Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (New Approaches to the Americas)

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Mosquito 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.

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, 1492–1650 J´unia 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

Mosquito Empires ecology and war in the greater caribbean, 1620–1914

J. R. McNeill Georgetown University

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São 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 www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521452861 © 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

978-0-511-67534-8

eBook (NetLibrary)

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

Contents

List of Maps

page xi

List of Abbreviations Used in the Footnotes Preface

xv

Acknowledgments 1

xiii xvii

The Argument (and Its Limits) in Brief The Argument The Limits of the Argument The Limits of the Novelty of the Argument

1 2 5 8

Part I. Setting the Scene 2

3

Atlantic Empires and Caribbean Ecology Atlantic American Geopolitics, 1620–1820 Ecological Transformation in the Caribbean, 1640–1750 Yellow Fever and Caribbean Ecology Yellow Fever Transmission and Immunity Epidemic Yellow Fever and Plantation Sugar Malaria, Mosquitoes, and Plantations of Sugar and Rice Climate Change, El Nino, ˜ Mosquitoes, and Epidemics Conclusion

15 15

Deadly Fevers, Deadly Doctors Early Yellow Fever Epidemics and Their Victims A Virulent Strain of Medicine Conclusion

63 64 68 86

ix

22 32 40 47 52 58 60

x

CONTENTS

Part II. Imperial Mosquitoes 4

Fevers Take Hold: From Recife to Kourou The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 The English in Jamaica, 1655–1660 The Scots at Darien, 1698–1699 The French at Kourou, 1763–1764 Conclusion

5

Yellow Fever Rampant and British Ambition Repulsed, 1690–1780 Yellow Fever and the Defense of the Spanish Empire The Deadly 1690s Siege Ecology at Cartagena, 1741 The Seven Years’ War and the Siege Ecology of Havana, 1762 Conclusion

91 92 97 105 123 135 137 137 144 149 169 188

Part III. Revolutionary Mosquitoes 6

7

8

Lord Cornwallis vs. Anopheles quadrimaculatus, 1780–1781 Introduction Slave Risings and Surinam’s Maroons Revolution and Malaria in the Southern Colonies Yorktown Conclusion Revolutionary Fevers, 1790–1898: Haiti, New Granada, and Cuba St. Domingue, 1790–1804 New Granada, 1815–1820 Immigration, Warfare, and Independence, 1830–1898: Mexico, the United States, and Cuba Conclusion Conclusion: Vector and Virus Vanquished, 1880–1914 The Argument Recapitulated Vector and Virus Vanquished Disease and Power

195 195 195 198 220 232 235 236 267

287 303 304 304 306 312

Bibliography

315

Index

363

List of Maps

2.1 The Greater Caribbean 4.1 Northeastern Brazil 4.2 Jamaica 4.3 Panama and Darien 4.4 Guyana and Kourou 5.1 Fortified Points in the Spanish Caribbean (c. 1750) 5.2 Cartagena and Environs (c. 1741) 5.3 Havana and Environs (c. 1762) 6.1 The Carolinas and the Chesapeake (c. 1780) 7.1 St. Domingue (c. 1790) 7.2 The Viceroyalty of New Granada (c. 1810) 7.3 Cuba

xi

page 22 93 97 106 123 139 150 172 199 236 267 296

List of Abbreviations Used in the Footnotes

AGI AGI AP AGI SD AGS AHN BL BL Add. MSS BN CSP MHS NLS PRO PRO ADM PRO CO PRO PC PRO SP PRO WO SHM

Archivo General de Indias Archivo General de Indias, Audiencia de Panama Archivo General de Indias, Audiencia de Santo Domingo Archivo General de Simancas Archivo Hist´orico Nacional British Library British Library, Additional Manuscripts Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid) Calendar of State Papers Massachusetts Historical Society National Library of Scotland Public Record Office Public Record Office, Admiralty Papers Public Record Office, Colonial Office Papers Public Record Office, Privy Council Papers Public Record Office, State Papers Public Record Office, War Office Servicio Hist´orico Militar

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

xiii

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. I pulled it off the xv

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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. I 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 forgotten, concerning historical matters include Andrew Bell, Lisa Brady, the late Philip Curtin, Alejandro de la Fuente, Luis Fajardo, Lil Fenn, Reinaldo Funes, Ignacio Gallup-D´ıaz, Sherry Johnson, Wim Klooster, Peter McCandless, Phil Morgan, Jean-Franc¸ois Mouhot, Matt Mulcahy, Celia Parcero, Anne P´erotin-Dumon, Ernst Pijning, Lydia Pulsipher, Ben Vinson, Jim Webb, Xenia Wilkinson, and Drexel Woodson. My debt extends to my former students Juan-Lu´ıs 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 suggestions 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 xvii

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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 Limits) 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 Whitman1

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 1

Traubel (1906–61, 3:293). Whitman served as a nurse in the American Civil War; Byron died in the Greek War of Independence – of malaria. 1

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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,2 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 2

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 Louverture, and Simon Bol´ıvar. 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.3 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.

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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 reverberated 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

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history, but they do not make it as they please.”4 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, I 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.

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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.5 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.6 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 6

Cloudsley-Thompson (1976) pioneered insect-centric history. McNeill (2000: 194–211) explores this theme.

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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 II, 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.7 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.8 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

8

In both these wars, the British army suffered about eight times as many deaths from disease as from battle. Smallman-Raynor and Cliff (2004: 34). Among the pioneers were Alfred Crosby (1972, 1986), Philip Curtin (1968), and William McNeill (1976). Medical authors with an interest in warfare preceded them, notably Prinzing (1916), Zinsser (1935), and Major (1940). The latest general treatment is Smallman-Raynor and Cliff (2004).

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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.9 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.10 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.

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Perdue (2005: 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 (2005: 283). Crosby (1986); McNeill (1976).

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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.11 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 populations 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 a result 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 11

Curtin (1998). 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.

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11

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.

PART ONE

SETTING THE SCENE

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.

A

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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.d.) 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 1900. 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

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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 societies were hammered by war, forced migrations, and enslavement.1 By 1650, roughly 10 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.2 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, 1

2

Livi Bacci (2005; 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).

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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.3 Portugal acquired an American presence in Brazil beginning in 1500, part of a seaborne 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.4 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

4

Of the countless tomes on the early Spanish Empire, an excellent one is Kamen (2003). A most helpful survey is Boucher (2008).

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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 history 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 great 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.5 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.6 England, a nation of about 5 million in 1650 (nearly 8 million counting Scots and Irish),7 was in many ways becoming the most disruptive power in the Atlantic world – a rogue state. As an island kingdom,

5

6 7

Around 1648, the Dutch had more ships than the rest of Europe combined according to Klooster (1997:3). Klooster (1998:38). 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.

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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 a result, 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.8 The logistical and other challenges were still too great. Except for Spain’s, colonies in the Americas were not valuable enough 8

Fissel and Trim (2005).

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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.9 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 European 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:10 r 1739–1748: The War of Jenkins’ Ear (merged in Europe with the War of the Austrian Succession) r 1756–1763: The Seven Years’ War (also called the French and Indian War in U.S. history, beginning there in 1754) r 1775–1782: The American Revolution (in which France and Spain joined in 1778) r 1792–1815: The Wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars 9 10

Rodger (2004); Glete (2006). A recent survey is Simms (2007).

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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.

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Map 2.1. The Greater Caribbean

Ecological Transformation in the Caribbean, 1640–1750 Geopolitical turbulence in Atlantic America coincided with ecological turbulence, and to some extent caused it.11 In the Caribbean basin, some of the ecological tumult involved forces specific to the Caribbean, but some resulted from changes affecting the whole of Atlantic America. Like people everywhere, Amerindians before 1492 tried to manage their 11

The classic works here are Crosby’s (1972; 1986). But see also Cronon (1984), Silver (1990), Watts (1987), Dean (1995), Sauer (1969), Melville (1994), Anderson (2004), Funes (2004), and Harris (1962; 1965).

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landscapes in their own interests. They had only one efficient tool for this – fire – but no shortage of determination and ingenuity. When their numbers declined after 1492, the landscapes they had periodically burned now went unburned. Their fields and villages shrank or vanished. Between 1500 and 1620 throughout most of Atlantic America, a gradual reforestation took place. The majestic forests encountered by seventeenth-century travelers and settlers were often recent artifacts – not, as was easily supposed, primeval. New animals and plants brought from Eurasia and Africa assisted in the ecological transformation of the Americas. The most consequential animals were large domesticated mammals, notably horses, cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. They provided new sources of protein in American diets, new means of traction for pulling plows or powering mills, and new menaces to soils, crops, and horticulture. In many parts of the Americas, including Caribbean islands and surrounding lowlands, these exotic species ran free, forming wild herds. Early pirates and other visitors to the Caribbean deliberately marooned them on islands so that later they could hunt them, especially cattle and pigs, for food and hides. The new plants included useful crops and irksome weeds. Settlers and some indigenous Americans in temperate climes found wheat, rye, or barley did well in their fields. In the Caribbean, the most important new plants were not food grains but bananas, citrus fruits, and sugarcane, all originally from South or Southeast Asia. Above all plants, sugar drove the ecological transformation in the Caribbean, creating what I will call “creole ecology,” a motley assemblage of indigenous and invading species, jostling one another in unstable ecosystems.

sugar revolutions and demography Botanically speaking, sugarcane is a grass, probably native to New Guinea. It figured in the diets of Indian and Chinese peasants from perhaps 500 b.c. but first became a plantation crop, raised for a market with slave labor, in the Mediterranean world, especially Egypt, Cyprus, Crete, southern Spain, and Morocco. Portuguese mariners in the fifteenth century carried sugarcane to Atlantic islands such as Madeira and S˜ao Tom´e, and then to Brazil in the early sixteenth century. Brazil soon became the world’s leading sugar producer, refining the plantation model. Sugar in the Americas was more than a grass. Whether it grew sugar, coffee, rice, tobacco, or indigo, the plantation complex involved imported slave labor, large-scale production, and

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monoculture. It was a short-term strategy for turning sunlight and soil nutrients into money as fast as possible. It was the principle institution in the Greater Caribbean, a way of life and a way of death. Sugar plantations were the most important part of it.12 As Brazil’s northeast became an increasingly profitable sugar landscape in the early seventeenth century, it attracted the roving eye of Dutch entrepreneurs and soldiers in the employ of the newly created Dutch West India Company. They conquered, and held for decades, the best sugar lands in Brazil, and helped turn Amsterdam into a leading center of sugar refining and marketing. When the fortunes of war swung against the Dutch in the late 1640s, refugees from northeastern Brazil settled in Barbados and brought their knowledge of the sugar business with them. They launched a sugar revolution, or more accurately several sugar revolutions, which in due course transformed the West Indies’ demography, ecology, epidemiology, economy, and politics.13 Sugarcane grew well on Caribbean islands for reasons of soils and climate. But a successful sugar industry had other requirements. One was cheap fuel. To form sugar crystals, cane juice must be boiled down. Plantations needed access to forests for fuelwood. Low fuel costs helped make American sugar (both Brazilian and Caribbean) competitive in European markets against Mediterranean sugar. Smaller islands with less forest eventually became uncompetitive producers as a result of fuel scarcity as well as loss of soil nutrients. Massive labor was the other main requirement for plantation sugar. Installing a sugar plantation took enormous amounts of work, mainly felling and burning trees then rooting out stumps, to create canefields from forestlands. Operating a plantation took plenty of work, too. Cutting fuelwood to fire sugar boilers was one major task, undertaken almost year round. The harvest was another, a burst of seasonal labor undertaken in the dry months (December to May). It had to be done quickly because once the cane was cut, it had to be milled within a day or two before the cane juice began to ferment. And once milled, the juice 12 13

On the plantation complex, see Curtin (1990). Sugar history is summarized in Galloway (1989), Curtin (1990), and Mintz (1985). On its establishment in the Atlantic in particular, see Schwartz (2004). On the term “sugar revolution,” see Higman (2000). Menard (2006) disputes the suitability of this term. As regards the ecological significance of sugar (not Menard’s concern), the phrase is appropriate.

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squeezed from the cane had to be boiled right away. So every sugar plantation had to have enough labor on hand to attend to the demands of the harvest. When sugar first came to the Caribbean, the islands generally had plenty of fuel but they did not have enough people. The Amerindian populations had almost disappeared on most islands, and few immigrants had come to replace them. The islands claimed by the Dutch, French, and English carried almost no population as late as 1620. The Spanish Caribbean had been a backwater since about 1535, when the allure of riches in Mexico and Peru siphoned people away. In 1640, Jamaica, then a Spanish possession, had roughly 1,500 people. The first English census taken in 1661 showed 3,874 inhabitants.14 Cuba, the largest island, probably had no more than 7,500 people in 1620.15 After 1620, when tobacco from the small islands of the eastern Caribbean found a ready market in Atlantic Europe, tens of thousands of indentured laborers from Britain and France migrated to islands such as St. Kitts, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. But the total population of the Caribbean islands as late as 1640 probably came to no more than 200,000 people, many of whom expected to return to Europe at the first opportunity. Plantation sugar changed all that. Barbados was the first island to take to cane cultivation in a big way. Its population soared from 1,400 in 1629 to 40,000 in 1642, and more than 60,000 by 1713.16 Jamaican population rose to 142,000 by 1750, of whom more than 90 percent were slaves.17 The French colony of St. Domingue, which counted about 8,000 souls as late as 1687, hosted 92,000 by 1730 and 182,000 by 1750.18 Even Cuba, which was late to shift to sugar, tripled its population between 1700 and 1755, reaching a total of about 160,000, of whom a quarter were slaves.19 St. Lucia, to which sugar came even later, in the mid-1760s, 14

15 16

17 18

19

Jamaica population data from Morales Padr´on (2003:35) and Wells (1975: 195–6). Ortiz (1916:21–2); de la Fuente (1993:63). Watts (1987:173); Dunn (1972:312). Barbados was described as “the Dunghill wharone England doth casts forth its rubidg” by one 1655 visitor, who went on to refer to the population as rogues and whores. British Library, Sloane MSS, 3926, Journal of Henry Whistler. Steckel (2000:494). Boucher (2008:239); Engerman and Higman (1997:48). Pritchard (2004:65–6) has additional figures. McNeill (1985:35).

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reported 5,021 people in 1760 but 19,295 by 1777.20 In a mature sugar colony – one where most land suitable for sugar was already in sugar – the ratio of free Europeans to African slaves was generally around 1:10.21 In the Caribbean islands as a whole, by 1750 human numbers had probably surpassed 1 million, three-quarters of whom were slaves.22 The population explosion that followed upon the emergence of the sugar economy was sustained only by high immigration, most of it through the Atlantic slave trade. Few women went to the region and everywhere birth rates remained low, well below death rates in most cases. Rough estimates of the total numbers of African slaves imported into the Caribbean before 1750 center around 1.5 million,23 and the number of Europeans, maybe half a million. So by 1750, some two million people had crossed the Atlantic to the Caribbean but total population stood at just over 1 million. Despite its growing population, the Caribbean was a giant sinkhole for humanity – thanks mainly to sugar and slavery. It was also a pot of gold. Lucky planters (there were many unlucky ones, too) could make fabulous fortunes on the backs of slaves. In 1776, Adam Smith regarded the profits available in sugar “generally much greater than those of any other cultivation that is known either in Europe or America.”24 By 1750, sugar revenues made the West Indies worth fighting over for their own sake, not merely as the avenue to Spanish silver.

sugar revolutions and creole ecology The sugar revolutions created their own ecology as well as demography. Forests and savannas, roamed by feral livestock, gradually gave way to 20

21

22 23 24

St. Lucia data reported in Anne French, St. Lucia Up To Now, a typescript in the St. Lucia National Archives, pp. 6–7. According to Breen (1844:277), the first sugar plantation began in St. Lucia in 1765, and by 1780 there were thirty in operation. Palmer (1997) has much useful data. The highest ratio seems to have obtained in Dutch Surinam in the 1770s, about 1:35. Jamaica surpassed the 1:10 ration by 1722; St. Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat, and Antigua all did so in the 1770s. St. Domingue passed the threshold by 1739. Of the major sugar islands, four did not attain a 1:10 ratio: Barbados, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Cuba. Watts (1987:311–25). Steckel (2000:494). Palmer (1997:22). Smith quoted in Watts (1987:382).

