented a genuine attempt to seize the trade, production, and territory of Spanish America. Had it not been for yellow fever, Britain almost surely would have prevailed at Cartagena, and pursued the dream Cromwell conceived a century before. At Havana

yellow fever destroyed an army, converting a British conquest into a pyrrhic victory and a dead end. YELLOW FEVER AND THE DEFENSE OF THE SPANISH EMPIRE

In the first century of its American empire, the Spanish Crown had avoided heavy investment in imperial defense, relying on distance and the logistical difficulties its enemies would face. By and large, this was enough. Sea rovers and buccaneers like Francis Drake or John Hawkins

might intercept a few ships now and again, might sweep down on a " Quoted in Houlding (:@8z:v).

137

138 MOSQUITO EMPIRES poorly defended settlement and sack it. But Spain’s enemies did not have the resources to take and hold anything of consequence.’ FORTIFICATION AND DISEASE

Once streams of silver from the Andes and Mexico began to flow through

the Caribbean, the Spanish commitment to imperial defense in the Americas deepened. More frequent and determined Dutch, English, and French piracy required a more active policy. Moreover, all of Spain’s

rivals ratcheted up their predatory ambitions and hatched repeated plans to take and hold parts or all of Spanish America. Opinion was divided as to how best to safeguard the Indies. One strategy was to build naval power sufficient to defend all important sea routes. This had the advantage that the ships and squadrons in question could be shifted to home waters in moments of crisis, but had the disadvantage of costing

lots of money to maintain. The Spanish Crown from the 1580s was in perpetual danger of bankruptcy, despite the influx of American silver, because of its military ambitions within Europe. While the Crown in the 1580s paid for a few galleys to patrol the waters off of Cartagena and Havana, it resisted the temptation to establish a squadron in the Caribbean until 1641, and funded it securely only from the 1680s.° In general, Spain let its navy languish from the disastrous attempt to invade England in 1588 until the 1720s. Instead, Spain put its money in masonry. Fortification was also expensive, but once built required less maintenance than naval squadrons, and with luck could bring great savings if manned mainly by local militia. Moreover, with sufficient persuasion local populations in the Americas would help pay for fortifications, which they would never voluntarily do for ships that might at any moment be recalled to the Bay of Biscay or

the Mediterranean. From the late sixteenth century, Spain slowly built up a network of fortified strongholds in the Americas. The underlying idea was to protect choke points along the sea routes used by the trade and treasure fleets (flotas and galeones) rather than to defend territory. Cartagena and

Havana got the most attention because of their roles in the Spanish trade system. In theory, trade with the Indies was confined to a convoy that left Seville (or after 1717, Cadiz) and stopped first at Cartagena 2 Hoffman (:a8e); Andrews (x98). 3 ‘Torres Ramirez (:982).

YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH AMBITION REPULSED 139

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Map 5.1. Fortified Points in the Spanish Caribbean (c. 1750)

before disbursing its goods throughout Spanish America. Cartagena — when it had naval ships — also protected the Caribbean coasts of the Isthmus of Panama, across which the silver from the Andes traveled. Havana, sometimes called “the key to the New World” for its strategic position, served as the final port of call for treasure ships en route home to Spain. San Juan in Puerto Rico also acquired fortifications, as did Veracruz somewhat later.* Minor ports received little or nothing in the way of defenses. Even an important post such as Portobelo in Panama had little in the way of fortification until the 1770s, perhaps because no local militia could be recruited and garrisons from Spain died too quickly from disease.°

Money was always short. Military engineers and governors always complained that defenses were too weak. Local councils and the Spanish Crown seemed ready to pay only in time of crisis, or only after an attack

had already demonstrated vulnerability. French corsairs even sacked Havana (in the 1550s) and Cartagena (1697), and English pirates sacked 4 Calderé6n Quijano (1984b). 5 Kuethe (1983:14). Gastelbondo (1753) notes that the crews of the flota suffered heavily from yellow fever at Cartagena and Portobelo; so did Alcedo (17861789), as cited in Sanchez-Albornoz (1974:102-3).

140 MOSQUITO EMPIRES Cartagena in 1668. But gradually, Cartagena and Havana acquired indepth defenses with multiple castles, walls, redoubts, bulwarks, and so

forth, built according to the latest standards. No other cities in the Americas could boast such fortifications.®

Fortification by the late seventeenth century was a refined art. Between 1450 and 1800, European engineers developed a precise science of siegecraft and fortification. By the 1670s, the French engineer Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707) set the standard with mammoth artillery fortresses intended to hold out against any imaginable assault for a period of eight weeks, after which time (the thinking went) French columns could march to the rescue and relieve any siege.’ In Europe, fortresses did hold out successfully in more than three fourths of sieges attempted between 1683 and 1815.° Vauban’s fortresses were very costly and needed proper garrisons, artillery, and supplies, but kings could not expect to hold territory without them. Every power, Spain included, developed the requisite engineering expertise to build them.° Building expensive fortifications in the Americas made less sense. Relief columns would likely not arrive within eight weeks. Mobilizing a rescue across the Atlantic took several months in the best of circumstances, by which time even a well-supplied and well-garrisoned fortress would fall if competently besieged. When the French built one in what is now Nova Scotia at Louisbourg, it amounted to a waste of money and was taken twice, in 1745 and 1758, after sieges lasting seven weeks. Only in one circumstance did reliance on fortifications make sense in the Americas: if the defenders could reasonably expect decisive inter-

vention within eight weeks. In the Caribbean basin after the 1690s, they could. Battalions of bloodthirsty mosquitoes could intervene when and where soldiers could not. No one knew about the role of mosquitoes, but everyone, including Spanish military planners, knew that yellow fever and other diseases ° Parcero Torre (1998:18-34); Albi (98:1 30-5); Segovia Salas (: 982); Calderon Quijano (:@8.4); Kagan (2000); Parker (200). 7 Vauban (r968:12). See also Duffy (x 98s). 5 According to a list in Landers (2¢04:401-3), defenders won 67 of 87 sieges. The success ratio stayed fairly steady in the various wars between 1683 and 1815, but dipped somewhat in the War of the Austrian Succession.

9 Zapatero (r978) reviews Spanish military engineering in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See also Duffy (1979); Albi (z987:127-40); Pares (:936:240-52) on the often poor quality of French and British fortification in the West Indies.

YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH AMBITION REPULSED I41

preyed on newcomers to the Caribbean. From experience and observation, they knew that expeditionary forces from afar would eventually fall sick and die. One military engineer, Don Silvestre Abarca, thought disease would take its toll beginning in the second week of a siege.‘* José de Galvez, president of the Council of the Indies, in 1779 explained how much Spain relied on “the climate” to defeat her enemies in the Caribbean: “Taking into account that apart from good garrisons, supplies, and preparedness, the enemy will encounter a climate so dangerous that it will weaken his forces, ruin his men and food supply... .”*’ In Veracruz, on the eastern shore of New Spain, the role of yellow fever in Spanish imperial defense was especially prominent but unusually complicated. The torrid lowlands around Veracruz hosted endemic yellow fever from perhaps the 1640s. As a British officer noted in 1740, visitors risked their lives in summers: Vera Cruz is reckoned unhealthy, especially when the flota is there,

or any great concourse of people...; and when a great number of peoples loges in the Town together during these heats they are visited with a pestilential distemper called the vomito prieto, of which disease many people die.** Throughout the coastal lowlands in the summer months, a “rain shower was enough to destroy a European army divison.”’? Maintaining a gar-

rison in Veracruz proved difficult because troops recruited in upland regions of Mexico or from Spain — men who had never encountered yellow fever and perhaps not malaria — fell ill and died at appalling rates,

in the worst year (1799), 50 percent annually. Recruits from highland Mexico baulked at service in Veracruz.'* Locally recruited troops fared '© SHM-Madrid, Seccién Histérica del Depdsito de la Guerra (4.1.1.1), Defensa de La Habana y sus castillos por el brigadier ingeniero director D. Silvestre Abarca; AHN, Estado, leg. 3025, Relacidén del estado actual de las fortificaciones de la Plaza de San Cristébal de La Habana y demas fuertes y castillos dependientes por el ingeniero D. Francisco Ricaud de Tirgale, 8 Julio 1761.

't AGI, Santa Fe, 577-A, Don José de Galvez a Manuel Antonio Fl6rez, cited in Marchena Fernandez (983:195). '2 British Library, Additional MSS 32,694, “An Account of the Havanna and Other Principal Places belonging to the Spaniards in the West Indies,” 14 April 1740, fol. 76. The view that yellow fever was endemic here from the 1640s is Bustamente’s (1958:70). '3 Informe del brigadier Fernando Miyares, 21 Junio 1815, SHM-Madrid, c. 97, quoted in Ortiz Escamilla (2e08:39).

'4 Castro Gutiérrez (:99:98). I owe this citation to my colleague John Tutino.

142 MOSQUITO EMPIRES much better, but they were in short supply as the region was sparsely inhabited. In the late eighteenth century, the disease toll among European (and Central Mexican) troops became the rationale for using black militia, who were regarded, probably correctly, as more disease-resistant.

When invasion threats loomed, authorities brought regiments down from the mountains and within reach of Aedes aegypti. Because everyone knew that Veracruz was a death trap for new arrivals, any march toward the coast brought mass desertions. Eventually, senior comman-

ders developed the doctrine that Veracruz should not be defended in war, indeed that the surest way to destroy an enemy force would be for it to land and stay at the port while the forces of New Spain dug in around the mountain passes on the way to Mexico City. This was brilliant strategy, and roughly analogous to the Russian reliance on “General Winter” to destroy invaders. But especially after 1778, the merchants of Veracruz were powerful enough to ensure that the city and their property would

be defended, a policy that cost the lives of countless highland peasants serving in the Spanish army or colonial militia — without a shot fired.'° In this respect, the Veracruz merchants resembled the planters of Jamaica, whose investments the British Army protected at the cost of several thousand deaths to fevers.

GARRISONS AND DISEASES

Reliance on the power of “the climate” made perfect sense as long as attackers hailed from regions free from yellow fever and most defenders were already immune. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when fortifications were meager, attackers came in the form of corsairs

and privateers, normally with only a single ship or two, and crews numbering less than a hundred. With the English, Dutch, and French settlement of several of the islands of the Lesser Antilles after the 1620s, larger expeditions of locally recruited men became imaginable. Indeed,

in 1655 Barbados and other islands provided some 3,000 men for the 'S Archer (:97:38—60); Archer (r972); Archer (:98); Albi (:987:132); Booker (:993); Bustamente (:9¢88:80-3); Knaut (:99); Ortiz Escamilla (2908:52, 7780). In 1778, new regulations liberalized trade within the Spanish Empire, to the great advantage of Veracruz, which grew quickly thereafter and became a prosperous trading center. Lind (:788:115) noted how much healthier Mexico City was than Veracruz.

YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH AMBITION REPULSED 143

assault on Hispaniola and Jamaica. But soon the English, Dutch, and French islands had slave majorities and their political stability required the ongoing presence of armed Europeans. After 1670, no slavemaster on Barbados or Martinique could cheerfully countenance the departure of a sizeable contingent of white men in an attempt on a Spanish possession. Arming either slaves or free blacks for military adventures scared most whites, although eventually, as we shall see, it happened. If large-scale attacks against Spanish strongholds came, they could come only in the form of amphibious assaults manned by luckless virus-fodder sent from Europe.

Successful defense against such attacks required garrisons composed of men resistant to yellow fever (and malaria). Troops freshly arrived from Spain would prove as vulnerable as anyone, a fact proved repeatedly.’ New Spanish troops sent to the West Indies could expect to lose about a quarter of their men to disease, mainly in the first several months. '? Locally recruited militia, men who had spent their childhoods surviving Caribbean diseases, held up best. The fact that populations in the Spanish Caribbean were highly urban meant that the proportion of militiamen who had weathered yellow fever in childhood was unusually high. But seasoned troops from Spain, who had lasted a few years in the lowland Caribbean, were likely to be just as fever-resistant, and normally far better soldiers than militiamen, who were notorious for their poor training and discipline. Veteran commanders preferred such seasoned troops, and dreaded the health consequences of new arrivals — just

as experienced plantation owners preferred seasoned slaves and would pay less for new arrivals. Although no one understood it at the time, “herd immunity” meant that a few new arrivals could likely be absorbed into a garrison in Cartagena, Havana, or Veracruz, with little risk of yellow fever. A large influx, however, set the stage for a yellow fever outbreak. The ideal arrangement for Spanish imperial defense in the Caribbean consisted of stout fortifications that would oblige attackers to halt for "© For example, among the garrison at Caracas in 1756-1757: “Notdse que sdlo los soldados espafioles sucumbieron, mientras que no eran atacados por la epidemia ninguno de los hijos de Caracas” Archila (:9@%3:375). Caracas suffered yellow fever

epidemics in 1694, 1756-1757, 1787, 1793, and 1798. Writing from Havana, Cérdoba (tae) noted that yellow fever was the single most deadly disease among Spaniards.

'? Marchena Fernandez (:983:213).

144 MOSQUITO EMPIRES weeks while mounting a siege, combined with garrisons composed of either militia and seasoned regular troops or both.'* Any port or colony

thus defended was as secure as Spain could possibly make it from amphibious attack. After 1764, reforms in Spanish imperial defense particularly emphasized militia and fortification in the Americas.** It took many decades and several wars, but by the 1760s the Spanish had adjusted their defense posture to the new ecological and epidemiological regime of the West Indies.

THE DEADLY 16908

The significance of the new ecological regime for imperial rivalries began to show only in the 1690s with the advent of large-scale warfare in the West Indies. When Louis XIV’s power grew too great for his neighbors’ comfort, they formed an alliance against France and went to war. In the Nine Years’ War (1688-1697), also known as the War of the League of Augsburg and as King William’s War, England, Spain, and the Netherlands (and some lesser powers) fought France on land

and at sea, including in the West Indies. At this time, the balance of sea power increasingly favored England over France, and the Lords of the Admiralty decided to mount amphibious assaults on French sugar islands. Like everyone else, they failed to account properly for yellow fever, which at least in epidemic form had spared the Greater Caribbean since 1652.

The result was grim in 1690, Captain Lawrence Wright managed to recapture St. Kitts from the French but lost half his men to yellow fever.** Commodore Ralph Wrenn in 1692 lost his own life and more than half of his crews to yellow fever; some of his ships sank amid shoals 'S In the late eighteenth century, regular troops cost the Spanish Crown seven times as much to maintain as militia, also a crucial consideration (Albi 1:98:97). Regular troops were always in short supply, even when there was money to pay them.

9 Albi (x98 3:93-140); Parcero Torrre (raqg8); Archer (1997:10); McAlister (1954); Kuethe (:978); Kuethe (1984). Buchet (:993b:191) says, without citation, that the Spanish understood the defense value of yellow fever and called it “flevre patriotique.” I have not seen such a term in Spanish sources but the term would be fully appropriate. 2° Guerra (1996:27) says yellow fever; the textual evidence is slender. The mortality of the expedition is noted in Ehrman (:98%3:609); Buchet (1992, 2:782). A fuller account in most respects but blind to disease is Moss (3¢99:14-26).

YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH AMBITION REPULSED 145

and reefs because of a shortage of sailors to maneuver them.*' RearAdmiral Sir Francis Wheler, sent to attack the French West Indies and Canada in 1693, lost nearly half his men to a fever acquired in Barbados,

and as a result gave up on a brief attempt to take Martinique. Fever dogged his fleet on his way to attack Canada. He stopped in Boston and told Cotton Mather he had lost 1,300 of 2,100 sailors (62%) and 1,800 of 2,400 soldiers (75%) to sickness.** He fired off a few cannon at French

fishing villages on Newfoundland before limping home. Mosquitoes were not yet through with the Royal Navy: In 1695, Admiral Robert Wilmot lost 61 percent of his men (77% of those who went ashore) while failing in a desultory attack on St. Domingue. These were all modest campaigns in the grand strategy of King William’s War, but by far the most deadly for the Royal Navy.** The habit of sending out fresh fleets each year (or two) ensured that thousands of hapless sailors with no yellow fever immunity would make the acquaintance of A. aegypti,

and large numbers of them would die. This bleak fact seems to have troubled the Lords of the Admiralty little if at all. French cruises to the Caribbean suffered heavy mortality, too.** That did not worry the Ministry of Marine enough to forestall French designs on Cartagena. Cartagena de Indias, on the Caribbean coast of what is today Colom-

bia, was founded in 1533. Within a few decades, it had become the chief entrepdt of South America’s Caribbean coast because its broad and sheltered bay was one of the best harbors in the Americas. Its strategic

and commercial importance inspired attacks by Elizabethan sea dogs John Hawkins (1568) and Francis Drake (1586). After 1598, when the Spanish organized their convoy system for trade to the Indies, Cartagena was the first port of call for ships coming from Europe to Spain’s colonies. In these early days, Cartagena had scant fortifications and no yellow fever to protect it. >t Details appear in Nathaniel Champney’s untitled account in BL, Harleian MSS, 6378; Kendall to Blathwayt, 20 April 1692, CSP, Colonial Series, America and West Indies (1689-1692, 13:627). Moss (1988:26—7). 2 Keevil, Lloyd and Coulter (1957-1963, 2:182-3), citing Mather, The Ecclesiastical History of New England (Hartford 1854, 1:226). Moss (:98:27-9). 23, Ehrman (1983); Keevil, Lloyd, and Coulter (1957-1963, 2:181—4); Moss (3 9883). Details appear in CSP (1693—1696:3 1-101 ). See for example pp. 100-1, Codring-

ton to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, 10 May 1693, in which he explains the failures of Wheler’s efforts as a result of the rainy season, the weakness of European troops, and the insufficiency of local ones.

4 Buchet (r9ar, 2:782-4).

146 MOSQUITO EMPIRES It had more of both by 1697,*° when a French fleet targeted Cartagena. Led by a career naval man, Jean Bernard Louis Desjeans, Baron de Pointis, this expedition included seven warships and about 5,000 men, including 650 buccaneers from St. Domingue. The Baron hoped

to take the city and establish a commanding French position on the mainland, upwind of the all-important isthmus of Panama. Aided by surprise and a late onset of the rainy season,*” the French landed unop-

posed near Cartagena on April 12, 1697, and managed to storm the dilapidated bulwarks and outer fortifications within days. The Spanish quickly abandoned other outposts and agreed to surrender on the condition that only the army, not the pirates, be allowed to sack the city. In early May, Pointis took control of Cartagena, having lost only sixty men. But heavy downpours began soon after the surrender at Cartagena, and with them rose swarms of A. aegypti. French regulars pillaged the city for two weeks while the pirates were cooped up in an outlying fort. However, the soldiers got more than they bargained for, acquiring yellow fever as well as booty. The virus afflicted Soo men in less than a week and killed most of them. Troops fresh from France suffered more than the pirates and those already resident in the West Indies. Pointis left on May 24th. In his account of the expedition,

Pointis made it clear that he departed in haste and with regret: “All my thoughts of triumph and wealth were erased by ones of sickness and

death. I feared I would lose, in the most beautiful port in the world, not only the fruits of my labors but the squadron entrusted to me by the king.”*’ Laden with loot but beset by fever, the Baron decided to make haste for France rather than share his booty with the pirates. They responded by sacking the city a second time, subjecting the inhabitants to a spasm of atrocities. The Cartageneros, however, were luckier than the departing French. *5 Solano Alonso (x99@8:79) says the “vémito negro” had become common in Cartagena in the seventeenth century, where it attacked newcomers regularly (and went by the name “chapetonadas”). Modern scholars note yellow fever outbreaks in 1651-1652, part of the first general epidemic in the Greater Caribbean, and enough smaller ones to judge the disease endemic in the later seventeenth century. Soriano Lleras (:986:52); Valtierra (r98.4:751-4). On the history of the city’s fortifications, Segovia Salas (199%); Zapatero (xa7¢); Marco Dorta (ree). © Pointis (1698:140). ?7 Pointis (1698:141). “Toutes les idées de triomphe et richesse étaient effacées par celles de la maladie et de la mort. Je me croyais en état de perdre dans le plus beau port du monde, non seulement le fruit de mes peines, mais l escadre que le roi m avait confiée.”

YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH AMBITION REPULSED 147

On its way home, the French squadron encountered an Anglo-Dutch fleet commanded by Admiral John Nevill, sent out to find the French

fleet in the West Indies. Nevill found it after the sack of Cartagena, but the French managed to escape with the loss of one ship: a hospital ship carrying yellow fever victims. Nevill in his journal doubted the French fleet could make it home because it “hath lost so many people by sickness.”®> The virus spread to the English and Dutch, who lost 1,800 men to it, including their admiral. The French fleet returned to Brest in August, having tossed overboard 24 percent of the remaining force, lost to fever. Another 34 percent were sick but still alive when they disembarked. Many soon died. But Baron de Pointis survived, gave King Louis XIV his share of the spoils, continued to serve in the navy until 1705, and lived out his days a wealthy man. Cartagena remained Spanish: Pointis could sack the city but he could not stay there.*® The bad luck that befell the soldiers and sailors under the commands of Wright, Wrenn, Wheler, Wilmot, Pointis, and Nevill was all of a piece with that which laid low the Scots at Darien. They had the misfortune to be newcomers to the Caribbean in the 1690s, when yellow fever seemed to surge through every port. Civilians suffered too in the 1690s.°° More than anything else, this reflected the influx of newcomers occasioned by war and colonization. But it may also have resulted from unusually good mosquito weather, leading to vector abundance. Recent research

(see Chapter 2) shows that vector abundance peaks in El Nifio and ENSO-+1 years. El Nifio in 1692 and 1694-1696 brought conditions ideal for hatching and sustaining A. aegypti, so the years 1692-1697 8 Nevill’s journal is in Merriman (:989:299-311), quotation from p. 306. He anchored for a day at Cartagena and his crews could have acquired the yellow fever virus there. 79 Accounts include the memoirs of the principals (Pointis 1698; Ducasse 1699); as well as historical narratives (Morgan 1932; Porras Troconis 1842; Pritchard 2004!326-31) and the analysis of Buchet (rear, 1:482—-6, 508, and 2:181, 193, 784). A detailed roster of Pointis’ armament and equipment appears in Buchet (x9Qt, 2:1162—230), from Archives Nationales, Marine, 662/36, “Armament en course de l’escadre de M. le Baron de Pointis, 1697.” Matta Rodriguez (197s) and Ruiz Rivera (zor) for views using Spanish documents. The fullest study is Nerzic and Buchet (2002). 3° PRO, CO 37/164, f.250 “Epidemic Fevers at Bermuda,” notes that a “very malignant fever” killed a large proportion of Bermuda’s population in 1699. Father

Labat (r722, 4:211-12, 251-3) noted yellow fever in Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1698-1699. Moreau de St. Méry (1797-1798, 1:701—2) recounts yellow fever outbreaks on St. Domingue in the 1690s.

148 MOSQUITO EMPIRES were good for mosquitoes and bad for people — worse for some than for others — in the Caribbean.°*'

The danger from yellow fever persisted, if not so acutely, after the deadly 1690s. Several naval expeditions during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713) suffered catastrophic mortality — sometimes from yellow fever, and sometimes not.** The worst luck belonged to Vice-Admiral Francis Hosier, with whom this book began. During a crisis in Anglo-Spanish relations he was sent to patrol Spanish Caribbean coasts in 1726 (a year after another El Nifio).** After visits to afew West Indian ports, his crews contracted yellow fever, which raged aboard his ships for months. He never commanded more than 3,300 men at a time,

but because of replacements dragged off the shores of Jamaica, in all the expedition lost over 4,000 of 4,750 men who served (over 84%), including Hosier himself who died aboard ship cruising off Cartagena.** This gruesome episode became legendary among British mariners, the stuff of mournful ballads, helping the West Indies to acquire the reputation as a place where men went to die.** A Spanish fleet sent — quite

unnecessarily, as it turned out — to hamper Hosier in 1730 lost 2,200 men to yellow fever.*”

The decades from 1690 to 1730 had made clear to one and all the deadly hazards of military operations in the West Indies. They also

3% Quinn and Neal (:9¢2) and Quinn (:992) for ENSO chronology. Poveda et al. (200%) show that in Colombia both vivax and falciparum malaria spike during ENSO and ENSO-+1 years. 32, Buchet (19913, 2:784-8).

33, According to a new ENSO chronology, the 1720s were an especially active decade. Garcia-Herrera et al. (a8). 34 PRO, Admiralty 1/230 contains several letters and reports from Hosier from June 1726 to August 1727, including details on health. His last signed missive was 14 August 1727, “State of HM’s Ships at Cartagena,” in which he noted 793 of 2,776 surviving men were sick. Most would soon be dead, like Hosier himself, who died on 25 August (some reports indicate in Jamaica, not at sea). Papers relating to Hosier’s command are in British Library, Additional MSS 33028, ff. 48-174. Long (s 774, 2:111) has a brief account, as do Keevil, Lloyd, and Coulter (1957-1963, 3:97-100). Correspondence in the Calendar of State Papers (1728—1729:164) notes Hosier was worried about rum shortages in July 1727.

35 For example, the popular ballad, “Admiral Hosier’s Ghost,” penned in 1739 by Richard Glover. A version appears in Keevil, Lloyd, and Coulter (1957-1963, 3:99—-100).

3© Guerra (1966:27), citing Gastelbondo (3783).

YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH AMBITION REPULSED 149

probably established the yellow fever virus firmly among the monkey and mosquito populations of the region’s forests, so that enduring reservoirs of virus existed almost everywhere, but especially on the mainland and

the big islands, where the biggest forests and most monkeys were. It is reasonable to say that from the 1690s onward, yellow fever was reliably endemic in the Greater Caribbean region, and needed only large influxes of nonimmunes amid swarms of A. aegypti to become epidemic. But this prospect did nothing to quell the ambitions of those making strategy in London, where a sense of Spanish weakness was matched by a growing faith in British power. Those ambitions soon focused on Cartagena. SIEGE ECOLOGY AT CARTAGENA, I74I

In the decades after Pointis’ attack, Cartagena resumed its roles as regional entrepét and hub of Spanish imperial trade. But the convoy system was winding down, inadequate to the burgeoning demand of Spanish America for European goods. The last fleet left in 1739. Throughout the early eighteenth century, Cartagena hosted a lively smuggling business with British and Dutch merchants. Local officials found conniving at contraband more rewarding than enforcing regulations.*’ Cartagena’s

hinterland yielded silver, gold, pearls, emeralds, sugar, cotton, cacao, hides, botanical drugs, and excellent timber. In addition to its commercial role, Cartagena served as a center of the naval and military establishment of the Viceroyalty of New Granada (established in 1717), a sprawling territory comprising what is today Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and most of Ecuador.** Like every trading and naval port, Cartagena had a mobile and fluc-

tuating population. That population was usually smaller than 10,000, made up mainly of people of mixed Amerindian, African, and European ancestry.*’ As the port of first arrival for most African slaves entering the Spanish Empire, Cartagena hosted a sizeable West African population. Between 1714 and 1736, Cartagena imported 10,475 slaves 37 Grahn (toe). 38 The list of exports is from Zapatero (+957). In 1740 New Granada was almost all forested, and most of its population lived in the highlands of Colombia (Palacio 2006:35, 171); (Gordon 1977:69—70). On Cartagena’s military role, Marchena Fernandez (:982:15-57); Segovia Salas (:999:14-34). 39 Gomez Pérez (982) says 6,000 for 1708 and 12,000 for 1778, based on archival

census materials. Zulueta (:992:132) gives 20,000 as the city’s population in 1741, surely too high.

150 MOSQUITO EMPIRES

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YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH AMBITION REPULSED I51

officially through the British South Sea Company, which then held a legal monopoly. The great majority were Akan and Ewe, shipped via El Mina or Ouidah on the coast of West Africa and arriving via Jamaica. Illegal slave imports, via Jamaica and Curac&o, amounted to at least three times this figure, bringing the total to perhaps 40,000 or some 2,000 per year.*° With the slave ships from West Africa and Jamaica presumably came additional immigrant A. aegypti, so the city was never in short supply of yellow fever vectors.

Cartagena received immigrant mosquitoes, but it and its hinterland also efficiently grew their own. Like other ports, Cartagena stored plenty

of water. In 1735, the Spanish naval officers Jorge Juan and Antonio Ulloa noted the city’s numerous cisterns, which provided water during the four- to five-month dry season, which in Cartagena is almost completely without rain.*' Where there were cisterns, there were surely A. aegypti. Cartagena had its own modest agricultural hinterland, with sugar and cattle as the chief products. All the plantations in this corner of the Spanish Empire (in practice, chiefly those of the Cauca valley) shipped their sugar through Cartagena, so the city was in regular communication with A. aegypti incubators in the countryside.*? What with frequent ship traffic from Jamaica and the West African coasts until 1739, and suitable breeding grounds in the city and its upriver hinterland, Cartagena was surely a buzzing metropolis for A. aegypti. Thus, one essential condition for yellow fever outbreaks was fulfilled.

With its sizable transient population, especially when the galeones stopped in, Cartagena was a crossroads of contagion of almost every sort.*° Infections easily found new hosts, and newcomers and residents alike often encountered unfamiliar diseases. Nearby Portobelo, usually the next stop for the galleons, earned the sobriquet “sepultura de Espafioles” (graveyard of Spaniards) by regularly killing a third to a half of the galleons’ crews.** Portobelo in the mid-eighteenth century could boast only about 500 houses and came to life only during the weeks of market fair, when people flocked there to do business (as fast as

possible). With its larger resident and transient population, Cartagena presumably hosted a wider variety of diseases than Portobelo. 4° Castillo Mathieu (+98 :266-70, 275-6). 47 Juan and Ulloa (1748, 1:ch. 5); Uprimmy and Lobo Guerrero (2007). 4° McFarlane (:993:39, 41, 45-7) on sugar in the Cartagena hinterland. 43, Diaz Pardo (2008); Chandler (sa8r). 44 Juan and Ulloa (1748, 1:129-30). See also Gastelbondo (3783).

152 MOSQUITO EMPIRES With the necessary mosquitoes and people available, the yellow fever virus could stay in circulation in Cartagena, but not without difficulty.

What with sailors from all over the Atlantic world, not to mention a garrison from Spain that was often topped up with new recruits, the city offered at times a sizable population of nonimmunes for the yellow fever virus. Inconveniently, from the virus’ point of view, Cartagena’s resident population consisted substantially of people either partially or fully of West African descent — and probably either fully or partially immune. Moreover, many Cartageneros had been born and raised there or elsewhere in the Caribbean region, and had likely survived yellow fever. These populations would be impervious to the virus, and could

provide herd immunity to the susceptibles. The proportion of young children remained modest because the city’s population included rather few women and families. The virus might have disappeared altogether

from the city at times: Juan and Ulloa wrote that it had no yellow fever before an outbreak of 1729 that killed 2,200, mostly sailors.** But even if it did disappear from the city, the nearby forests hosted monkeys serving as a reservoir for the virus. Perhaps at times it was endemic in the city, circulating among children, newcomers, and A. aegypti of the

city; perhaps at other times it was not, but maintained in Cartagena only via occasional links to infected monkeys. In any case, the yellow fever virus lurked in or around Cartagena, able to exploit the opportunity of any good-sized contingent of nonimmunes that sailed within range.*" Cartagena’s surroundings also hosted plenty of Anopheles mosquitoes.

The local topography of marshes, mangrove swamps, and lagoons suited

anopheline breeding specifications nicely. The many moats dug for the fortifications, filled with stagnant water, algae mats, and aquatic plants, could not have been better designed for anopheline larvae. The immigrant slaves brought malarial parasites to the region in a steady stream, so Cartagena’s hinterland featured endemic malaria, both vivax and falciparum, and had done so since the sixteenth century. Anyone

not resistant to malaria stood an excellent chance of falling ill upon arriving near Cartagena, especially during the rainy season. 45 Juan and Ulloa (1748, 1:59-61); Restrepo (2e04:71). Moseley (1 798:402) also says Spanish sailors suffered heavily in this outbreak.

4° Gast Galvis (:982) has scattered information on yellow fever in and around Cartagena; see Bates (x94) on sylvan yellow fever in Colombia in the early twentieth century.

YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH AMBITION REPULSED 153

ADMIRAL VERNON GOES TO THE CARIBBEAN

After nearly a quarter century of peace between Britain and the Bourbons, war broke out again in 1739. British merchants objected to constraints on trade with Spanish America, and foisted an aggressive war on a reluctant prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Spanish mercantile interests objected to British smuggling in the Spanish Empire and insisted on their legal privileges. The war eventually fused with a dynastic struggle in Europe. The Atlantic dimensions go by the name of the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739-1748), based on the story of a sea captain’s

severed ear, allegedly brandished in pickled form by its former owner before a committee of the House of Commons in 1738 to illustrate Spanish atrocities. In Spain it is known less colorfully as La Guerra del Asiento, referring to the trade treaty of 1713 regulating British commercial activity in Spanish America. Campaigns in Europe came to be known as the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), involving coalitions of all major European powers. Fighting between Britain and France also took place in India, North America, and at sea. As Britain and Spain slid into war in 1739, schemes sprouted all over Britain for expeditions to the West Indies. Blockades of the treasure ports such as Hosier’s in 1726-1727 had achieved worse than nothing. Eager armchair warriors planned to seize and hold big chunks of the Spanish Empire — just as Cromwell had planned in his day. Almost everywhere from Cuba to Chile came under consideration.*’ An expedition to the West Indies came together late in 1739. No high-ranking naval officer wanted to go to the West Indies, so the honor fell to an enthusiastic supporter of the war, Edward Vernon (1684— 1757), a well-connected opposition politician and semi-retired naval officer. Vernon had joined the navy as a teenager and been a captain at age twenty-one. He acquired considerable experience of the Caribbean but had not seen active service since 1728, and he had made a second career as an inconspicuous member of parliament. Probably his best qualification for the job was unacknowledged: acquired immunity to yellow fever. After two decades of inaction, it took the British military bureaucracy some time to creak into action. But ina few months, it had assembled an assault force of nine ships of the line. Vernon sailed in July 1739 — before 47 BL, Additional MSS 32694, Newcastle Papers, ff. 1-100, contains proposals for taking various targets in Spanish America.

154 MOSQUITO EMPIRES war had been declared — and arrived in Jamaica in October, having lost

about seven percent of his men, a little more than average for such a crossing.

After consultations in Jamaica, Vernon chose to tackle Portobelo, where he hoped to find Spanish treasure ships. He found only a meager garrison that put up token resistance for two days before surrendering. Vernon lingered for a few weeks — this was November and Decem-

ber, the dry season — to destroy the modest fortifications. He then returned, triumphantly, to Jamaica to refit his fleet. Word of his success reached Britain, prompting celebration. A medal was struck in his honor. Portobello Road in London acquired its present name (lately home to a famous flea market). By March, Vernon was ready to sail again. He wanted a closer look at the defenses of Cartagena and to attack the small port of Chagres. Seven hours’ bombardment sufficed to persuade the defenders of Chaeres’ small castle to submit. Many Spaniards along these coasts welcomed the trading opportunities that the British represented and cooperated with Vernon after token resistance. After taking Chagres, Vernon learned that London, dizzy with his success, had sent reinforcements. So he decided to wait before attempting anything grander than harrying Spanish shipping. He waited and waited because finding enough men and supplies took many months. The reinforcements, led by Lord Cathcart, a Scot who had served with distinction in the War of the Spanish Succession and in suppressing a Scots’ rebellion in 1715, sailed from England in October 1740. They arrived in Jamaica in January 1741, without Cathcart, who died en route at Dominica. The army command fell to Thomas Wentworth, a soldier who had never exercised independent command

and never heard a shot fired in anger. Vernon later said Wentworth was more fit to be an attorney than a general.** After spending a few weeks getting organized and chasing a French fleet in vain, Vernon and Wentworth sailed for Cartagena, arriving on March 4th. They came in force, with 29 ships of the line, 186 vessels of all descriptions, 15,000 sailors, and about 29,000 men in all. This was the largest agglomeration of military men yet seen in these waters, and possibly the largest amphibious assault force yet assembled in world history. The land army included 8,000 men in eight regiments from Britain, almost all of them recently mobilized and new to combat. The novelist 45 Houstoun (1 34°7:241).

YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH AMBITION REPULSED 155

Tobias Smollett, who took part in the campaign, wrote in Roderick Random (Chapter 31) they were “not as yet much used to discipline, most of them having been taken from the plough-tail a few months before.”

Some 3,400 more were recruited from the North American colonies from Massachusetts to North Carolina. A British naval officer described them as “Blacksmiths, Tailors, Barbers, Shoemakers, and all the Banditry the colonies afforded.”** Among them was Lawrence Washington, elder half-brother of George and captain of a Virginia company. The

British would have done better to recruit yellow fever veterans from Charleston and Savanna, but South Carolina and Georgia militiamen were otherwise engaged in a fruitless campaign against Spanish Florida. All in all it was, by the standards of Britain in the eighteenth century, an inexperienced army with unprepared immune systems.** THE SPANISH DEFENSE AT CARTAGENA

As war approached in 1739, Cartagena prepared for attack. Blas Lezo y Olavarrieta (1689-1741), a Basque who began his career at age twelve, commanded the meager naval forces.*’ Lezo lost his left leg in combat at fifteen, and lost his left eye and right arm in battles before his twentyfifth birthday. Undeterred, he rose rapidly in the Spanish navy, spending most of his career in the Mediterranean. In 1737, he took the assignment to defend Cartagena, where he would fight his twenty-second and final battle. The Army command at Cartagena belonged to a lifelong soldier, Sebastian de Eslava (1684-1759), also a Basque, and newly appointed as Viceroy of New Granada. He arrived in April of 1740 with about 600 additional soldiers for the garrison. Lezo from 1737, and Eslava from 1740, oversaw a refurbishing of the fortifications of Cartagena, work

still unfinished when combat began. Some friction existed between the two men, perhaps natural given Lezo’s record and Eslava’s political seniority.

Cartagena and its surroundings featured formidable fortifications, upgraded since 1697 under the supervision of some of Spain’s best military engineers. It had even acquired a school of military engineering in 1731. [he area afforded abundant limestone, which slaves had hacked,

hauled, and installed in a system of walls, bulwarks, and forts. Tall 49 Charles Knowles, quoted in Harding (:9¢1:70). 5° Houlding (:@81:408) on regiments sent to Cartagena just after being raised. 5' Quintero Saravia (2802) for a biography.

156 MOSQUITO EMPIRES and thick stone walls surrounded the city itself. The harbor and its approaches bristled with batteries. Half a dozen stone forts guarded the likeliest avenues of attack.**

Spanish military engineers had learned that places like Cartagena were not the same as Flanders. They built their defense systems in depth,

expecting that in the event of attack Spanish forces would retreat by stages, slowing the assault, so as to let the disease climate work its havoc on the attackers. At Cartagena, engineers estimated they needed defenses that could delay an assault for six to eight weeks before, as one engineer later put it, besiegers fell to the “diseases in these lands that are almost unfailing among recently arrived Europeans, and all the more so among those who get no rest.”*? Vernon thought six weeks was all the time attackers would have at Cartagena.**

When Vernon and Wentworth brought their armada within view in March 1741, Lezo and Eslava had at their disposal six frigates, about 1,000 artillery pieces, and some 2,100 army regulars (of whom 282 were

sick, according to the return of December 24, 1740). Most of these regulars formed the permanent battalion (fijo) that Cartagena acquired in 1736. Their immune systems had already passed several tests. Lezo thought everything was scarce, especially rifles, powder, and food. Eslava feared the city might be starved out (an unlikely strategy for the British

in this environment) but the distinguished Spanish Admiral Rodrigo de Torres, who left Cartagena early in 1741, thought the city’s defenses were in good shape.** Supplementing the regulars were about 1,000 militia, 600 Amerindian bowmen, and 1,000 sailors.*” Of these (roughly) 4,700 men, only about 700 were new to the local disease environment. 5? Marco Dorta (19S0:210-15): Segovia Salas (:9a6); Zapatero (x98). 53 Engineer Antonio de Arévalo, quoted in Segovia Salas (99:30). Segovia Salas gives no citation for this, and I do not know its date. Arévalo worked on Cartagena fortifications for several decades beginning in 1742 according to Marco

Dorta (980:281-5). 54 Vernon to Newcastle and Wager, 15 April 1741 (26 April old style), printed in Ranft (:@s8:229). 55 "Torres a Marquis de Larnage, 26 février 1741, Library of Congress, Vernon- Wager MSS. On shortages: Quintero Saravia (2902:169—-70). 5° AGI, Audiencia de Santa Fé, leg. 572, f. 685, Estado de la Infanteria, 24 diciembre 1740. Different accounts give different figures. Bermtidez (1912:16) says 3,300 in all; Zapatero (198 7:132) says 2,800, the lowest figure I have seen (his is a very

patriotic account); Segovia Salas (:99:54) has 6,000 in all, the highest, which corresponds to the paper strength of five Spanish regiments.

YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH AMBITION REPULSED 157

Almost all, militia and regulars alike, had likely acquired resistance or immunity to local infections. Moreover, except those confined to the outer forts, the regulars lived among a population of 10,000 overwhelmingly immune Cartageneros. Although not distinguished for its discipline or valor, the Cartagena militia was composed of men, many of them African or of African descent,*’ with vigilant immune systems especially attuned to yellow fever. Supplementing these fever-resistant troops, after the spring rains began, Lezo and Eslava would soon have on their side countless squadrons of A. aegypti.®®

The walled city stood against the Caribbean surf on a shore open to strong winds and currents, where shallow water imperiled naval ships.*° The easiest approach involved passing through a channel called Bocachica, between islands about 15 kilometers south of the city itself. The Bocachica passage opened onto a broad interior lagoon, the northern part of which served as Cartagena’s harbor. Vernon’s armada arrived off of the city on March 13, 1741, and after a few preliminary

57 Kuethe (1983:16); Helg (2g04:100—5); Zapatero (:987:130) says of five militia companies, two were “pardos,” or blacks. 5° A Briton familiar with the region warned that around Cartagena “heat, sand flys, Musquitoes and other vermin is almost intolerable.” BL Additional MSS

32,694, f. 92, “An Account of the Havannah and Other Principal Places...” (1740). The female mosquitoes might have been especially attentive to humans in 1741 because the Spanish had driven all the cattle into the interior to deny beef to their enemies (Nowell :962:481). 59 Narratives of the siege include: Beatson (184, 1:89-109); Fortescue (1910:6374); Bermtidez (1912); Ranft (:@s8:15—-19); Nowell (x992); Kempthorne (z935);

Richmond (1920, 1:101-37); Restrepo Canal (r9a4x); Zapatero (198 7:134-54);

Harding (:993:83-122); Zulueta (:a92); Quintero Saravia (2002:230-72); a useful day-by-day chronology appears in Marchena Fernandez (:¢82:127-38). Documents from participants include Eslava (:89a); AGI, Audiencia de Santa Fé, legajo 1009, “Informe de Navarrete sobre el Ataque de Vernon,” 27 mayo 1741; Servicio Histérico Militar (Madrid), Signatura 52116, “Diario Puntual de lo acaecido en la defensa que hizo la Plaza de Cartagena de Yndias, sitiada y atacada por la nunca vista y formidable Esquadra Ynglesa”; Vernon’s papers in Ranft (:@s&) and the Vernon- Wager Correspondence in the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division; BL Additional MSS 40830, ff. 1-12, “An Account of the

Expedition to Cartagena.” This manuscript, a copy of which is in the VernonWager manuscripts, is attributed to naval engineer Charles Knowles. A published version appeared as a pamphlet (Dublin: Faulkner, 1743). Many useful Spanish documents, including a diary of Blas de Lezo, appear in AHN Estado 2335. A discussion of the Spanish siege diaries appears in Lucena Salmoral (3973).

158 MOSQUITO EMPIRES bombardments, troops began to disembark on March 20th.” In the intervening week, the Spanish reinforced their outer forts with sailors and militia. Had all gone as British planners wished, Cathcart’s army would have left England two or three months sooner and would have begun operations at Cartagena in late December, at the beginning of the dry season, rather than near its end in late March. But assembling and outfitting a gigantic amphibious force after decades of peace and inactivity (and amid legendary corruption in both government and military) could not be done on a crisp schedule. Vernon, among others, knew the risks of arriving too late and staying too long.”' To approach Cartagena through Bocachica required disabling four small forts and a battery, and then a larger fort called San Felipe on a hill called San Lazaro, perhaps 20 meters in elevation and overlooking the city.” Baron de Pointis had followed this route in 1697, taken San Felipe, and used its commanding position to blast a breach through the city walls. Vernon recommended it now, unaware of how much stronger

the defenses had become since 1697. General Wentworth had studied sieges and took an orthodox approach. He wanted to reduce the little forts one by one in the classic manner by erecting artillery batteries and smashing the stone walls long enough to create breaches through which troops might dash. (The first through a breach, most of whom could expect to be shot, were in the British Army called the “forlorn

6° A note on dates: Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar, the one we use today,

in 1752. I use those dates here, although the British documents of the time used the Julian calendar, which dated everything eleven days earlier. Because understanding the season of events and documents is important, I have changed the dates from the old calendar to the new in citing documents, but given the old style dates in parentheses. Spain has used the modern calendar since the 1580s.

6t Vernon to Cathcart, 1 October 1740 (21 September old style), printed in Ranft (:gs8:127); Vernon and Ogle to Wentworth, 22 March 1741 (11 March old style), printed in Ranft (ras8:185); Vernon and Ogle to Wentworth, 17 April 1741 (6 April old style): “... we can’t but in regard to the interest of our royal master and friendship to you, repeat what we have often mentioned to you, that the most fatal enemy to be apprehended is from delay exposing your troops to the approaching rains.” Printed in Ranft (988:217). 62 Descriptions are in Eslava al Marqués de Villadarias, 9 mayo 1741, and Carlos Desnaux, “Descripcién de la Fortaleza o Castillo de San Phelipe de Barajas...” 3 mayo 1741, both in AHN, Estado 2335.

YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH AMBITION REPULSED 159

hope.”) Wentworth’s approach suited conditions in northern Europe, where there was no yellow fever. Sickness spread in the first few days after the troops landed.”? Vernon urged his fellow Admiral, Chaloner Ogle, to level his guns quickly on the outermost forts because the army was “daily decreasing by sickness, so that slow measures are certain ruin.”’* With the navy’s help, British troops took the small forts guarding Bocachica and the bay, but it took sixteen days’ bombardment before the Spanish relinquished the first one. After the first five days, Lezo considered retreating from the Bocachica fort (San Luis) to save what was left of its 400 men, but he was dissuaded by the fort’s engineer, a certain Carlos Desnoux, who perhaps saw more

clearly than his superiors the value of trading men for time.”> Lezo and Eslava convened on a ship in the bay on April 4th to confer on a situation that seemed to be turning against them. A cannonball hit their cabin, sending a hail of splinters into one of Eslava’s legs and Lezo’s remaining arm. Matters soon grew worse. By early April, Spanish troops were withdrawing from their battered positions, Lezo scuttled his ships, and a few

of Vernon’s ships were through Bocachica and on the bay. Admiral Vernon sent confident messages to London predicting final success and attributing the reduction of the first fort to “the Lord’s doing.”*’ When these words reached London, victory bells rang out across England and more medals were struck in Vernon’s honor, showing him receiving the surrender of a kneeling Blas Lezo. But the Spaniards put obstacles in their attackers’ way, sinking merchant vessels in the navigable channels of the bay, for example. They reasoned that if they could slow the British advance a bit longer, time and the “climate” were on their side. Wentworth took his time securing the inner forts, disembarking his remaining troops, and taking up positions near San Lazaro hill. By some

careless error, the soldiers’ tents did not make it ashore and they had to sleep in the open, easy targets for mosquitoes. Sickness mounted within the ranks. Vernon’s letters to Wentworth urged haste in view of the advancing season, but also show him unwilling to contribute much 63 Anonymous (:744:8) mentions sickness on the diary entry for 20 March (9 March old style). 64 PRO, SP, 42/90, f. 59, Vernon to Ogle, 28 March 1741 (17 March old style). 6 Zufiiga Angel (:997) on the Bocachica struggle. 6° Vernon to Newcastle and Wager, 12 April 1741 (1 April old style), printed in Ranft (yes&:211).

160 MOSQUITO EMPIRES (i.e., no sailors) to the effort. Wentworth wanted a breach in the fort’s walls and irritated Vernon by asking the navy to bombard San Lazaro, which Vernon thought a “paltry” fort,’ and anyway beyond the effective range of his guns. By one account attributed to a Spanish officer, Wentworth’s engineers had never smelled gunpowder and were fitter to “form hay stacks than to erect batteries.”°* The venerable problem of rivalry and friction between army and navy had begun to hamstring the British and to exacerbate delays. Every day, hundreds died of fever. Eventually, Wentworth saw the logic of trying his luck without waiting for a breach in the walls atop San Lazaro. Perhaps Vernon browbeat

him into this decision,’ or perhaps Wentworth recognized that his army would almost all die of fever before he could expect batteries to smash a hole in the fort. It was a desperate gamble, contrary to ordinary siege procedures, but the best of the bad choices available given the daily losses to disease.” Before dawn on April 2oth, some 1,500 British soldiers (Spanish accounts usually give 3,500) began the assault on San Lazaro, defended by some 250 Spaniards.’’ Many of the attackers got lost in the woods, thanks to the incompetence or cunning of their local guides. The North Americans allegedly tossed aside their siege ladders

rather than drag them up the twisting paths to the fort. Those who did haul their ladders into position found they were too short to reach the ramparts. After a few hours of fierce but futile fighting the British withdrew, leaving behind most of their equipment, 179 dead, and some of their 475 wounded.** The Spanish reported their losses as 2 killed 67 Vernon and Ogle to Wentworth, 18 April 1741 (7 April old style), printed in Ranft (:as8:219). 6° BL, Additional MSS 22680, ff. 5-7, “A Brief Relation of the Expedition to Cartagena being an Extract of a Letter wrote by a Spanish Officer” (no date). The authenticity of this as a Spanish opinion is open to question. 6) In the most careful analysis of this decision I have seen, Harding (:9@3:112-14)

opts for the view that Wentworth was driven to a bad decision by Vernon’s engineer, Charles Knowles. Harding accuses Vernon, probably rightfully, of calculated deletions and emphases in his correspondence, all with an eye to avoiding blame.

7° Anonymous (:744:40), in a diary entry for 21 April (10 April old style) says sickness “hourly encreased.”

7 Zapatero (r987:137) says 500 defenders. 7? Lezo’s account says 600 British dead. “Diario de lo acontecido en Cartagena de Indias desde el dfa 15 de marzo de 1741 hasta el 20 de mayo del mismo afio,” AHN, Estado 2335. He says the British left their ladders, picks, shovels, and rifles behind when fleeing.

YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH AMBITION REPULSED 161

and 13 wounded.’? Shortly before dying, a British colonel allegedly said, “The General ought to hang the guides and the King ought to hang the General.”**

In the next few days, amid flying accusations and recriminations, Vernon and Wentworth continued the bombardment of both the city and the fort atop San Lazaro. They contemplated a second assault. Further down the chain of command, “all thoughts of taking Carthagena ceas’d: the rainy season coming on, made us think of nothing but leaving the place....”° Yellow fever raged more lethally each day, complemented, according to Spanish accounts, by dysentery the British acquired by drinking from wells of captured forts.*” Between April 18th and April 21st, the army lost 3,400 of the 6,600 men put ashore, leaving only 3,200 fit for duty. Some 2,500 were dead. Heavy downpours on April 21st signaled worse conditions to come (although it seems daily rains came only after May 7th).’’ Some thirty-three days after the siege began in earnest, Vernon and Wentworth agreed to abandon the entire enterprise “on account of the general sickness in the army.””* On April

26th, Wentworth wrote that he had 1,700 men fit for duty, of whom only 1,000 he considered reliable.?* Wrote one participant, “The army sickened surprisingly fast, and those that were killed being esteemed 73. Carlos Desnaux al Marqués de Villadarias, 27 mayo 1741, AHN Estado 2335. 74 According to Fortescue (1910, 2:71). In the novel Roderick Random (Chapter 33), Smollett wrote that in storming San Lazaro, British soldiers “behaved like their own country mastiffs, which shut their eyes, run into the jaws of a bear, and have their heads crushed for their valour.” One of the survivors was the father of James Wolfe, the British hero of Quebec; the younger Wolfe had intended to ship out for Cartagena with his father’s regiment but stayed in England, owing, ironically, to illness (Keevil, Lloyd, and Coulter, 1957-1963, 2:106).