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more domesticated landscapes. Broad areas were cleared for cane, for other crops, and for grazing. Sugar boiling consumed yet more forest: In eighteenth-century Cuba, a good-sized sugar mill burned the equivalent of one huge tree per hour.25 Many local species dependent on the forest went extinct while new plants and animals, suited to the emerging environment, prospered. Soil erosion and nutrient depletion accelerated rapidly with clearance and cultivation. Ranches developed on the big islands to provide horses, oxen, and other beasts of the field. Additional land went to food and fiber crops to feed and clothe growing populations. But plantation sugar was the heart of the matter.26 Barbados was the first island to undergo this ecological transformation. It happened quickly. In the 1620s, the island was uninhabited and featured dense forest down to the shoreline. Sir Henry Colt, who visited in 1631, wrote “The whole Island is soe full of wood & trees, as I could not finde any place wher to trayne 40 musketteers.”27 In the early years of English settlement, when cotton, tobacco, and food crops dominated Barbadian agriculture, pioneers cleared the western districts. As late as 1647, forests still covered about 60 percent of the island.28 When Richard Ligon lived there (1647–1650), he found the woods irritatingly widespread.29 But by the late 1650s, local councils had begun to restrict timber-cutting, suggesting anxieties over wood scarcity. Nevertheless, soon the woods were almost all gone. Surviving sources make no mention of forest after 1665, and by 1666 Barbados imported timber and fuelwood from Surinam.30 By 1671, planters found the fuel situation still more dire: “at the Barbadoes all the trees are destroyed, so that

25

26

27 28

29 30

Twelve cubic meters of firewood, estimated from Moreno Fraginals (1978:74). Such a mill produced about 100 kilograms of sugar an hour, so as a rough average, every 8 kilograms of sugar required a cubic meter of firewood. New technology, known as the Jamaica train, doubled the fuel efficiency of sugar boiling in Cuba by 1820. Funes (2004:60–80) has more on the strain Cuban sugar put on forests, c. 1600–1771. Watts (1987); Kimber (1988). Griggs (2007) gives a sense of the ecological effects of sugar in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Queensland, a richly documented case. Colt (2002:17). To judge from the map drawn by Watts (1966:42) with information from Ligon (1657). Ligon (1657:41, 72–9) on trees, their uses and their heights. Watts (1966:45). On wood imports: Clarendon to Willoughby 13 April 1666. Clarendon MSS 84, folios 134–5, Bodleian Library (Oxford).

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wanting wood to boyle their sugar, they are forced to send for coales from England.”31 The quick removal of forests on Barbados set in motion other ecological changes. Weeds that flourished on cleared ground and in strong sunshine, many of them invaders from across the Atlantic, colonized much of Barbados. Invasive species, notably rats, flourished amid the new canefields. Many of the island’s birds and tree-dwelling monkeys disappeared.32 Even though Barbados has only gentle slopes, soil erosion and nutrient loss quickly lowered sugar yields, requiring planters to deploy more slaves (some of whom were employed carrying eroded soil back uphill in baskets on their heads, a true labor of Sisyphus). Gullies grew numerous and steep, so much so that horses had difficulty on the terrain and planters resorted to donkeys and, briefly, camels.33 One downpour in November 1668 opened a gully in the churchyard of Christ Church parish that carried 1,500 coffins and their contents out to sea.34 Soil and silt carried to coastlands formed new marshes. Barbados became slightly more hospitable to mosquitoes.35 Miraculously, Barbados had neither malarial mosquitoes nor malaria, which accounted 31

32

33

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“Memorial of the island of Tobago,” P.R.O., C.O 1/21, f. 171 (cited in Watts 1996:45). Kimber (1988:212–13) reports coal imports to fire sugar boilers in Martinique in 1708. Importing coal from across the Atlantic was not economic and soon was abandoned in favor of fuelwood imports from closer locations. Ligon (1657:101) noted that Barbados had no coal “for which reason, we preserve our Woods as much as we can.” Gragg (2003:18–19) notes the rapid deforestation on Barbados. In 1631, Sir Henry Colt noted “diuers sorts of birds” including blackbirds, turtle doves, pigeons, and pelicans. Ligon (1657:60–1) recounted a dozen or more species, and allowed there were more he could not name. But a visitor in 1652, Heinrich von Utcheritz, claimed “one hears no birds” (see Gragg 2003:22–3). Kimber (1988:180–211) discusses introduced plants on Martinique in this period. Chanvalon (2004) is the key primary source for Martinique’s ecology (as of the 1750s). Ligon (1657:58). Ligon refers to “assinigoes,” a term used in the Azores for donkeys. Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh (1972:185). Watts (1987:219–23) on these changes. Handler (1969:6) reprints a 1661 visitor’s complaint about night-biting mosquitoes. Barbados, as well as Antigua, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, Nevis, and Tobago, remained thoroughly deforested in 1824–1825 to judge from the sketchbook of Robert McCormick, whose artistry was meticulous with respect to ships, windmills, buildings, and the occasional palm tree. His sketches of these islands are in The Wellcome Library (London), Manuscript 3356.

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for its reputation as a healthy island (by West Indies standards). Other islands were less fortunate. Montserrat underwent similar changes a few decades later. The island, which has elevations of about a thousand meters, was thoroughly wooded in 1631 and carried scant settlement as late as 1650. However, hunger and English subjugation of Ireland drove many poor Irish to Montserrat in the 1650s. Sugar production, negligible as late as 1654, burgeoned in subsequent decades. By 1676, a third of the forest was cleared, African slaves had largely replaced the Irish, sugar was the economy’s mainstay, and by the 1770s the island was almost bare of woodlands.36 The environmental consequences of clearing the forest on Montserrat were much the same as on Barbados, except the physical changes to the soil were more pronounced because of Montserrat’s steeper slopes. Planters tried to check gullying as early as 1673 and passed laws aimed at conserving soil in 1702. By 1738, they tried to legislate actions to reduce the frequency of flash floods. But stabilizing a disturbed island ecosystem was no easy business and generally beyond the abilities of eighteenth-century societies and governments.37 Other islands also followed the ecological path blazed by Barbados. On Martinique, a return visitor in 1656 noted that clearing had progressed so far that one could ride horseback almost anywhere, which would have been unthinkable on his first visit fifteen years before.38 As the supervisor of the St. Vincent botanical gardens put it in 1791: “It is a matter of astonishment to see the inconsideration or rather stupidity of West Indian planters, in extinguishing many useful woods that spontaneously grow on all these islands except in this [St. Vincent] and Dominica, hardly the vantage of a tree is to be seen of any sort, where the planters’ axe could get at. Barbados, Antigua, St. Kitts are almost rendered unfit for cultivation by the destruction of woods. . . . ”39 36

37

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Pulsipher (1986). On the pace of deforestation in Martinique, see Kimber (1988), especially pp. 176, 209. Pulsipher (1986). Further useful account of deforestation (and conservation efforts) on Barbados and Montserrat is in Grove (1995:63–71). Kimber (1988:181) calls eighteenth-century erosion on Martinique “severe.” On forest policy, including efforts at conservation, in the Spanish Caribbean, see Giraldo (1991). Du Tertre (1667–1671, 2:28). Alexander Anderson to Sir George Yonge, 10 October 1791, PRO, War Office Papers, 4/4.

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Settlers on these and other islands cleared far more land than they intended to use for sugarcane. They tried to recreate the open vistas of the British Isles (or France or Spain) for aesthetic reasons. They needed room for their livestock to roam. And they thought that cleared land would be less conducive to disease because it had less in the way of rotting vegetation, humidity, and other factors thought to create “miasmas,” from which fevers emanated. Plantation sugar was the main driving force behind both the new demography of the West Indies and the new landscapes: slave societies and creole ecologies. These social and biological revolutions happened first and most thoroughly on the small islands of the eastern Antilles – at least those on which sugar became king – as on Madeira and the Canary Islands before them.40 On the large islands such as Hispaniola and Jamaica, sugar’s ecological transformation happened only after 1713 (and on Cuba only after 1740). As the smaller islands’ soils grew poorer and their fuelwood scarcer, planters gradually shifted investment to the bigger and more forested islands. It took far longer to deforest broad swathes of the big islands, and it was much more difficult to drive local species to extinction. To Nicol´as Joseph de Ribera, Cuba in 1755 seemed “entirely covered with a continuous forest of precious woods.”41 Nonetheless, in those parts of Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Cuba where sugar reigned, it taxed the forest. When Ribera wrote of “continuous forest” in Cuba, clearing was proceeding apace, much to the concern of authorities worried about timber supplies for Spain’s naval arsenal. By the end of the eighteenth century, fuelwood requirements of the sugar boilers cleared nearly one square kilometer per year.42 On Cuba, as on all the bigger islands, slaves escaped from the plantations formed maroon communities in the mountain forests, giving planters further reasons to cut and burn forest. Whatever the motives, for fuel, for land, or to deny cover to maroons, deforestation brought a similar suite of social and ecological effects on the large islands as on the small, albeit affecting

40

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On Madeira, Vieira (1999:88–113); on St. Kitts and Nevis, Merrill (1958); on Martinique, Kimber (1988:171–80). Quoted in Funes (2004:49). Figures elaborated from Funes (2004:106–13) et passim. Forest conservation measures were rare but not unknown, even on the big islands. Gabriel Debien (cited in Boomgaard 1992:214) says planters on St. Domingue in the eighteenth century sometimes set aside land for sustainable wood production to feed their sugar boilers.

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smaller proportions of the larger islands’ territory and eliminating fewer species.43 Sugar’s ecological transformation brought its share of indirect effects too, touching even the flora and fauna of the sea. For example, the Caribbean had supported tens of millions of hawksbill and green turtles before the eighteenth century, but energetic harvesting nearly obliterated them, changing reef ecologies in fundamental ways. Passing through Havana in 1637, Thomas Gage found turtle the only affordable meat.44 Richard Ligon, after 30 months on Barbados in the mid-1650s, recalled fondly “the green turtle, which is the best food the Sea affords.” Turtle hunters, said Ligon, “take infinite numbers of them, by turning them on their backs with staves, where they lye till they are fetcht away.”45 One sea captain apparently landed 25 tons of salted turtle meat on Jamaica in 1657, and 22 tons in 1659.46 According to a Spanish manuscript from about 1670, “The regular diet of the English [on Jamaica] is made up of turtle.”47 Father Labat, who lived on Martinique in the 1690s, noted the importance of turtle harvesting on that island.48 Slaves and poor whites ate turtle meat in the British West Indies, and by one account turtles provided most of the meat eaten in Jamaica around 1700–1730. Eventually, turtle meat became a delicacy in England, served at the finest tables, prized for its taste and its alleged aphrodisiac qualities. By 1800, green turtles had grown scarce in parts of the Caribbean, notably the Cayman Islands, where they had formerly been most abundant. Population growth and links to European markets, both outgrowths of the 43

44 45

46 47

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Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh (1972:268–72) provide a useful discussion of deforestation on English Caribbean islands, 1640–1690. On maroons in the forests of eastern Cuba, see La Rosa Corzo (1988). The importance of woodlands to Jamaican maroons emerges from the pages of Dallas (1803). The clearing of forests in the Danish West Indies pushed maroon communities there to escape to Puerto Rico (Hall 1985). For the (modest) impact of sugar plantations on the forests and environment of Surinam, see Boomgaard (1992) and Stiprian (1993). Descourlitz (1935) provides information on St. Domingue ecology as of 1803. Gage (1648:196). Ligon (1657:36). Ligon went on: “Sure, there is no creature on Earth, nor in the Seas, that enjoyes life with so much sweetness and delight, as this poor fish the Turtle, nor none more delicate in taste, and more nourishing, than he.” Parsons (1962:28). Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid), MSS 17,635, ff. 228–32, Descripci´on de la Isla de Xamaica. Labat (1722, 1:296–305); du Tertre (1973, 2:214–19).

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plantation complex, spelled catastrophe for turtles and a new ecology for Caribbean reefs.49 Small and bounded ecosystems, whether aquatic or terrestrial, are normally highly sensitive to perturbation, and easily shifted from one state to another. A few people, a few goats – even in special circumstances, a few thousand mosquitoes – could bring profound effects. In the Caribbean, the plantation economy and the influx of tens of thousands of people brought far-reaching changes – but at variable speeds. On the small islands, the ecological transformation of sugar and plantations was thorough and fast. In the Caribbean as a whole it was thorough but slow. Forest clearances for sugar (and other) plantations continued into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at least on the bigger islands of Hispaniola and Cuba.

Yellow Fever and Caribbean Ecology Ecological transformations, like social ones, bring unintended consequences. Among the unintended consequences of the sugar revolution in the Caribbean were soil erosion, fuel shortages, and rat infestations, all of which caught the attention of planters. One they did not notice but that affected their world more than all the rest was the creation of environments favorable for A. aegypti mosquitoes. Another consequence they did not recognize was the creation of social, demographic, and military circumstances favorable for the circulation of the yellow fever virus. Viruses are strange creatures. They amount to a few ribbons of genetic material encased in a protein wrapper. They cannot reproduce on their own, but must seize control of cells in other creatures and convert them into copying machines. A single virus can become millions in short order. One Nobel laureate in biology thought that the “single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance on this planet is the virus.”50 The yellow fever virus is one among the flaviviruses, a genus that includes dengue fever, West Nile virus, and Japanese encephalitis, among about 70 others. In its present form, the yellow fever virus is probably about 3,000 years old, judging from genomic evidence. The virus is native to Africa, probably East or Central Africa. Within Africa, the virus shows considerable genetic variety, but in the Americas it shows almost none at all. The American version is genetically nearly identical 49 50

Jackson (1997). Crawford (2003:2).

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to the West African one, implying it arrived in the Americas from West Africa only after Columbus.51

yellow jack and black vomit: symptoms and susceptibility For the 250 years before 1900, yellow fever was the most feared disease among whites in the Greater Caribbean. Called yellow fever because jaundice is one of its symptoms, it went by many names. By the nineteenth century when quarantine regulations required hoisting yellow flags, it was often called “yellow jack.”52 Spanish speakers called it “black vomit” for its signature symptom. The symptoms of yellow fever make for grisly reading but hold one advantage for the historian. In fortunate cases, yellow fever brings on high fever, muscle pains, and headache, sometimes nausea and dizziness as well. These symptoms last for three or four days but then disappear. In these happy cases, it is easy to confuse yellow fever with any of a number of other diseases. In unfortunate cases, these symptoms abate but then recur after about a day’s respite, joined by jaundice and by internal hemorrhage in what is sometimes called a “toxic phase.” In lethal cases, victims generally ooze blood through the nose and ears, suffer delirium, and vomit up partly coagulated blood, often roughly the color and consistency of coffee grounds: the black vomit.53 The good thing about this symptom is that untrained observers easily noticed it 51

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On the virus and the disease, I relied on Barrett and Monath (2003), Monath (1999), Monath (2001), Vasconcelos (2003), Tsai (2000), Vainio and Cutts (1998), Tomori (2004), Restrepo (2004), and Barrett and Higgs (2007). The classic studies, outdated in several respects now, are Carter (1931) and Strode (1951). Once in doubt and now confirmed by genomic analysis, the African origin is also suggested by the fact that the virus is more deadly in South American monkeys than it is in African ones (Marianneau et al. 1999). As far as I know, the first writer to suggest an African origin for the disease was Mackrill (1796:17), who wrote it should be called “African fever.” Wilkinson’s (1995) ingenious linking of yellow fever and Maya collapse is no longer plausible. Moreau de Jonn`es (1820:7–10) lists dozens of terms for yellow fever in French, Spanish, and English. A vivid description of a fatal case, using the image of coffee grounds, appears in Pinckard (1806, 2:262–3). Warren (1741:12–18) has a detailed account of yellow fever symptoms, as does Poupp´e-Desportes (1770, 1:191–201) and Labat (1722, 1:72–4, 435–40, 4:2–6). Labat had what he termed “Mal de Siam” (usually considered yellow fever) twice, in June 1694 and May 1697. Because repeat bouts of yellow fever are unknown, one or more of these illnesses was probably something else.

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and often mentioned it, so that retrospective diagnosis of lethal yellow fever from textual accounts is easier than for almost any other disease.54 Coma and death normally follow the black vomit. Many victims, I imagine, would have regarded death as a welcome escape from misery.55 Yellow fever kills people via organ failure, usually of the liver and kidneys, and by circulatory collapse. From the onset of symptoms to eventual demise takes about two weeks. Typically, the immune system forms antibodies within a week, which does not always help and in some cases may paradoxically hinder recovery. As one medical authority puts it, “it is unclear whether immune mechanisms during the acute stage of the disease contribute to pathogenesis.”56 In other words, their immune systems might make victims sicker still, and a specially vigorous immune system might be a liability (also considered a possibility in the 1918 influenza pandemic). Young adults in the prime of life (“strong, full, youthful”) are at the greatest risk of death, which suggests that a lusty immune response may be part of the problem.57 A French doctor on Martinique in 1818 54

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But it is not foolproof. Retrospective diagnosis is always uncertain to some degree. Dengue is also sometimes a hemorrhagic fever, with all the same symptoms except the black vomit. Louse-borne relapsing fever also mimics yellow fever symptoms fairly closely, and even malaria and typhoid can be mistaken for yellow fever. Infections manifest themselves differently in different victims; pathogens evolve; seventeenth- and eighteenth-century observers leaped to conclusions. Even with yellow fever, there is a real possibility of confusion and mistaken historical diagnosis. Patch (1996) found a most ingenious diagnostic tool in his study of epidemics in the Yucatan. Priests refused to give all three last rites to those dying of yellow fever because they found the implications of parishioners vomiting up the body of Christ too disturbing. Patch believes one can tell the difference between yellow fever epidemics and others in the records of priestly conduct. Those dying of yellow fever got only two of the three last rites, penance and extreme unction, but not viaticum – as the Eucharist is called when administered to the dying. In the Cook Islands, I once contracted hemorrhagic dengue fever, a sister flavivirus to yellow fever, and for a few unspeakably miserable days viewed the prospect of my own death with delirious equanimity. George Pinckard, a British medical officer serving in Guyana in 1796–1797, recorded similar ambivalences in his account of a bout with what he believed was yellow fever. Pinckard (1806, 3:135–50). Monath (1999:1262). Moseley (1795:416–17). As Pinckard (1806, 3:231), put it: “Nor do health and vigour give any security; for he who to-day boasts the greatest strength, to-morrow, perhaps, is extended in his coffin.” A Father Lapey, observing the

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observed that the most vulnerable were “Americans of an athletic constitution,” which he put down to the “abuse they make of spirituous liquors.”58 Although it kills a few of them, children often experience yellow fever mildly and may not even notice they are sick, a common pattern with infectious diseases. A certain Dr. Thurston writing from St. Kitts in 1818 claimed, “I have only in one or two instances seen any one [suffer?] from this complaint under ten or upwards of fifty five years of age.”59 The apparent hardihood of the elderly probably represents their higher likelihood of prior exposure and acquired immunity rather than any particular vigor on their part. The yellow fever virus leaves victims whom it does not kill weak as a kitten for weeks – but immune for life. Gender as well as age may have affected yellow fever risk. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century observers often claimed that men were more vulnerable than women, although one must bear in mind they usually saw vulnerability as a consequence of intemperance, which they typically associated with males. Hence they generally wished to find males more susceptible than females:60 In the yeare 1647 there was a great Plague in Barbados, which raged violently especially at Saint Michaels or the Indian Bridg, it swept away abundance of people, but it was observed it fell most upon the men, as all other Epidemicall deseases, ordinarily doo, showing something of favour to the other sex. One of the most celebrated doctors of the eighteenth century, James Lind, put it this way: “It is a general observation that women enjoy a

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Yucatan outbreak in 1648, noted “The most healthy and robust of the young men were most violently attacked and died soonest.” Quoted in Ziperman (1973:105). Wellcome Library, American MSS 113, Certificats de Guadeloupe, ff. 56–7, Gardey a` Chervin, 6 f´evrier 1818. Wellcome Library, American MSS 113, Certificats de Guadeloupe, ff. 60–2, Thurston to Chervin 20 March 1818. Buchet (1997) shows that ship’s apprentices (“mousses”) survived Caribbean cruises more often than did regular sailors in the French navy. The Inspector General of Hospitals on Barbados, recalling an 1819 yellow fever epidemic there, noted the elderly seemed less affected. PRO, WO 334/165, ff.20, “Extract of Annual Report to Accompany the Annual Return of Sick,” 30 July 1839. BL Sloane MSS 3662, ff. 62–54 [this part of the manuscript is written back to front], “Description of Barbados.”

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much better state of health, in the West Indies, than men, and are not so subject to the yellow fever as them, owing probably to their more temperate way of living.”61 A French doctor who lived in St. Domingue from 1732 to 1747 put it in even stronger terms: “Yellow fever has put an infinitude of men in their graves quickly, but I have seen only one woman attacked by it.”62 If indeed men contracted yellow fever more often than women, this difference is probably best explained by greater risk of exposure rather than bodily susceptibility.63 The modern medical literature, usually mute on this point, occasionally notes “a slight excess of cases in males.”64

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Lind (1716–1794) was a naval doctor famous for making the case that citrus fruits could prevent scurvy, which he showed in 1747 through what were perhaps the first clinical trials (Lind 1788:117–18). John Hunter, who served with the British Army in Jamaica in 1779–1783, agreed with Lind, saying the “life of a woman is at least twice as good as that of a man, to speak in the terms of those, who make such things matter of calculation.” He added that women were also protected by “their . . . temperance in living” (Hunter 1788:25–6). The sole countervailing view I have found is that of the planter Matthew Lewis, who in an 1817 epidemic on Jamaica noted it spread “particularly among the wives of the soldiers” (Lewis 1999:209). Winterbottom (1803, 1:14) notes that in West Africa European women were less likely to succumb to fevers than European men. These authors often connected disease to intemperance, and thus found it convenient to report that men suffered more often than women. Poupp´e-Desportes (1770, 1:40). The original: “Le mal de Siam a mis une infinit´e d’hommes au tombeau en tr`es-peu de temps; mais je n’ai vu qu’une femme qui en ait e´t´e attaqu´ee.” Moseley (1795:416–17) thought women, children, and thin people were less affected by yellow fever. Lind (1788:117–18). Pinckard (1806, 3:426–7): “The strongest men – those with the most dense or rigid fibre are most subject to the high degrees of the continued, or yellow fever; and are most frequently, and most rapidly destroyed by it. Women, children, convalescents from former malady, and those who have been reduced by the use of mercurial remedies are less frequently the objects of its attack; and when it does seize them, it is commonly milder, and less rapid in its progress.” See also Jackson (1791:250) and Rodr´ıguez Arg¨uelles (1804:unpaginated prologue). Bajon (1777–1778, 1:34, 88–114) on the diseases of women in French Guyana also finds women in general healthier than men, although he does not mention yellow fever specifically. Monath (2001:12). Conceivably, any difference in incidence of the disease is a reflection of vector preferences. I have seen no evidence concerning A. aegypti, but apparently the primary malarial mosquito of the Caribbean, An. albimanus, much prefers to bite men over women (Frederickson 1993:14). Waddell (1990– 1992) reports several yellow fever epidemics in nineteenth-century Spain that showed far greater incidence among men than among women.

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yellow fever mortality Today, about 75 to 85 percent of yellow fever victims are lucky enough to be sick only briefly, and of those who get the full one-two punch only 20 to 50 percent die from it. In total, about 3 to 13 percent of cases are fatal. There still is no known cure. Mercifully, it is now among the easiest of viruses to control because its vector is among the fussiest of mosquitoes (as we shall see) and because since the 1930s an extremely effective and safe vaccine has been available.65 In historical epidemics, the case mortality (i.e., the percentage of infected victims who died) was probably much greater – some accounts suggest 85 percent or more.66 In most instances, reporting was so sketchy that many more people had the disease than found their way into official statistics, and recovered without fanfare. Therefore, reported case mortality rates deserve some skepticism. Six well-documented yellow fever outbreaks, albeit minor ones, give credence to reports of high case mortality. In 1853, yellow fever attacked the British garrison on Bermuda: of 829 infected, 360 died (43%).67 In 1856, three British steamships called at Haitian ports and left with a yellow fever epidemic aboard, which killed 30 percent of those who fell ill on the luckiest ship and 48 percent on the unluckiest.68 This percentage was not case mortality (the proportion of those infected who died) but overall mortality in an isolated population. In 1861 in the French port of St. Nazaire, 44 people fell ill with yellow fever and 26 died (59% case mortality). In 1900, an Italian opera company visited the Brazilian city of Belem to perform Aida on the 400th anniversary of the founding of Brazil. Twenty-nine of the Italians contracted yellow fever, and nineteen (65%) died of it, a matter of acute embarrassment to local authorities who provided the best medical care available.69 In 1920, 65

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Barrett (1997). The vaccine is manufactured in chicken eggs and cannot easily be mass-produced. Slosek (1986:249) offers 94.5% as the upper limit. Monath (1999) gives 1–80% as the range of case mortality but emphasizes the unreliability of all such figures. PRO CO 37/150, f. 81, “Report of the Commissioners on the Yellow Fever at Bermuda 1853.” “Report upon Yellow Fever in HM Ships on the West Indies Station in 1856” by Sir John Liddell, 19 July 1856. National Maritime Museum (Greenwich), MLN/153/9/. Hillemand (2006); Coleman (1984); Costa (1973:71–3). I owe this latter reference to Xenia Wilkinson. Curtin (1998:3–5, 9–11) reports some mortality figures

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Mexican authorities recorded 505 cases of yellow fever and 249 (49%) deaths.70 In 1995, an outbreak in Peru killed 38 percent of 800 people who fell ill.71 For comparison, in the days before effective prevention, case mortality rates for smallpox ranged about 20 to 50 percent, and for bubonic plague as much as 80 percent.72 Why might mortality have been greater in the past? Two main possibilities might explain it. First, it could be that the risk of exposure has declined so that fewer people in a given population get infected. Second, perhaps case mortality has dropped, and among those infected fewer people die. The first possibility is surely part of any explanation. Certainly, the virus today no longer gets the chance to run amok among highly susceptible populations because of mosquito control and the vaccine. Rarely if ever do large contingents of unvaccinated people travel to places where yellow fever presents a risk. In addition, many of the historical data, especially those used in this book, come from populations including large proportions of military men or indentured servants. In an ordinary epidemic, whether of yellow fever or anything else, many people avoided infection by fleeing. For example, in the 1793 yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia some 20,000 Philadelphians, between a third and a half of the city’s population, left the city.73 But in the Caribbean, soldiers, sailors, and indentured servants – and, of course, slaves – were not normally at liberty to flee in the face of epidemics, so fewer of them did so and more stood their ground and took their chances. They could not reduce their risk of exposure.74

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for European troops in West Africa in the nineteenth century that support the notion of extreme mortality in yellow fever epidemics. In one case, in Gambia in 1825–1826 yellow fever killed 279 men of a force that numbered about 120, a statistical oddity made possible only by frequent (doomed) reinforcements. Sol´orzano Ramos (1997:173). Barrett and Higgs (2007). Livi-Bacci (2006:206). Plague mortality rarely achieved this level, however. Kornfeld (1984:189). As many as 10,000 Philadelphians died in the epidemic. Desertion rates in the West Indies ran highest in the French and British navies in times of epidemics (Buchet 1997b). A French doctor claimed that in his ten years working in the Port-au-Prince military hospital, yellow fever killed at least seven-eighths of those admitted. Wellcome Library, American MSS 133, ff. 35–6, Leuren a` Chervin, 17 Avril 1818. Moreover, soldiers, sailors, and perhaps servants may have made themselves more vulnerable to yellow fever by damaging their livers through heavy use of alcohol. Buckley (1998:293) offers this suggestion, and documents (281–94) the view that the British soldier was a

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Beyond exposure risk, there is the possibility that modern yellow fever kills fewer of those people it does infect. It is theoretically possible that the virus has evolved in the last century or two so as to become less virulent, which would explain the conundrum neatly. But this seems not to be the case. Evidence from the virus’ genome implies that it has been very stable for the last 500 years.75 Although viruses and other pathogens have an evolutionary stake in allowing their host to survive until they find the next one, if high levels of virulence are required for prolific reproduction within a host’s body, the evolutionary payoff is not always for reduced virulence. And in any case, the arboviruses (those communicated by ticks or insects) are under less pressure to evolve so as to flourish within their human habitat: The primary habitat of the yellow fever virus, for example, is mosquitoes, not people. So the evolutionary pressure to maximize transmission has been stronger within the bodies of A. aegypti, not within us. Indeed, by making us so sick and listless that we cannot swat their mobile habitat, mosquito-borne pathogens probably benefit from being virulent in humans.76 The dengue virus, which unlike yellow fever has mutated freely in the last 200 years, has evolved more rather than less virulent strains.77 So this possibility seems remote. Another biological hypothesis is that in many parts of the world, potential yellow fever victims are protected by experience with dengue fever. Dengue, another flavivirus, is ordinarily transmitted by the same mosquito, and seems to confer some “cross-immunization” for yellow fever. Dengue probably arrived in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century, like yellow fever, and has been widespread since 1827.78 Since the 1970s, it has grown still more common in the Caribbean and Brazil.

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brobdignanian swiller. However, the frequent observation that young men died more readily than their elders of yellow fever runs counter to this suggestion, as younger livers on average should have been less damaged by alcohol. Barrett and Higgs (2007). For an accessible account of how pathogens might evolve, see Ewald (1994:36– 55). Ewald is controversial among evolutionary biologists, I am told. My views here are largely extrapolation based on de Roode et al. (2008), for which reference I thank David Krakauer. Tabachnik (1998:413). Dengue has undergone “explosive radiation,” evolving many new forms. Frederiksen (1955); Downs (1982); Slosek (1986:253); Vainio and Cutts (1998). Ashcroft (1979a) finds that British soldiers who served in India, and likely encountered dengue, were less likely to suffer from yellow fever if subsequently posted to the West Indies.

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Its prevalence (in recent centuries) in Asia is the leading hypothesis to explain the absence of yellow fever there, despite the presence of A. aegypti. This hypothesis looks much more likely. Today, yellow fever mortality is minor. According to official data, it kills 2,000 to 5,000 people annually in Africa and a few hundred in South America, mainly in the Amazonian regions of Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil. In all, counting those victims who never make into official reports, it probably kills about 30,000 people annually and sickens some 200,000, mainly in Africa.79 Malaria and AIDS each kill 100 times more people. Yellow fever today ranks so far down the list of deadly diseases that almost no yellow fever research takes place outside of Brazil.

Yellow Fever Transmission and Immunity Historically, yellow fever epidemics happened in the Americas when the virus somehow got into the vicinity of sizeable populations of nonimmune people and of A. aegypti. Yellow fever’s outsized importance in the Greater Caribbean owed a great deal to the vector.

vectors of the caribbean: aedes aegypti The A. aegypti’s habits govern the range of yellow fever.80 Like the virus, the mosquito is of African origin, and presumably first came to the Americas aboard slaving ships.81 No native American mosquito occupied A. aegypti’s favored niche, so it had no direct competition. It may also have left some of its parasites behind when crossing the Atlantic, a frequent stroke of luck for invasive species.82 Like all mosquitoes, A. aegypti pass their short lives in four stages. They start out as eggs, and if all goes well graduate to become larvae, pupae, and then adult mosquitoes. Unlike most mosquitoes, A. aegypti 79

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World Health Organization estimates reported in Barrett and Higgs (2007) and Restrepo (2004). On A. aegypti: Christophers (1960); Clements (2004); Rodhain and Leon (1997); and more accessibly, Spielman and D’Antonio (2001). I have learned about mosquitoes by buzzing around my colleague Peter Armbruster of the Georgetown University Biology Department, an authority on a dengue vector, A. albopictus. The evidence for African origin is that A. aegypti has many close relatives among African mosquito species but none in the Americas (Slosek 1986:251). On disease vectors as invasive species, see Lounibos (2002), esp. 235–6 on A. aegypti.