75 BL, Sloane MSS 3970, “An Account of Admiral Vernon’s Attempt Upon Carthagena in the West Indies.” 7 “Tiario Puntual de lo acaecido en la defensa que hizo de la plaza de Cartagena de Indias,” Servicio Histérico Militar (Madrid), Signatura 52116. 77 | infer this from the “Log of HMS Windsor,” in the National Maritime Museum, ADM/L/W123. Onset of the rains in late April would be normal for today’s Cartagena.

7 Vernon to Newcastle and Wager, 7 May 1741 (26 April old style), printed in Ranft (:988:229). A copy of the Memorandum of a Council of War of 6 May 1741 (25 April old style), noted: “That the troops are. . . daily falling sick by great Numbers, which is each day increasing more than other.” Library of Congress, Vernon- Wager MSS.

79 Wentworth to Newcastle, 7 May 1741 (26 April old style), cited in Fortescue (1910:2:74).

162 MOSQUITO EMPIRES the Flower of the Flock, the General declared he was no longer in a position to defend himself, much more to carry on the siege against the place....”°° By April 27th, it seemed the army risked annihilation: The sickness amongst the Troops increased to so great a Degree, that any longer Continuance in that unhealthy Situation, seemed to threaten no less than their total Ruin; the General therefore, and the principal Land Officers, agreed to the Admiral’s Proposal, for demolishing the Forts, @c which commanded the Harbour; that being done, and Water taken in for the Voyage, the whole Fleet set sail for Jamaica. By April 28th, the last shots had been fired and the last of the survivors re-embarked, although for eight more days officers of the fleet worked to destroy the remaining Spanish fortifications around Bocachica and arranged exchanges of prisoners. By this point the British force, soldiers and sailors, had lost upwards of 8,000 dead. Hundreds more sailors as well as soldiers died at anchor before the fleet set sail for Jamaica on May 7th, some fifty-four days after it appeared in front of Cartagena. Colonel Harry Burnard wrote that his friends in good health one day were often dead the next, that 600 of the 700 who left England in his regiment were now dead, and those left alive were suffering from “a melancholy destruction this climate makes amongst us.” Smollett, who worked among Vernon’s sailors as a surgeon’s mate, fell ill himself with the “bilious fever” that “raged with such violence that three-fourths of those whom it invaded, died... .”*? He and Vernon wrote that dead soldiers were tossed overboard to the sharks. 8° BL, Additional MSS, 40830, “An Account of the Expedition to Carthagena.” This text is attributed to Charles Knowles, always critical of Wentworth and the army. St Anonymous (3°74.4:47). 82 Burnard to [his brother?], 6 May 1741 (April 26 old style) BL, Additional MSS, 34207, ff. 9-12.

83 Smollett, Roderick Random, Chapter 34. Smollett’s account of the Cartagena campaign (Chapters 31-34) is wickedly sarcastic in tone, hard on Vernon and Wentworth both, accurate in many respects but wantonly exaggerated in others. As asurgeon’s mate, Smollett stayed onboard ship and learned only secondhand of events ashore. He exaggerated British losses in writing that at the storming of San Lazaro “the greatest part of the detachment took up their everlasting abode on the spot.” He did experience an artillery duel while afloat, which appears in his novel as a hectic swirl of rum, splinters, and amputations.

YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH AMBITION REPULSED 163

A participant, Lord Elibank, indicated the sharks could thank yellow fever for their extra rations:*“

Thus ended the fatiguing part of the Campaign & it certainly was the most disagreeable one that has been known. This People were more sensible of, that it had none of the Comforts of War, with all the Inconveniences of it, & many others not known to

those who take the Field in Peopled Countries and temperate climates. The Distructive part of it ought to take its Date from our disembarkation. The sickness amongst us till then, was no more

than might be accounted for by our great fatigue, the excessive Heats, bad water, and salt provisions, and without respect officer and soldier shared alike but hardly were we on board again, when we became sensible how impossible it would have been to have kept the Field much longer, the excessive rains and Thunder that

are constantly expected here at this time of the year, and can be compared to nothing of the kind felt in Europe, begun to take place, & as they ever do, brought along with them universal Sickness & Death. We lost above a 3° of our People as well officers

as Soldiers, in 3 weeks that we remained in Carthagena Harbour. Everybody was taken alike; they call the distemper a bilious fever, it kills in 5 days; if the patient lives longer it’s only to die of greater agonies of what they then call Black Vomit. The black vomit left the Spanish untouched. The defense of Cartagena

cost the Spanish between 200 and 600 men.* No accounts mention yellow fever in their ranks during the siege. Those who had fallen ill in late 1740 and early 1741, when yellow fever killed a third of the recent arrivals from Spain, had died or recovered by the time of Vernon’s attack.*® In an epidemiological irony probably lost on all those involved, 84 BL Additional MSS, 35898, “A Journal Written of the Expedition that sailed from Spithead in the West Indies under the command of the Right Honourable Lord Cathcart, in the Month of Oct. 1740,” f.120. A part of this quotation is in Lewis (1940:263). 85 Eslava (:894:214) wrote 200; most later historians prefer 600.

8° “Niario Puntual de lo acaecido en la defensa que hizo de la plaza de Cartagena de Indias,” Servicio Histérico Militar (Madrid), Signatura 52116. See also: Marchena Fernandez (:882:138). No other writer (to my knowledge) considers health among the Spanish troops at Cartagena. Marchena Ferndndez (:983:194237) treats the health of the entire Spanish army in America in the eighteenth century.

104 MOSQUITO EMPIRES Cartagena’s defense was more secure because no large contingent of reinforcements from Spain had joined the garrison. A few hundred reinforcements amid an urban population of 10,000, who provided herd immunity, gave the yellow fever virus no foothold among them. Lezo and Eslava may have wished for many more troops, but they were better off without them. Lezo died of his wounds in September 1741. Eslava lived until 1759, and held many high posts in government. Both men received titles of

nobility from their grateful king and became national heroes in both Spain and, when it became a country, in Colombia, with their faces eracing postage stamps and their names on city streets. Despite their frictions,’ they had played for time successfully, used their advantages shrewdly, gambled on “the climate” calculatingly, and won a great victory for Spanish arms, perhaps saving Spain’s American empire.**> The A. aegypti and yellow fever virus received no honors.

Yellow fever continued to take its toll on the British fleet after it returned to Jamaica. Another 1,100 soldiers died in the next three weeks, and by early June 1741 only 3,000 of Cathcart’s original 9,000 soldiers remained fit for service; by the end of the month, only 2,100."° DEATH AT GUANTANAMO, 1741

Vernon and Wentworth survived. After much dispute they agreed, ambitiously and desperately, to use what few men they had left in an. attack on Santiago de Cuba.** Santiago de Cuba was a fortified port and privateers’ lair in southeastern Cuba, a perpetual menace to Jamaican shipping. Jamaican planters and merchants hoped that control

87 AGI, Audiencia de Santa Fe, legajos 572 and 940, include many letters to authorities in Spain accusing one another of malfeasance and cowardice. 88 No one can say whether the loss of Cartagena would have led to the loss of much or all of the Spanish American Empire. Backers of the War of Jenkins’ Ear hoped it would. The Spanish naval historian Cesareo Fernandez Duro claimed it would (cited in Nowell :962:501). Britain absorbed French Canada and Dutch South Africa soon after, and they held much less allure (at the time) than did Spanish America. 89 For the return of 10 June (30 May old style), Harding (:9%:124) says 1,909 British and 1,086 Americans; Fortescue (1910, 2:74) says 1,400 British and 1,300 Americans. Return of 30 June (19 June old style) has 2,142. °° Council of War, June 6, 1741 (26 May old style), Vernon-Wager MSS, Library of Congress.

YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH AMBITION REPULSED 165

over eastern Cuba would eliminate Spanish privateering and piracy on their merchandise, and secure access to the Windward Passage (between Cuba and Hispaniola), the best route from Jamaica to North America and Europe. Vernon’s superiors in London wanted him to take Santiago, hold it, and settle it with loyal British subjects from North America, so that eastern Cuba would become a British colony (as western Hispaniola had become French half a century before). Indeed, Vernon wanted Wentworth’s North American troops to settle there and start the British colonization of Cuba.°' Santiago de Cuba made a tempting target. English buccaneers had

sacked it with ease in 1662. In 1741, it had a population of about 10,000 people. Its garrison consisted of only about 700 men, counting militia and two companies of “Indios.”** Although strengthened since the outbreak of war in 1739, its fortifications remained modest compared to those of Cartagena. But it lay on a small bay with a narrow mouth, surrounded by almost uninhabited mountains. Vernon and Wentworth (or perhaps only Vernon) decided to attack overland, using the broad, almost unpopulated, and undefended bay of Guantanamo, 80 kilometers to the east, as their base. At the end of August 1741, their fleet rode into the bay, where it would spend four futile months.** Attacking Santiago de Cuba from the landward side proved impractical. The track linking it to Guantanamo was long and passed through near-empty savanna and woodlands, meaning a British army would have to carry all its supplies. Explorations of the terrain attracted guerilla raids by Spanish forces and Cuban militia. Despite Vernon’s urgings,

Wentworth refused to make the attempt by land; and despite Wentworth’s pleadings, Vernon refused to try to force Santiago de Cuba’s

®' Vernon to Newcastle and Wager, 7 May 1741 (26 April old style), printed in Ranft (x988:229-30): “And think if the Americans could be settled there, it would be much better than their returning home to a country over-peopled already, which runs them setting up manufactures, to the prejudice of their mother country.” See also Newcastle to Vernon, 26 October 1741 (15 October old style) and ro November 1741 (31 October old style), BL, Additional MSS 32608, ff. 138, 240; Wager to Vernon, 2 July 1741 (21 June old style), printed in Ranft (:98&:242-3). See also Pares (1:93:92). 92 Numbers from Portuondo Ztifiiga (1986:59, 68). °3 Narratives of this campaign include “Diario de lo occurido en Santiago de Cuba desde la primera noticia de la intentada invasidn por los ingleses,” AGI, Audiencia de Santo Domingo, leg. 364; Portuondo Zifiiga (:89%:69—-72); Harding

(:993:123-37); Pérez de la Riva (x38).

166 MOSQUITO EMPIRES harbor by sea. So the army stayed put, trying to fortify positions around Guantanamo and giving everything in sight an English name as befitted an British colony. The late summer rains came and, predictably, yellow fever surged

through the army. In early September, Wentworth had reported over 2,300 men fit for duty, but a month later only 1,400." The end of the rains in November brought no immediate relief from yellow fever — it would take weeks for the last generation of A. aegypti to expire. By mid-November, Wentworth wrote Vernon (they were no longer on speaking terms) that he did not have enough men left to defend positions

around Guantdnamo.°* At the end of the month, Wentworth led the remnants of his army, a little over a thousand men, back to Jamaica. In December, Col. Burnard wrote his brother that his regiment had lost twenty more officers than had originally come out from England, that is, most of the original officers and most of their replacements had died. Of 388 men alive (most of whom were replacements, if Burnard’s earlier correspondence can be trusted), 383 were sick.°” Unaccountably undeterred, Vernon and Wentworth in the spring of 1742 planned an attack on coastal Panama, probably the most feverinfested shore of the Spanish Empire. Some 2,000 soldiers had arrived from Britain as reinforcements but began to fall sick in Jamaica. The

expedition to Panama lasted only a few days, as once the transports arrived on the coast the commanders deemed the mission impossible, so they turned around and headed back to Jamaica, having lost 200 men

to disease.’ At this point, Vernon and Wentworth elected to cut their losses and call it quits. RECKONING DEAD, 1740-1742

Of the 10,000 British soldiers sent to the West Indies in the years 1740-1742, about 74 percent had died by October 1742. Around six percent died in combat. Of the original cohort that sailed with Cathcart, °4¢ PRO SP 42/90, f. 320, Wentworth to Vernon, 7 September 1741 (27 August old style); and PRO SP 42/90, ff. 332-3 Council of War 9 October 1741 (29 September old style). °5 BL, Additional MSS, 40829, f. 35, Wentworth to Vernon 14 November 1741 (3 November old style). Many reports suggest that officers were especially scarce. °° BL, Additional MSS, 34207, Harry Burnard to his brother, 18 December 1741 (7 December old style). 97 Harding (:99%:137—-48).

YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH AMBITION REPULSED 167

go percent died.** The North Americans fared slightly better. Of some 4,200 who served, 65 percent died in the West Indies, about 3 percent

of them in action. If one takes into account the North Americans’ lower casualties in combat (a result of their perceived incompetence and unreliability) and the much shorter trip to the West Indies and correspondingly fewer deaths en route, it seems the Americans died just as fast as did British soldiers — after all, they came from Virginia

and points north, and had no yellow fever immunities. Altogether, about 10,000 of 14,000 soldiers perished in trying to win Cartagena and Santiago de Cuba for Britain, and no doubt a few more died trying to get home.*®

No official figures exist for the losses among the sailors, but the fact that Vernon kept drafting soldiers from Wentworth’s ranks to fill out his crews implies severe mortality on shipboard as well. This stands to reason: sailors and soldiers mingled at sea and in ports; ships often hosted their own swarms of A. aegypti in the warm and humid quarters below decks; and Vernon’s fleet anchored for weeks in bays at Cartagena and Guantanamo, where sailors rowed ashore and mosquitoes surely flew

aboard ships. If the proportion of sailors lost was equal to that in the army, °° then of roughly 15,000 sailors about three quarters, or 11,750,

died of all causes. Adding soldiers and sailors together, a reasonable estimate is that 22,000 of 29,000 died on Vernon’s expedition, and perhaps 21,000 of those died of disease.

Interestingly, nowhere in the extensive correspondence of Vernon, Wentworth, and their superiors in London did any of them express any remorse over the sufferings and deaths of so many Britons and colonials. Vernon did use some of his own money to expand hospital facilities in

Jamaica at the outset of the campaign, but this he took as a practical measure more than a sympathetic one. Writing to his brother from his flagship in Guantanamo Bay, the Admiral did seem relieved to be alive: “[I]t has pleased God wonderfully to preserve me in health, in the midst

® Keevil, Lloyd, and Coulter (1957-63, 1:78). °° The official returns are in PRO CO 5/41 and 5/42. Harding (:99+:202-6) has arranged the data in useful tables. Of the Massachusetts contingent to Cartagena, only 10% returned home according to Ames (:88::365). Yellow fever probably did cross the Atlantic, albeit in Spanish ships, because there was an epidemic in Malaga in 1741 (Reyes Sahagun 37.42). te° Harding (1993:149) believes mortality among the sailors was “at least as severe” as among soldiers.

168 MOSQUITO EMPIRES of such sickness and divided councils.”’°' He and those like him lived in a ruthless social order in which callousness toward the less fortunate was a well-honed trait. One did not make admiral or general, or become a planter or slaver, without a reservoir of indifference to the sufferings of others. Whatever their reasons, the commanders’ and strategists’ apparent nonchalance did not derive from experience seeing such large proportions of armies die. In the European campaigns of the War of the Austrian Succession, about eight percent of the British Army died from wounds and disease combined. In the Jacobite rising of 1745-1746, when the Crown sent an army of 16,000 men to suppress Scottish rebels, about 300 (under 2%) died of diseases in the six-month campaign. For soldiers and sailors alike, the Caribbean disease environment proved far more dangerous than military service in the British Isles or Europe (or North America). Taking part in a large expedition, although perhaps safer in terms of the risks of death via combat, was the most dangerous service of all because thousands upon thousands of susceptibles gave the yellow fever virus admirable opportunity to establish cycles of transmission and reproduce uninhibitedly.***

These grim odds were not lost on officers and men, even if the makers of British strategy seemed unperturbed. From the 1730s onward, soldiers

increasingly paid for others to take their place to avoid West Indies duty, and officers resigned commissions or connived to stay home when

their regiments shipped out. Gradually, the high command refrained from risking elite regiments in the West Indies and used duty there as punishment for units or officers that did not match expectations.'** In any case, at Cartagena and Santiago de Cuba, British ambitions for territorial conquest at the expense of Spain came to naught. British bumbling and bickering, and Spanish valor of course, had something to tor Vernon to James Vernon, 7 December 1741 (26 November old style), printed in Ranft (:a9s8:250). ©? Mortality figures from Cantlie (sa74, 1:93, 100). The seven major battles of the War of the Austrian Succession listed in Raudzens (:987:11) show total casualties, killed and wounded together, of 3-16% among winners and 6—26% among losers. Raudzens’ figures are for battles, not lengthy campaigns. 03 ()YShaughnessy (:996:106—-11). British naval crews in 1738 in the West Indies lost 8-16% on six- to nine-month cruises in peacetime owing to disease (Crewes 1993:63—-98). Army regiments also died fast in the West Indies even when safe from combat; on Antigua, one lost 150% of its original strength, 1738— 1745 (O’Shaughnessy 1996:110). Using West Indies duty as punishment was analogous to the practice of “transportation” of convicts to disease-ridden penal colonies such as Georgia or Australia, where they were out of sight, out of mind, and likely to die within a year.

YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH AMBITION REPULSED 169

do with it. But had it not been for yellow fever, British forces probably

would have prevailed anyhow, with long-term consequences of the magnitude that Vernon and his superiors had eagerly envisioned when they went to war in 1739. THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR AND THE SIEGE ECOLOGY

OF HAVANA, 1762

With their barracks and treasuries sorely depleted, the monarchs of Europe consented to peace in 1748. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle was in effect only a truce, and the renewal of hostilities in 1754 surprised no one. The Seven Years’ War (often known in the U.S. as the French

and Indian War) began slowly, in the backcountry of Pennsylvania. It became a world war, with campaigns in North America, Europe, India, the Philippines, the West Indies, and at sea. Britain and Prussia headed a loose agglomeration that included Portugal, some small German states, the Iroquois confederacy, and various South Asian princes against France, its Amerindian and South Asian allies, and Austria, Sweden, and Russia among others including, after 1761, Spain. By and large, Britain left the European fighting to Frederick the Great of Prussia and concentrated resources against French overseas possessions and, after 1761, Spanish ones as well. After some early reverses this strategy, associated with the ministry of William Pitt, bore fruits with the conquests of French Louisbourg (1758), Guadeloupe (1758),‘°* Quebec (1759), and all major French posts in India (1757-1761). With Spain’s

entry into the war, Pitt’s ambition turned to Havana, the “key to the Indies.”

Havana remained the strategic linchpin of Spanish America. The treasure fleets still stopped there before their transatlantic voyages to Spain. Its harbor ranked among the best in the Americas and served as the home port for the Caribbean squadron of the Spanish navy. Its shipyard built two of every five warships of the Spanish navy including almost all the biggest, made from tropical hardwoods and twice as durable as vessels built in Spain. And it built them more cheaply than any Spanish shipyard could.‘*? Since the close of the last war, Havana t°4 Guadeloupe’s inadequate fortifications allowed a conquest before fevers decimated the British force (Smelser 1a 5). 5 McNeill (:988:173-6); Ortega Pereyra (:aa8). BL Additional MSS, 15,717, f. 35, “Estado que manifiesta las fuerzas marittimas del Rey de Espafia,” (1771), says all ships of more than 80 guns in the Spanish navy were built in Havana.

170 MOSQUITO EMPIRES had also become the center of a thriving sugar industry. Sugar exports from the Havana district quintupled between 1749 and 1760. Nearly a hundred plantations ringed Havana in 1761, extending 20 or 30 kilo-

meters inland from the port. Each year, about five more opened for business. Together they produced about 4,600 tons of sugar annually, and the rest of Cuba another 1,000. This quantity amounted to no more than an average small sugar island’s, and less than 15 percent of the sugar exports of Jamaica or St. Domingue. But visionaries foresaw the day when western Cuba would outstrip the rest of the West Indies in its sugar harvest.‘°° From Pitt’s point of view, Havana looked a sweeter prize than ever. THE BRITISH AMPHIBIOUS EXPEDITION

Within a week of the declaration of war with Spain in January 1761, Pitt’s war planners had begun preparing an assault on Havana.’*? Within fifty-seven days, an amphibious expedition was under sail, a feat of orga-

nization that testifies to the efficiency of the British military machine '0© Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid), Seccién de Manuscritos, 20144, José Antonio Gelabert a Don Julidn de Arriaga, “Proyecto para que se tomen los azucares de Cuenta de la Real Hacienda,” 25 abril 1759; a copy appears in AGI, Santo Domingo 2015; see also Marrero (1972-1992, 7:11-23); McNeill (xa8s:162-6). Comparative production figures appear in Moreno Fraginals (1976, 1:40-2). *°7 No authoritative book covers the campaign. The most useful are: Parcero Torre (za¢8) and Syrett (1970); older narratives include Valdés (1814); Guiteras (38588); Hart (2933); Zapatero (39%4:264-75); Fernandez Duro (1901, 7:3982); Pezuela (x868, 2:428-529); Corbett (rao7, 2:246-84). Garcfa del Pino (2zoo2) is highly patriotic, concerned to show the virtues of Havana’s popular classes. Keppel (:98:) is helpful, especially about the British side; Calleja Leal and O’Donnell (1999:103—79) is useful on the Spanish side, but reports (164) that George Washington served among the British forces at Havana! Castillo Manrubia (zee) is derived from secondary sources but has more on the naval aspects than most. The daily correspondence of Havana’s governor is in AGI, Ultramar 169. His diary is printed in Pezuela (:86&8, 3:27-51). An anonymous Spanish journal appears in SHM, Ultramar, 4.1.1.7; and one by “J. M. y J.,” probably a naval officer, in Martinez Dolmau (:94.3:65—101 ). The journal of the chief British engineer, Patrick MacKellar, mainly about artillery, glacis, fascines, and entrenching tools, is in BL Additional MSS, 23678; in PRO CO 1179/1 ff. r10— 18; and printed in Beatson (184, 2:544-65). Anonymous (3762) (An Authentic

Journal) is more revealing. Further documents appear in Archivo Nacional de Cuba (29483 1951; 1963). The 1948 volume includes many documents from the private archive of the Albemarle family.

YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH AMBITION REPULSED I7I1

in the latter stages of the Seven Years’ War. The army command went to George Keppel, the Earl of Albemarle, who although an officer since age fourteen had scant combat experience. But he had good personal connections. Two of his brothers also secured posts as high-ranking offcers with the expedition. Vice-Admiral George Pocock led the naval forces. He had entered the Navy in 1725 at age nineteen and had commanded ships since 1733, often in the West Indies. Their instructions required Albemarle and Pocock to rendezvous with units already in the West Indies, and with an army of North American volunteers to take Havana, then capture additional Spanish places of their choosing, and finally to seize Louisiana from the French. The expedition anticipated the usual fevers and included an unprecedented complement of medical officers, one for every 110 men.'*° Albemarle and Pocock made Barbados by late April, and by late May were cruising off the northern coast of St. Domingue, waiting for the last of their comrades to assemble for the descent on Havana. When finally gathered, the British expedition included 20 ships of the line, 10 lesser warships, and perhaps 200 transports carrying 11,098 soldiers — of whom 1,241 were listed as sick.'*’ Albemarle bought and rented a few hundred slaves because “sailors and soldiers cannot possibly work in this country,” for exertion would bring fevers.’'° The commanders expected another 4,000 men from North America but they could not wait, what with the sickly season already upon them and the hurricane

months not far off.‘'’ They took the shortest route, along the north coast of Cuba, an unconventional approach because of the dangers of its current, reefs, and keys. When they arrived off Havana on June 6th, the military governor was attending mass, entirely unaware that a giant fleet and army had come to call. T° On medical officers: Cantlie (1974, 1:117-18). Albemarle’s orders appear in PRO CO 1179/1, ff. 24-35. t°9 Abstract of the general return of H.M.’s forces under the command of Lt.-Gen. Lord Albemarle, 23 May 1762. Printed in Syrett (1970:126). Syrett has corrected the arithmetic of the original. The figure of 10,998 printed in Archivo Nacional

de Cuba (:948:79) is incorrect. "T°? Albemarle to Egremont, 27 May 1762, PRO CO 117/1, f. 70. "tt The British military reckoned the “sickly season for Europeans is from the Middle

of May ‘till the beginning of October during the heats and rains; and then it is hardly possible for Europeans to work.” BL Additional MSS 32694, “An Account

of the Havanna and Other Principal Places belonging to the Spaniards in the West Indies,” 14 April 1740, f. 76.

172 MOSQUITO EMPIRES

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Map 5.3. Havana and Environs (c. 1762) HAVANA AND ITS DEFENSES

In 1762, Havana counted about 40,000 to 50,000 people, making it among the largest cities in the Americas. It comprised more than a quarter of the population of Cuba."'* Its immediate suburbs included perhaps 5,000 to 6,000 more people. Most of them were born and raised in Cuba, although not necessarily in the Havana region. Their ancestry was mainly Spanish, predominantly from the Canary Islands, but many had roots elsewhere in Spain or in France, Ireland, Italy, or Greece. A very few had Amerindian ancestry. A large minority, perhaps a quarter,

were slaves, mostly born in Africa. Of these slaves, probably about half came from Kongo and its hinterlands, and about half from West Africa.''? In addition to the slaves, perhaps another fifth or sixth of Havana’s population was free blacks, so the total proportion of Africans and Cubans of African descent came to about 40 or 45 percent.'"4 '™2 The visita of Bishop Morell y Santa Cruz, AGI SD 534 (and a copy in 2227)

reports 26,000 for Havana and its suburbs in 1755-1757. This is an undercount. See McNeill (1985:37-8); Marrero (1972-1992, 6:47-8). A 1760 estimate (Declaracién de Juan Ignacio de Madariaga, 14 abril 1763, AGI SD 1587) GIVES 40,000 tO 50,000.

"T3 This is based on a document in AGI, Contaduria 1167, which gives the origins of slaves smuggled into eastern Cuba in 1749, summarized in Marrero (1972-1992,

6:33); and another in AGI SD 504, summarized in Marrero (1972-1992, 6:36) giving the origins of 182 slaves sold in Havana in 1759. "™4 Cuba’s first census (1774) found the island’s population was 55% whites, 45% slaves plus free blacks. In 1762, the population was likely slightly more white;

YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH AMBITION REPULSED 173

Havana lay on the west side of a large bay, connected to the sea by a long channel only 200 meters wide. This situation gave the city and its

harbor enviable natural defenses. In addition, it had a fort within the city walls. At the mouth of the channel, on its west bank just north of the city, stood a seawall and a second fort called La Punta. On the east side of the channel, on a promontory about 7 meters above sea level, loomed the fortress called El Morro, standing sentinel over the harbor’s

entrance and the city itself. El Morro represented the careful work of Spain’s finest military architects (and legions of slaves). Its thick walls were of stone, and on its east and landward side it sported a deep, dry ditch, cut into rock.''® Besiegers could not hope to dig trenches in an approach to El Morro. Nor could they starve it out: El Morro had its own food and water kept in several storehouses and cisterns, and at night small boats could cross the channel from Havana with little risk. Nor could attackers expect to force the channel with warships because vessels would have to run a gauntlet between the guns along the city walls and those of El Morro. Indeed, every attempt on Havana since 1555 (when it was but little fortified) had ended in failure. The many Spanish officers who regarded Havana as impregnable had their reasons, and the chief one was El Morro.‘ ‘®

But as a French military engineer pointed out in the summer of 1761, to the southeast of El Morro there stood a row of hills called La Cabafia,

overlooking the fortress and harbor.''? It carried a mantle of woods in 1762. Throughout the 1750s, Spanish authorities had proposed to perfect Havana’s defenses by fortifying these hills.‘'° When war with Britain loomed in 1760 and a new governor was sent to Havana, the minister responsible for the Indies expressly instructed his new appointee, how fully Havana conformed to the island’s proportion is unclear. In 1762, Havana’s free black militia included over 800 men (Garcia 2902:165). 5 Mante (1772:432-3) says the ditch was at various points 45 to 63 feet deep and 43 to 105 feet across. Mante was an assistant engineer at the siege. Similar figures

appear in the diary of Archibald Robertson (:¢30:63), another participant. 16 Parcero Torre (:998:18-30) is the best description of Havana’s fortifications. Their historical development to 1762 is recounted in Pérez Guzman (2902:13543). See also Blanes Martin (:9¢8; 2001:76-87). "t7 Relacién del estado actual de las fortificaciones de la plaza...de La Habana y demas fuertes y castillos por el ingeniero D. Francisco Ricaud de Tirgale, 8 julio 1761, AHN, Estado 3025. "8 For example, Informe y Consulta del Rey por el Gobernador de esta Plaza en favor del proyecto de fortificar la montafia nombrada la Cavafia (signed: Cagigal 1759), SHM 4.1.1.1.

174 MOSQUITO EMPIRES Juan de Prado, to fortify La Cabafia.‘'* But work had scarcely begun when the British fleet arrived. Juan de Prado Mayera Portocarrero y Luna (1716-1770) came from a military family and had fought at Oran in 1731 and in Spain’s Italian wars. In 1760, he was serving as sub-inspector of the infantry of Aragon, Valencia, and Murcia when his older brother arranged his appointment

to Havana. He took his time before embarking for Cuba, stopped to inspect Santiago de Cuba, and arrived in Havana in early February 1761 to serve as captain-general of Cuba and take command of the military forces of Havana.

Those forces consisted of the so-called “fixed” battalion, in place since 1719 in Havana. Two newly arrived battalions and some dragoons brought the total number of regular soldiers to about 2,400 in May of 1762 — of whom 321 were listed as sick and a few others were stationed outside of the city.’°° Perhaps 2,000 healthy regulars were in Havana when the British arrived.'** About 3,300 militiamen, of variable usefulness, supported them. A naval squadron of twelve ships of the line and three frigates anchored in the bay with some 5,500 sailors, many

in a pinch available for shore duty. Altogether, Havana’s defenders numbered some 10,000 to 11,000 in June of 1762.‘** They did not lack for artillery or shot. Havana’s walls and forts bristled with 195 cannon, and many more lay in the warehouses. In 1758-1759, Spain had sent new cannon and plenty of ammunition and powder to 'T9 Arriaga a Prado, 23 agosto 1761, AGI, SD 1581. Ina 1755 report, a bishop had raised the issue with King Ferdinand VI: AGI SD 534, Morell al Rey, 2 julio 1755:

20 Several estados de tropas from May 1762 appear in AGI, SD 1581, 1584, 1585. Albi (x98 7:46—-9) has an account of the defenders. "1 At his trial, Prado gave 2,681 “sin descontar los enfermos” as the number of regular troops at the outset of the siege. Proceso y [sentencia?| dada al Gobernador de la Habana Juan de Prado (1765), BN-Madrid, MSS 10,421. He mentions 2,430 Havana militia, also. "22 Fetado de la fuerza de milicias, 6 junio 1762, AGI SD 1584; El Marqués del Real Transporte a Arriaga, 26 abril 1762, AGS, Marina, 406. An Account of the Havanna, BL Additional MSS 32694, ff. 73-4, gives a favorable account of the fighting qualities of Cuban militia; most Spanish sources do not. A captured Spanish document (Estado que manifiesta el numero de Plazas de que estaban tripuladas y guarnecidas los vaxeles de la Esquadra de $.M.C. en este Puerto de la Havana, 7 junio 1762, PRO CO 1177/2 f.34) lists only two frigates and a total of 4,781 sailors.

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Havana. The naval squadron carried over 600 more cannon. Small arms, however, may have been in short supply.***

Havana’s defenders could count on help. The strong northeasterly winds prevailing in January through April made it dangerous for an armada to try to ride off the north shore of Cuba, guarded by almost con-

tinuous reef. From August through October, hurricanes might destroy an entire fleet in minutes. If attackers wished to avoid these hazards, and did not think they could complete a siege in the interval between October and late December, then they had to face the risks of the yellow fever season. As the engineer Francisco Ricaud made clear in 1761, fortifications and mines could delay attackers but “experience shows it is the climate alone that debilitates armies.”**“ YELLOW FEVER AT HAVANA BEFORE 1762

Havana had long experience with yellow fever. A brutal epidemic in 1649 cost the city a third of its population, and repeated outbreaks in 1651, 1652, and 1654 took yet more.'*> This catastrophe inaugurated a 250-year long struggle in the city against the virus. Major epidemics occurred in 1709, 1715, 1730, 1731, 1733, 1738, and 1742. Smaller outbreaks happened virtually every year among the city’s children, newcomers, and sailors. ‘**

Havana’s urban environment suited the A. aegypti nicely in terms of temperature and breeding habitat. As the biggest city and one of the most active ports in the Caribbean, Havana had extensive water "23 Noticias de la artillerfa que conceptuo habia montada y desmontada en la plaza de La Habana... 6 de junio de 1762, 16 junio 1763, AGI SD 1578.

"4 Relacién general e instructiva de la consistencia del Castillo de San Carlos, proyectado en la Eminencia llamada la Cabafia al Este de esta Plaza de la Habana, 8 julio 1761, AHN Estado 3025. 25 de la Fuente (:993:65—7). Lower figures, less well documented, appear in Le Roy y Cassa (r936) and Martinez Forttin (1952:29-30). 126 | 6pez Sanchez (:997:15 1-62); Espinosa Cortés (2005:29—-33). The epidemics of the early 1730s might best be considered a single event, like those of 1647-1652 and the 1690s. St. Domingue and Charleston also experienced multiple outbreaks in the 1730s, and according to Henry Warren (:7.43:73—4) some 20,000 British subjects, mostly sailors, died of a “malignancy” in the West Indies in 1733-1738. This spate of outbreaks could have resulted from the buildup of immigrants in the Greater Caribbean in the peaceful years after 1715, but in Havana the arrival of a permanent naval squadron could also have contributed fuel for epidemics.

176 MOSQUITO EMPIRES storage facilities. Its immediate hinterland, as noted previously, acquired a plethora of sugar plantations in the 1750s, further improving the breeding environment. In most years the rainy season began in May, peaked in

June, and then reached a second peak with the August and September tropical storms. Humidity and temperatures, always high, both edged upward in May and June. This meant that A. aegypti populations normally exploded in June and were looking for blood throughout the summer. Several generations could hatch before the great-grandchildren of the June crop died out in November. The city and its hinterland offered plenty of mammal blood. Beyond

the 50,o00 humans in the city and suburbs, the nearby sugar and tobacco plantations added a few thousand more human bloodstreams for mosquitoes to drink from. A. aegypti prefer human blood but, in a pinch, will drink what they can get. The sugar plantations all had oxen and horses. Where there were no plantations (yet) there were ranches, with more cattle and horses. Havana and its vicinity in 1762 might have offered the best conditions anywhere on earth for A. aegypti. The virus as well as its vector found Havana well suited to its needs. Its

hinterland had forests, and forests had monkeys where the virus could survive indefinitely. The crown preserved forest land around Havana

Bay for the naval shipyard, so Havana had more forest close to the city than any comparably sized city in the Americas (and thus probably more monkeys and more yellow fever virus in reserve close by). The big

urban population meant newborns and toddlers, that is, nonimmune bloodstreams. Most Caribbean cities had a large surplus of young males

and thus little in the way of families and fertility. As an old and big city, Havana had more of an established population, more locally born people, more females, more marriages, more families, and more babies than any other Caribbean community.

These babies soon got yellow fever and either died from it (rare among children) or became immune. Moreover, roughly a tenth to a fifth of Havana’s population had been born in yellow-fever zones of Atlantic Africa.‘*? So as in Cartagena, the resident population, containing mostly immunes, offered some scope for the yellow fever virus’ survival and circulation, but not much for epidemics. '27 A guess, perhaps high, based on the estimates of Moreno Fraginals (1976, 2:86) that 88% of slaves on Havana’s plantations, 1740-1790, were born in Africa; and an estimate that one quarter of the city’s population were slaves. This takes no account of the free black population, some of whom were African-born.

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Fortunately for the virus, Havana attracted newcomers from elsewhere. In addition to the babies, nonimmune bloodstreams arrived constantly with immigrants from Spain and young people from Cuba’s interior villages. Some of these migrants carried immunity but some, especially the Spaniards, did not. Moreover, Havana hosted a floating population of temporary visitors, sailors, and merchants, from all over the Atlantic world. They might number in the hundreds or even thousands, at least when the treasure fleets were in port. Some of these visitors were immune, if they had survived yellow fever on previous Caribbean

(or West African) visits. But many were not. Thus, the ecological and demographic circumstances of Havana ensured a lively population of A. aegypti and an omnipresent, if fluctuating, supply of virus. Any time a goodly influx of newcomers coincided with the wet season, a yellow fever epidemic would reliably result. One such epidemic flared up in the summer of 1761. Within a month

after Spain entered the war, the Minister of War in Madrid ordered reinforcements to Havana, the first large batch of new troops sent to Cuba since 1749. They came from precisely the same units that had been sent to Cartagena in 1740, suggesting the Spanish recognized the value of “seasoning” and had units designated for service in America. ‘**

Of some 1,440 men who left Cadiz, 68 died en route and nearly 300 disembarked in either Puerto Rico or Santiago de Cuba; about 1,000 landed in Havana. Yellow fever had already broken out among them, and quickly spread once they were ashore. They arrived at the worst possible time, in late June. “El v6mito” spread among the newly arrived soldiers,

the sailors of the six ships of the line on which they had come, and even to the veterans of the fixed battalion.'** The sick soon overflowed the hospitals and had to be quartered on the local population, some of whom fell ill as well. By November, when Juan de Prado sent a report to Madrid, 183 of the 1,000 reinforcements had died, and another 45 from the fixed battalion. The number of deaths among sailors and civilians is unknown but some authors suggest, probably extravagantly, either 1,800 or 3,000.'3° Costly as it was, the yellow fever outbreak of 1761

128 Albi (1987:38).

"9 Gutierre de Hevia (the Marques del Real Transporte) a Arriaga, 28 julio 1761, quoted in Calleja Leal and O’Donnell (1999:93). 3° Prado a Arriaga, 12 noviembre 1761, AGI SD 1581; several further letters from Prado to Arriaga mentioning the epidemic are in AGS, Marina 405. Prado added the number of yellow fever victims up to 187 total; I get only 183. Fernandez

178 MOSQUITO EMPIRES meant that by June 1762 the Spanish forces in Havana, and the city’s population too, consisted overwhelmingly of immunes. Despite the losses of 1761, little doubt remained that yellow fever was an ally of Spanish defense. No one could forget the precedent at Cartagena. Havana’s chief military engineer in July 1761 made clear that the city relied on the navy, the fortifications, the garrison, and the “peculiarly pernicious effects of this climate, the costs of which to the enemy we have already witnessed.”'?' Several British military men had made the point in the 1740s, including Vernon and Admiral Knowles. Looking back in 1771, Samuel Johnson put it more colorfully, explaining

that the Spanish dominions “are defended not by walls mounted with cannon which by cannons may be battered, but by the storms of the deep and the vapours of the land, by the flames of calenture and blasts of pestilence.”'** Everyone knew what yellow fever could do. THE SIEGE

Pocock’s armada and Albemarle’s army arrived off Havana on June 6, 1762. In sixty-six days they would master the city, only to die in droves from blasts of pestilence. Armed with a good idea of the city’s defenses, the British planned to assault El Morro first. Albemarle allegedly told his army they would all “be as rich as Jews,” for Havana was “paved

Duro (898-1903, 7:43) claimed 1,800 soldiers and sailors died in this epidemic, while Levi Marrero (1972-1992, 6:3) says 3,000, probably following Martinez Fortun (1948). Guerra (:994:370) uses this figure too, and also (116) says 40 to 50 died daily when things were at their worst. These are likely to be too high, even if they include sailors and civilians. Guijarro Olivares (:948:376) says in 1761 Juan Antonio de la Colina, leading a group of “galeotes” (which usually means galley slaves), brought yellow fever to Havana from Veracruz, killing 1,800 victims in a single year, entirely among soldiers and sailors. Garcia del Pino (2002:75-6) claims the “supposed” epidemic was used to cover up Spanish military incompetence. The question became a political one when Prado was court-martialed in 1763-1764. "31 Relacion del estado actual de las fortificaciones de... La Habana... por el ingeniero D. Francisco Ricaud de Tirgale, 8 julio 1761. AHN, Estado 3025. In the original: “...los peculiares perniciosos influxos de este clima que tan a costa enemiga tenemos ‘ya experimentado...”

"3? Johnson (977 [1771]:373-4). Knowles, perhaps in 1748, wrote of operations in the West Indies, “the Climate soon wages a more destructive War, than the Enemy.” From BL, Additional MSS 23,678, f. 17, quoted at greater length in McNeill (s@8s:102).

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with gold.” The army began to disembark the next morning, June 7th,

well to the east of the city at Cojimar, without resistance but amid heavy rains.'** Soon the British had thousands of men ashore, and after a brief skirmish had taken the village of Guanabacoa, to the southeast of Havana. Guanabacoa included the headwaters of the small Cojimar

River, which the British wanted because fresh water was otherwise scarce. And from Guanabacoa they could keep an eye on the countryside and obtain some provisions.

Observing that the heights of La Cabafia remained bare of fortifications, British infantry took the hills, again with minimal resistance, on June r1th. Then began the tedious hot work of putting artillery, shot, horses, and other supplies ashore, cutting roads through the woods between the coast and La Cabafia, and hauling everything up the slopes while under fire from El Morro, from the city, and from Spanish ships in the bay. Building batteries atop La Cabafia took a month. Twice, on June 29th and July 22th, the Spanish tried in force to retake La Cabafia with no success. Beginning in early July when the first batteries opened, a fierce artillery duel took place between the British batteries and the Spanish fortress, supplemented by Spanish ships in the harbor. British ships also exchanged cannon fire with El Morro briefly, inflicting no damage on

the fortress but some on the ships. The batteries on La Cabafia fared better, and gradually knocked out the Spanish guns on the landward side of El Morro. With great difficulty because of rocky terrain and Spanish musketeers, British sappers slowly dug mines under the outer bastions of El Morro. Meanwhile, beginning on June 15th, the British also besieged the city from the west, landing 2,800 men safely beyond the range of Havana’s guns at the mouth of a small river, the Chorrera. Here they watered their

ships. They also cut the aqueduct that brought fresh water to Havana. But they lacked the manpower to surround the city and its bay, and cut communications with neighboring districts. So water, food, men, and supplies continued to flow into Havana throughout the siege, and in any case the city’s storehouses and cisterns were well stocked. To win, the British would have to take El Morro.

33 On the rains: Anonymous (: 782) (An Authentic Journal), entry for 7 June. Narration of the early days of the siege appears in the diary of Robertson (930:49-63). Albemarle’s quotations from Mante (3772), cited in Keppel (1:98:36).

180 MOSQUITO EMPIRES Many obstacles hampered the besiegers. They could find no fresh water close to their operations and had to carry water from nearby streams upward of three kilometers to their batteries and sappers. Unexpectedly dry weather after the rains of June 7th and June 16th left them desperately short of water. Often they had to ferry water by ship from the Chorrera, west of Havana, to the operations east of the city. They could not dig trenches in the rocky earth in which to move men and materiel out of sight of the defenders. They could not “scrape soil sufficient to fill our sandbags” for their batteries atop La Cabafia, and one of them, couched in wood instead of earth, caught fire and burned for days. '34

Moreover the defenders of El Morro, under the naval captain Don Luis de Velasco, fought ferociously. Each night, Havana could easily send fresh supplies and men to El Morro across the bay’s channel. Units rotated in and out of the fortress every few days. As a British diarist put it on July 4th, “The Morro was now found to be tuffer work, and the Spaniards more resolute than was at first imagined.” ’ *°

Yet the British had fortune on their side. Velasco, Prado, and the Spaniards counted on “the climate” taking its toll on the British. But a dry July followed a dry June. After June 16th, or perhaps June 18th, the normally reliable summer rains did not fall. The British thought this bad luck because it exacerbated their shortage of fresh water. A soldier, James Miller, remembered“... the bad water brought on disorders, which were mortal, you would see the men’s tongues, hanging out parched like a mad dog’s, a dollar was frequently given for a quart of water....” At the time, Miller thought the siege would fail. ‘°°

34 Memorandum of Lt.-Gen. David Dundas, printed in Syrett (1970:314-26). The quotation is from p. 323. '35 Anonymous (3762) (An Authentic Journal). 36 James Miller, “Memoirs of an Invalid,’ Public Archives of Canada, Amherst Papers, Packet 54, f. 43 (quoted in Syrett 1970:xxix). Anonymous (3762) (An Authentic Journal) notes rains before 15 June, but then “want of rains” in the entry of 21-24 June; “want of water” for 4 July; and “great want of water” for 23-27 July. Mackellar’s journal entry for 2 July remarks on the lack of rain for the last 14 days, i.e., since 18 June. BL Additional MSS 23678. Knowles’ “Remarks upon the Siege of the Havana,” also in BL Additional MSS 23678, f. 21, mentions the “excessive dryness of the weather,” as of 2 July. It was already dry enough on 18 June that the Spanish could set fire to the woods east of El Morro in an effort to drive back the besiegers: Diario de el Sitio de la Abana enviada a la Corte por el Lord Albermarle [sic], BN-Madrid, MSS 2,547, entry for 18 June 1762. On the

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But unseasonable summer drought — perhaps another El Nifio effect —

was the best luck they could have had.'?? Dry conditions (recall Chapter

2) inhibit the hatching of A. aegypti and their eagerness to fly and bite. Prado’s arthropod allies failed to turn up in force. As a result, the disease burden of the British army in the first fifty-five days of the siege remained modest — although Albemarle worried he was losing men too fast and would have to withdraw before taking El Morro. Indeed, on July 17th he wrote to London that he needed more troops if he were to prevail.'3> But Pocock supplied sailors willingly for operations on land, and the soldiers and sailors building and manning the batteries on La Cabafia stayed surprisingly healthy. The sailors who remained aboard ship retained their health. Those working on the shore ferrying supplies amid mangrove swamps suffered the most from “flux, fever, and ague.”'>* They had to abandon Guanabacoa on July 21st after 2,100 of the 2,400 troops stationed there fell ill. Despite the likely unseasonable

shortage of vectors, by the seventh week of the siege, on July 27th, roughly half the British force was unfit for duty. By July 28th, yellow fever had become more widespread and the British “scarce able... from sickness to defend themselves had they been attacked regularly.”'*° But for Prado, the British army did not suffer badly enough soon enough. Unlike Prado’s, Albemarle’s allies did turn up. On July 27th, just as yellow fever took hold among the British, ships from New York landed 3,188 healthy troops, mainly American volunteers. They were months late but in time for the climax of the siege. Engineers exploded the mines on July 30th, blowing a breach in El Morro’s walls. After a withering hail of artillery fire directed at the breach, British soldiers, including same day Albemarle wrote to Pocock, “We are so distressed for water with this dry weather...” (Keppel :982::55). "37 According to Quinn (1992), 1761-1762 witnessed an El Nifio, which in Cuba usually means early summer drought, a result of unusually low sea-surface temperatures and reduced convection. The 1997-1998 El Nifio brought Cuba its worst drought in 50 years (Jury et al. zoo). 38 Albemarle to Egremont, 17 July 1762, PRO CO 117/1, f. 96. Albemarle reported 4,063 sick. “General Return of H.M forces under... Albemarle,” 17 July 1762. PRO CO 1127/1, f. 93. On 13 July, he wrote to Egremont that “increasing sickness of the troops, the intense heat of the weather, and the approaching rainy season are circumstances which prevent my being too sanguine as to our future success against the town.” PRO CO 117/1, f. 79. 39 Dundas Memorandum printed in Syrett (1970:324). 4° Anonymous (7782) (An Authentic Journal), 28-29 July entry. Mante (1 772:430) also notes the sickness and suffering among British troops in late July.

182 MOSQUITO EMPIRES the new arrivals, stormed through. In a matter of hours, at the cost of fourteen dead, the British controlled the castle. The Spanish had lost the linchpin of Havana’s defenses. ‘*’

For the next twelve days, as torrential rains set in, the British turned the remaining guns of El Morro against the city and the Spanish naval ships while continuing the cannonade from La Cabafia. More healthy North Americans arrived on August 2nd. They helped to drag guns into position on the west flank of Havana, so the city prepared to receive fire from the east and west, and from ships anchored to the north. The fall of El Morro put Juan de Prado in an awkward spot. As long as the British artillery had targeted El Morro, the city of Havana and its civilians faced little immediate danger. His men, militia included, had fought well. His pleas for men and food from nearby districts had often met with helpful responses, so Havana suffered little. Throughout June and most of July he could play for time, waiting for yellow fever to save the city. And he had reason to hope: Deserters kept the Spanish informed about sickness in the British Army.’** But after El Morro

fell, the rain of cannonballs and howitzers threatened the lives and property of all remaining Habafieros. By Prado’s orders, thousands of women and children had left in the days after June 7th, but some 20,000 people stayed in the city. Had he known that the late rainy season, finally underway in August, ensured an abundant and active mosquito population and a yellow fever epidemic, he might have held out longer than he did. But he did not know, and on August 11th, soon after the three-sided bombardment began, he chose to seek terms and on August 14, 1762, he surrendered the city. The Spanish had lost somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 men in combat, soldiers, sailors, and militia combined. As of August 13th, the British army suffered 290 killed and 56 “dead of wounds,” and the Royal Navy only 86 dead.'*’ But in August, with the rains yellow fever set in with a vengeance. Several hundred Spanish sailors fell sick, as did several ‘47 Tn losing El Morro, the Spanish also lost 130 killed, 37 wounded, 326 taken prisoner, and 213 drowned or killed in boats. “State of the Garrison of Fort Morro when taken by storm the 30th of July 1762,” PRO CO 117/1, f. 130. '42 The anonymous diary printed in Martinez Dalmau (1943) records deserters speaking of sickness on ten different occasions between 14 June and 5 August. ‘43, Parcero Torre (:9¢8:173—-4); over a thousand more defenders had been wounded:

Relacién de Herridos, 25 agosto 1762, AGS, Hacienda 1056; in a diary sent to the Spanish court, Albemarle gave 1,200 as the number of Spanish dead and 1,500 wounded, Diario de el Sitio de la Abana enviada a la Corte por el Lord Albermarle [sic], BN-Madrid, MSS 2,547. “Return of the Killed, Wounded, Died

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thousands more British soldiers and sailors. Looking back, in September

Albemarle wrote to London that his army had been “so reduced by sickness, and the well so unfit for almost any service, that, if the governor had been firm, he might have named his own terms.”'** Had Prado held

out another week or two he might have held out forever and become a hero like Eslava and Blas Lezo. Or had the North Americans not come when they did, wrote Albemarle, the siege would have failed. '*°

Albemarle thought the North Americans arrived in the nick of time,

and he was more right than he knew. He would have preferred that they had kept to the plan and joined him in May, but he was lucky they did not. Had they done so, they too would have suffered at least as grievously as their British cousins. By August, about three in four of them would have been dead or unfit for duty. As it was, they remained fit for at least a week or two after arrival, providing the British with an infusion of fighting and laboring power just when they needed it most. Thus had the North Americans arrived on time, as Albemarle wished, or had they arrived later than the end of July, the siege probably would have failed. AFTERMATH: DEATH IN HAVANA AND PEACE IN 1763

Havana was a rich prize. The British captured a treasury with over 3,400,000 pesos, or £700,000, in it. Adding in the tobacco, sugar, and other goods taken, the booty amounted to more than £3,000,000. They also took about a fifth of the entire Spanish Navy. They acquired huge quantities of military supplies.'*” And they had in their possession the of Wounds, Missing, and Dead since the Army landed on the Island of Cuba, to the 13th of August 1762,” printed in Beatson (:Se4, 3:406). ‘44 Albemarle to Newcastle, 29 September 1762, BL Additional MSS 32,942, f. 388; printed in Archivo Nacional de Cuba (:948:195). Albemarle’s correspondence shows he was sick himself in August and September 1762.

‘45 Albemarle to Egremont, 21 August 1762, PRO CO 117/1, f. 137. Admiral Knowles agreed: “Remarks upon the Siege of Havana,” BL Additional MSS 23,678, f. 28. On f. 35 he wrote: “... time was wasted, numbers were lost by sickness, and it became next to a miracle that we succeeded at last.” Knowles here was criticizing the army, countering Mackellar’s criticism of the navy. ™4© Parcero Torre (1998:176-87) summarizes Spanish losses. “Return of Guns, Mortars, and Stores Found in the City of Havana... 13 August 1762,” 8 October 1762, PRO CO 117/2, ff. 24-8 (a copy is in PRO ADM 1/237, ff. 84-88), lists captured military materiel. Prado was not short of weaponry or ammunition. “A List of Ships of War that were in the Harbour of the Havana...” 21 August 1762, PRO CO 117/1, f. 134.