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prefer to breed in water vessels rather than swamps or puddles. Wells, cisterns, open barrels, buckets, or pots suit it nicely. According to some reports, it has the further preference for clay-bottomed or clay-lined water containers.83 In an ideal A. aegypti world, females lay their eggs on the damp walls of water containers, not on the surface of the water itself. The eggs can survive for several weeks in dry conditions if necessary. If the containers fill with water, the eggs will hatch. Thus the onset of the Caribbean rainy season, or the end of a drought, normally brought a surge in mosquito populations. For example, in Veracruz in 1817 a diarist noted that little more than a week after heavy rains, “such an abundance of mosquitoes resulted . . . that all the walls of the houses . . . appeared black.”84 Unlike many mosquitoes, A. aegypti eggs require clean, unpolluted water to mature into larvae and pupae. A. aegypti eggs often make meals for birds, fish, frogs, spiders, dragonflies, and wasps. They are also subject to several parasites. Eggs that avoid these perils last seven to nine days as larvae, then another two to three days as pupae before maturing into fledgling mosquitoes. The entire progression is slowed by cool weather and accelerated by warm weather. Once full-fledged and aloft, A. aegypti like to stay low to the ground. They are stealthy creatures. The females are silent, unlike their buzzing brethren, and bite people around the ankles, often at dawn or dusk. A. aegypti bite more frequently in warm and humid weather. As with all mosquitoes, only females require a blood meal, which is necessary for oviposition, that is, making eggs. When hungry, the female A. aegypti can drink up to three times their weight in human blood. A full meal requires two to five minutes, counting the time needed to find a blood vessel. Sated A. aegypti are too bloated to fly well and will seek out a wall or other secure surface 83

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Ramenofsky (1993:325), following Carter (1931). The modern medical literature makes no mention of clay in this connection. I have asked mosquito experts and soil chemists if there could have been anything about clay that particularly suited A. aegypti eggs or larvae, thinking maybe somehow nutrients from the clay might leach into water and help feed mosquito larvae, but no one thought this plausible. It could be that there was no attraction to clay itself, merely that clay was in common use as a water container when Carter made his studies. In the modern world, say, since 1950, metal and plastic has replaced clay so widely that A. aegypti rarely get the chance to lay eggs in clay containers. Antonio L´opez Matoso, quoted in Knaut (1997:627). Veracruz presumably had many species of mosquitoes, not merely A. aegypti.

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for a rest, and not bite again for three to four days. After two or three blood meals, they seek out a suitable spot for laying eggs. Ordinarily, female A. aegypti can lay a batch of eggs per week in their two- to fourweek lifespans, but again warmer weather speeds everything up – flying, eating, digestion, oviposition. Some long-lived individuals last for six or eight weeks. Hungry A. aegypti find human victims by sight and chemical sensors. Their sensors work much better in humid air. They can detect moving objects as far as 10 meters away, and are attracted to warmth and exhalations of water vapor and carbon dioxide. They are especially attuned to ammonia and lactic acid in concentrations typical of human sweat.85 It may be that adult men, more inclined to sweat than women or children, hold a special attraction for A. aegypti. A hard-working, hard-breathing, sweaty human body close to the ground, such as a sugarcane cutter or a digging soldier, made the most conspicuous and enticing target. Female A. aegypti are finicky eaters: They bite humans over 90 percent of the time. Only in desperation will they turn to another mammal for a blood meal. This feeding focus, as specialists call it, makes them highly efficient vectors for human disease because they rarely inject a load of virus into cattle, pigs, or horses and more often ingest virus with their meals than would more eclectic feeders. Although A. aegypti are homebodies, timid flyers reluctant to venture far on their own, they traveled widely by accident. Their affinity for water casks made them good stowaways onboard ships, allowing eggs, larvae, and full-grown mosquitoes to travel across seas and oceans. Indeed, the reluctance to fly far improved A. aegypti chances of crossing the sea in convoy with a ship; a more adventuresome species would often fly off on its own and soon starve to death or drown. Wherever ships sailed A. aegypti could settle, if there were people, water containers, and warmth. Their need for wet and warm weather limited A. aegypti’s range. In cool or dry conditions they prefer to relax rather than fly and bite, and so are ineffective at propagating yellow fever. By and large, they need temperatures above 10◦ C (50◦ F) to survive, above 17◦ C (63◦ F) to bite, and above 24◦ C (75◦ F) to feel their best. The ideal range is 27◦ –31◦ C (81◦ –88◦ F). Anything above 40◦ C (104◦ F) is unhealthful, even fatal. Their eggs can tolerate wider temperature ranges, even frost, 85

Kent et al. (2008); Ghaninia et al. (2008).

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but to hatch they need water and to mature the larvae need warm water. These temperature requirements mean that A. aegypti can exist year-round throughout the lowland Caribbean, especially on the coasts (where the cities are) and South America about as far south as Rio de Janeiro. In North America, A. aegypti eggs can survive a mild winter and can hatch in spring warmth. Ships from warmer climes could bring reinforcement mosquitoes every summer. Thus, yellow fever could make rare seasonal appearances at latitudes as high as Quebec, for example, where it appeared in 1711, or in Dublin in 1726. It could make frequent summer calls at subtropical latitudes, as it did at Charleston, South Carolina, and Buenos Aires. Yellow fever acquired historical importance only when it burst out as an epidemic, and epidemics had more stringent requirements than did mere appearances. The temperature and moisture requirements and eccentricities of the A. aegypti limited the scope for yellow fever. Human factors did as well. A sustained cycle of transmission (in the absence of an abundance of monkeys) required human beings, and not just any human beings.86 Whether the yellow fever virus spreads and kills many people rather than just a few depends on the efficiency of transmission from mosquito to human to mosquito. With mosquito-borne diseases, the cycle’s efficiency depends chiefly on three things: the population densities of people and vectors; the feeding focus of the vector, that is, whether or not it bites only people or bites people among other mammals; and the longevity of the vector. Old mosquitoes are the most dangerous because they are more likely to have bitten an infectious person and thus harbor the virus. The feeding focus is important because indiscriminate biters will often inject the virus harmlessly into unaffected mammals. With yellow fever, the vector populations are especially important. Only about 60 percent of A. aegypti are able to transmit the yellow fever virus (“vector competence”), so abundance of the vector is crucial. People have the disease for about two weeks, after which they are either dead or immune. Although A. aegypti will bite anyone, even recently deceased corpses, yellow fever victims’ blood is infective for only three to six days toward the beginning of their illness, and each mosquito 86

Although it is possible for the virus to be transmitted directly, from mother mosquito to daughter (“vertical transmission”), this is rare. Fewer than 1% of infected A. aegypti do it.

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only bites a few times (maybe ten or twenty) in her life. The transmission cycle can be robust only when there are plenty of mosquitoes to ensure that enough infective people are bitten so that the virus can get from person to person. This helps explain why yellow fever was generally seasonal, in a rhythm connected to the summertime abundance of A. aegypti. Epidemic yellow fever also requires an abundant, closely packed human population or the virus will not get from mosquito to mosquito fast enough. The vector’s limited flying range, the brief infective period of human sufferers, and other factors make it difficult for yellow fever to circulate among dispersed populations. Hence, in part, its urban character. Moreover, epidemic yellow fever needs a favorable ratio of susceptible people to immune people because immunes are virus killers.

yellow fever immunity The cycle of transmission is broken when mosquitoes inject virus only into immunized bloodstreams. To judge by modern vaccination programs in Africa and Brazil, a population with 60 percent immunes can still host a yellow fever epidemic, but one with 80 percent immunes cannot because infected mosquitoes too frequently expire without biting a susceptible person.87 This phenomenon, by which a high proportion of immunes can serve as a shield for susceptibles, is known as “herd immunity.” In a community recently visited by yellow fever, too few susceptible bodies remained, making the community invulnerable. In a community with many people, say 80 percent, who grew up in yellow fever zones, whether in Africa or America, the virus could rarely get to the vulnerable 20 percent who were protected by their neighbors’ immunity. Herd immunity was an unknown concept in the Greater Caribbean, but it was crucial for its history. Complicating these matters is the possibility of heritable resistance to, or even full immunity against, yellow fever. Over the long haul, evolutionary pressures can select genetic traits that offer resistance to specific infections, generally those prevalent over many centuries amid a geographically stable population. Many people of African (especially West African) descent carry the so-called sickle cell trait, which confers strong resistance to the deadliest form of malaria – about a quarter 87

Massad et al. (2003).

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of West Africans carry this trait, and a tenth of African-Americans. If yellow fever in its present form has been present in West Africa for at least 3,000 years as the genomic evidence implies, it would be astonishing to evolutionary biologists if human populations living in its midst did not evolve some form of resistance to such a virulent disease. Moreover, in many epidemics in the U.S., Cuba, and Brazil, records show far greater mortality among people of European descent than among people of African descent. But there is no direct evidence of resistance, and no identifiable mechanism (like the sickle cell trait) to explain it. Some students of the question, aware that the argument applies only to people of African descent or origin, regard such arguments skeptically because they seem to imply inherent biological differences among people of different skin colors.88 There are other possible explanations for recorded differences among blacks and whites in disease morbidity and mortality, such as uneven reporting, differential exposure to disease, or different patterns of acquired immunities. In the slave societies of the Caribbean, the great majority of blacks were recent arrivals from parts of Africa – Senegambia, Gold Coast, Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, northern Angola – with endemic yellow fever.89 If they did not carry genetic resistance, most of them were immune to yellow fever through childhood experience of the virus. So the historical evidence does not 88

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For a recent such statement, Watts (2001), and in response, Kiple (2001). The biologists I have consulted on this point uniformly accepted the idea of heritable immunity. Burnard (2001; 2008:144) has data on geographic and ethnic origins of 130,000 slaves arriving in Jamaica, 1655–1725, many of whom were sold to Spanish Caribbean settlements. About 93% were shipped from the zone between Gold Coast and Angola, which by the nineteenth century (and I expect long before) was rife with yellow fever. Some of these slaves spent their childhoods far inland, and in some cases perhaps not in yellow fever zones. But if they survived a stay in the barracoons of West Africa, they probably also survived yellow fever. By virtue of childhood exposure, or by enslavement and subsequent exposure, those Africans sent to the Americas if not genetically resistant to yellow fever would in almost all cases have acquired immunity. The maps in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (http://www.slavevoyages.com/tast/assessment/estimates.faces) also suggest an overwhelming proportion of slaves came from areas of Africa where yellow fever was widespread in recent times, and probably during the slave trade as well. Inevitably, some uncertainty surrounds this issue as it impossible to know the local geography of yellow fever or of slave origins (as opposed to ports of embarkation) with precision.

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resolve the question of heritable immunity to yellow fever. The World Health Organization’s pronouncements on the issue are cautiously agnostic, calling only for more research.90 If there is a heritable resistance or immunity to yellow fever, it is a result of the disease environment of one’s ancestors – not a matter of race or skin color. West and Central Africans and people of West and Central African ancestry probably often did carry some measure of resistance to yellow fever; people in and from other parts of Africa generally did and do not. Wherever there was yellow fever there were people with immunity to it – whether acquired or, in some cases, inherited as well. Genetic immunity (or resistance) to yellow fever is not necessary for the arguments in this book. It could be that there is none whatsoever, and that the immunity (or resistance) in populations of African descent is all acquired. Even those slaves who were born and raised outside of yellow fever zones had to pass through the towns, ports, and barracoons of West or West-Central Africa. They spent weeks and months in the most intensive yellow fever environments in the world. Mortality (from all causes) during this stage of the slave trade was enormous, perhaps 15 to 30 percent. Quite plausibly, almost all who made it through this experience acquired yellow fever immunity if they did not have it previously. Most of their descendants in the Greater Caribbean experienced yellow fever in childhood (if they were indeed not genetically shielded) and survived as immunes. Heritable resistance, in my inexpert judgment, probably does exist. But what mattered for the fate of empires and revolutions was the existence of differential immunity and resistance, not whether immunity was genetic or acquired. It is among Atlantic history’s crueler ironies that in their bodies slaves brought new infections to the Americas – yellow fever, falciparum malaria, and hookworm among them – to which they also carried (inherited or acquired) resistance or immunity, which in turn raised the value of slaves against other forms of labor (such as European indentured servants or wage-earners). Differential immunity improved the economic logic of slavery and the slave trade, making it larger geographically, longer chronologically, and more intensive than it would otherwise have been. 90

Vainio and Cutts (1998:30). These authors suggest that in Cuba, race is a factor in dengue resistance, but this merely reflects the land of the ancestors of Cuban blacks – a dengue zone – as opposed to that of other Cubans. Halstead (1997:37) makes a case (of which I am skeptical) for heritable resistance to dengue among blacks generally, acknowledging that there is no known mechanism for this.

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sylvan yellow fever For the moment at least, yellow fever in the Americas is almost completely confined to a form called sylvan (or sylvatic, or jungle) yellow fever.91 In this form, the identical virus causes disease among treedwelling monkeys – it kills howler monkeys but not other species – transmitted among them by mosquito species of the genus Haemagogus.92 It infects people only when they climb into the forest canopy or cut down trees, bringing down infected mosquitoes in the bargain. Today, it mainly affects Amazonian loggers. It normally cannot trigger an epidemic because people, especially unvaccinated people, are too few within the range of infected mosquitoes.93 Moreover, the mosquitoes in question usually disdain human blood. However, if an infected person travels to a city with an active population of A. aegypti, sylvan yellow fever can spark an epidemic, as happened in 1998 in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. The existence of the sylvan form of yellow fever ensures that there is always a reservoir of virus, making it an unlikely candidate for eradication. Indeed, outbreaks have been increasing since 1985 in both Africa and South America, probably because people have encroached more steadily upon the forests where Haemagogus mosquitoes, overcoming their prejudice, bite them from time to time. Other changes have assisted in yellow fever’s modest comeback: Mosquito control programs have lapsed, and global warming has extended the range of the vector.94

Epidemic Yellow Fever and Plantation Sugar From the virus’ point of view, its opportunities were sadly limited in the Caribbean before 1640. Despite suitable warmth and rainfall for the vector, conditions left a lot to be desired: not enough water storage containers for vector breeding sites, not enough vectors, and definitely not enough people for mosquitoes to bite. Before it could exert any sway 91 92

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On sylvan yellow fever, Vasconcelos (2003:280–1). This raises another possibility concerning yellow fever’s dismal failure to evolve toward benignity in humans: For most of its history, it may have been more useful to the virus to evolve toward benignity in monkeys (as well as mosquitoes). I have not encountered this idea in the medical literature but if it has merit, no doubt someone else has already thought of it. Brazil in particular has tried hard to encourage vaccination for people moving into its (enormous) yellow fever zones (Massad et al. 2003). Barrett and Higgs (2007).

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over Caribbean history, yellow fever had to become established in the region. The virus could not do so on its own, but in the middle of the seventeenth century it got the help it needed. The sugar revolutions helped A. aegypti prosper and gave yellow fever its foothold. The widespread deforestation reduced the habitat of island birds. For the grim purpose of sustaining epidemics, old mosquitoes are the most effective, so landscapes with fewer insectivorous birds and more veteran mosquitoes probably had more virus in circulation (other things being equal). Predation on mosquito eggs and larvae may have abated too, although a confident assessment would require historical censuses of dragonflies, frogs, and the many smaller aggressive creatures residing in stagnant water. Whatever the effects of the sugar revolutions on mosquito predators, sugar plantations did wonders for A. aegypti breeding and feeding. Plantations and the ports that sent sugar to Europe made ideal incubators and larders for A. aegypti. Like cities, sugar plantations were human communities where people had to store water. Unless situated on a reliable stream, people needed to keep water for the dry season in cisterns, kegs, barrels, or buckets. Small islands especially had few or no reliable streams in the dry season, requiring people to store water.95 In addition, sugar plantations had clay pots that captured water, too. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, sugar processing required putting partly crystallized sugar into clay pots for a month or two while molasses drained out, leaving semi-refined sugar. The pots were shaped like cheerleaders’ megaphones, cones with a small hole at the narrow end. A small plantation needed hundreds of these, and large ones used tens of thousands. The pots were empty except for three to five months after the sugar harvest. Presumably they often broke, as they were made of clay and handled by slaves, who often treated their masters’ (other) property with less than loving care. Clay pots and fragments of clay pots caught the rain easily. They had residues of sugar in them, ideal for maximizing bacteria populations on which A. aegypti larvae could feed. Whether or not sugar assisted indirectly in larval nutrition, the sugar plantation assisted generously in nursing A. aegypti populations. After 95

Ligon (1657:28–9) notes the shortage of streams on Barbados and the prevalence of cisterns and ponds. Writing in the 1670s, Trapham noted that Jamaican colonists drank water infested with mosquito eggs, to which he attributed their difficulties with intestinal worms (Kupperman 1984:231).