184 MOSQUITO EMPIRES best harbor in the West Indies with the most formidable fortifications, which they quickly set about repairing. '*”

But with the booty came the virus. The recently arrived North Americans, mainly men from New England and New York, suffered heavily. Among them was a future hero of the Battle of Bunker Hill, Israel Putnam from Connecticut. Putnam’s company lost 76 of its 96 men (83%), all killed by yellow fever.'** Major Joseph Gorham, a lifelong soldier from Massachusetts, arrived in Havana on August 6th with 253 men; ten weeks later 102 (40%) had died when the survivors reembarked for New York. A Rhode Island detachment that accompanied Gorham lost 111 of its 212 men at Havana and en route home, two of

them in combat and the rest (53%) to disease.*** Levi Redfield of Killingworth, Connecticut, who had joined up as a seventeen-year-old in hopes of seeing Fort Ticonderoga, arrived at Havana on August roth and remained there until October 28th, during which he wrote, “most of our men died of West Indian fever.” More died en route home.'*° Although the North Americans may have had it worst, yellow fever quickly crippled Albemarle’s entire army. There could be no question of taking further Spanish strongholds or French Louisiana. With no intact units and strength diminishing every day, it was challenging enough to hold the coastlands of western Cuba. That task required 4,000 fit men, thought Albemarle, which meant a permanent garrison of 6,000 was needed, taking sickness into account.'°' This came to roughly twice as many men as the British had stationed in recently acquired Canada. But Albemarle only had 2,067 fit for duty in mid-October according to an official return, and a mere 700 by his count.’**? Almost his whole army was sick — or already dead.

47 “Estimate of the Expenses of the Fortifications at the Havana,” PRO CO 117/1, f. 275. This document appears to be from early 1763 as it records expenses in the five months since September 1762. 48 Putnam (1933:5). His Connecticut regiment lost 220 men to disease at Havana and another 400 en route home. “49 Gorham (:899:162, 168). Gorham’s Rangers also lost both of the “women of the corps” to disease en route home. 5° Redfield (¢ 798:3-9). '5t Albemarle to Egremont, 7 October 1762, PRO CO 1127/1, f. 149. 52 “General Return of Officers, Sergeants, Drummers & Rank and File... from the 7th of June to 18th October 1762,” PRO CO 117/1, f. 158; Albemarle to Egremont, 7 October 1762, PRO CO 1197/1, f. 145.

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Yellow fever victims piled up after the end of human hostilities. As of the Spanish surrender, 696 British officers and men had died of “sickness.” On October 7th Albemarle wrote: “We have buried upwards

of 3,000 men since the capitulation.” By October 18th, the date of the last return that has survived in archives, 4,708 had died of disease (compared to 305 killed in action and 255 dead of wounds). Albemarle had lost more soldiers from yellow fever in two months of peace at Havana than the British Army had lost in the entire Seven Years’ War in all of North America. ***

Meanwhile, the Royal Navy lost so many men that Pocock reported he could not contemplate further action. In October, he reported: We have lost since the 7th of June to the gth instant by death about

eight hundred seamen and five hundred marines, and eighty-six were killed during the siege; but from the number at present sick, as their Lordships will observe by the weekly account to be two thousand six hundred and seventy-three seamen and six hundred and one marines, we have reason to apprehend several of them will die. '*4

So as of October gth, 1,300 sailors had died from disease. If half of the sailors sick on October gth later died, then the navy lost about 3,000 to disease. If the epidemic continued among the navy, as it did in the army, the figure should be greater still. Because Pocock spent £1,500 on cinchona bark in January 1763, it is a plausible assumption that the navy still had many sick in its ranks, and likely more deaths followed. ‘**

In the months after the last official calculation of its losses in October 1762, the army lost several hundred, perhaps more, in Havana, and more still among soldiers sent to North America to improve their health. The

remnants of the army still in Havana in the spring of 1763 suffered a renewed outbreak in late May.*>° A reasonable guess is that the army lost '53 “Return of the Killed, Wounded, Missing and Dead since the Army landed on the Island of Cuba,” 13 August 1762, PRO CO 117/1 ff. 106-7; “General Return of Officers, Sergeants, Drummers & Rank and File... from the 7th of June to 18th October 1762,” PRO CO 117/1, f. 158; Albemarle to Egremont, 7 October 1762, PRO CO 117/1, f. 145. '54 Pocock to Clevland, g October 1762, PRO ADM 1/237. 55 Pocock to Clevland, 13 January 1762, PRO ADM 1/237, f. 103. The bark was used against all West Indian fevers, even though helpful only against malaria. "5° Keppel to Egremont, 31 May 1763, PRO CO 1177/1, f. 221.

186 MOSQUITO EMPIRES 7,000 to disease, bringing the total to about 10,000 soldiers and sailors as the price of Havana. Fewer than 700 died in combat. A. aegypti killed about fourteen or fifteen times as many British attackers as did Spanish arms.

The appalling toll from disease impressed sages of the day. Benjamin

Franklin, in congratulating an English friend on the fall of Havana, wrote: “It has been however the dearest conquest by far that we have purchas’d this war when we consider the terrible Havock made by the sickness in that brave Army of Veterans, now almost totally ruined.”'*?

Samuel Johnson, looking back on the victory in 1771, summed it up thus: “May my country never be cursed with another such conquest!”'>° While yellow fever still raged in Havana, British and French diplomats began negotiating a peace. The French needed it badly. In Britain,

the policy elite divided into two camps. Some wanted to press their advantage against France and Spain, others to make peace and consolidate their gains. Initially, the conquest of Havana strengthened the hand of those who wanted to continue the war: Without Havana, the Spanish system of defense in the Americas was severely undermined and Britain could choose among several tempting further targets. But as Albemarle’s army died off, those who wanted peace prevailed. Further Caribbean conquests seemed not only unlikely but, even if successful, undesirable. Too few men remained for actions against Louisiana, which in any case would also have presented another challenging disease environment. The Peace of Paris, signed in February 1763, gave Havana back to Spain but awarded Spanish Florida to Britain. To win Spanish acquiescence, France ceded Louisiana to Spain. ‘°

The manpower shortage that stopped the British from attacking Louisiana affected North America in another way. Too few men remained in the British army in North America to respond quickly to Pontiac’s Rebellion in 1763, in which an Amerindian confederacy challenged British rule especially in the broad interior regions just taken from the French. The rebellion swelled and ended in a stalemate that

'57 B, Franklin to G. Whitefoord, 7 December 1762, BL AM Add MSS 36, 593, f. 53. "58 Johnson (197°7:374).

‘59 As late as December 1762, Albemarle seemed to think Britain would keep Havana. His instructions to William Keppel include very detailed efforts to win good will, such as a plan to support orphans. “Instructions for the Honourable William Keppel...” printed in Archivo Nacional de Cuba (:848:102—4).

YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH AMBITION REPULSED 187

convinced the British to try to keep colonists and Amerindians apart, drawing a boundary around the eastern colonies and creating a huge Indian reserve from the Appalachians to the Mississippi, from Florida

to Canada. This added to the resentments colonists felt against the British government and contributed in a modest way to the crisis that ended in the American Revolution. ‘°° For the Spanish, the temporary loss of Havana came asa terrible blow, both because it was so strategically important and because it was thought

invincible. The defeat served as the prod for a general reorganization of imperial defense in the Americas in the 1760s. It included fortifying the heights of La Cabafia. The Spanish recognized that yellow fever had come to their rescue in 1762, but too slowly. Had they delayed the British by another week or two, as holding La Cabafia surely would have

done, then, they expected, they would have prevailed. So the strategy for the defense of the “key to the Indies” still rested with fortification and fever.'”! Juan de Prado and other senior officials were put on trial in Madrid, accused of failing to fortify La Cabafia and to send sallies out against the British, among other sins. The judges found Prado guilty. Some wanted him executed, but the King instead banished him from court for twelve years, from employment forever, and confiscated his property for the royal treasury.'°* He died in a village near Salamanca, probably in 1770. Rich beyond his dreams, Albemarle suffered from poor health until his death at age forty-eight in 1772. Admiral Pocock, also rich (his

share from Havana was more than £122,000), lost several of his ships in a storm on the way back to England and was never granted another command. He died in 1792 and rests in Westminster Abbey. Don Luis de Velasco died of wounds shortly after the fall of El Morro. His valor so impressed King Carlos III that he decreed that forevermore the Spanish

navy would always include a ship named “Velasco,” and it has. Once again, A. aegypti went unrecognized and without honors. But everyone knew what yellow fever had done.

16° This link is suggested by Syrett (1970:xxxv). 't Parcero Torre (2003); Abarca (3773) contains details about how many days each

feature of the defense would delay attackers. He was confident that “el clima” (fol. 106) would destroy attackers within three months — three weeks longer than the 1762 siege lasted. 62 BN-Madrid, MSS 10,421 has the 192 folios of the Proceso y [sentencia?] dada al Gobernador de la Habana Juan de Prado (1765).

188 MOSQUITO EMPIRES CONCLUSION

Fortifications and yellow fever helped keep the Spanish Empire Spanish.

Of course, valiant soldiers and other infections contributed too, as did the French alliance and a modest navy. But the heart of Spain’s defense system in the Americas was heavily fortified ports that, together with the ravages of yellow fever, could reasonably be expected to repel even the formidable war machine of Georgian Britain. Yellow fever did its duty

by Spain at Cartagena, at Santiago de Cuba, and belatedly at Havana. Even there, where it came too late to prevent the surrender, it came with such a vengeance that it prevented Britain from exploiting the success, and encouraged diplomats to return the pestilential city in the Peace of Paris. Spain lost Florida, gained Louisiana, kept Havana, and kept its empire. At Havana, British soldiers had the satisfaction of dying from yellow fever as victors. At Cartagena, they died as vanquished. Although it is true that in the intervening years the British improved their capacity to mount amphibious operations, and that the land and sea arms coordinated better at Havana than at Cartagena, the big difference was a few days: In 1741, yellow fever forced a desperate attack on a stronghold before proper siege preparations had even begun, but in 1762 it held off long enough for the besiegers to breach El Morro’s wall before attempting to carry it by assault. The 1762 siege lasted sixty-six days, that of 1741

only forty-six. Had yellow fever come sooner at Havana, Prado would have been a hero, Pocock and Albemarle disgraced. Its late appearance is probably a result of the summer drought, although any number of

things might explain it. Had El Morro held out another two weeks, Albemarle would surely have chosen to depart with what army he had left. In politics and war, timing — even of rains, mosquitoes, and viruses —

is everything. Mark Twain is credited with saying that history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. The sieges of Cartagena in 1741 and Havana in 1762 form a couplet. One failed and the other succeeded, but in both cases yellow fever destroyed an amphibious assault force and checked British ambitions on the Spanish Empire.

Spanish military officials in Veracruz, Cartagena, Havana, and throughout the Greater Caribbean learned the value of yellow fever. By the 1760s, they wrote about it explicitly as part of their system of defense. Perhaps living with frequent outbreaks kept it in the forefront of their minds. But between 1815 and 1830, Spanish military authorities in Madrid committed expeditionary forces to the killing grounds of coastal

YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH AMBITION REPULSED 189

Venezuela and Mexico, as if they had no knowledge, or no fear, of the “climate.” Meanwhile, French and British strategists seemed to know what to expect in expeditionary warfare to the Greater Caribbean by the 1730s if not before, but often either failed to complete their invasions during the dry season or, in some cases perhaps, supposed that history would not repeat itself and that God would protect their troops from harm. Spanish, French, and British strategists and statesmen all learned from experience but sometimes also forgot or ignored their lessons. The British seemed to ignore the lessons of Cartagena and Havana

in 1780 in an assault on what is now Nicaragua. During the War of the American Revolution (of which much more in the next chapter), the Governor of Jamaica secured permission for an attempt to annex a slice of Central America and establish British naval power on both the Caribbean and Pacific coasts. The revolt of Tupac Amaru in the Andes (1780-1782), which threatened the foundations of the Spanish Empire, fired British ambitions once more. Horatio Nelson, already a captain but not yet twenty-two, sailed with an expedition to the mouth

of the San Juan River. They arrived in good health, recruited local Amerindians (called Miskito or Moskito) as allies, and pushed upriver to the castle of San Juan. After an eighteen-day siege, they took it as the April rains began. Nelson fell ill before the victory but, luckily for him, received orders for a new posting that obliged him to return to Jamaica. Meanwhile, his comrades suffered a blistering epidemic. Of 1,800 men who went upriver, 380 survived. Two or three were killed in the siege; another died from snakebite; and over 77 percent perished from disease. Most of the Spaniards taken prisoner died as well, as did many of the British Amerindian allies. The disease(s) in question scarcely affected the Africans (and those of African descent) involved with the expedition. A British naval surgeon and eyewitness, Thomas Dancer, made the interesting observation that Indians of the coast “who have an admixture of negro blood... did not fall ill so soon as the others.” An army doctor, John Hunter, also noted differential immunity at work in this campaign, writing: “There was the

strongest proof of this in the negroes who were sent along with the troops against Fort St. Juan, of whom scarcely any died, although few or

none of the soldiers survived the expedition.’ 63 Dancer (1781:12); Hunter (: 88:23). Moseley (:78:147) wrote of “negroes” that only a “very few of them were ill.” Of an attack on another Spanish post, Fort Omoa on the same coast, he added (147), “... half of the Europeans who

IQO MOSQUITO EMPIRES This circumstantial evidence suggests the frightful mortality of the Nicaragua campaign came from a mosquito-borne disease to which people of African descent carried some resistance — in other words, malaria, yellow fever, or dengue. The acute mortality has led most who offered an

opinion (including me)‘ to a diagnosis of yellow fever. However, the swampy riverside terrain, the absence of good A. aegypti habitat outside

the fort itself, and Dancer’s description of symptoms (which does not mention black vomit) suggest malaria. In his journal, Stephen Kemble, a British officer on the expedition, repeatedly described his own sickness and that of his men as “ague.” He claimed to have recovered his health

thanks to the bark, taken “in quantities.” Like Dancer, Kemble said nothing of yellow fever or black vomit.'°> So a diagnosis of malaria fits the textual evidence and the ecological circumstances, even though a 77 percent mortality rate is extremely high even for falciparum malaria. Perhaps the best guess is falciparum malaria in combination with other infections.

Nelson narrowly escaped an early death, and he remained sick in Jamaica and England for a year or more. But eventually he recovered, his reputation enhanced, his trajectory set for Trafalgar and glory.‘ The epidemic at Fort San Juan ended British hopes of seizing a chunk of Central America and acquiring a naval station on the Pacific. It

landed, died in six weeks. But very few negroes; and not one, of 200, that were African born” (italics in the original). Stephen Kemble, a British officer, wrote in his journal that: “The Negroes from the Bay of Honduras stand the Climate and are better Calculated to Service in this Country than any other People.” Kemble (2884-85, 2:14).

64 McNeill (xagq). Beatson (1804, 6:230-31) includes the text of the Spanish capitulation at Fort San Juan. As a response to a proposed Article VII, the British commander wrote: “It is characteristic of Britons to treat their prisoners with humanity and politeness; and I pledge my word to do my utmost to keep the Mosquitoes within the bounds of moderation.” When I first saw this sentence | thought it might be a reference to fierce insects, surely unique in the annals of capitulations, and evidence of the likelihood of mosquito-borne disease. But, alas, the passage refers to the Miskito Indians, allies of the British in this campaign. 65 Kemble (1884-85, 2:48-58) mentions “ague” six times. He also described his fever as recurring frequently, which sounds more like malaria than dengue or yellow fever (1884-85, 2:15—16). 166 The best sources are Dancer (:78:) and Kemble (: 884-85); Moseley (2 798:135— 48). Knight (2008:55—-61) and especially Sugden (2904:148-75, 810-11) provide fine accounts of Nelson’s experience. The reports and correspondence on British operations are in PRO CO 137/77 and 137/78.

YELLOW FEVER RAMPANT AND BRITISH AMBITION REPULSED IgI

confirmed Spanish faith in the “climate” as a powerful ally.*®’ In terms of loss of life, it was the single costliest engagement for Britain in the War of the American Revolution: Nicaragua’s mosquitoes killed more British

soldiers in the summer of 1780 than the Continental Army did at the battles of Bunker Hill, Long Island, White Plains, Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, King’s Mountain, Cowpens, and Guilford Courthouse combined. In political terms, however, the siege of Yorktown fifteen months later cost far more. 67 The “climate” also menaced troops fresh from Spain in this war: An army of 7,000 sent out in late 1780 to attack British posts on the Gulf Coast, to expel them from Nicaragua, and ideally to retake Jamaica, lost more than 4,000 of its men (57%) to disease by January 1781 (Saavedra de Sangronis :989:103—4, journal entry for 23 January 1781). In his entry for 6 December 1780, Saavedra de Sangronis summarized the import of tropical diseases on operations in the Caribbean: “In any case, it will be advisable to hasten the operations, because the effects of the climate will carry off more cautious persons than the enemy’s fire will kill among the reckless” (Ibid 63).

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PART THREE

REVOLUTIONARY MOSQUITOES

n the 1770s, the geopolitical significance of differential immunity in

I the Atlantic American world shifted. Formerly, it had helped stabilize the distribution of territory among the various imperial powers,

especially protecting Spain’s empire in the Americas. It continued to do so, as the example of Fort San Juan in Nicaragua showed. But now, by the 17708, it also helped insurgents in their quests to change the imperial order. Political dynamics evolved in such a way that many people born and raised in the Americas sought to upset the status quo. Rebel slaves in Surinam, for example, benefited from differential immunity. In British North America, growing numbers, wealth, self-confidence,

and sense of frustration with their treatment by King and Parliament helped turn many Americans onto the path of revolution in the 1770s. A generation later, slaves in St. Domingue and Creole elites in South America also chose revolution. So did Cubans at the end of the nineteenth century. Historians for generations have brilliantly illuminated this age of revolution. One thing that has escaped their spotlight is the role of mosquitoes in making the revolutionaries victorious.

193

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CHAPTER SIX

LoRD (CORNWALLIS VS. ANOPHELES

QUADRIMACULATUS, 1780-1781

INTRODUCTION

This chapter follows the story of environmental change, mosquitoes, vector-borne disease, differential immunity, and war to two new locales,

the Atlantic coastlands of Surinam and the American South. The Surinam excursion is brief. Although illustrative of the power of differential immunity, the rebellion in Surinam carried far smaller consequences than the American Revolution. This chapter also shifts the focus to malaria, part of the earlier stories in the Caribbean, but aside from the English conquest of Jamaica in 1655 never at the center. So in this chapter the political dynamics, the venue, the vector, and the principal disease in question are all different from those in earlier chapters. But as in earlier chapters, mosquitoes in pursuit of human blood shaped human politics. SLAVE RISINGS AND SURINAM’S MAROONS

From the late seventeenth century onward, Dutch planters had organized a thriving plantation economy along the coastal rivers of Surinam

based on African slave labor and sugar, coffee, cocoa, and cotton as export crops. By 1770, some 50,000 to 60,000 slaves toiled on perhaps 400 to 500 plantations.’ Runaway slaves gradually formed maroon communities in the sprawling swampy forestlands of the interior, and rou-

tinely raided the plantations, provoking counter-raids that became an ' Goslinga (:9g79:100). Key texts include Herlein (1718); Hartsinck (177s); Pistorius (: 763); Malouet (182, v. 3). 195

196 MOSQUITO EMPIRES annual ritual by 1749 if not before.* Beginning in 1772 the maroons, who

now numbered several thousand,’ embarked on larger attacks against the plantations involving, according to one account, some 2,000 to 3,000 men.* They had few and poor weapons, but one powerful ally. Surinam had endemic malaria, abetted by naturally swampy terrain and the polders the Dutch planters had designed and their slaves had built, accidentally making good Anopheles habitat even better. In Surinam, wet rice was a staple food. It was not an export crop, but it fed the slave population and sometimes the whites. Maroons also grew it in the swamps. With their frequent floodings and bountiful organic debris, rice fields made ideal nurseries for Surinam’s resident malaria vector, Anopheles darlingi. In the mid-1770s, Dutch Surinam’s mosquitoes were

“inconceivable numerous.”* They remained so a generation later, as Dr. Pinckard recalled: “...we were in danger of being devoured by those annoying insects the musquitoes, which attacked us in such daring hosts that we were obliged to walk with small boughs in our hands, and to continue, the whole time, beating them from our legs and faces.”” There were many different species of mosquitoes in Surinam but, thanks to the rice economy, An. darlingi was well represented. Moreover, because the rice fields required endless toil female mosquitoes easily found human blood from slaves. Because many of these slaves came from Africa, most carried malarial plasmodia in their bloodstreams, ensuring that the An. darlingi of Surinam’s rice fields would

almost always be infective. So the rice economy improved the land for An. darlingi while increasing opportunities for the transmission of malaria. This made Surinam an extremely dangerous place to visit for anyone without strong resistance to malaria. To make matters worse for newcomers, residents also collected rainwater in tanks, inadvertently creating good environments for Aedes aegypti larvae, and thereby assisting in Surinam’s frequent yellow fever outbreaks.’ 2 Fermin (1 778:138-72). See Thompson (20%) on maroons generally. 3. Boomgaard (:992:216) says 5,000 to 10,000. Others say as many as 20,000. 4 Extrait de la Resolution du Conseil de la Ville d’ Amsterdam, 15 novembre 1774. British Library, Additional MSS 35,443, fol. 149. 5 Stedman (1988:46). Stedman thought mosquitoes preferred to bite newcomers from Europe and noted that locals burned tobacco to keep mosquitoes at bay.

° Pinckard (1804, 2:210). 7 Malouet (S82, 3:257). Stiprian (z993) gives a sense of the overall ecology of eighteenth-century Dutch Surinam. On rice-malaria links in Surinam: Hudson (:984); van der Kuyp (1950).

LORD CORNWALLIS VS. ANOPHELES QUADRIMACULATUS — 197

The maroons’ attacks on the plantations in the early 1770s prompted the dispatch from the Netherlands of some 1,650 soldiers. They were probably reluctant to go: Surinam’s justly acquired reputation as a par-

ticularly unhealthy spot for Europeans was well known.* The Dutch forces succeeded politically while failing demographically. They pushed the maroons deeper into the forests and temporarily relieved the immediate threat on the plantations. But only about 200 soldiers survived to return to Europe. John Stedman, the Scottish-Dutch soldier-of-fortune (from Chapter 2) who served — willingly — with the Dutch expedition,

noted the death toll at the end of the campaign in 1777:

In Short out of a number of near twelve hundred Able bodied men, now not one hundred did return to theyr Friends at home Amongst whom Perhaps not 20 were to be found in perfect health,

all the others (a verry few of the Remaining Relief Excepted) being Repatriated, sick; discharged, past all remedy; Lost; killed; S murdered by the Climate... . ° Stedman went on to remark on the importance of differential immunity, observing that:

Amongst the Officers and Private men who had formerly been in the West Indies, none died at all, while amongst the whole number of 1200 together I Can only Recollect one Single marine who Escaped from Sickness... . °°

Stedman did not know why the “climate” was so murderous for those who had not previously been in the West Indies, but he left no doubt about the strong partisanship of the disease(s) that reigned in Surinam. Judging from the swampy terrain of Surinam and the abundant rice cultivation, the chief suspect would be malaria. However, the sharp distinction between veterans of the West Indies, among whom none apparently fell ill, and the others, among whom almost all did, suggests ® Fermin (:378:208-9). 9 Stedman (:a8&l1790]|:607). Dutch documents put the strength of Dutch forces at 1,650, not 1,200; see Hoogbergen (:990:104). Extrait de la Resolution du Conseil de la Ville d’ Amsterdam, 15 novembre 1774, British Library, Additional MSS 35,443, fol. 149 says 1,200 plus 600 reinforcements, including a corps of 300 blacks raised in Surinam (or, 1,800 in all).

t0 Stedman (:988:607). The italics are in the original. Col. Fourgeoud au Prince d’Orange, 6 septembre 1774, BL, Additional MSS. 35,443, f. 128-30, notes the rampant sickness among troops chasing maroons through swampy terrain.

198 MOSQUITO EMPIRES yellow fever, which more completely immunizes its survivors than does malaria. Soldiers spent what time they could in the main town, Paramaraibo, attracted by its women, drink, and food, and in turn attracting

urban A. aegypti. Yellow fever was present in Surinam in 1779, as a letter to Amsterdam attested: “Strangers and sailors after disembarking...come down with the so-called chocolate sickness, called by the Spaniards vomito negro or chapetonnade, which is the vomiting of gall, by which the sick person, sometimes in the greatest paroxysm of frenzy,

is snatched by death within three or four days.”'' Some of the Dutch probably caught yellow fever in town, some probably developed malaria while on campaign in the bush, and many of them probably hosted both. Whatever the case, Stedman’s account shows how powerful differential immunity could be in aiding rebels in the American tropics.

The maroons of Surinam lived to fight another day but they were two few, too disunited, and too poorly armed to convert the destruction of the Dutch regiments into a political triumph over the Dutch plantation colony. In Surinam, mosquitoes and diseases could destroy an army but could not defeat the political order. In North America, the revolutionaries held a stronger hand than did the maroons of Surinam. REVOLUTION AND MALARIA IN THE SOUTHERN COLONIES

While the maroons waged their war in the swamps of Surinam, a larger scale revolt brewed in North America. It resulted in war by 1775.°* The rebellious Americans organized the Continental Army — drawn from a population of nearly 3 million and led by George Washington — to counter British forces. After a few years of inconclusive ebb and flow, by 1779 the British were firmly entrenched in port cities, chiefly New York, and the Americans unable to dislodge them. But the Americans

controlled most of the countryside, and the British were unable to lure them into decisive battles. It was a considerable achievement that Washington was able to maintain an army, despite precarious finances, uncertain loyalties among his troops, quarrels in the fledgling Congress, and the toll exacted by smallpox and other diseases. It was an expensive 'T Quoted (without attribution or citation) in Goslinga (:979:107). '2 For the political and military history of the war, I relied on Mackesy (1965); Pancake (x98s); Lumpkin (: a8: ); Black (x99); Weintraub (2005); Middlekauff (2o08); Wilson (2008); Ferling (2007).