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1640, with each passing year the Caribbean became more and more suitable for A. aegypti breeding.96 It also became better for feeding. Sugar meant population growth, urbanization, and hence more frequent blood meals for mosquitoes, especially those like A. aegypti that hanker for human blood. Moreover, A. aegypti like sucrose, too. Any sweet fluid will do, and few are sweeter than cane juice. Any individual mosquito can survive on cane juice or honey, although mosquito populations of course required blood meals. Nonetheless, the spread of sugar plantations made cane juice easier to find, providing energy for flight, prolonging mosquito lives (improving males’ chances of finding mates), and raising the odds that females would last long enough to find enough blood meals. Thus, the local ecology of sugar plantations boosted A. aegypti food supply and populations. In addition, sugar meant slaves and slave ships from West Africa, and so more opportunities for stowaway mosquitoes to arrive and found new colonies of A. aegypti.97 A further ecological change may also have helped make yellow fever a scourge of the Caribbean: monkey immigration.98 On many of the thousands of slaving voyages from West Africa, monkeys crossed the Atlantic. Several different species of African monkeys made it to the Antilles between 1640 and 1690, including some such as green monkeys, capable of hosting the yellow fever virus. In the West Indies, they initially found a monkey paradise: plenty of woodland and no predators except people and dogs. They lived in the vanishing forests, subsisting on woodland fruits and vegetation and making frequent raids on croplands, including canefields. They, too, enjoyed eating sugarcane. As the woodlands shrank back and croplands expanded, the monkey populations presumably found it necessary to risk raiding the plantations more often, thereby coming closer to human settlements (on the small islands they could never be very far from settlements). They became notorious pests on Barbados by the 1680s, where there was scant woodland to

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Goodyear (1978:10–13). The speculation about sugar residues is my own. Laboratory evidence suggests that if plentifully supplied with sugars, A. aegypti bite less frequently, which would make them less effective as disease vectors. Whether this holds outside of lab conditions is uncertain. In any case, if abundant sugar doubled A. aegypti populations, that would more than offset their reduced appetites for blood (Foster and Eischen 1987). The following paragraph is speculation based on data from Denham (1987).

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house them, and soon thereafter on Nevis and St. Kitts as well. Moreover, the habit of keeping monkeys as pets would also have allowed easier communication of the yellow fever virus between monkeys and people, as vector mosquitoes would not have to travel far to serve as conduits. If this reconstruction of Caribbean monkey ecology is correct – and there are many uncertainties in historical monkey ecology – then it is likely that on many islands a reservoir of the virus built up in the monkey populations. With each passing decade after 1640, the likelihood that an island hosted sylvan yellow fever improved until such time as monkey populations crashed for want of suitable forest habitat. For half a century perhaps, maybe more, conditions were right for the establishment of sylvan yellow fever in the smaller islands. On the larger islands of Cuba, Jamaica, and Hispaniola, and on the South and Central American mainlands (where there were indigenous monkey species capable of carrying the virus), suitable habitat survived and monkey populations probably did as well. If true, all this could help explain how local populations developed immunities to yellow fever even in times when the virus was not brought anew from Africa. It suggests that especially on the big islands and the mainland, yellow fever could be endemic in the countryside and on the plantations, not merely in the cities. Lastly, whether monkeys mattered or not sugar and economic growth generally meant more shipping, more sailors, and more urban settlements within the Caribbean. Large, dense populations meant a steady supply of newborns and toddlers – that is, from the virus’ point of view, bloodstreams without antibodies. To survive in any given location, the virus needed to get quickly from one such na¨ıve bloodstream to another, so densely packed cities made good habitat for the virus. They also suited the vector because cities held vast quantities of human blood, a groaning smorgasbord for A. aegypti. And because city folk invariably stored water in casks, troughs, barrels, buckets, pots, and cisterns in the times before piped water systems, Caribbean cities met the breeding as well as eating preferences of A. aegypti nicely. Sugar exports inspired the growth of Caribbean port cities. As the sugar revolutions progressed more and bigger ports emerged, capable of handling and supplying larger and larger merchant ships. As plantation revenues mounted, the logic of lodging more soldiers, sailors, and officials improved, as did the capacity to do so. The plantation economy helped commercial, military, and governmental establishments grow.

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In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the West Indies had only one big city, Havana, with about 30,000 people in 1700. In all the Americas, only Mexico City was larger. But there were many small cities with between 2,000 and 10,000 people. The plantation economy encouraged decentralization and dispersal, especially where sugar was involved. Semi-refined sugar did not store well, so planters needed nearby ports to get their product to European refineries quickly. Plantation crops in general could not support the cost of land travel for long, and so needed ports close to the plantations. This pattern of numerous scattered ports kept the virus in circulation – as long as there were enough ships. Every transatlantic ship required dozens of barrels of water, and even local vessels needed a few, so every port and ship was a storehouse of fresh water and a nursery for A. aegypti.99 As sugar gradually made the Caribbean richer, and increasingly a theater of large-scale warfare, select port cities built the water storage infrastructure – cisterns, ponds, wells, canals, and so forth – to service naval fleets requiring hundreds or thousands of barrels of water. A. aegypti could scarcely have designed more suitable cities than Caribbean ports. Better still for both vector and virus, the ports were all linked by ever-more frequent shipping. Ships, warm and humid below decks and with plenty of water casks, amounted to limousines for A. aegypti. As commerce grew, connecting all the ports in one web of regular contact, the Caribbean ports in effect provided a super-city for the purposes of a virus needing to get from one body to the next. Sailors helped move the virus in their bloodstreams while ships transported the vectors. The sugar trade (as well as others) brought thousands of sailors to the West Indies every year, many of them with inexperienced immune systems. They easily fell ill and, while infectious, served to move the virus from mosquito to mosquito and port to port. Not for nothing did yellow fever go by the name mal des matelots (“sailors’ disease”) in the French West Indies.100 Ships in effect were super-vectors, efficiently moving both

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Small sailing craft in Gambia have been found to breed A. aegpyti at the rate of 2,000 per week according to a 1902 study cited in Smith and Gibson (1986:331). Henry Warren (1741:73–4) noted yellow fever’s impact on sailors: “ . . . [W]ithin these last six Years, or thereabouts, His Majesty has lost, by means of this Malignancy, in and about his Sugar-Colonies, upward of Twenty Thousand very useful Subjects, the greatest Part of whom were Sea-faring People . . . ” This remark refers to 1733–1738.

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mosquito and virus from port to port. And ports in effect were superhosts, providing warm welcomes for mosquito and virus alike. Thus the sugar revolutions created a new world of plantations, population increase, ships, and ports – a world almost tailor-made for the yellow fever vector and virus.

Malaria, Mosquitoes, and Plantations of Sugar and Rice The ecological and social changes described previously, so helpful to the propagation of yellow fever, also assisted malarial parasites and their mosquitoes. Here I will only sketch some of the basics, but will return to the connection between ecology and malaria in the specific contexts where it mattered most, in Jamaica (Chapter 4) and the American Revolution (Chapter 6). Malaria is among the most ancient of human diseases and the most deadly.101 Today, it kills upwards of 2 million people a year, mainly children, mainly in Africa. It is caused by a parasite, a plasmodium that comes in four varieties, the two most important of which are Plasmodium vivax, which causes a milder form of malaria, and Plasmodium falciparum, the most deadly. The parasite has a complex life cycle, divided between time spent in humans and in female anopheles. The time spent inside mosquitoes, called the extrinsic cycle, lasts for nine to twentyone days. In warmer temperatures, the parasite reproduces faster within mosquitoes. The extrinsic cycle requires temperatures of 15◦ C, in the case of P. vivax, and 20◦ C for P. falciparum. The parasite does mosquitoes no harm. When infected anopheles mosquitoes bite a person, they inject parasites into the bloodstream, beginning the intrinsic cycle. The parasites then migrate to the liver, reproduce exuberantly, and then move into red blood cells. They spend seven to thirty days incubating in human bodies before symptoms appear. In these weeks, if not checked by a vigilant immune system, the parasites can reproduce prolifically within the red blood cells, so that an initial sortie by a few dozen parasites becomes a few trillion invaders. The symptoms of malaria include shivering chills, high fever, sweats, bodily pains and malaise – not easy to distinguish from a variety of other diseases. The on-and-off pattern of fever, with sharp spikes and welcome 101

Webb (2008); Packard (2007).

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breaks, is more distinctive. Different forms of malaria bring fevers and chills at different intervals, hence the old terms such as “intermittent fever” and “tertian fever,” in which the sufferer has an intermission of one day between fevers, and “quartan” (two days between fevers). It is possible to be infected with more than one strain of malaria at a time, complicating the rhythms of fevers and chills. Malaria often brings an elevated heart rate, a mild jaundice, and an enlarged spleen or liver. In severe cases of falciparum malaria, the parasites turn one’s red blood cells into a sticky plaque that clogs the circulatory system, bringing on organ failure, seizures, coma, severe anemia, and cardiovascular collapse, among other grave symptoms. Malaria often kills people who are already weakened by other conditions, such as malnutrition, another disease, or a compromised immune system. Unlike yellow fever, it is more dangerous to children than to adults. Immunity to malaria is hard won. Most people in Africa between the Sahara and the Kalahari are immune to P. vivax because of genetic characteristics (the absence of Duffy antigen in red blood cells), as are many people of African descent elsewhere. This immunity is the result of hundreds of human generations of exposure to malaria and rigorous selection for resistance to P. vivax. Moreover, long exposure to the deadly falciparum strain has favored the evolution and survival of genetic resistance among West and Central Africans, even at the cost of greater risk of anemia. This comes in the form of the so-called sickle cell trait, common but not universal among people of West African origin and descent. The sickle cell makes one’s hemoglobin indigestible to P. falciparum. People from other parts of the world in which malaria has long been present have also evolved genetic shields in other forms. Regardless of ancestry, anyone can acquire conferred resistance (not immunity) by surviving repeated bouts of malaria. Acquired resistance is a complicated matter, not fully understood even today, because the parasites pass through different stages and different antibodies provide protection against them in these different phases. But in short, the more often one has hosted malaria, the more resistant one is likely to be, although rarely if ever fully immune. The structure of resistance means malaria is most dangerous to people whose genetic inheritance does not include either of the two heritable shields, to small children in general, and to adults whose background does not equip them with the necessary antibodies through prior exposure to malaria. Hence, people born and raised in endemic malaria regions who hosted the parasite frequently (and survived childhood) by adulthood enjoyed

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strong resistance to infection. People born and raised elsewhere, unless their ancestors came from malarial regions, carried no immunity and if infected with P. falciparum stood a strong chance of falling severely ill and a good chance of dying. Whether malaria sickens and kills a lot of people rather than just a few depends not only on immunity but on the efficiency of transmission from mosquito to human to mosquito. As with yellow fever and all mosquito-borne diseases, this efficiency depends chiefly on the population densities of people and vectors, the feeding focus of the vector, and the longevity of the vector. Of these it is longevity that matters most. Old mosquitoes are the most dangerous because they are more likely to have bitten an infectious person and to harbor malarial parasites. As it happens, under suitable conditions – warm, humid weather with plenty of aged anophelines – one infected person can easily spread malaria to another 100, making it far easier to spread than most diseases.102 About 400 mosquito species of the genus Anopheles walk this earth, of which perhaps 30 or 40 can transmit malaria.103 They are distant cousins to the yellow fever mosquitoes; the genus Aedes and genus Anopheles diverged perhaps 150 million years ago in Africa.104 Some anopheline species strongly prefer human blood, and thus are highly efficient vectors of malaria, such as Africa’s An. gambiae, the world’s most deadly insect. Some prefer other mammals, and only rarely bite humans. Whereas the yellow fever vector had to colonize the Americas before that disease could become established in the West Indies, anophelines existed all over the Americas before the Columbian Exchange, and several Species of them were capable of hosting malarial parasites. Most West Africans crossing the Atlantic carried malarial plasmodia in their bloodstreams, so once the slave trade began malaria was constantly re-introduced to American Anopheles populations. Thus, malaria was likelier to spread sooner than yellow fever in suitable locations in the Americas, and 102

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On average, an AIDS victim is likely to infect only slightly more than one other person; a measles sufferer about twelve to fourteen people. The vector makes diseases like malaria (and yellow fever) much easier to communicate and thus much more likely to take epidemic form – if enough nonimmune people are available (Spielman and D’Antonio 2001:96–7). On the habits of the anopheles, see Clements (2004); or for laymen, Spielman and D’Antonio (2001). Also useful is the Center for Disease Control and Prevention website: http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/biology/mosquito/ #generalinformation. Kent et al. (2008).

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probably did so soon after Columbus. Several accounts suggest malaria had arrived in the West Indies by the early sixteenth century.105 The chief carriers of malaria in the Caribbean were An. albimanus and, secondarily, An. darlingi.106 Neither is an efficient malaria vector compared to the North American species, An. quadrimaculatus (see Chapter 6), let alone the African An. gambiae. The smaller islands of the eastern Caribbean were the domain of a still less effective vector, An. aquasalis.107 Its indifference to human blood made those islands somewhat healthier than the larger islands and coastlands. The inefficiency of the vectors in the Caribbean meant that malaria transmission required very dense vector populations, as well as plentiful susceptible hosts. The changes sugar plantations brought helped malaria transmission in both respects. The strongest factor governing mosquito population dynamics is normally breeding conditions, which is especially true of An. albimanus. Landscape changes, such as the creation of ditches, canals, and irrigated fields, have outsized effects on its numbers.108 An. albimanus is a short-lived mosquito, normally lasting no more than twentyseven days, so good breeding conditions are especially important for its survival in any given locale. It rarely flies more than a kilometer from its birthplace (even less in the dry season). Deforestation and soil erosion created new lowland freshwater (or brackish) swamps, good breeding habitat. An. albimanus in particular likes to breed amid aquatic plants and algal mats, preferably open to the sun. Rice fields in Surinam and elsewhere proved especially suitable. Dutch planters there re-arranged land and water (a Dutch specialty) to create irrigated plantations. Even their sugar plantations used irrigation canals on which small watercraft could carry sugar stalks to the mills. Inadvertently, they created acres of stagnant ditchwater, full of aquatic vegetation and open to sunlight, inviting anopheline breeding sprees.109 Indeed, the ecological tumult associated with the plantation economy helped improve breeding prospects for An. albimanus across the board. Anything that pockmarked the landscape and created 105 106 107 108 109

Webb (2008:66–91). Komp (1942) on anophelines; Frederickson (1993) on An. albimanus. Flores-Mendoza et al. (1996) on feeding preferences of An. aquasalis. Frederickson (1993:55). All An. albimanus data here are from Frederickson. Stiprian (1993:81–98); Debien (1941:107) on irrigation in St. Domingue; Guerra, Snow and Hay (2006) on deforestation and anophelines.

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catchments for rainwater, and thereby puddles inaccessible to fish and other predators of mosquito larvae, was a boon for any anopheline mosquito. Felling trees, putting up buildings, digging wells, planting crops – all this made conditions more promising. Everywhere sugar plantations maintained livestock, especially oxen and mules, which improved Anopheles nutrition. These animals were useful for hauling loads of cut cane to the sugar mills and for powering the mills themselves.110 Most anopheline species like horse and cattle blood as much or more than the human variety. An. albimanus and An. darlingi are both much fonder of cattle and horses than of humans – although in deforested environments, An. darlingi at least becomes far more eager to bite humans.111 With more blood within easy reach, thanks to plantation livestock, anophelines lived longer and reproduced more prolifically. Livestock could also have indirectly helped Anopheles breeding because the mosquitoes like to lay their eggs in puddles and watering holes of the sort that cattle use and people sometimes maintain for their herds. Richard Ligon noted that on Barbados landowners maintained ponds to water their cattle because the island had so few streams.112 He also listed among the torments of Barbados, “Musketos, who bite and sting worse than the Gnats and Stouts, that sting Cattle in England (and are commonly felt in marish ground).”113 The Caribbean region had suitable habitat for An. albimanus and An. darlingi before sugar, but the plantations, irrigation, and livestock made it all the more welcoming. Plentiful livestock meant more Anopheles but not necessarily more malaria. Where people lived among their livestock, they apparently sometimes thereby raised their malaria rates, a process called 110

111

112

113

Debien (1941:40) mentions oxen, mules, and horses on a St. Domingue plantation in the early eighteenth century, with a ratio of roughly two slaves per beast of burden. Frederickson (1993:12–14) on An. albimanus’ host selection. Vittor et al. (2006) find in experiments in Peruvian Amazonia that An. darlingi proved 278 times more likely to bite humans when in deforested environments. Ligon (1657:28–9). Frederickson (1993:2) notes that animal watering ponds and rice fields are the landscapes most hospitable to An. albimanus larvae. Ligon (1657:62). “Stout” meant horsefly and “marish” meant marshy. However, his mosquitoes were not anophelines, which Barbados seems miraculously to have lacked until 1927 (Webb 2008:78).