LORD CORNWALLIS VS. ANOPHELES QUADRIMACULATUS 199

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engagement for the British to maintain a large force (they sent 60,000 men to America in all, half of them German mercenaries) so far from home for so long. The argument here is straightforward: In the American Revolution, the British southern campaigns ultimately led to defeat at Yorktown in

October 1781 in part because their forces were much more susceptible to malaria than were the American. Malaria was ubiquitous in the Carolina Lowcountry, partly because of changes in the agro-ecology of the Carolinas since 1690. On average, Americans were more resistant to

200 MOSQUITO EMPIRES it than were British troops because of repeated prior exposure. Differential susceptibility to malaria constrained British strategy and presented

a dilemma from which there was no escape. In the South, the British could either keep their forces within reach of the Royal Navy, in which case they could easily be re-supplied and reinforced but could not be kept healthy, or they could leave the coasts, in which case they could expect better health but could not be reliably re-supplied or reinforced. MALARIA VS. SMALLPOX IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Infections killed far more combatants in the American Revolution than did violence, and two of the most deadly, malaria and smallpox, were systematically partisan because of differential immunities.'? American

forces were more vulnerable to smallpox than were the British and German troops arrayed against them because most of them had grown up in regions where smallpox was not endemic and they had not encoun-

tered it. (Some 30,000 Germans, called Hessians by the Americans because many hailed from Hesse, served under British command in the

American Revolution.) On the other hand, the British and Germans were almost all survivors of smallpox and therefore immune to it.'* Moreover, many British soldiers had been inoculated against smallpox, a frequent practice since 1756. In some regiments by the 1770s, inoculation was obligatory.'* A smallpox epidemic raged nearly the length and breadth of North America during the American Revolution, and its ‘3, Duncan (%9323:371) estimates that in both the Continental and British armies, disease deaths outnumbered battle deaths by 10:1. Over the course of the war, he figures that Washington’s army lost 18% of its men annually to disease and 2% to wounds. The Continental Army’s disease death toll came mainly from smallpox and typhus in the early years of the war. Duncan (374) estimates that the British lost 10% annually to disease, and the Germans only 6%, which he accounts for by their prior experience with smallpox, typhus, and other diseases common among eighteenth-century armies. Other authors offer a ratio of 8:1 for disease deaths

over combat deaths in the British Army during the American Revolution, a figure that may originate with Hamilton (1704, 2:262). In the Royal navy, the ratio was 16:1 say Keevil, Lloyd, and Coulter (1957-1963, 3:137). Kipping (:a6s) reports that of the roughly 17,000 Hessians who served in the war, 4,626 died in all and 357 were killed in combat, a ratio of 13:1. Eelking (:83) makes frequent mention of disease among the Germans, but offers few specifics. ‘4 Duncan (:¢@3%:372) quotes a British doctor as saying only two out of every nine British and German soldiers had not already survived smallpox. ‘5S Kopperman (2007:69—70, 75-6).

LORD CORNWALLIS VS. ANOPHELES QUADRIMACULATUS 201

partisanship posed one of George Washington’s most vexing problems. ‘”

Early in the war, he wrote he had “more to dread from it, than from the Sword of the Enemy.”’? With the example of British regiments before

him, Washington opted to require inoculation throughout his army. Through compulsory inoculation, which killed a few but saved the rest,

the Continental Army acquired an effective shield against smallpox. Without it, the epidemic might have sapped the American forces faster than other diseases drained the British. On the other hand, their enemies for the most part had never encountered malaria. Before 1750, the marshy and low-lying districts of Kent

and Essex had hosted vivax malaria and as a result were more sickly than elsewhere in England. The same held true of wetlands landscapes in Germany. But as the eighteenth century wore on, increasingly English

and German youth lacked prior exposure to malaria, partly because of wetlands drainage and partly because of an enormous expansion in cattle numbers. With plenty of cattle to bite, the anophelines of northern Europe grew increasingly ineffective as malaria vectors, so people became increasingly inexperienced with, and unresistant to, vivax malaria.’ Even the few who did carry resistance to vivax proved vulnerable to falciparum malaria, a routine summer scourge in the Carolinas and the Chesapeake but entirely absent in Europe. Ecological conditions and changes in Europe, as well as those in the Americas, had some bearing on differential resistance to malaria. The toll from disease became the greatest demographic problem facing the British Army in America. Through 1779, by resorting to ever more desperate measures, it managed to recruit men to replace those it lost despite annual losses to West Indies garrisons of 15 to 25 percent. Stationing a large share of the army in Canada, New England, and New York to counter rebellious Americans improved its health because losses in these locales came to only 1 to 6 percent annually. But in 1780, the balance tipped because Britain’s grand strategy committed a larger proportion of the army to malarial (and yellow fever) zones. The death of 2,500 men in the Nicaragua campaign (recall the previous chapter),

© See the fascinating account in Fenn (200%:92—103), and the thorough discussion in Becker (2e¢¢8). ‘7 Washington to Dr. William Shippen, 6 January 1777 (quoted in Fenn 2e01%:92).

"8 The reduction of malaria in northern Germany is summarized in Blackbourn (2006:64). On the role of cattle, see Kjaergaard (2e00:19). See also Dobson (:997:287-367); Bruce-Chwatt and de Zulueta (98a).

202 MOSQUITO EMPIRES and almost 5,000 more in the occupation of fever-stricken St. Lucia in 1780-1781, on top of the routine wastage of men on garrison duty in the West Indies — in 1779-1783, Jamaica fevers killed 3,500 troops — put the army in a demographic plight. When in 1780 the British Army placed its single largest force, some 9,000 men, in the vicinity of South Carolina’s Anopheles mosquitoes, it could no longer recruit men fast enough to offset those it lost.'’ Neither immunity nor inoculation could shield the British Army from malaria. THE SOUTHERN STRATEGY AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

After the battle of Saratoga (1777) had showed them that the Americans

would not lose quickly, the French joined the war (1778) and Spain followed (1779). Simultaneously, Britain and Holland went to war (late 1780). Britain thus faced an international war of the utmost seriousness.

The British Army, which had numbered only 48,000 at the outbreak of the war, was thinly stretched from Bengal to Barbados and beyond. The British Army in America could not be supplied locally except at ereat political cost (commandeering food and supplies was a good way to turn Loyalists into revolutionaries), so the Royal Navy had to safeguard

each British enclave in the Americas. Now with the expansion of the war, the Navy would be thinly stretched too, by threats in the English Channel and North Sea, in the West Indies, the Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean. With the entry of France, Spain, and the Netherlands into the war, maintaining control of the rich sugar islands of the Caribbean required

that the North American war be forced to a conclusion and forces shifted to more important theaters. Campaigns in the northern colonies in 1775-1778 had frustrated the British: They had hoped that if Washington’s army could be shattered, colonists loyal to the king would

easily restore British authority. But although Washington had been beaten in several small battles, he prudently would not allow another "9 Hunter (x 788:56-8), Jamaica and St. Lucia; Kopperman (2007) and O’Shaughnessy (:9¢3:106-11) on the general demographic plight. The navy’s difficulties in the 1770s and 1780s are analyzed by Wilkinson (2e04). On St. Lucia, the troops remained “more healthy than usual in this Climate” as late as May 1779 according to a letter from James Grant to Gen. Henry Clinton, 12 May 1779, Society of the Cincinnati Library, Manuscript Collection, Lzoo1F518.

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major showdown after his defeat on Long Island (1776). With the internationalization of the war, the standoff of late 1778 and most of 1779 could not last, and time now seemed to favor the Americans. The war, never widely popular in Britain, had become a divisive political issue. Britain needed a new strategy, one that would bring matters to a head quickly.

Britain’s warlords in London and the commander of the army in America, Sir Henry Clinton, settled on a southern strategy. They believed the Loyalists, who in the north had proved too few or too timid to turn the tide, existed in sufficient number in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia.** They also hoped to ruin the lucrative export trades of tobacco and rice in the southern colonies, and so to starve the rebels of funds with which to pay the Continental Army. Encouraged by small-scale successes in Georgia, early in 1780 the British besieged

Charleston,*' the only major city in the south, and took it in May. The Carolinas certainly had loyalists, but they had far more Anopheles mosquitoes. THE CAROLINAS AND THEIR MOSQUITOES

After 1670, Barbados planters and all manner of English had begun to settle in the Carolina coastlands, and by the 1690s South Carolina was a fast-growing slave plantation society.** The local Amerindian population, probably in intermittent decline since the 1520s, shrank rapidly after 1670, making settlement easier. The land here is flat — an early settler likened it to a “Bowling ally.”’* Sluggish rivers snaked through pine and broadleaf forests, and lost their way in cypress swamps and bogs before seeping into estuaries and the sea. 2° Lord Germain, now responsible for London’s war strategy, apparently believed

as late as November 1780 that over half of Americans were “well disposed to Britain” (Marshall 2e08:357). On Loyalists in the south, see Smith (1984); Lambert (987); Piecuch (2008). The latter argues that the wagering on Loyalist strength was sound policy. *t Strictly speaking, Charleston was Charles Town until 1783, but I use the modern name throughout. 22, Olwell (:e98); Wood (r97.24); Coclanis (: 989); Edelson (ze); Carney (2001). For the ecological situation, Silver (rage). On the adjacent Georgia coast, see Stewart (:a96), especially chapter 3. 23. “An Old Letter” in Langdon Cheves, ed., The Shaftesbury Papers and Other Records

Relating to Carolina (Charleston: South Carolina Historical Society, 1897), vol. 5: 308, quoted in Coclanis (:989:30) and Morgan (1998:30).

204 MOSQUITO EMPIRES By 1730, rice was the principal crop, well suited to the swampy lowlands from Cape Fear to Savannah, called the Lowcountry.** Raising

rice in these environments required endless labor, such as diking and draining swamps, and careful management of irrigation. (Indigo, the second most important plantation crop, also involved irrigation and was also first grown on the inland swamps.) Some slaves from West African rice-growing regions had the necessary know-how for rice cultivation in tidal estuaries and inland swamps, and by 1760 their knowledge,

skill, and labor had helped create a thriving plantation regime that exported tens of thousands of tons of rice each year. They were making the swamps into “the golden mines of Carolina.”** In all, between 1700

and 1780 planters imported roughly 100,000 slaves who spent their remaining days building and maintaining creole landscapes, analogous

to those of the sugar zones of the Caribbean.*® As in Surinam, the landscape the slaves created was ideal habitat for Anopheles mosquitoes. Chapters 2 and 3 explained something of the ecology of Anopheles and

malaria as it applied to the West Indies. In the Carolinas, the details of anopheline and malaria ecology were different — and the details matter. Several anopheline species existed in the Americas. The dominant

one in the eastern United States in the twentieth century was the Anopheles quadrimaculatus.** It presumably reigned in the eighteenth century as well, an inference supported by its very widespread distribution today, from Florida to the Dakotas and from Mexico to Quebec.** It needs temperatures between 10°C (50°F) and 40°C (104°F), with its ideal around 35°C (95°F) and humid — midsummer weather in the Carolinas and Virginia. In the Carolina Lowcountry, the climate was

4 Exports (which accounted for almost all production) averaged a little over 3 million pounds annually in the 1710s, 20 million pounds in the 1730s, and 65 million pounds in the 1770s. Figures from Dethloff (:988:41). 5 Johan David Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation (1783-1784) (Philadelphia,

tg11), vol. II, 180, cited in Morgan (98:33). See Wood (97.4); Littlefield (:a8x); Carney (2001); Edelson (2008); and Eltis et al. (200-7) on the installation of the rice economy and the degree of African expertise involved. 2° Numbers from Morgan (?998:61). *7 Kaiser (xga4); O'Malley (:992); Horsfall (1972:134-59). 8 Wood (:74:86) says An. quadrimaculatus was present in the Carolina wetlands when settlers first arrived, citing M.D. Young et al., “The Infectivity of Native Malarias in South Carolina to Anopheles quadrimaculatus,” American Journal of Tropical Medicine, 28(1948), 302-11.

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warm enough for more than six months of the year, allowing upwards of twelve generations of An. quadrimaculatus yearly. An. quadrimaculatus prefer to breed around the edges of bodies of fresh water, such as ponds, swamps, ditches, and irrigated fields. But the larvae

can also survive in brackish water and salt marshes. The larvae thrive best when sheltered by floating or emergent vegetation in warm water spiced with bountiful organic matter, for example, algae and bacteria. In their lifetimes, females (on average) might lay 2,000 eggs in nine to twelve batches. Females hibernate, often in close proximity to humans and domesticated animals, and in spring when temperatures reach 20°C (68°F) they become active again, usually only long enough to lay one more batch of eggs before dying.

After 1690, the Lowcountry plantation environment increasingly provided exemplary conditions for An. quadrimaculatus’ breeding. The creole ecology and rice plantations of the Carolina Lowcountry did for An. Quadrimaculatus what the sugar plantation ecology of the Caribbean did for A. aegypti. Lowland South Carolina suited Anopheles’ habits even before the installation of the rice economy, but the extensive irrigation of fields with shallow and stagnant water, full of organic debris, made good conditions much better. Usually, rice fields got four floodings per year, ensuring that in the warm months conditions suited An. quadrimaculatus larvae. Moreover, slaves built reservoirs to guarantee suffcient supplies of irrigation water, and surrounded fields with networks of ditches and canals.** 79 On the rice-Anopheles link in the U.S. South, see Steelman et al. (:g8s); Sandoski et al. (1987). It may also be that the widespread presence of maize, or corn, helped Anopheles to flourish in the Carolinas. A third of plantations raised maize for sale, and almost all had acres of maize to help feed slaves (Morgan r998:48-50; Edelson 2906:90). Recent research in Ethiopia shows that hybrid maize pollen serves as an ideal food for Anopheles larvae, which are much more likely to survive to the pupal stage if located close enough to maize fields so that the wind carries pollen to their aquatic cradles. In Ethiopia, the relevant Anopheles species is arabiensis, and it is uncertain (to me at least) whether other Anopheles species react so favorably to the presence of maize pollen. Perhaps any pollen would do, and in the Ethiopian case it just happened to be maize. It also happens to be a new hybrid maize, which releases its pollen at just the right season for An. arabiensis larvae. Could the maize grown in the Carolinas in the eighteenth century have released pollen at the right season for An. quadrimaculatus? Possibly, and if so then the Lowcountry plantations would have been especially good incubators for Anopheles. The Ethiopian research is presented in McCann (2008:174-96).

206 MOSQUITO EMPIRES The growth of the Carolina plantation economy helped with anopheline feeding as well as breeding. Full-grown male An. quadrimaculatus typically live only about one week, feeding on nectar and sucrose, and devoting all available energy to finding females of their species. Females

survive one to three weeks, on average. They too can feed on sweet substances but to reproduce, they must find a blood meal. They feed chiefly at dawn and dusk on large mammals including deer, cattle, and horses, but especially humans. Dog or pig blood will serve in a pinch, but chicken and rabbit blood will not do. An. quadrimaculatus are not as efficient as An. gambiae, but as malaria vectors go, they are very good ones, because of their preference for human blood.

The Carolina coastlands had been thinly populated in the seventeenth century. Only with the rise of rice and the importation of Africans

did human population grow quickly. By 1710, there were some 9,000 people (about evenly divided between whites and blacks) in the areas surrounding Charleston, and by 1770 about 88,000 in the Lowcountry, mainly (78%) of African birth or descent.“* Population grew faster still in the backcountry, where malaria took a smaller toll and immigrants more easily found opportunity. In addition to the rapidly growing human population, the Carolinas also offered a menu of deer and cattle blood for the thirsty anophelines.*' South Carolina had seemingly endless herds of deer and a huge deerhide export trade (second in value only to rice). As hunters killed off the deer,

settlers brought in cattle. Lowcountry plantations normally maintained pastures and cattle for their own purposes, sometimes running hundreds of cattle in nearby woods under the management of slave cowboys. The Carolina backcountry had yet more cattle, routinely driven to the coast for sale and slaughter. Almost every plantation had a few horses too,

and more than half kept hogs.** Thanks to rice, the plant kingdom generously contributed to the welfare of Anopheles larvae; thanks to people, deer, and cattle, the animal kingdom fed female Anopheles. 3° Coclanis (:989:68). The colony as a whole had about 175,000 people, nearly 60% of African descent (Gordon 2993:17). 3" In Louisiana at least, higher cattle density in rice regions raises mosquito populations (McLaughlin and Focks rags). 3, Morgan (x:998:52) has figures on livestock on Lowcountry plantations, 1730— 1776; Edelson (2e06:113-24) explains land use patterns. The proliferation of cattle, hogs, and sheep attracted the attention of Thomas Ashe in 1682 (Ashe r682), reprinted in Salley (t9:1:138-59, esp. p. 149).

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In general, conditions for An. quadrimaculatus in the Carolina Lowcountry improved markedly throughout the eighteenth century. Even

the weather cooperated. From the 1750s to the 1770s, in South Carolina conditions were wetter than average and spring rains, important for mosquito populations, were especially abundant.’* Contemporary Carolinians often noted how thick the mosquitoes were in summer and early fall. Eliza Pinckney complained of “muskatoes and sand flies in abundance,” and George Ogilvie of “swarms of Muskitoes [drawing] blood at every pore.”** Dense populations of vectors and of hosts improved the odds for the transmission of malaria. MALARIA, MALARIA RESISTANCE, AND MALARIA AWARENESS

With reliably abundant crops of An. quadrimaculatus, malarial plasmodia

easily moved from human to human. Slave ships brought new strains of malaria from West and Central Africa, or from the West Indies, every year. As in Surinam, the rice economy ensured that there would be many human bloodstreams swimming with plasmodia amid the best breeding grounds for An. quadrimaculatus, maximizing the chances of infection among mosquitoes. In the summer and early fall, the Lowcountry hummed with hungry mosquitoes, and after a few bites almost all of them carried malaria.**

Thus in the years after 1690, the Carolina coastlands increasingly became a perilous landscape, but more perilous for some than for others. People of West African origin or descent generally had less to fear from

malaria than anyone else. People born and raised locally, if they survived childhood, normally carried strong resistance and had little cause for concern, although they might experience recurrent vivax malaria (which stays with one forever and can flare up from time to time). People who came to the Carolinas from malaria-free zones — mainly from high latitudes — ran great risks.

33, Climate data from Stahle and Cleaveland (:9¢2); and Stahle, personal communication 2 August 2005. 34 Eliza Pinckney quoted in Wood (:974:75-6); Ogilvie in Edelson (200%:145). A traveler quoted in Wood (:974:76) likened mosquitoes’ “venom” to that of rattlesnakes. 35. Packard (2007:57-8).

208 MOSQUITO EMPIRES By the middle of the eighteenth century, everyone in the Carolina Lowcountry grudgingly accepted malaria as a routine fact of life and death.*” Despite their comparative safety from malaria, slaves considered

rice work the most dangerous to their health. The slave population did not increase of its own accord until the 1750s or perhaps the 1770s, in large part because of high disease mortality among children in which malaria figured prominently. Contemporaries recognized a connection between swamps in general —and rice plantations in particular — and fevers. Lord Adam Gordon, a British officer traveling through the Carolinas in 1764-1765 unknow-

ingly identified the link: “In general what part of South Carolina is planted, is counted unhealthy, owing to the Rice-dams and Swamps, which as they occasion a great quantity of Stagnated water in Summer, never fails to increase the Number of Insects, and to produce fall fevers and Agues....”°’ Thomas Jefferson regretted that rice cultivation “requir[es] the whole country to be laid under water during a season of the year, [and] sweeps off numbers of the inhabitants annually with pestilential fevers.”?*> Whites tried to spend the summers away from the rice plantations, preferably well inland where malaria was less prevalent. In the years before the American Revolution, the most prosperous families summered in Rhode Island to avoid the fever season.“* Gradually, people learned not to build their homes next to swamps or rice fields.*°

However, this knowledge did not prevent what contemporaries often called “country fever” from ravaging the Lowcountry population in the

eighteenth century. As a German visitor put it in 1783, “Carolina is in the spring a paradise, in the summer a hell, and in the autumn a 3© Chaplin (993) provides a sense of how fearsome and familiar whites in South Carolina found malaria, as do Merrens and Terry (:@84). Miranda (1983:33) notes how agues were routine for Lowcountry whites. He visited in August— October 1783. I owe this citation to my colleague Alison Games. Childs (1940) on the early history of malaria in the Lowcountry. 37, Quoted in Duffy (:983:213). 38 Quoted in Carney (200%:147). 39 In this respect, white Carolinians imitated behavior then routine in the marshlands of East Anglia and Kent, where summer malaria was a fact of life in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries. Vicars in those parishes made a point of residing well inland so as to avoid malaria (Dobson :937:295—7). 49° Wood (19'74:74).

LORD CORNWALLIS VS. ANOPHELES QUADRIMACULATUS = 209

hospital.”*' Every summer and fall, especially in wetter years, it carried off thousands. In Charleston (afflicted by yellow fever as well as malaria)

in the three decades before 1750, three people were buried for every one baptized — and everyone considered Charleston healthier than its hinterland.** The European population in the Lowcountry could not sustain itself biologically until the 1770s, before which time it grew only because of strong flows of immigrants. Newcomers from Britain, lacking all resistance unless they were from the marshy and malarial parts of East Anglia and Kent, were the most likely to suffer and die. The seasonality of death in the Lowcountry shows the dangers of malaria: In one parish, 77 percent of all those who died before age twenty did so in the malarial months from August to November. The culling of children reveals the same dangers: 57 percent of males and 33 percent of females baptized died before age five, and go percent of those who died in their first year perished in those four malarial months.*’ The survivors’ bloodstreams

were swimming with malarial parasites, a standing reservoir of future infections that would menace newcomers without experienced immune systems. MALARIA VS. THE BRITISH ARMY IN THE SOUTHERN

COLONIES, 1780-1781

This was the Lowcountry environment into which the British Army stepped, in force, in early 1780. Sir Henry Clinton (1738-1795), the chief of all British forces in North America, had commanded the siege of Charleston, but soon after its successful end he returned to New York, leaving the infantry in the hands of Major General Charles Cornwallis.

Lord Cornwallis (1738-1805) was a graduate of Cambridge, Turin’s military academy, and of several European campaigns in the Seven 4™ Johan David Schoeph, Travels in the Confederation (1783-1784) (Philadelphia, IQII, 2:172), cited in Merrens and Terry (1984:549).

4 Duffy (:983:212-13). Fraser (rg8a) includes mentions of several yellow fever epidemics, notably in the mid-1740s. Yellow fever seems to have made its first appearance in the 1690s, about the same time as malaria. 43 Merrens and Terry (:e84) and Terry (x98::92-3) cited in Packard (2907:58). Dobson (:¢89:271-3, 294) shows that malaria was the chief reason the southern colonies were less healthy than the northern. Settler demography is summarized

in Coclanis (:989:42-3). Only the wealthiest could afford cinchona bark; see Wood (:97.4:76).

210 MOSQUITO EMPIRES Years’ War. A career army man and an earl related to prime ministers and archbishops, he had excellent political connections (he had served as aide-de-camp to the king). In an army led by amateurs, Cornwallis was unusually professional and dedicated to his craft.**

Upon taking over at Charleston, Cornwallis presided over about 9,000 regulars and an awkward political alliance. He looked forward to the support of Loyalists, especially in the backcountry. He also expected

and found allies in the slave population, half a million strong in the southern colonies. In Virginia in 1775 the royal governor promised freedom to slaves willing to fight against rebels, and in June 1779 Clinton proclaimed that blacks who fought for the Crown would be eranted protection and freedom at the war’s end. Thousands of slaves traded their bondage for an ambivalent reception in the British Army, where they normally toiled as laborers.**

The heart of the British southern strategy lay with the Loyalists. Clinton and Cornwallis hoped that if the British Army could temporarily secure a given region, Loyalists would then declare for the king — as many had done in Georgia a year or two before — and reliably hold and administer territory for the crown.*” Thus, the regular army would

be free to move on and repeat the exercise elsewhere. With only a modest commitment of men and resources — all that was available given Britain’s worldwide entanglements — the southern colonies could plausibly be won through this policy of Americanization of the war.*?

Cornwallis and his men faced enemies both human and microbial.

The British capture of Charleston and 5,000 rebel Americans took precious months of cool weather in early 1780. To counter this British triumph, Congress dispatched a small army to counter the British. It was to be led by General Horatio Gates, the victor of Saratoga. Gates never commanded more than 1,600 regulars. But Cornwallis also had to worry about irregular forces throughout the Carolinas, the revolutionary militias skilled in guerrilla tactics. And deadliest of all, as spring’s paradise gave way to summer’s hell, he had to worry about malaria. In pursuing the southern strategy, the British put an army in the awkward position 44 Wickwire and Wickwire (x97) and Frey (1981:18-19) for a biography. 45 Piecuch (2008); Frey (¢981:18-20). 4° The British had seized Savannah late in 1778 and held it until the end of the war. A joint Franco-American force tried to retake it in October 1779, but suffered catastrophic disease mortality. Wilson (2ges) reviews the southern campaigns before 1780.

47 See Shy (:990:193-212).

LORD CORNWALLIS VS. ANOPHELES QUADRIMACULATUS _2II

noted at the outset of this chapter. Cornwallis needed to find a place where ships could reach his troops but malarial mosquitoes could not — but there was no such place in the South between May and November. British soldiers coming to America in the 1770s and 1780s arrived in a vulnerable state. The rank and file of the British Army had often suffered from malnutrition for much of their lives, and had survived many diseases. Joining the Army often improved their diet but not necessarily

their health. If sent to America, the men first had to withstand the hazards of their ports of embarkation, which offered all the unhealthy temptations, and many of the pathogens, known to man. They then faced a cruise of six weeks or more, in crowded conditions with sometimes spoiling food. Regiments shipped out to the West Indies during 1780 lost 5 to 25 percent of their men while crossing the ocean.** Sailing to North America was usually a little healthier because the journey was shorter. But nonetheless, many died en route and more fell sick. Arriving in the Americas brought men into an alien disease environment. Conditions in camps, barracks, and garrisons anywhere, North America included, were often crowded and filthy, although in the eighteenth century the British Army was developing sanitary regulations that helped check some infectious diseases somewhat.*? To exacerbate matters, British soldiers in America were often underfed because of the difficulties of supplying an army from across the sea, making the men more vulnerable to infections generally, and malaria especially. Those soldiers who hailed from Britain or Germany came overwhelm-

ingly from malaria-free environments. Of the 15,000 men who joined the army in 1778, for example, two-thirds were Scots. When sent to America, British soldiers were typically only weeks or months away from their homes. By 1780, many had served for long months in America, but mainly in New England or New York. One regiment had been in the south since 1778, and most of its men probably had one or two bouts of malaria under their belts. No regiments had served in the West Indies or in India (where the British East India Company maintained its 45 British Library, Additional MSS 38,345 “An Account of the Number of Troops

Sent to the West Indies for the Years 1775-1782.” On dysentery’s role, see Haycock (2002) — a reference brought to my attention by Pratik Chakrabati. French ships sailing to the West Indies lost somewhat fewer according to Buchet

(xga7) because the journey was shorter and because they carried wine rather than beer. Beer spoiled, obliging British ships to stop in Madeira for wine and water, slowing their passage and raising their mortality.