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“zoopotentiation.” But where people penned their livestock or lived at a distance from it, the livestock usually attracted the anophelines and thereby lowered the chances of malaria transmission among humans, a cross-species form of herd immunity known as “zooprophylaxis.” In the Caribbean, livestock sometimes was penned at night (the Anopheles’ preferred meal time) and sometimes let loose in forests. It is tempting to guess that on Caribbean plantations, livestock lowered rather than raised the risks of malaria, although one cannot know for sure. In any case, the presence of abundant mammals raised the total populations of Anopheles species, and in the unusual event that the livestock should suddenly disappear, the thirsty Anopheles would descend on the humans with desperate abandon.114 The impacts of livestock on plantations for Anopheles populations may carry ambiguities, but there are none when it comes to plantation rice. Chapter 6 addresses this issue for South Carolina in particular; a few general remarks will do here. Many landscapes in the Greater Caribbean produced irrigated rice. Outside South Carolina, it was usually not an export crop but a subsistence one, often grown to feed slaves. Wherever irrigated rice is raised, Anopheles are raised along with it. The calm, warm water, replete with algae and other organic matter, is just what anophelines look for when laying their eggs. The frequent floodings that rice needs allow nearly year-round crops of anophelines, which tends to make malaria less seasonal and more constant throughout the year. The rhythm of flooding and drying up in rice fields keeps down the predator populations that might otherwise batten on mosquito larvae. Different rice varieties, raised in different fashions, suit different sorts of Anopheles. But the link is strong all around the world between rice, mosquitoes, and malaria.115 114

115

On zooprophylaxis and zoopotentiation, I consulted Sota and Mogi (1989), Bouma and Rowland (1995), Bøgh et al. (2001), and Saul (2003). I thank Jim Webb of Colby College for discussing the issues with me. Webb (2008:40, 56, 76); Packard (2007:55–61, 76–9). On West Africa specifically, Bri¨et et al. (2003) and several articles in the special issue on malaria and agriculture in Acta Tropica vol. 89, no. 2 (January 2004); on Brazil, Dos Santos et al. (2004). See also Fernando (1993). The link between malaria and rice was first established by Italian researchers: Italy. Ministerio dell’Economia Nazionale, Direzione Generale dell’Agricoltura (1925), but Spaniards in Valencia in the eighteenth century saw a connection (Riera 1982). Frederickson (1993) notes a rice-Anopheles link in the Caribbean.

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Climate Change, El Nino, ˜ Mosquitoes, and Epidemics In addition to ecology, demography, and immunity, climate change and climate anomalies affected the frequency and severity of mosquitoborne disease outbreaks. Weather, especially rainfall and humidity but also temperature, powerfully affected mosquito strength. These matters are fraught with uncertainty, and surely local variability must be great. In general, temperatures in the northern hemisphere have warmed since the depths of the Little Ice Age in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During the Little Ice Age, the Caribbean apparently was considerably cooler and drier than today, so that over time as the Little Ice Age waned climate improved for mosquitoes.116 Although it was always warm enough for A. aegypti, warming trends after about 1750 meant that temperatures would attain the mosquito’s ideal range more often and more enduringly, encouraging more frequent biting, faster mosquito reproduction, and faster reproduction of the yellow fever virus within mosquitoes. It also meant A. aegypti felt comfortable at higher elevations and at higher latitudes too, so that A. aegypti’s range probably expanded. (It is expanding rapidly nowadays because of climate warming.)117 In short, it is likely that warming climate conditions gradually improved the odds of yellow fever epidemics after the middle of the seventeenth century. 116

117

Winter et al. (2000); Watanabe et al. (2001). Judging from oxygen isotopes in corals around Puerto Rico, it seems that sea surface temperatures were 2–3◦ C cooler than today in the coldest intervals sampled (1700–1705, 1780–1785, and 1810–1815). The authors attribute this to air masses, implying that air temperatures would likewise have been much cooler. Regrettably, their data do not shed light on the seventeenth century, which if the Caribbean conformed to hemispheric patterns would have been colder still. The inferences of Haug et al. (2001), based on sediments off the Venezuelan coast, support the view that the Little Ice Age was unusually dry in the Caribbean, as do those of Hodell et al. (2005) for the Yucatan. For an overview of Caribbean climate history, see Curtis et al. (2001); a potentially useful source I have not seen is Talman (1906). Apparently, minor changes in average temperature can have large effects on the efficiency of disease transmission. In South America, a rise in temperature of 2◦ C is expected to translate into increases of two- to five-fold in vector efficiency for dengue; see Githeko et al. (2000:1140). Of course, this is a projection, not a measurement, and dengue, although normally carried by the same A. aegypti mosquito, is not yellow fever. Nonetheless, the estimate gives some idea of the sensitivity to temperature of the infection cycle.

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The other way in which climate might affect disease is through the frequency and severity of anomalies, notably of rainfall and drought. The Caribbean has a fairly reliable rainy season from April or May through November, with peaks in May-June and September-October, but droughts are not rare. Sometimes they are associated with El Nino ˜ events, but they can occur independently as well.118 Where reliable streams (or later, piped water) existed and no one bothered to store water, drought suppressed A. aegypti populations by limiting the availability of good breeding sites, and therefore must have lowered the odds of yellow fever (or dengue) outbreaks. On the other hand, prolonged rainy seasons raised the odds sharply. But where no year-round streams (and no piped water) existed, drought paradoxically improved breeding conditions for A. aegypti because people took pains to store water everywhere they could. Depending on the situation, particularly the incentives to store water, either drought or abundant rains could lead to a bumper crop of A. aegypti. Rainy periods after a drought probably led to maximum mosquito populations and the greatest risk of yellow fever. Recent research suggests that in the year following an El Nino ˜ (known in the trade as ENSO+1 because specialists prefer the term “El Nino/Southern Oscillation,” or ENSO), Caribbean rains come early, ˜ last long, and maximize the A. aegypti crop. In short, El Nino ˜ years and their immediate successors brought conditions ideal for epidemics.119 Perhaps the best conclusion is that El Nino ˜ provided helpful but by no means necessary conditions for yellow fever epidemics.120 As we shall see, several of the politically important epidemics did come in the wake 118

119

120

Malmgren et al. (1998) attribute rainfall fluctuations in Puerto Rico since 1911 not to El Nino ˜ but to North Atlantic air currents. See Giannini et al. (2000) and Jury et al. (2007) for overviews. In general, the Gulf of Mexico and northwestern Caribbean is strongly affected by oscillations in the North Atlantic High as well as by ENSO events. ENSO typically brings heavier rains to the Gulf of Mexico and northwestern Caribbean but drought to northern South America and the southern Caribbean. Chen and Taylor (2002); Jury et al. (2007); Amarakoon et al. (2004); Gagnon, Bush and Smoyer-Tomic (2001). There are at least two possible reasons for this effect. One is vector abundance, as this paragraph proposes. But in addition (or as an alternative), warmer conditions accelerate the growth and activity of mosquitoes and the rate of virus reproduction; in the case of malaria, warmth accelerates the reproduction of plasmodium within mosquitoes. Poveda et al. (2001), in a study of malaria and ENSO in Colombia, suggest that warmer temperatures during El Nino ˜ shorten the sporogenic period in malarial mosquitoes, increasing malarial transmission.

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of an El Nino, ˜ and the chronology of yellow fever epidemics in the American South (where El Nino ˜ years are very wet) seems to match up fairly well with El Nino. ˜ 121 Similarly, with Anopheles mosquitoes drought can help create population surges that intensify risks of malaria. Serious drought kills off most Anopheles mosquitoes but eliminates most of their predators, too. In the aftermath, once rains return Anopheles are much quicker to re-colonize formerly dried-up wetlands than are their enemies. In a wet year after a drought year, Anopheles strength can be twenty times greater than normal, which would often create malaria epidemics where none could exist otherwise.122

Conclusion All these variables – demography, ecology, immunity, climate – affected the probability of yellow fever and malaria epidemics occurring in the Caribbean. Considering them together, it is plausible to draw four broad conclusions. First, because of differential immunity yellow fever weighed lightly on locally born and raised populations compared to invaders and immigrants from outside the A. aegypti domain. It went easy on populations with children as opposed to those made up exclusively of adults, and on populations with West and West-Central Africans as opposed to those without them. Yellow fever was most dangerous to unadulterated populations of young adults who had grown up outside of yellow fever or dengue zones. Thus, bursts of European immigration to the West Indies could easily ignite epidemics. Second, because of A. aegypti ecology yellow fever spared rural populations more than urban ones, spared those far from sugar zones more often than those on or around plantations, and spared those in (not those from) cool and dry lands. At the same time, because of probable

121

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Also on Colombia, see Pabon and Nicholls (2005). A general review of possible linkages between climate and mosquito-borne disease is Sutherst (2004). Warmer temperatures during El Nino ˜ might have been more important in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than today because overall temperatures were lower, especially 1680–1720. Diaz and McCabe (1999). Their work connects warmer temperatures and greater rainfall (not drought) to greater vector abundance. Chase and Knight (2003). This counterintuitive finding is based on both observation and controlled experiments in North America.

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childhood exposure, those living their whole lives in Caribbean cities or on Caribbean plantations were more likely to carry acquired immunity to yellow fever. Third, as a result of climate change, growing European immigration, the spread of sugar cultivation, and of ship traffic it is likely that yellow fever risk escalated over time – other things being equal. Fourth, malaria in general was more a rural disease than an urban one, more prevalent in deforested and cultivated landscapes, especially rice zones. It was harder on children than on adults. Many people of West and Central African descent carried powerful genetic shields against it. Other people acquired resistance, but not immunity, to malaria the hard way through bitter experience. As with yellow fever, surges of immigration from malaria-free lands invited epidemics. The ecological changes wrought by the plantation economy in the Greater Caribbean after the mid-seventeenth century created creole ecologies that improved prospects for searing epidemics of both yellow fever and malaria, but especially yellow fever because of its links with the sugar economy. The sugar plantation economy had three main pillars: the slave trade as a source of labor, the plantation as a unit of production, the port city as the organizer of exports. All three combined to improve conditions for the vector of yellow fever. For the virus, the new landscapes and demography were not quite as helpful. Of course, the bodies of A. aegypti provided good habitat for the virus, and the port cities improved the odds of getting around the region. Monkey populations on some forested islands (and in mainland forests) may have helped the virus get from mosquito to mosquito. The growing human populations brought about by the sugar revolutions suited the virus, but unhappily from its point of view too many of those people were immune and thus barriers to the virus’ reproduction and spread. It could survive for a while circulating among port city populations and briefly on plantations, but unless there were lots of children (more likely to be nonimmunes), the virus would exhaust the available susceptible human bodies, leaving it nowhere – except perhaps to monkeys – to go. Environments with a large proportion of West and Central African-born people (likeliest to be immunes) were especially hazardous to the virus. So for the virus, sugar revolutions were a mixed blessing. All this left the virus in a highly unstable situation in which its survival in any given location in the Caribbean remained uncertain, given the perils posed by herd immunity. But its survival somewhere in

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the Caribbean was almost assured because A. aegypti guts and human bloodstreams were so widespread. Its best chances lay in the biggest ports, partly because they would have more small children but mainly because they welcomed the most newcomers from distant shores and high latitudes. When newcomers descended en masse, the virus had an excellent chance of commandeering countless human cells for an orgy of mass replication, and converting countless mosquitoes into virus-laden darts – in other words, launching what humans regard as an epidemic. Sugar’s demographic and ecological revolutions assisted in the establishment of malaria as well, but here they were less crucial. Anopheline mosquitoes already existed in the Caribbean before Columbus. The plasmodia probably arrived soon after 1492. Sugar’s changes led to more deforestation, erosion, silting, and swamps, of some help in anopheline breeding. More important, sugar brought more people and, indirectly, more livestock, on which anophelines might feed. Rice cultivation proved much more supportive of anophelines, but outside of South Carolina and Surinam its extent remained modest. Malaria took a large toll as an endemic disease in the greater Caribbean from the early sixteenth century. But as long as there were few people, most parts of the region rarely hosted malaria. As more and more people arrived, especially Africans carrying more and more plasmodia, malaria gradually colonized more and more of the region. Where and when people congregated in the presence of anophelines, malaria was likely to break out unless the congregation included a strong proportion of highly resistant people to provide herd immunity. In this way malaria, like yellow fever, helped make history by blunting efforts to conquer or colonize parts of the Caribbean. Between the two diseases, yellow fever had the more dramatic effects. The most deadly form of malaria, falciparum, normally kills only about 10 percent of those whom it attacks. Vivax malaria, a more widespread strain, usually kills only about 1 percent. Thus, malaria rarely if ever swept away entire armies as yellow fever could. Unhappily for visitors to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Caribbean, nothing prevented A. aegypti and anophelines from sharing the available supply of human blood and infecting people with both yellow fever virus and malarial plasmodia. Many people probably had both diseases at once. Many armies hosted both simultaneously. Together, but with yellow fever in the lead, they made life for nonimmune and nonresistant newcomers to the Caribbean perilous and, more often than not, nasty, brutish, and short.

CHAPTER THREE

Deadly Fevers, Deadly Doctors

This chapter is about the early history of yellow fever and malaria in the Greater Caribbean and the mainly futile efforts to check or cure these fevers. After 1650, the Greater Caribbean hosted multiple medical traditions from Atlantic Europe, Atlantic Africa, and from indigenous Amerindian society. None of these could help anyone who had contracted yellow fever. One drug, quinine, in the form of powdered bark from the cinchona tree helped against malaria and won wide acceptance. Those most likely to suffer from yellow fever and malaria, newly arrived Europeans, were likely to get what medical attention they received from European doctors, usually to their misfortune. The least unfortunate among fever victims avoided doctors altogether and found themselves in the care of local women, often Afro-Caribbean women, who provided basic nursing. The dismal record of medicine in the face of yellow fever, and to a lesser extent malaria, allowed these two infections to achieve geopolitical importance in the Greater Caribbean for 250 years. Here I must freely admit that the discussion of medical ideas and practices here is not up to the standards of the historical profession. I have sometimes succumbed to the temptation to reveal my amusement at seventeenth- and eighteenth-century medical writers and practitioners. Many historians, especially historians of medicine, will find this “ahistorical.” They are correct to insist that medical knowledge is anchored in its historical context, that its adherents deserve better than condescending smiles, and that some of the practices we now follow will in 200 years seem laughable. I certainly hope that even sooner than that, people will be chuckling with ahistorical amusement at the ineffectiveness of early twenty-first century medicine. 63

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Early Yellow Fever Epidemics and Their Victims There was nothing amusing about yellow fever epidemics. Conceivably, yellow fever had made sporadic appearances in earlier centuries, but the first general epidemic hit in 1647–1652.1 Twenty or thirty years of heightened immigration by nonimmunes, more slaving voyages from West Africa bringing more Aedes aegypti, and improved breeding and feeding conditions for the vector set the stage. A strong El Nino ˜ in 1647 may also have raised the odds. The epidemic began in Barbados, then the leading sugar island, where it killed some 6,000 people, perhaps one in seven on the island. Richard Ligon, who arrived in the middle of the epidemic, wrote: “the living could hardly bury the dead.”2 It then visited Guadeloupe, St. Kitts, Cuba, Curac¸a˜ o, the Yucatan, Florida, and some ports along the coast of Central America. The spotty evidence suggests it killed some 20 to 50 percent of local populations.3 But after this catastrophe, yellow fever seems to have disappeared for nearly forty years before returning with a vengeance in the 1690s. Presumably, it worked its way through the susceptible hosts, killing some and immunizing the rest. That left behind a high proportion of immunes, narrowing the scope for the virus for years thereafter. Without a new influx of inexperienced bloodstreams, yellow fever could circulate only among small children, who often showed no symptoms and quickly became virus-stopping immunes. The fact that the virus confers strong immunity on survivors combined with the fragility of the transmission cycle gave yellow fever an irregular, episodic, and terrifying pattern in the Caribbean. When conditions were just right, it might sweep through the region, as in the late 1640s. But then it might vanish for decades, perhaps lying low as a childhood (endemic) disease, perhaps absent entirely or confined to 1

2 3

Cordero del Campillo (2001) reviews the evidence for early yellow fever epidemics. Bustamente (1958:35–64) and Guerra (1966; 1999), perhaps too confidently, find yellow fever outbreaks in the West Indies soon after Columbus. See Curtin (1993) for a general view. Gragg (2003:166). Ligon (1657:25). In Havana, where the evidence is better, it killed about one third of the population, says de la Fuente (1993:67); in the Yucatan, perhaps 50% (Patch 1996). Bustamente (1958:70) says yellow fever became endemic at Veracruz and M´erida (Yucatan) from the 1640s. This is quite possible, even if there were no recorded outbreaks until the 1690s due to a lack of susceptible adults.