49 Cantlie (x97); see also Frey (1983:22-52).

212 MOSQUITO EMPIRES own army). Thus, in the great majority of cases their immune systems were unprepared for the challenges they faced from malaria.*” Doctors were normally of little help. The British Army maintained a medical establishment, much expanded since the 1750s, but it had difficulty recruiting the best doctors of the day. Even the most skilled doctors probably killed more patients than they cured. Ordinary soldiers suffering from malaria (or indeed almost anything) could expect to be bled and purged if they fell into the hands of doctors. A healthy distrust of doctors was commonplace in the British (and American) military. English folk remedies for ague (mentioned in Chapter 3) did no good, nor could the cures soldiers might learn in America. Americans tried powders made from barks or roots of dogwood, tulip, and peach trees, and downed concoctions of brimstone and sugar as well as water from iron mines. Indeed, Americans envied the skills of the British military medicine, less surprising perhaps when one considers American doctors sometimes applied poultices of chipmunk brains to combat wounds. °’

The greatest exception to the lethal impact of eighteenth-century doctors involved malaria and “the bark” (discussed in Chapter 3). But cinchona bark was expensive, and the British Army never had enough. In 1778, the Spanish forbade the export of cinchona bark, explicitly trying to keep it for their use and deny it to hostile powers. Moreover, what little the British could get was needed more urgently in India and the West Indies than in the Carolinas. So an army based in Charleston and expected to operate in the southern colonies faced acute dangers to its health with little medical help.*’ Cornwallis was fully aware of the malaria problem. British forces active in Georgia and South Carolina before 1780 had suffered in the ague season and tried to time operations to avoid it. Soon after taking

over from Clinton in South Carolina, Cornwallis wrote that: “This climate (except at Charleston) is so bad within one hundred miles of 5° Frey (xa8x:3-21); Babits and Howard (2009:79-94). 5' See Chapter 3; Frey (x983:47-52). On American malaria remedies, Kalm (77x, 1:373—6); Stephenson (2007:168—9, 172). Middlekauf (2e05:525-34) and Dun-

can (:933) review medical matters in the Continental Army. One American soldier, James Fergus, when urged to enter a hospital in Charleston in 1779, replied, “I [have] seen hospitals in Philadelphia, Princeton, and Newark and would prefer dying in the open air...” Dann (x98:184). As far as I can determine, by the 1770s Americans no longer resorted to the seventeenth-century folk cure for malaria of drinking horse-dung posset, mentioned in Childs (1940:263). Posset is a spiced drink of hot sweetened milk curdled with wine or ale. 5? Pérez-Mejia (2002:32); Frey (x983:47).

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the coast, from the end of June until the middle of October, that troops could not be stationed [here] during the period without a certainty of their being rendered useless for some time for military service, if not entirely lost.”°? Eighteen months into the southern campaign, if not before, the British director of the war, Lord Germain, also recognized the hazards of the Lowcountry summer and early autumn. He instructed Cornwallis in June 1781 to employ his (modest) reinforcements as “a co-operating army until southern provinces are reduced, or the season becomes too advanced for active service.”°* Recognizing the problem did not mean the British could solve it.

As Cornwallis appreciated, staying in Charleston was the healthiest option. Its position on a breezy promontory kept Anopheles mosquito numbers down and saved Charleston from a heavy burden of malaria. Charleston suffered occasional outbreaks of yellow fever, but, happily for the British Army and everyone else in the city, none occurred during the war. Venturing outside Charleston, however, invited malaria. If the southern strategy was to work, then Cornwallis would have to seize territory in the winter and spring and turn it over to Loyalists before late summer. He got off to a slow start: The siege of Charleston lasted until May, leaving only a few months before “the country fever” would set in. In the first weeks after the capture of Charleston, Cornwallis moved quickly to secure important inland points such as the villages of Camden and Ninety-Six, and lesser bases such as Cheraw and Hanging Rock, leaving garrisons large and small. This was the British Army’s largestscale attempt to occupy American territory in the war. The rebels had no army yet in South Carolina, and their militias prudently melted away. The British set about finding the Loyalists who could control Georgia and the Carolinas for them while the local population, revolutionary and Loyalist, engaged in an informal civil war marked by frequent atrocities. By July 1780, the militias were active again. In a foretaste of what lay in store, a British garrison had to retire from Cheraw in midsummer because two-thirds of the men had fallen ill with “Fevers @ Ague.”*® 53 Cornwallis to Germain, 20 August 1780, Germain Papers, Clements Library, University of Michigan (quoted in Duncan :¢33:312). Wilson (20¢8:67, 71) on pre-1780 health problems of the British army in the south. 54 Germain to Cornwallis, 4 June 1781, PRO 30/11/6, f. 215-16. 55 Jackson (170%:300); Pancake (x98s8:82). McCandless (2e07) provides several quotations indicating how serious malaria was in the British Army in Georgia and South Carolina. His is the only account I have seen that puts proper weight on this factor in shaping the southern campaigns.

214 MOSQUITO EMPIRES In August of 1780, before malaria had taken firm hold of his army, Cornwallis managed to deliver a smashing blow to Gates’ army at Camden. Gates’ force of 3,700, mostly militia, scattered. His regulars (800

men) retreated pell-mell to North Carolina. It was the last time the British would administer a convincing defeat to the rebels. Cornwallis lost only 68 men (of about 2,240) in battle at Camden, but by now the vulnerability of the British Army to malaria began to tell. He wrote to Clinton (August 23rd) that” “Our sickness is great and truly alarming. The officers are particularly affected; Doctor Hayes and almost all the hospital surgeons are laid up. Every person of my family and every Publick officer of the Army is now incapable of doing duty.”5° Cornwallis’ pursuit of Gates was hampered by the fact that he had 800 men, more than one in every three, in hospital in Camden. In the months to come, he would find his mobility constrained by morbidity: He had to protect sick men, who could easily be surprised, captured, or killed by the numerous bands of guerrillas roaming the Carolinas.*? The British occupation strategy placed some 9,000 men in the Lowcountry and Piedmont of the Carolinas and Georgia. In that number were about 7,000 Britons, 500 Germans, and perhaps 1,200 to 1,500 Loy-

alists in units from South Carolina, Pennsylvania (mainly Irish-born), New Jersey, and New York. As the mosquitoes began to bite, energized by a warm summer of 1780, malaria spread. The easy communications of South Carolina, which had many wagon roads built for the highly commercial plantation economy, and still more navigable streams and rivers, meant that troops could move around quickly.°* Even those prostrated by malaria could be wheeled or floated to the nearest military hospital.

In this way, malaria migrated quickly via the bodies of sickly British soldiers (and infected men who had not yet fallen ill), whom previously uninfected mosquitoes could then bite. As more men fell sick, more mosquitoes bit infective men, and the British Army by late August hosted its own epidemic, to which most of the local population (including Cornwallis’ Loyalists from the Carolinas) was resistant. Cornwallis 5° Quoted in Duncan (:931:313). Dr John Hayes was Cornwallis’ chief medical offcer. By his “family,” Cornwallis presumably meant those officers on his personal staff.

57 Savas and Dameron (2006:249—52) for the numerical data. Camden and other South Carolina battles are succinctly related in Gordon (2903) and Pancake

(s98s). 58 Edelson (200:130—2, 151-2) discusses transport and the spread of disease in civilian contexts.

LORD CORNWALLIS VS. ANOPHELES QUADRIMACULATUS — 215

wrote that one regiment was “so totally demolished by sickness, that it will not be fit for actual service for some months.”*? Looking back six months later, he wrote that his army had been “nearly ruined” by disease in the fall of 1780.°° Cornwallis fell ill himself. In early October, a thousand of his Loyalists were defeated, and a quarter of them killed, at King’s Mountain (50 kilometers west of Charlotte) while Cornwallis lay feverish 40 kilometers away. The commander of his cavalry, a law-

school dropout with a savage reputation, Banastre Tarleton, was also too sick to ride to the rescue of the Loyalists that day, despite an urgent request from the Loyalists’ leader.

Cornwallis and Tarleton may have inadvertently contributed to the malaria burden of the British Army by buying or requisitioning cattle, hogs, chickens, and other edible mammals. When far from Charleston and other harbors, the British Army had to acquire food as best it could, which no doubt reduced the livestock and fowl populations of South Carolina, especially in the immediate vicinity of British regiments. With

fewer mammals on which to feed, the An. quadrimaculatus of South Carolina focused their ambitions still more on human blood, improving their efficiency as malaria vectors.” In any case, as long as conditions remained warm and humid, mosquitoes would bite and breed. Only cool weather could save the British Army. By November 1780, the change of the seasons came to Cornwallis’

rescue. His chief surgeon, John Hayes, considered that “health once more begins to smile on us” in mid-November, when he counted only 59 Cornwallis to Clinton, 29 August 1780 (quoted in Pancake r98s:115). 6° Cornwallis to Clinton, ro April 1781, Clinton Papers, University of Michigan (cited in Frey r98r:43).

6t As noted in Chapter 3, it seems that larger cattle populations allow higher survival rates for mosquitoes and can contribute to higher malaria rates where people and their animals live close together. But still more effective for communicating malaria is a situation with high cattle populations suddenly reduced, leaving large mosquito populations in search of blood meals. Sota and Mogi

(x98); Bouma and Rowland (:a9s); for a general review, Saul (2003). An intriguing further possibility is that breeding conditions grew better still for An. quadrimaculatus with the onset of war in the south. Slaves ran off, others died in the smallpox epidemics, and so maintenance of dams and other waterworks in the rice zones suffered. Moreover, there was occasional damage wrought by marauding armies and guerillas eager to destroy their enemies’ property. Water splashed and spilled everywhere. Quite possibly, the only thing better for anopheline larvae than a rice plantation was a ruined rice plantation. These ruminations are inspired by Chaplin (:992:37-9).

210 MOSQUITO EMPIRES 198 sick in the hospital of the Charleston garrison, and only five dead in

the previous week. In anticipation of further encounters with malaria, Hayes reported that he had ordered “two hundred weight of the best

powdered bark.” The military doctor Robert Jackson served in the southern campaign and his experience gives some sense of the challenge posed by malaria to the British Army. He first saw duty in Georgia in 1779, where he noted that by the end of April, after several healthy months, the “intermitting fever soon made its appearance, and spread so rapidly, that before the

end of June, very few remained, not only in the regiment, but even in the garrison, who had not suffered more or less from this raging disease.”*? After the siege of Charleston, Jackson served with the main

body of Cornwallis’ forces in South Carolina, and ministered to the many sick soldiers at Cheraw. Matters did not improve much while the warm weather lasted, as Jackson related: “During the month of August [1780], anda great part of September, the army remained encamped near Camden. The weather was excessively hot, and fevers were frequent — sometimes malignant and dangerous; though they preserved, in general,

the distinct character of intermittents.”°* Only winter brought relief. Jackson continued: The campaign of the following winter was a very active one. The army traveled over a great extent of country, and was considered by many as performing very hard service; but I have the satisfaction to add, that notwithstanding occasional forced marches, wading of

rivers, exposure to rain, accidental scarcity of bread, and no great profusion of beef, with the total want of rum, the troops enjoyed in general a most perfect state of health. Valetudinarians were restored to perfect vigour; and when we arrived at Wilmington, at the latter end of April, there scarcely was a man in the regiment to which I belonged, who was not fit for the duty of the field.”

In the healthier conditions of the colder months, Cornwallis’ forces lost a battle at the Cowpens (January 1781) and held the field after the bloody encounter of Guilford Courthouse (March). The two battles cost 62 Hayes to Cornwallis, 15 November 1780, PRO, 30/11/4; “Return of Sick and Wounded in H.M. Hospital at Charleston” November 1780, PRO 30/11/4. °3 Jackson (1793:295). °4 Jackson (193:300-1). 6 Jackson (t79%:303-4).

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him about 200 men killed. Only by fighting and winning such battles could he hope to win the war.” By not fighting, he could only lose. After Camden, Cornwallis had been engaged in an exhausting game of cat-and-mouse with American forces led after December 1780 by Nathanael Greene. Greene, a Rhode Island Quaker born in 1742, had distinguished himself in the early years of the war as a quartermaster and logistical magician. Aware of the debacle at Camden, Greene took care not to risk all on a single battle — he lost several small ones — and excelled in drawing Cornwallis’ men deeper and deeper into the country, further and further from British supply bases. Although normally the superior force in any set-piece battle, the British Army did not have nearly enough men to hold the

country it won, and the Loyalists, on whom the British counted to administer and police secured regions, were unwilling to perform their assigned task until they saw clearly that Cornwallis would survive and win. So Cornwallis chased the Americans the length and breadth of the Carolinas, hoping for a decisive encounter that would change the political balance. Greene prudently would not give it to him. At one point, in a desperate attempt to catch Greene’s forces as they retreated, Cornwallis ordered all his supply train burned, except for salt, ammunition, and — revealingly — medicine.

Although Greene’s forces suffered from diseases as well, and many more died from them than from battle, on the whole his men enjoyed better health than did the British. His ragged medical department, short of supplies in part thanks to Tarleton’s habit of capturing or destroying medical stores, had less to do with this than the vigilant immune systems of his men. Nonetheless, Greene had reason to fear malaria in the warm months. In the mid-summer of 1781, having exhausted his supply of cinchona bark, Greene took his army to the hills of the Santee district,

thought to be salubrious. Some of his regulars did suffer badly that fall, and the next year, in the fall of 1782, more than a hundred died from malaria.’ However, at most points roughly two-thirds of his force 6° Babits (1998) and Babits and Howard (2009) on these battles. 67 Gillett (xggo:119-24). One of Greene’s colonels, Otho Williams, wrote to him from the High Hills of Santee on 10 October 1781 that fever was so rampant that “Battalions can scarce form Companies” and no physicians or surgeons were healthy (Conrad 1997, 9:440). In his memoir, Henry Lee wrote: “The soldiers of Greene’s army may truly call these hills benignant. Twice our general there resorted, with his sick, his wounded, and worn-down troops; and twice we were restored to health and strength, by its elevated dry situation...” (Lee 88o:448).

218 MOSQUITO EMPIRES consisted of locally recruited militia men, veterans of the Carolinas’ disease environment and in particular survivors of repeated bouts of malaria. Greene thought little of them, saying 20,000 militia were worth less than 500 soldiers,” but they did have some malaria resistance thanks to having spent about twenty summers in the Carolinas. Even the regulars whom Gates and Greene commanded carried considerable resistance to malaria. Their infantry came from Virginia (seven

regiments), Maryland (seven), North Carolina (four), and Delaware (one), almost all from coastal, tidewater, or piedmont counties — which

after all is where most the population lived in the 1770s. The two artillery and three cavalry regiments serving in the southern campaign hailed from Maryland, Virginia, or the Philadelphia area. As in every eighteenth-century army, most of the Continentals came from farming backgrounds, but in Greene’s regiments quite a few were maritime men whose jobs in the many small ports of the Chesapeake had vanished with the British blockade of the Bay. Whether farmworkers, dockers, or something else entirely, almost all the American regulars would have had lengthy experience with vivax malaria and often some with falciparum as well. It was probably accident rather than design, but the Americans chose the right units to fight in the southern theater.” After Guilford Courthouse in the spring of 1781, Cornwallis found himself in an awkward position. He had marched far from his bases to get at Greene’s army because he needed a decisive victory with the fever season coming on. He held the field after the battle, but almost all the Americans (about 4,500 in all) got away. The British killed only seventy. Greene could lose every battle and still win the campaign. As

Greene later put it, “We fight, get beat, rise and fight again.”’* The Americans had slipped away, and the fever season would soon return — a most unwelcome prospect for the British Army. 68 Greene to Governor Nash, 3 February 1781, quoted in Middlekauf (2008:510, n. 22). 6 Details on origins of regiments from Wright (%983:195—-351); Babits and Howard (2009:75). If the selection of mainly southern and mid-Atlantic troops was made

with disease resistance in mind, I have not seen any indication of it. Randall Packard alerted me to the importance of ascertaining specifics of the geographic origins of the manpower of the Continental Army. Duffy (:983:204-14) on the presence of malaria south of New England. Duffy uses words such as “universal” and “omnipresent.” See also Rutman and Rutman (:976). 7° Green to Lafayette, 1 May 1781, printed in Idzerda (1977:74—-5).

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In April of 1781, Cornwallis moved his force back to the coast to Wilmington, North Carolina, in hopes of rest, reinforcement, and resupply. His army had recovered its health, but as he contemplated the onset of the summer months, he concluded he would have to go inland again, “to the upper parts of the Country, where alone I can hope to preserve the troops from the fatal sickness, which so nearly ruined the Army last autumn.”’' Another malaria season, he recognized, would ruin much of what he had left. The British Army had had two chances in the malaria-free months (December through May) of 1780 and 1781 to take South Carolina and install Loyalist control. In 1780, they were busy besieging Charleston until May. In 1781 they chased Greene out of the Carolinas but could not destroy the rebel army. Decisive victory eluded them, and the steamy summer eroded their manpower. Another summer amid the mosquitoes and fevers of the Carolina Lowcountry would only lower their chances of prevailing in America. Cornwallis concluded he had had enough of the Carolinas. He did not have enough men to hold the up-country, and the Loyalists would not do it for him as long as the war’s outcome lay in doubt. He could not keep his army healthy in the Lowcountry, and fever deaths depleted his strength so that even maintaining his garrisons was

becoming difficult. Tarleton later reflected on the failure, remarking on “fatigues from the climate and the country, which would appear insuperable in theory and almost incredible in the relation. ..aclimate, at that season, peculiarly inimical to man....”’* Tarleton exaggerated in one respect: The climate was particularly inimical to British and German men, not to “man” in general. So bowing to these unpleasant realities, on April 25th Cornwallis gave up on the Carolinas. He left garrisons to hold Charleston and a few other strategic posts, and moved the bulk of his force northward toward Virginia and the Chesapeake, to join forces with a smaller British Army in a land he hoped would prove more welcoming and more salubrious. He did so on his own initiative, without orders from his superiors, who

complained when they learned of it.?? Neither they nor Cornwallis knew it, but he was fleeing from An. quadrimaculatus. 7" Cornwallis to Clinton, ro April 1781, Clinton Papers, University of Michigan (cited in Frey :983:43). 7? Tarleton (:783:507). 73 Greene (2005:4-5, 7-9) has an interesting discussion of the move to Virginia.

220 MOSQUITO EMPIRES YORKTOWN

In Virginia, small British forces had been raiding freely, opposed only by the militia and a few regulars. Since March 1781, rebellious Virginians

had fought under the command of the 22-year old aristocrat, MarieJoseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette. Lafayette (1757-1834), received a French military education from age eleven, a generous inheritance at age thirteen, and an opulent dowry at age sixteen upon his marriage to the daughter of a duke. At nineteen he accepted a commission as Major-General in the Continental Army. He fought for years at Washington’s side, and when sent to Virginia eventually accumulated a force of about 5,000. After Cornwallis united with the existing British units in Virginia, Lafayette’s mission was to keep close to Cornwallis and prevent him from intercepting the supplies that must be sent south to Greene’s army. He carefully avoided giving

a pitched battle (he lost the largest one he fought, at Green Spring), playing his own game of cat and mouse with Cornwallis as Greene had done before.’ After launching a few successful raids in the Virginia piedmont in May 1781, Cornwallis received orders to move to the tidewater coast. His commander, Clinton, fearful that the French West Indies fleet under Admiral de Grasse might join Washington’s army to attack New York, had instructed Cornwallis to find some “healthy” anchorage along the coast from which it would be possible, with suitable transports, to move the army to New York within days if summoned. Cornwallis obeyed but objected, wanting to avoid the coast. On June 30th, from Williamsburg, he wrote: “I submit to your Excellency’s consideration whether it is worth while to hold a sickly defensive post in this Bay.”’* He knew, as everyone did, that the shores of the Chesapeake were reliably malarial

in summertime.*’ Eight days later he returned to the issue, writing that his position “only gives us some acres of an unhealthy swamp.””’ 74 Useful narratives of Yorktown, albeit inattentive to disease, include Davis

(x90); Bougerie and Lesouef (1992); Ketchum (zea); Hallahan (2s); Greene (2008); Grainger (2008). James’ journal (1896:111-29) provides an account of the siege from a naval officer’s viewpoint. 75 Cornwallis to Clinton, 30 June 1781, PRO 30/11/74, f. 26. 7 By the 1680s, malaria (including falciparum) was established around the Chesapeake, and deeply entrenched by the 1750s (Rutman and Rutman :97%). See also Kalm (237, 1:365—-76); Duffy (x983:204-14). 77 Cornwallis to Clinton, 8 July 1781, PRO 30/11/71, f. 33.

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On July 17th, he reported he had “many sick.” Cornwallis wanted reinforcements from Clinton, and Clinton wanted reinforcements from Cornwallis. But Clinton was in charge, so Cornwallis grudgingly kept to the tidewater estuaries of the James and York rivers, and on August Ist chose to install his army at Yorktown. A declining tobacco and slave port on the York River estuary, Yorktown hosted a population of perhaps 2,000. Cornwallis dug in on a low bluff overlooking the town and the estuary, between two marshy creeks. According to one Pennsylvanian, rice was growing nearby.?* It was good mosquito country and a bad time:

the hot and humid August of 1781.°° Meanwhile, to Clinton’s surprise the French fleet sailed not for New York but for the Chesapeake. For de Grasse, as for the French and British generally, the West Indies commanded a higher priority than the North

American colonies, but during the hurricane season fleets normally avoided major operations in the Caribbean. Admiral de Grasse was

7 Cornwallis to Clinton, 17 July 1781, PRO 30/11/74, f. 44. He reported 934 sick on June 15, 1,044 on July 15, and 1,222 on August 15 according to various “Return|s] of the Troops under Earl Cornwallis” in the Clinton Papers, cited in Wickwire and Wickwire (1970:455). However, in early September he reported the army was not very sickly — a situation soon to change. See Davis (:970:138). 79 Linn and Egle (1896:720), diary entry for 6 September 1781. This section of the “Diary of the Pennsylvania Line” was written by William Feldman.

8° Every August is hot at Yorktown. Johann Conrad Déhla, the Hessian diarist, wrote on 31 August that the whole month had been “very hot” (Dohla :g9¢:160). Greene (2005:91, 133) says the weather remained warm and humid into September and October. A French officer complained of brutal heat in his diary on 28 September (Clermont-Crévecoeur :972:57). Captain Benjamin Bartholomew (2002:16-17), from Chester County Pennsylvania, found early August just south of Richmond, “intolerable Warm,” but 11-18 August, near Yorktown, cooler. Bartholomew noted rains in early September and again October 11-12. Several weather observations for August and September 1781, emphasizing heavy rains and warm weather until 21 September appear in the “Diary of the Pennsylva-

nia Line,” (Linn and Egle :&8&:716-33). After a mention of cooler temperatures on 21 September, the weather observations stop. Several more appear in “Revolutionary War Diary by an Officer of the Third Pennsylvania Continental Line, May, 26 1781 — July 4, 1782,” Society of the Cincinnati Library, Manuscript Collection L2007G37. The years 1780 and 1781 were also rainier than the 1928-1978 average on the Virginia coast, improving breeding conditions for Anopheles, according to the tree-ring data compiled for the LamontDoherty Earth Observatory’s North American Drought Atlas, available online at: http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu/SQURCES/.LDEO/.TRL/.NADA2004/.pdsiatlas.html (consulted 14 July 2008).

222 MOSQUITO EMPIRES thus willing to remain in North American waters for a few weeks until the risk of hurricanes faded. The French fleet hemmed Cornwallis in, presenting Washington with an improbable opportunity. The Congress

was bankrupt and earlier in 1781 the Continental Army had twice mutinied. Yet now Washington had a chance to inflict a crushing defeat

before the war destroyed the morale of the Americans. So he seized the chance and marched south, together with a French force led by General Rochambeau (Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau, 1725-1807, a career army man), to join the small army under the command of Lafayette. *' It had been Rochambeau who quietly

advised the French fleet to sail to the Chesapeake rather than to New York and had urged Washington to exploit the opportunity that arose in August 1781. While Washington and Rochambeau marched south in early September 1781, Admiral de Grasse drove off a British fleet at the Battle of the Capes. The mouth of the Chesapeake remained sealed. Cornwallis now had the worst of both worlds: His army was entrenched on the coast, at maximum risk to malaria, yet the Royal Navy could not get through to relieve him. When he learned of the approach of Washington and Rochambeau, Cornwallis could only hope that he might hold out long enough for another British fleet to break through and save him.*? Washington and Rochambeau joined Lafayette in Virginia in mid-September, and together they laid siege to Yorktown with over 16,000 regulars, plus some 3,000 militiamen.*? Rochambeau and his officers had plenty of useful experience: Yorktown was Rochambeau’s fifteenth siege. Clinton promised another fleet and a relief expedition at the soonest opportunity. Until it arrived, Cornwallis would need all his men, and need them healthy. Most of Cornwallis’ men were in their second ague season in the land of An. quadrimaculatus. At most ten percent had served in the south since 1778 and were thus in their fourth season. In the arduous process of building up malaria resistance his troops lagged about twenty years behind the average American soldier. Cornwallis could not close this gap. St The fifteen volumes of Rochambeau Papers are in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. 82 Sands (:@83:1-g2) covers naval aspects of the Yorktown campaign. 3 Reports on the numbers vary only slightly. These come from Ferling (2007:531).

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Dr. Jackson was at Yorktown from the beginning of the siege and left an account of the health of the British Army. His regiment, the 71st, had moved north to Virginia with Cornwallis and had fallen ill with intermittent fevers at Portsmouth in July, but recovered its health. This was too good to last, and “intermittent” fever returned. Jackson claimed his regiment was the healthiest in the army, having endured three campaigns in the South already. (It might also have been the healthiest because Jackson was a great believer in “the bark,” and when he had it he prescribed it quickly and in quantity, sometimes mixed with Virginia snake root; he thought that the textbook remedies of bleeding, blistering, purging, and opiates were less effective in America.)** Only

six or seven men were too sick to serve in the 71st at the beginning of the siege of Yorktown. But intermittent fever, and dysentery (which Jackson regarded as a consequence of malaria),*® afflicted other regiments. Jackson claimed that others suffered because their surgeons used the bark “sparingly,” and that “the Hessians all of them were inveterate enemies of the bark,” and suffered as a result.°° As September turned to October, malaria haunted the British and German core of Cornwallis’ army. Some of his Loyalists, who were just as resistant to malaria as Washington’s troops, suffered from smallpox, as did many of the slaves who had fled Virginia’s plantations.” Beginning their trenches on September 28th, Rochambeau, Lafayette, and Washington conducted the siege competently and quickly. They knew that the French fleet could not linger and had to return to the West Indies. They also knew that come November, the ague season would end and the British Army would recover its vigor. They had good reasons to hurry.

Three weeks later, on October 19th, Cornwallis surrendered. In his account of the siege, Cornwallis gave credit to the siegecraft of the French and Americans but stressed the importance of sickness in 84 Jackson (179%:310—26) on his cures. 5 Insofar as malaria is a strong suppressant of human immune systems, he was right

in making this connection. Dohla (:990:162), a German serving with Cornwallis, mentioned dysentery and “the foul fever” in his diary for 11 September I7Ol.

86 Jackson (3793:304-5, 329). According to the American doctor James Tilton, the French at Yorktown also eschewed the bark (Tilton 1822, cited in Duncan £939:354).

87 Becker (2005:181—7).

224 MOSQUITO EMPIRES hampering his ability to resist. The day after the surrender, he wrote to Clinton:

I have the mortification to inform your Excellency that I have been forced to give up the post of York and Gloucester [a small encampment across the York River estuary] and surrender the troops under my command.... The troops being much weakened by sickness, as well as by the fire of the besiegers; and observing that the enemy had not only secured their flanks but proceeded in every respect with the utmost regularity and caution I could not venture so large sorties as to hope from them any considerable effect....Our numbers had been diminished by the Enemy’s fire, but particularly by Sickness, and the strength and spirits of those

in the works were much exhausted by the fatigue of constant watching and unremitting duty....Our force diminished daily by Sickness and other losses, I was reduced, when we offered to

capitulate on this side to little more than 3,200 rank & file fit for duty including officers, servants, artificiers, and at Gloucester about 600 including cavalry.*®

On October 24th, the long-awaited British fleet from New York arrived at the mouth of the Chesapeake with an army aboard, but it was a week too late. Had Cornwallis been strong enough to hold out another few days, the siege might have ended differently, provided the British navy could defeat the French at sea. Could Cornwallis have avoided defeat? Rochambeau, Tarleton, and subsequently several historians thought that Cornwallis made a crucial error on the night of September 29—30th, when he withdrew his forces from his outermost defenses. However, at this point he expected twentythree warships and 5,000 soldiers as reinforcements from New York,

which Clinton had assured him would sail by October 5th. His army was too depleted by sickness to hold the larger perimeter.*’ Cornwallis

was far from incompetent. He was not running low on stores, except possibly of medicines.” But he did not have enough healthy men. 8S Cornwallis to Clinton, 20 October 1781, PRO 30/11/74, ff. 106-10. 89 Bonsal (:.45:151—2). Grainger (2005: 109-10) and Greene (2008:115—23) have interesting discussions of this choice. James (:89:119—20) shows the British still expected relief as of 5 October. 9° A document filed by Henry Knox, the American artillery officer (“Return of Ordnance and Military Stores Taken at York and Gloucester... 19th of October,

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More generally, to avoid disaster Cornwallis would have had to break

out and escape or else withstand the siege long enough — perhaps a week longer — for the naval situation to change. Either action would have required men he did not have. To break out meant winning a battle against Lafayette in the days before Washington and Rochambeau

arrived and then scampering either south to the Carolinas or north to New York, across rivers and through hostile country. Cornwallis knew he would lose many men if he tried, and he would have to leave his sick troops behind to the tender mercies of American militias.

Withstanding the siege for another week, as every veteran of the Seven Years’ War well knew, meant mounting sorties almost every night

to interfere with the advancing trenches of the besiegers. In effect, it meant trading men for time, to prevent the enemy from placing artillery advantageously. This might have worked — had he held out five more

days the British fleet might have scattered the French squadron and come to Cornwallis’ rescue. Had he held out a few weeks, Admiral de Grasse and the French fleet would have left for the West Indies leaving

any British ships easy access to Yorktown. The French admiral had at first told his allies he would stay only until October 15th. Under pressure, he relented and agreed to stay until the end of October (he left November 4th). But to exploit the Admiral’s eagerness to depart, Cornwallis needed to mount a vigorous defense, trading men for time. Many of the French and Americans arrayed against him found it strange that he did not. Only once (October 16th) did a party of British troops

sneak out at night and attack, spiking a few cannon, bayoneting a few French soldiers, and losing a dozen men. As he wrote to Clinton, Cornwallis thought he did not have enough healthy men to do what every experienced soldier knew had to be done to prolong, and thus withstand, the siege.”’ 1781”), printed in Tarleton (:787:451—-4), shows Cornwallis had at the time of his surrender plenty of ammunition and supplies; another document (“Return of Provisions and Stores in the Ports of York and Gloucester” 19 October 1781, p- 457) indicates the British surrendered 36 tons of flour, 30 tons of bread, 10 tons of beef in barrels and 37 tons of pork, among other foodstuffs. James (:&o6:120) nonetheless refers to a shortage of artillery ammunition. On the possible lack of medicines: the French officer Nicolas-Francgois-Denis Brisout de Barneville wrote in his journal on 19 October 1781 of the English: “Leurs hépitaux pleins de malades et manquant de tout” (Brisout de Barneville :989:277). ®t Set. Roger Lamb of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, with Cornwallis at Yorktown, afterward wrote a memoir in which he quoted (without attribution) these words:

226 MOSQUITO EMPIRES When it first arrived in Charleston in 1780, the British Army had about 9,000 men. After many losses and reinforcements in the next seventeen months, Cornwallis commanded some 8,700 at the outset of the siege of Yorktown and surrendered about 7,660, counting 1,850 across the river at Gloucester.** If he was honest in his account and he truly had only 3,200 in Yorktown and 600 in Gloucester fit for duty by October roth — something he could expect to be investigated by a military board of inquiry’? — then Cornwallis’ army must have suffered

erievously indeed from “sickness” because only about 150 to 300 of his men were killed in action and 300 to 600 wounded, about 4 to 10 percent in all.’* By his account, then, more than half of his force — 51 percent — was too sick to fight.°*

Cornwallis’s account is not the only one. The number of British Army troops sick at Yorktown is sometimes given as only 2,000.” The journal of the American officer St. George Tucker says 1,875 were unfit for duty in a British force of 5,818 (or about 32%).°? The official journal of the French general staff gives the same figure of 1,875 British sick at the time of surrender, and 3,935 in good health. It says nothing of “ ,.it would be madness to attempt to maintain [British defensive works] with the present garrison, exhausted by the fatigue of constant watching and unremitting duty, and reduced in its numbers by sickness even more than by the enemy’s fire” (Lamb :8e9:378-9). 9 Greene (2008:17, 33) says Cornwallis had 7,200 at the start of the siege, 8,go0o by September 20, and over 9,700 counting sailors, plus 1,500 to 2,000 slaves and ex-slaves.

°3 Cornwallis’ uncle Edward had been one of the targets of an official inquiry concerning the siege of Minorca in 1756; he was acquitted on technicalities. Admiral John Byng was shot for “failure to do his utmost.” These events were surely familiar to Cornwallis. Details in Great Britain (1757). % Hallahan (2e04:206); Savas and Dameron (2006:336); Ketchum (2004:247) says the British lost 556 dead and wounded at Yorktown. A British document

printed in Tarleton (x787:451) reports 309 British killed at Yorktown. The French general staff recorded 389 killed and 679 wounded (Gallatin :93::27). Secondary sources vary somewhat in the numbers they present, but none suggest Cornwallis lost more than about 10% of his men, killed and wounded, to combat. °5 This represents 3,800 fit for duty and 3,860 sick. The inconsistency in reported figures of course means this can be only an approximation. 9° For example, Ferling (2007:536). Reiss (:g98:211) and Duncan (193%:352) say 16% of Cornwallis troops were unavailable owing to malaria, much less than the evidence provided by Cornwallis himself, or any other original sources I have seen. 97 Riley (:948:393).

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the condition of another 1,850 taken prisoner at Gloucester across the York River.” Two British deserters reported some 2,000 in hospital on October 4th.°* Henry Lee, an American officer present at the siege, gave figures of 4,017 fit for duty of a total force of 7,107, implying 3,090 sick or wounded (44%) at the time of the surrender.'°° Set. Roger Lamb, who copied dispatches for Cornwallis, reported the same 4,017 fit for duty out of 5,950 rank and file (or 33% sick).'°’ These figures do not match those

reported by Cornwallis. It is tempting to suppose the Americans and French preferred lower figures so as to inflate their glory, but one might equally suppose Cornwallis inflated his figures to minimize his shame. Unlike the Americans and French, however, he was describing his own army and knew a board of inquiry or court martial might parse his words

carefully. His assessment is broadly corroborated by the diary of the Prussian Captain Ewald, who wrote on October 17th that “nearly all” of Cornwallis’s soldiers were “plagued with fever.” Ewald went on: “[T]he army melted away from 7,000 to 3,200 among whom not a thousand

men could be called healthy.”'** According to the journal of a naval officer who took part in the siege, Bartholomew James, the British lost 450 dead to sickness as of the date of surrender. (His is the only figure | have found for disease mortality in the British Army at Yorktown, and his numbers for other things are eccentric.) James went on to say that in the days just after the capitulation, “few, if any” British soldiers escaped

“intermitting fevers.”'° Why did the French and Americans at Yorktown not suffer from malaria? They did, but too rarely and too late for it to matter. Upon arrival in Virginia the Franco-American forces were in superb health by the standards of eighteenth-century armies. Washington’s troops had

been quartered around New York and Rochambeau’s had summered ® Gallatin (x932:9). °° Ketchum (2004:224). Too Lee (r860:514).

rer Lamb (:80:380). Here Lamb quotes from another author without revealing his source. Lamb’s precision is open to question: He also wrote that the distance from New York to Yorktown is more than 500 miles, when it is about 370 (p. 389). 02 Ewald (:979:338-9). Ewald’s diary was written in the field but he revised it after the war, so he might have taken the 3,200 figure from Cornwallis, whom he admired, or perhaps they both got it from the same staff officers responsible for daily returns. 3 James (1896:127-8).

228 MOSQUITO EMPIRES in salubrious New England. Hardly a man reported sick as they headed south to join Lafayette. The few French troops who had been in Virginia all summer under Lafayette were suffering from malaria; about half of them were unfit for duty.*°* Lafayette’s Americans fared rather better. At the very end of August, Lafayette’s little Franco-American army welcomed about 3,400 additional French soldiers recently posted to St. Domingue, who had sailed with de Grasse to the scene. These men were survivors of a summer amid the malaria strains of the West Indies, and perhaps more resistant as a result.‘°* Washington and Rochambeau had many things to be thankful for at the outset of the siege, and the health of their army ranked well up the list. 4 Duncan (1934:351); Reiss (:aQ8:210). In his many letters written in July, August, and September of 1781, while settling in close to Cornwallis’ positions Lafayette complained bitterly to his several correspondents about shortages of flour, salt, shoes, clothing, ammunition, wagons, militiamen, money and, above all, horses. But he did not, in hundreds of letters to people nearby, mention sickness among his troops. He noted his own intermittent fever in early September. Hundreds of Lafayette’s letters from this period appear in Idzerda (1977:228—426). Curiously, General Anthony Wayne, writing to Lafayette on 11 September 1781, refers to Lafayette’s as a “Caitiff fever” (Ibid 399). In a single letter to a friend in France

on August 24th, 1781, Lafayette wrote, “The heat of this country is so fierce that you can hardly move in the month of August. It results in an additional difficulty, that of illness. Almost all my people at present have fever. I on the other hand have never felt better.” Lafayette to Prince de Poix, 24 August 1781,

printed in Idzerda (1977:346-8) and quoted in Gottschalk (:942:292). This translation is Gottschalk’s; the original, which I have not seen, is in a private collection. The part about his “people,” if by that he meant the men under his command, was at best a great exaggeration. Perhaps he meant only his French troops or, more likely, those on his personal staff. In the letters to comrades in Virginia he made no such claims, although in one letter, also of August 24th to General Washington, he did mention medicines well down a list of things he needed. On August 26th, he noted sickness among the Continentals, which he attributed to their having gone eleven days without liquor. Lafayette’s American troops hailed chiefly from Virginia and had grown up with malaria. Aside from the French-born, it appears Lafayette’s army suffered only slightly from malaria (or anything else) in the summer before Yorktown. '°5 Perhaps. They might also have included some infectives who brought more malaria to the mosquitoes at Yorktown. The figure often given for the French regiments from the West Indies is 3,000 or 3,200, but the correspondence of their commander indicates 3,470: Marquis de Saint-Simon to Lafayette, 31 August 1781, printed in Idzerda (1977:376—7). Wooden (:976:403) is the only author I have come across to comment on the likely disease resistance of these troops.

LORD CORNWALLIS VS. ANOPHELES QUADRIMACULATUS = 229

The allied army survived the siege almost intact. Few men (about two percent) died in combat.'*’ Disease claimed a few more. Rochambeau’s

French regiments were just as susceptible to malaria as Cornwallis’s Britons and Germans. But unlike their enemy, and unlike Lafayette’s troops, they came to the tidewater only toward the end of September, some fifty to seventy days after Cornwallis’s army had settled in. Remember that malaria plasmodia take a while to circulate among a population, and up to a month to provoke illness after entering a bloodstream. While the siege lasted, the French stayed remarkably healthy.’ *’

After the surrender, their susceptibility began to tell. In the next months a few dozen died and a few hundred fell sick. Rochambeau contracted malaria. His army stayed in the tidewater for ten months and began to suffer from malaria once again in June 1782. By August, after they had marched north to the Hudson Valley, more than a quarter of the army was in hospital and another fifty-eight had died.**°

Among the Americans, only the New Englanders suffered heavily from the tidewater disease climate. Washington marched south with one Rhode Island regiment, one from the St. Lawrence valley (northernmost New York), and another comprised partly of men from coastal Connecticut and partly from lower New York. Most of his troops came from eastern Pennsylvania and the lower Hudson valley (six regiments), or New Jersey (two regiments) and Maryland (two and a half regiments). This army was not as well suited to malarial environments as Greene’s,

but, aside from the New Englanders and some New Yorkers, most of Washington’s men would have had repeated experience with malaria,

© Ketchum (2004:247) gives French losses as 389 killed or wounded, of which 98 were killed; and of Americans, 299 officers and men killed or wounded. Savas and Dameron (2006:336) give lower figures. Cornwallis apparently tried his best to spread smallpox among them, expelling from his encampment hundreds of infected slaves (Fenn 2001:132—3); Becker (2008) is less sure this was deliberate. 07 Greene (2005:231) says a maximum of 400 French soldiers were ill at any one time. The French fleet at the end of September had about 1,500 to 1,800 sick according to de Grasse; Idzerda (1977:405). ‘8 Tibrary of Congress, Manuscript Division, Rochambeau Papers, 9:215; Scott (xgQ98:81, 96, 100). A full account of the experience of Rochambeau’s army, including the march north from Yorktown, is in the manuscript of the French engineer, Francois-Ignace Ervoil d’Oyré, “Notes relatives aux movemens de l’armée francaise en Amérique,” Society of the Cincinnati Library, Manuscript Collection, L2zoo8F163.1-5.

230 MOSQUITO EMPIRES and those from Maryland or the Delaware valley would likely have had nearly annual bouts all their lives.**° The New England natives did eventually fall afoul of Virginia’s fevers. A Connecticut contingent that wended its way toward Yorktown in the summer of 1781 had minor health problems, chiefly agues and fevers.

In its ranks marched Josiah Atkins, an enlisted man who became a doctor’s assistant. He left a diary, noting prophetically on July 16th that the “next month is the season for the fever & ague.” Several times in the next few weeks he wrote that the number of sick increased; on September 15th he wrote of “ague & fever, that is continually taking hold of our men.” His final entry, written in the “Camp before York” on October 15th reads in full: “I recruit but very slow; my ague & fever is very severe on me at present.” He died soon thereafter, but happily for historians his diary found its way to his widow. Atkins in places mentioned rheumatism, dysentery, and venereal disease as well as agues and “intermitting” fever. But it seems probable that his fellows suffered chiefly from malaria, to which life in Connecticut (after about 1750) provided no exposure. Lafayette was not far wrong to think the local water was “very unhealthy to Northern soldiers.”’ '° Two factors favored the health of the Franco-American army. Washington and Rochambeau had some susceptible “Northern soldiers” under

their command, but they had more malaria-resistant troops. Moreover, when they reached Yorktown in late September, the weather had cooled somewhat — and the mosquitoes bit less frequently.‘ '' According to the

'°9 Tetails on regimental origins from Wright (:983:195-351). ‘T° Lafayette to General Weedon, 16 June 1781, quoted in Gottschalk (:942:248). The relevant diary entries are from Atkins (:975:45, 49-50, 53, 55, 58, 61). Gillett (xgge:121-2) says malaria was the chief ailment afflicting Continental soldiers at Yorktown. "Tt Batholomew (2002) gives the most frequent weather observations of the York-

town diarists, and emphasized the heat in early August, and cooler weather r1-18 August and a “remarkable Cool” day 21 September. The “Diary of the Pennsylvania Line,” (Linn and Egle :898:716—33) also notes cooler weather after 21 September. See also “Revolutionary War Diary by an Officer of the Third Pennsylvania Continental Line, May, 26 1781 — July 4, 1782,” Society of the Cincinnati Library, Manuscript Collection L2007G37, which includes commentary on the weather. By and large the available diaries and journals cease comment on the weather after the siege began in earnest on 28 September. But it seems plausible in view of the textual evidence (and the turn of the seasons) that the mosquitoes of the York peninsula were more active in August than in

LORD CORNWALLIS VS. ANOPHELES QUADRIMACULATUS 231

diary of the French quartermaster Claude Blanchard, whose job included

feeding the sick, only 300 were reported ill on September 28th when the siege began, 400 by October 11th, and 500 by October 13th.‘ ** This

counts as excellent health for an eighteenth-century army anywhere, let alone in the malarial Virginia tidewater, despite the ominous trend of mid-October. Had the siege lasted a few more days, malaria might have hampered

the French and Americans’ ability to continue. Blanchard’s reports imply some galloping infection among the allies in the days just prior to Cornwallis’ surrender. Dr James Thacher, a surgeon in the Continental Army and a careful observer of almost everything, confirmed this implication in his journal on October 16th, “Our New England troops have now become very sickly; the prevalent diseases are intermittent

and remittent fevers, which are very prevalent in this climate during the autumnal months.”''? Washington on October 19th reported that 1,430 French and American troops were sick.''* But on that day, the British forces laid down their arms. As at Cartagena or Havana, differential resistance was at work. Washington, Rochambeau, and Lafayette had by good fortune assembled an army fairly well-equipped with the right antibodies for late summer and early autumn conditions along the York River. Moreover, the most vulnerable portion of their army arrived on the scene only a month before hostilities ended, too late to get very sick before it no longer mattered to the outcome of the siege. Hence in the final days at Yorktown, about 3 to 8 percent of those under Washington’s command were sick, and about 25 percent of those serving under Cornwallis if one prefers the figures of the French general staff, or 51 percent if one believes Cornwallis himself.’ **

late September and October, and thus more efficient communicating malaria before the bulk of the Franco-American force arrived. "2 Blanchard (:876:145—50). "3 "Thacher (:862:286).

"4 Hallahan (2004:209). Washington busied himself trying to find more hospital space for sick men even before settling the terms of capitulation (Gillett "tS "These percentages take Blanchard’s and Washington’s figures as the range for the Franco-American forces. Greene’s remark (2005:232) that sickness “plagued both sides” at Yorktown is, strictly speaking, true but still misleading. To his

credit, Greene is one of the few historians to mention disease at all in this Campaign.

232 MOSQUITO EMPIRES At Yorktown, mosquito-borne disease served the besiegers and bedeviled the besieged, reversing the pattern evident at Cartagena or Havana.

The reason is simple: Differential immunity consistently favored the locals and worked against those from northern climes. At Cartagena and Havana, the locals with the better portfolio of disease immunities were besieged; at Yorktown they were the besiegers. CONCLUSION

With the help of malaria and differential immunity, Surinam’s maroons protected their freedom in the mid-1770s. With the help of malaria and differential resistance, rebellious Americans achieved their freedom by

defeating the British southern strategy in 1780-1781. The maroons and the American rebels had little in common. But they both enjoyed resistance to malaria much stronger than that of the armies sent out to deny them their goals.

Cornwallis surrendered a quarter of the British Army in North America at Yorktown. When the news reached London, Gibraltar lay besieged by Spanish and French troops; the North Sea was menaced by Dutch and French fleets; India was aflame and French squadrons

prowled the Indian Ocean; and in the West Indies, small and illdefended British islands were falling to French and Spanish assaults. In these circumstances, there could be no question of reconquering the rebellious American colonies, despite the continued presence of British squadrons and garrisons in Halifax, New York, Charleston, Savannah, and elsewhere. Peace negotiations took another twenty-two months, during which only small battles took place in America. Yorktown and its mosquitoes ended British hopes and decided the American war.'*”

Of course, mosquitoes and malaria did not win the American Revolution on their own. Washington and Greene had to fight (and avoid

fighting) as prudently as they did; the French had to intervene; the British had to gamble on their southern strategy; de Grasse had to sail

for the Chesapeake; and no doubt much else had to fall into place for things to come out as they did.''? But given these circumstances, ™ Returning British troops even brought malaria to England, leading to a brief spike in mortality there (Dobson 1997:346, n. 226). ''7 Ferling (2007:572-3) finds the outcome almost miraculous, citing “Cornwallis’ egregious blunder in advancing into Virginia, Clinton’s misguided decision to leave a large, and vulnerable, British force on the Williamsburg peninsula, France’s determination to send de Grasse north from the Caribbean, and

LORD CORNWALLIS VS. ANOPHELES QUADRIMACULATUS — 233

mosquitoes and malaria could help make the difference, snatching victory from the jaws of stalemate. Simply put, differential vulnerability to malaria put Cornwallis’ forces at a systematic disadvantage, creating a problem for which he had no

solution. Mosquitoes and malaria helped drive Cornwallis from the Carolinas and then sickened his army at Yorktown to the point where he lacked the manpower to conduct counter-siege operations properly. American resistance to the British Army had been made more effective by American resistance to malaria. Because “fevers” killed British soldiers at roughly eight times the rate that battles did in the war, a small edge in disease resistance translated into a significant advantage. It was a war of attrition in which malarial plasmodia and the smallpox virus killed far more than cannon and muskets, and sickened far more than were wounded. In the case of Cornwallis and An. quadrimaculatus, mortality among

British soldiers was only a fraction of what redcoats experienced at Cartagena and Havana. Part of the reason is that malaria is normally less lethal than yellow fever, and the Lowcountry and tidewater disease

environments were less dangerous to visitors than that of the West Indies. And at times Cornwallis’ men got powdered cinchona bark, which helped against malaria, whereas nothing helped against yellow fever. In addition, Cornwallis fled the most fever-ridden districts of the Carolinas, whereas the armies of Wentworth and Albemarle stayed put. But at Yorktown, malaria put thousands of men hors de combat for the weeks when Cornwallis needed them most.

Had malaria not hamstrung Cornwallis, he might well have been able to hold South Carolina and Georgia indefinitely, and the Loyalists he counted on might have rallied to his side in greater numbers. After all, Generals Gates and Greene lost almost every battle they fought in the South, and could not oust the British Army from fortified coastal positions — only mosquitoes armed with malaria could accomplish that. It is probably unlikely that the British southern strategy would have succeeded in keeping all of British North America, but, absent malaria, the southern plantation colonies might well have stayed loyal, as Florida, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Quebec did, in effect creating a southern version of Canada linked to the plantation world of the British West Indies, and leaving a narrower band of North America to the fledgling United States. But that did not happen. The Rochambeau’s covert decision to ask de Grasse to sail not to New York but to the Chesapeake.”

234 MOSQUITO EMPIRES tiny female An. quadrimaculatus stands tall among the founding mothers of the United States.

Cornwallis had been fortunate to avoid yellow fever in his army. Charleston hosted seven major epidemics between 1693 and 1763, and would suffer more after 1793.''° But in 1780-1781, yellow fever did not strike. It was a much deadlier disease than malaria, even falciparum malaria, as the British and French armies would find once more in the West Indies during the Napoleonic Wars. "8 Duffy (:953:162).

CHAPTER SEVEN

REVOLUTIONARY FEVERS, 1790-18938:

Haiti, NEw GRANADA, AND CUBA

If Nature is against us, we will fight it and make it obey us. — Simon Bolivar’

The defeat of Cornwallis in 1781 decided one American Revolution, but more soon followed. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, free populations in the Americas grew in number, wealth, confidence, and ambi-

tion. Their frustration with old regime monarchies that limited their opportunities for trade and for political voice gradually mounted. That frustration contributed to revolutions in French and Spanish colonies, as it had in thirteen of Britain’s in North America. In St. Domingue uniquely, the revolution evolved into a massive slave uprising. Monarchs responded to each revolution with armed force in hopes of maintaining their American empires. But when they sent their legions to the mosquito coasts of the Caribbean, they ignited epidemics that destroyed their armies far more thoroughly than any revolutionary brigades could. Canny revolutionaries recognized the power of differential immunity to yellow fever, and conducted their wars accordingly. This chapter tells the stories of yellow fever (and malaria) and revolution in St. Domingue, the Viceroyalty of New Granada, and Cuba.

The stories span a century, from the 1790s to the 1890s. But in each case, the broad pattern was the same. Locally born and raised armies fought revolutionary wars against troops sent out from Europe to prevent t “Si se opone la Naturaleza, lucharemos contra ella y haremos que nos obedezca.” Quoted in Indalecio Liévano Aguirre, Bolivar (Bogota: Intermedio, 2001), 84. Bolivar’s remark came in response to a monk telling him that an earthquake showed nature supported the Spanish in 1812. 235

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