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forest monkeys, until a large enough population of susceptibles grew up, either through natural increase in the absence of the disease or through immigration of nonimmunes. If enough nonimmunes arrived, enough A. aegypti hatched, and the virus was either present or re-introduced by ship traffic, then another epidemic would almost surely result. The necessary circumstances for an outbreak are easy to understand in retrospect with today’s knowledge of yellow fever, but from the 1690s to 1900 its apparent randomness and unpredictability, combined with high mortality, made yellow jack the Caribbean’s most feared disease.4 In two conspicuous respects, yellow fever attacks did not appear random. Yellow fever – and malaria, too – were diseases above all of newcomers from cool climates. From the 1730s if not before, this fact was widely recognized. As early as 1708, a Brazilian medical text noted that a yellow fever epidemic there (1685–1692) affected newcomers more often than longtime residents.5 The Spanish naval officers Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, who visited Cartagena in 1735, noted how dangerous chapetonada was to newcomers, how it decimated ships’ crews but left Creoles unharmed.6 A French doctor who lived in St. Domingue from 1732 to 1746 found that yellow fever “broke out constantly in these towns upon the arrival of new-comers from France, and among these, only such as had not been formerly in that climate. . . . ”7 A Spanish physician writing from Cartagena in 1753 noted that yellow fever “only attacked newly arrived Europeans, and not residents of the city.”8 4

5

6

7

8

Nowadays, epidemiologists have mathematical formulae involving a handful of variables to model the cycles of outbreak and quiescence of various diseases. See Hay et al. (2000) for a review of such modeling in light of climate variability. Dias Pimenta (1708), cited in Brazil. Minist´erio da Sa´ude (1971:76). If this was the first yellow fever epidemic in Brazil, as most authors agree, then it ought not to have discriminated against newcomers in its early months because all in Brazil (except those from yellow fever zones in Africa) would have been susceptible. But after a few months, survivors with immunity had better chances than those newly arrived. Juan and Ulloa (1748, 1:59–61). “Chapetonada” (“newcomer’s disease”) was one of the Spanish terms for yellow fever, used especially in what is now Colombia and Venezuela. Cited in Clark (1797:53–4). Clark gives the author as M. Disportes, presumably Poupp´e-Desportes (1770). Pinckard (1806, 3:415–46) makes the point clearly. So did Alcedo (1786–1789) as quoted by Sanchez-Albornoz (1974:102), who wrote that yellow fever “regularly attacked newly arrived Europeans. . . . ” Gastelbondo (1753:2): “solamente assalta a´ los Europeos recien venidos, y no a´ los Populares de esta Ciudad.”

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Dr. Robert Jackson, who lived in Jamaica from 1774 to 1779, also connected it with residence in the tropics: “ . . . this disease seldom discovers itself among those people who have lived any length of time in a tropical country.”9 In the Carolina coastlands, part of the Greater Caribbean, clergymen newly sent out to minister to the locals complained of the horrific health risks they faced. Military personnel from Europe dreaded duty in the West Indies, and on occasion mutinied when informed of Caribbean destinations.10 Two British sailors in 1755 opted for 1,000 lashes rather than risk a West Indian cruise. Officers routinely refused West Indies duty.11 Everyone in the West Indies in the eighteenth century believed yellow fever conferred immunity on survivors or, to put it in their terms, in “seasoning” that allowed a body (if it survived) to adjust to the climate. Doctors, sailors, and soldiers all recognized what black Jamaicans understood when they taunted white newcomers with the song:12 New-come buckra, He get sick, He tak fever, He be die, He be die. This appreciation of the partiality of yellow fever for newcomers from cooler lands probably developed gradually and grew firmer with time. An appropriate fear of the region’s fevers discouraged countless immigrants 9

10 11 12

Jackson (1791:250). So did Moseley (1795:393). Rodr´ıguez Arg¨uelles (1804:1) emphasized residence as key to resistance. In recounting a yellow fever outbreak on Dominica in 1793, Clark (1797:2–3) ignored race and emphasized seasoning among both Europeans and Africans: “Few new-comers escaped an attack, and very few of these recovered. It spared neither age nor sex among the Europeans and emigrants who arrived, and not only the people of colour from other islands, but the new negroes who had been lately imported from the coast of Africa, were all attacked with it. . . . The negroes who had been long in the town, or on the island, escaped.” This is the only view I have come across stating that freshly arrived Africans were susceptible to yellow fever. Houlding (1981:73). Brumwell (2002:155–6). Song quoted in Renny (1807:241), where it is credited to black women fruitsellers of Port Royal. “Buckra” in the British West Indies, among the Gullah speakers of coastal Georgia and in parts of West Africa, means a white person, often used disparagingly. A French doctor on Guadeloupe noted that locals called yellow fever “fi`evre Europ´eenne” because it attacked newcomers from Europe so preferentially. Wellcome Library, American MSS 113, ff. 33–4, Lorillard a` Chervin, 8 janvier 1818.

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and visitors who had a choice in the matter (not slaves, sailors, and soldiers) and thereby saved many lives. Fear of fevers also probably filtered out the cautious and the well-informed, making the volunteer immigrant population younger, poorer, less literate, and more male than it would otherwise have been. The second respect in which yellow fever and malaria seemed predictable was in their apparent animus against white people.13 Seventeenthand eighteenth-century West Indians noticed the effects of differential immunity but understood it as a matter of the bodily constitutions of different races of humankind – not as a result of genetic selection on one’s ancestors or prior exposure among different populations. Most eighteenth-century observers were convinced that yellow fever affected different people differently for reasons both of race and “seasoning.” Henry Warren of Barbados wondered in 1741: “How is it that the negroes, whose Food is mostly rancid Fish or Flesh, nay often the Flesh of Dogs, Cats, Asses, Horses, Rats, &c., who mostly lead very intemperate Lives, and who are always worse clad, and most exposed to Surfeits, Heats, Colds and all the Injuries of the Air, are so little subject to this Danger?”14 Writing about a yellow fever outbreak in 1748 in Charleston, South Carolina, Dr. John Lining captured things succinctly: The subjects which were susceptible to this fever, were both sexes of the white colour, especially strangers recently arrived from cold climates, Indians, Mistees, Mulattoes of all ages, excepting young children and of those only such as had formerly escaped the infection. And indeed it is a great happiness that our constitutions undergo such alterations in the small-pox, measles, and yellow fever, as for ever afterwards secure us from a second attack of those diseases. There is something very singular in the constitution of the Negroes, which renders them not liable to this fever; for though many of these were as much exposed as the nurses to the infection, yet I never knew one instance of this fever amongst them. . . . 15 13

14

15

As early as the beginning of sixteenth century, when there was no yellow fever yet, the Spanish churchman Bartolom´e de las Casas wrote that Spaniards in the Caribbean believed the only way an African would die was if he were hanged, perhaps an indication of belief in African disease resistance (Honigsbaum 2001:41). Warren (1741:13–14). Bertin (1778:7–8) also thought race was important, but explained this in terms of different diets. Lining (1799:7).

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A typical view was that of Dr. Jackson from Jamaica: “It has never been observed that a negroe, immediately from the coast of Africa, has been attacked with this disease.”16 Given the medical ideas of the age, in which a body’s “constitution” had much to do with its vulnerability, and the social ideology of the Greater Caribbean, in which notions of race mattered in every sphere, the interpretation of differential immunity (and vulnerability) as characteristics of race was well-nigh universal.

A Virulent Strain of Medicine In the Greater Caribbean, sick people usually got little in the way of medical attention. If they sought it, they had two choices, broadly speaking: European medicine and Afro-Creole medicine. The arrival of yellow fever to the Americas in the 1640s posed a professional and intellectual challenge to European doctors as well as a biological one to susceptibles. European medical thinkers emphasized environmental explanations of health and disease – suitable environments for particular bodies – and in the Greater Caribbean they met an unfamiliar and unstable environment. Their efforts to make sense of it bore scant fruit, especially in the matter of yellow fever. With malaria, a more familiar disease, their interpretations remained traditional but their practices proved slightly more helpful. For 250 years, victims of yellow fever expected scant help from the medical profession. Indeed, many prudent sufferers from disease made a point of keeping their distance from doctors, especially military ones. At the end of the seventeenth century, the English army’s medical chests contained remedies “of the most loathsome ingredients usually compounded from parts of different animals,” including “oil of vipers, and angle worms, beetles, earwigs and powdered mummy.”17 A century later, military medicine still inspired no trust. While serving as a medical officer with the British army in what is now Guyana in 1797, George Pinckard encountered a grenadier named Chapman, who he thought looked feverishly ill. Pinckard recommended he go to the regimental hospital. Chapman replied: “I am not ill: if you take me to the hospital I shall catch the fever and die. . . . Indeed I am not bad, and if I was, 16

17

Jackson (1791:249–50); Hunter (1788:24–5) for a similar view. Poupp´eDesportes (1770, 1:192) notes the differential vulnerability of Europeans and Creoles in St. Domingue. Cantlie (1974, 1:57).

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I would rather stab myself at once, than go where so many are dying every day of yellow fever.” Chapman succeeded in avoiding the hospital, but even so was dead within hours.18 More fortunate was John Grant of the Black Watch, who fell ill with fever on Guadeloupe in 1759. He survived to write that the Royal Navy surgeons “bled us profusely [and] would have killed us but luckily their ships were order’d and we were saved.”19 A planter, Edward Long, accused ill-trained doctors of depopulating Jamaica with their deadly cures.20 Soldiers and sailors and civilians too – even kings – had every reason to keep their distance from doctors.

medical ideas When confronted with yellow fever or malaria, European doctors generally relied on medical traditions that extended back to Aristotle, Hippocrates, and, above all, Galen.21 These worthies had come up with a marvelously versatile scheme that could be adjusted to fit almost any observations. Health consisted of proper balance among the four “humors” (bodily fluids) and disease of humoral imbalance. Therefore, treatment consisted in restoring a suitable balance among phlegm, yellow bile, black bile, and blood, which in happy cases could be achieved through a change of diet. In Protestant countries especially, a modest dose of Paracelsus – who believed in the efficacy of small amounts of poisons such as mercury – was added to the mix of ideas. According to prevailing views, fevers generally resulted from an excess of blood and thus were best treated by venesection – opening an 18

19

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Pinckard (1806, 3:112–14). In the novel Roderick Random, published in 1748 and based on the author’s experiences in the Cartagena campaign of 1741, Tobias Smollett suggests the lengths to which men would go to avoid ship’s doctors and their medicines. Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random (Oxford: Blackwell, 1925), vol. I, pp. 266–8. “Journal of Lieutenant John Grant” cited in Brumwell (2002:160). Duncan (1931:20) quotes an American doctor, James Tilton, who noted that in the Continental Army during the American Revolution surgeons died at higher rates than officers because serving continually in hospitals was more dangerous than fighting the occasional battle. Long (1778, 2:591). Riera (1981); Porter (1997); Foster (1987); Santos Filho (1977–1991); Sheridan (1985); Porter (1997: chs, 9–10). Helpful reviews of British ideas about diseases of hot climates are Kupperman (1984), Kiple and Ornelas (1996), and Harrison (1996).

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artery in the arm and “bleeding” the patient. One’s constitution might be weak in any number of ways, predisposing one to certain imbalances; one’s diet might affect one’s humoral balance in ways bad or good; so might unusual heat or cold, or rapid alteration between hot and cold. Excited passions could upset the balance, so several medical authorities urged that men refrain from an “excess of the pleasures of Venus.”22 And all these variables might interact in mysterious ways, allowing for a rich menu of diagnoses and explanations.23 These ideas and associated cures survived among medical experts for centuries. In Europe, humoral theory acquired renewed authority in the sixteenth century with the worship of all things ancient and new vernacular translations of the classical texts. In the seventeenth century, the emergence of a more experimental approach to science brought many challenges to humoral theory. It seemed incompatible with William Harvey’s proof of the circulation of the blood (1628). Acquaintance with Asian medical traditions, mainly from India, raised doubts. Humoral theory and its followers were ridiculed by the playwright Moli`ere, and no doubt by millions of less eloquent suffering patients.24 By 1750, few scientists still believed in it but plenty of doctors still behaved as if they did. And many patients expected to be bled or purged, so doctors obliged, whether they believed in Galenic medicine or not. In 1807, Thomas Jefferson expressed what many had long felt about the reigning ideas when he wrote, “The patient, treated on the fashionable theory, sometimes gets well in spite of the medicine.”25 However, puzzlement, disenchantment, and experimentation did not lead to fundamental changes in belief or practice until a convincing alternative synthesis emerged at the very end of the nineteenth century.26

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Rodr´ıguez Arg¨uelles (1804:8). Moreau de Jonn`es (1817:5–7) listed “les plaisirs de l’amour” among the thirteen reasons fevers beset Europeans in the West Indies (he included electrical charges in the atmosphere, too). The French doctor Antoine Poissonnier-Desperri`eres (1763) recommended that one must avoid “les commerces des femmes, surtout des n´egresses.” Cited in Eymeri (1992: 234–5). Kuriyama (1995) provides a useful discussion of the logic and endurance of venesection. Moli`ere wrote three plays that mocked the cupidity and ineffectiveness of doctors. Brockliss and Jones (1997:336–44) analyze his views. Quoted in Shryock (1960:73). Temkin (1973:134–92); Porter (1997:163–303); Urteaga (1997:11–21). Guerra (1968) considers early yellow fever publications.

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In the West Indies, some medical professionals with long experience wondered whether Caribbean diseases were indeed the same as those familiar in Europe and discussed in hallowed texts. The glaring ineffectiveness of their remedies in the face of yellow fever inspired occasional self-doubt. But the majority of European doctors held tightly to their educations, their traditions, and their cures. Their conventional wisdom held that tropical fevers resulted from the effects of heat and strong sun, combined with inherently unhealthy landscapes and their exhalations. Anyone whose constitution was unsuited for such rigors would likely suffer humoral imbalances in these conditions. Unconventional wisdom was no further from the truth, and sometimes closer. The great scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who observed yellow fever outbreaks in lowland Mexico, thought that the rigors of traveling on Mexico’s awful roads also made a body more vulnerable to yellow fever. Ordinary Mexicans believed foreigners fell ill by eating bananas together with rum.27 One Mexican medical author, Diego Porcell, writing in the 1760s suggested yellow fever might be connected to the “seed of invisible insects,” whereas a contemporary, Jos´e de Patricio de los R´ıos, thought it originated in tiny insects coming from lagoons. Connecting yellow fever with insects was a maverick idea, proved correct only some 140 years later.28 In summary, to Europeans it seemed vulnerability and resistance to yellow fever and malaria were related to a person’s constitution, behavior, and environment. Some people naturally had their humors poorly balanced, making them vulnerable. By their nature (or by intemperance), men seemed more vulnerable than women. By their constitutions, whites seemed more vulnerable than blacks (although long residence in the West Indies could shield even whites). Those in the prime of life seemed more vulnerable to yellow fever than the very young, whereas 27 28

Archer (1987:51, 77). Porcell and de los R´ıos manuscripts in AGI, Audiencia de M´exico, leg. 1681, quoted in Guijarro Olivares (1948:370, 375). Pinckard (1804, 3:454) also connected mosquitoes and health: “with respect to the bites of musquitoes and other insects, the difference of effect upon the Europeans, and the people of the climate, is peculiarly marked, as it is with respect to yellow fever. The small puncture made in the skin of a robust European by a musquito, or a sand fly, frequently becomes inflamed, tumefies, breaks into a sore, spreads into a malignant ulcer, and, ultimately, robs the hardy son of the North of his life – while the languid creole, or the negro, quietly lets the insect bite, without apprehending any of this sad train of consequences.”

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the reverse held true for malaria. All these were matters of an individual’s or a group’s nature or constitution. Beyond one’s constitution, behavior mattered, also. Those too active put themselves at risk, whereas those more sedentary did not.29 The wrong diet, dress, or drink and excessive devotion to the “pleasures of Venus” raised one’s risk. Lastly, one’s physical environment influenced risk as well. Filth, decaying vegetation, swamps, humidity, heat, and low elevation30 seemed connected to yellow fever and malaria, whereas cleanliness, cool temperatures, and altitude seemed to provide protection. These last observations about environment were on the right track, but they did not suffice to shield sufferers from doctors.

medical practices: venesection and the bark When confronted with yellow fever or malaria, believers in humoral theory adhered to a set of medical practices that followed more or less logically from their mostly erroneous premises. A fine and famous example of medical wisdom in action against malaria was the case of King Charles II of England, age 54. He awoke one morning in 1685 feeling poorly. When the first of his several physicians arrived, he fell into convulsions, whereupon a doctor drained sixteen ounces of blood from the royal arm. Further doctors joined in the treatment, and decided on scarification – cuts on his shoulders through which another eight ounces of blood were drawn. The king had now sacrificed about 15 percent of his blood supply. Cupping, a harmless practice in which cups filled with heated air were applied to the skin, followed next. The doctors then gave the King an emetic derived from antimony to make him vomit, another of zinc sulphate, and a series of enemas to purge his bowels. Next, they shaved the King’s head to prepare his scalp for blistering, achieved by pressing a hot cautering iron to his skin. By this point, Charles II was in helpless convulsions. To draw humors from his head, his doctors applied plasters to his feet. They then administered a sneezing powder and a laxative and left him for the night. The King rallied the next day and enjoyed black cherry syrup. But on the third day of his illness he relapsed, and his doctors elected to 29 30

Emphasized by Bertin (1778) and S´anchez Rubio (1814). Clark (1797:59–60) found little yellow fever above 1,400 feet (which he attributed to the lack of thunderstorms); Leblond (1805) emphasized elevation in his discussions of vulnerability to yellow fever.

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feed him a powder made from the skull of a man who had never been buried. This nourishment seemed to bolster the kingly condition but on the fourth day another relapse occurred, which led the attending physicians to a diagnosis of ague (malaria). They quickly turned to cinchona bark, which contains alkaloids that alleviate malaria’s symptoms. This the King resisted with what strength he had left. The bark was newly introduced into England’s medicine chest and was controversial. Like Oliver Cromwell in his day, some fervent Protestants refused it because they thought it papist – Jesuits had first introduced it to Europe. King Charles II’s religious convictions apparently were in flux in his moment of crisis. A lifelong Protestant, if a rather relaxed one, he seemed to embrace Catholicism in his delirium but still resisted the bark. Perhaps he was merely developing skepticism about his doctors’ skills. But the doctors prevailed and the King took the bark. Sadly it did not help, and the King faded. As a final measure, the heirs of Hippocrates administered bezoars, crushed stones from the intestines of a Persian goat. The King – prudently, one is tempted to add – died. His treatment had been orthodox, following the best practices of the day.31 A luckier patient was the Marquis de Montebelo, newly arrived governor in Recife in 1690 amid a yellow fever epidemic. He fell ill in his second week in Brazil. A Portuguese doctor who had accompanied him from Lisbon tried bloodletting, purges, enemas, and potions. The Governor grew worse and vomited up black blood (“rust” as the Brazilians called it). The attending physician willingly turned his patient over to a more experienced Brazilian colleague, who had been treating yellow fever victims for three years. The Governor’s stomach humors were (it seemed) too cold, so he was instructed to swallow the juice of a yellow flower (“escorcioneira”) with kermes oak seeds in it, as hot as he could stand it. Despite crying out for Portuguese wine, he finally drank the potion. The Governor survived.32 In the West Indies, European doctors followed similar practices when they could. Bezoars were no doubt scarce. They typically prescribed bleeding as the best remedy for fevers of all sorts. They generally took about 20 ounces at the onset of a fever, more than 10 percent of an adult’s 31

32

Woolley (2005:345–6) and Porter (1997:234), both of whom rely on Crawfurd (1909). Malaria also afflicted Louis XIV from 1686 onward, but he survived following doctors’ instructions to consume quinine regularly (Brockliss and Jones 1997:312–13). Brazil. Minist´erio da Sa´ude (1971:91).

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total. If fever persisted, they might do this several times on successive days, depriving fever victims of as much as half of their blood. Hans Sloane, a plantation doctor in Jamaica at the end of the seventeenth century, bled and purged almost all his fever patients, but in some cases administered the bark and various drugs and potions as well.33 As late as 1843, one British doctor wrote: “In Europeans, particularly Soldiers, a timely and free use of the Lancet is the anchor of hope.”34 For people suffering from dehydration or anemia, this cure could easily kill them. If they had it, doctors often administered “Jesuit bark.” Powder derived from the bark of some species of the cinchona tree, native to the eastern slopes of the northern Andes, offered some real protection against malaria. Its alkaloids – commonly called quinine – could kill falciparum and vivax malarial plasmodia in human red blood cells (but not in human livers), and therefore worked as a prophylactic and sometimes as a cure. Andean healers had used the bark for some unknown length of time before Jesuits brought it to Europe by the middle of the seventeenth century. It was part of common doctors’ knowledge by the 1680s. The indefatigable sexagenarian Swiss Col. Louis Henry Fourgeoud, who campaigned in the Surinam bush for several years in the 1770s chasing maroons on behalf of Dutch planters, drank a potion each morning of “jesuit’s bark, cream of tartar and stick-licorice, boiled together.” The repulsive taste prevented his men from imitating him, but he survived while more than 90 percent of them died from diseases, probably malaria above all others.35 The bark tasted bitter and made people nauseous, but if they could keep it down it could cure them. It was the only helpful thing doctors did by way of treatment for fevers in the West Indies. It seemed little short of a miracle. But the bark was expensive. The cinchona tree grew naturally only in remote parts of the Andes, at elevations above 1,500 meters. Tropical forests feature great varieties of tree species but few representatives of any single species, and so the cinchona tree proved difficult to find 33

34

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Sloane (1707–1725, 1:xci–cli). Sloane summarized his preferred cures on pp. cxxxiv–cxxxvi. Du Tertre (1973, 2:447–52) explains cures preferred in the French West Indies as of 1670. S. Gordon Warner, “The Fever Prevailing in the Bermudas during the summer of 1843.” This pamphlet is in PRO/CO/37/164, at folio 262. Collis (1965:180). Cream of tartar is an acidic salt used in cooking and cleaning.

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even in the right places. Anyhow, some cinchona trees lacked the right alkaloids. But a strong market for the bark developed once its efficacy had been shown. Some Spanish naturalists in the eighteenth century thought the cinchona would soon disappear through overharvesting.36 Precious though it was, doctors often wasted the bark. They prescribed it liberally, for malaria and for a raft of other diseases against which it had no effect. Pinckard noted with respect to yellow fever: “I find that here, as at Berbische [Berbice in today’s British Guyana], the disease is treated in the same manner as the common remittent fever of the country [malaria], and nearly the whole reliance confided to the bark – that great sheet anchor of West India practice. This was prescribed in ample quantity, and in various forms, but it wholly failed of success.”37 In the 1780s, another British military doctor in the West Indies, Thomas Dancer, advised sprinkling the bark over feverish bodies, a waste of an expensive medicine.38 Others agreed that the bark and bleeding worked best together with other remedies against fevers. Jo˜ao Ferreira da Rosa, a Brazilian doctor of the 1690s, recommended above all else drinking water in which red-hot gold had been plunged. He also advised applying freshly killed pigeons to the soles of the feet, so as to absorb their warmth.39 Accompanying a British expedition in what is now Nicaragua in 1781, Dancer recommended opium against “intermittent fever” (malaria) and malt liquor or wine in any case: claret in mild cases of fever and Madeira for severe ones.40 Treating himself for yellow fever in Guyana, Pinckard asked a comrade to draw “twelve or fourteen ounces of blood” from his arm and administer calomel as an “evacuant,” together with the bark, 36

37 38 39

40

Cinchona history from Stuart (2004:28–32), Sumner (2000:64, 202), Webb (2008:94–5), Rocco (2003), and Honigsbaum (2001). Pinckard (1806:3, 79). Dancer (1781:49–53). Brazil. Minist´erio da Sa´ude (1971:98). In some cases, copal oil applied to the patient’s anus or plasters of pigeon dung on the feet were deemed advisable. Dancer (1781:48, 57). Interestingly, some Chinese doctors recommended opiumsmoking as a cure for malaria (Bello 2005:299). In his novel, The Commodore, Patrick O’Brian has one of his central characters, the learned Stephen Maturin, treat his own case of yellow fever with coca leaves. I have not encountered this innovative cure elsewhere. This reference I owe to Prof. Brent Haddad of the University of California at Santa Cruz.

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opium, wine, and a cold bath. Pinckard found the wine “heavenly.”41 (A Spanish doctor, Anacleto Rodr´ıguez Arg¨uelles, recommended strict teetotaling.42 ) The British army surgeon Robert Jackson favored opiates, bleeding the patient, shaving his head, and wrapping him in a blanket soaked in seawater or brandy.43 James Lind, the renowned naval doctor, recommended cinchona bark, bleeding, opiates, purging, and antimony for fevers in the West Indies, with blistering of the patient’s back in cases of delirium and occasionally doses of snake-root. Moreover, Lind believed, “leeches applied to the temples, and cupping-glasses to the nape of the neck, have also proved serviceable.”44 Lesser doctors prescribed cream of tartar to go with the orthodox measures.45 For a few decades, roughly 1790 to 1830, British army doctors in the West Indies often prescribed mercury for yellow fever and malaria 41

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Pinckard (1803, 3:139–43). Pinckard was unusual in admitting how useless his efforts against yellow fever were: “bark, mercury, bleeding, bathing and a variety of other remedies have been amply tried – but tried in vain, for all have proved equally ineffectual” (3:83); and “my utmost powers can offer only a feeble resistance to the yellow-visaged destroyer, who now wields his autumn scythe amongst us” (3:85). Rodr´ıguez Arg¨uelles (1804:3–4, 8, 20). John Bell (1791:122–3) agreed that alcohol made yellow fever fatal. William Hillary (1766:146) thought it attacked “those who use vinous or spirituous liquors too freely.” Sloane (1707–1725, 1:cxliv) seemed to agree: “John Parker, about thirty-five years of age, a lusty fullblooded Fellow, was much given to drink. He had been taken ill of the Epidemic continual Fever, reigning at first when I came to [ Jamaica], and recovered, as others out of it, of which before. Soon after he committed a great debauch of Rum Punch, after it lying on a cold Marble Floor. He fell from these causes into a Mania, so that he was observ’d to speak and act very incoherently, and to get up in the night, etc. His rage increas’d to a very high degree and he died in a very few days, notwithstanding all the methods usually followed in these cases.” John Thurston, a doctor on St. Kitts, thought intemperance could even make otherwise invulnerable Creoles susceptible to yellow fever. Wellcome Library, American MSS 113, ff. 60–2, Thurston to Chervin, 20 March 1818. Jackson (1791:268–72). Jackson must have grown unpopular with healthy soldiers who imagined more conventional uses for brandy. Lind (1788:240–2, 260). Ferreira da Rosa in the 1690s also recommended cupping and leeches (imported preferably from Portugal and covered over with spider’s webs). Brazil. Minist´erio da Sa´ude (1971:98). For example, Mackrill (1796:26). He was a British military doctor in Trinidad in the 1790s. Bertin (1778); C´ordoba (1790); Oyarvide y Samart´ın (1801); S´anchez R´ubio (1814) also subscribed to similar views.

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patients before concluding that bleeding alone yielded better results.46 James Clark, a doctor on Dominica, recommended as yellow fever cures purgatives, blistering of the skull and abdomen, opiates (sometimes with Madeira wine), and occasionally sprinkling the sick with vinegar. He was against bleeding but relied on “[o]ur greatest dependence, or, in the nautical style, our sheet-anchor, [which] was mercury.”47 Although the bark if properly administered helped against malaria, nothing doctors recommended helped anyone with yellow fever. And most of their remedies, especially venesection and mercury, sapped the resistance of their patients.48 In addition to the cures of medical science, soldiers and sailors endured folk remedies. None existed in Europe against yellow fever, but for malaria, or “ague” in the English vernacular, there were several because the disease was a common one in warm months in much of Europe. These remedies included, for example, consuming spiders and cobwebs, drinking one’s own urine, and tying one’s hair to a tree and yanking it out, theoretically leaving both hair and ague on the tree. More common but no more helpful except as pain relievers were alcohol, opium, and cannabis. Unhelpful as these measures were, they probably did less harm than those preferred by doctors.49 Fortunately for the sick, doctors were almost as scarce as bezoars. In Jamaica in 1750, two doctors with incompatible views about yellow fever got into a pamphlet war that escalated into a double murder, probably bringing a net improvement to public health on the island.50 In 1780, Jamaica had about 75 doctors, of whom 10 had M.D. degrees. Cuba in the 1790s had about 100 doctors. The entire British West Indies in 1834 had a little more than 400. Given the distances and difficulties of

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49 50

Harrison (2007); Alsop (2007:31–2). The use of mercury, which emerged in India, did not become popular in the Royal Navy according to Harrison; Alsop disagrees. Mercury was routinely prescribed for smallpox according to Hamilton (2005:119). Clark (1797:27–37). Quotation from p. 37. Sheridan (1985:19–41) summarizes the views of prominent doctors in the British West Indies; Alsop (2007) reviews major British military medical texts. Mart´ınez Cerro (2001) gives an idea of medical practice in the Spanish navy in the early eighteenth century. Dobson (1997:303–5, 318–19). Ashcroft (1979).

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transport, few patients would have been exposed to the risks posed by physicians.51 Military men by the eighteenth century stood a greater risk of encountering doctors than did the general public. By the 1750s, British regiments often had their own surgeon and surgeon’s mates. Large expeditions came fitted out with a field hospital and physicians, some of whom were educated at the finest medical schools such as the University of Edinburgh. Others finagled their way into appointments via connections or money. The examination board was notoriously lax, prone to an eighteenth-century version of grade inflation: “Often I have heard the president of a board of examiners address a young man in the following terms: ‘You seem, Sir, to be exceedingly ignorant in many very important matters, but you are young and may improve, we have granted you a diploma with this expectation. . . . ”52 As a rule, military medicine was “the lowest step of professional drudgery and degradation.”53 Hospitals too were rare, even in navies, which suffered severely from yellow fever and malaria. The French built the first hospitals in the West Indies in St. Domingue in 1698 and Martinique in 1702. The British Royal Navy had none in Jamaica until 1729, and that was a small one built near marshy ground, which at least one admiral thought was so dangerous to his sickly sailors that he preferred to rent houses for them. A larger hospital in Jamaica was built during the Seven Years’ War. One reason hospitals remained rare is that no one entered one willingly. Their justified reputation as antechambers to the cemetery stifled demand for their services.54

preventive medicine Although doctors misunderstood the nature of yellow fever and malaria, and usually harmed the sick more than helped them, they were not 51

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Numbers from Sheridan (1985:46, 53). De Barros (2004:29) has figures showing that in the early nineteenth-century British Caribbean, the ratio of population to doctors varied between 700:1 and 1,800:1. Kopperman (2007:58). Hennen (1829:2), cited in Alsop (2007:33); Harrison (2004:64–8) reviews military medical institutions. For French military medicine, see Comit´e d’Histoire du Service de Sant´e 1982, vols. 1–2; for Spanish, Massons (1994, vols 1–2). Buchet (1997b:179–80). French and British fleets operating in the Caribbean typically lost 10% of their crews to disease in the first year of a cruise, and 5% in the second. Ibid, p. 185.

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always detrimental. As noted, cinchona bark if deployed properly was helpful against malaria symptoms. Beyond that, by the eighteenth century doctors knew, as did everyone else, what the healthy and unhealthy seasons were. They knew that newcomers to the West Indies stood greater risks, and that large contingents of newcomers invited havoc.55 They knew that lowlands were more dangerous than highlands,56 and beginning in 1840 the British Army began to put some of its Jamaica garrison at altitude specifically for health reasons.57 Doctors knew that swamps brought poor health. Naval doctors knew that sending men ashore was risky.58 They knew that stiff sea breezes (which kept mosquitoes from flying) portended better health.59 When it came to diseases other than yellow fever and malaria, by the end of the eighteenth century at least, doctors did have some useful preventive measures and cures. Rigorous hygiene could check dysentery and typhus, inoculation usually worked against smallpox, and citrus proved highly effective against scurvy, for example. Doctors and officials often favored quarantines, which although they could not stop mosquitoes sometimes surely kept local mosquitoes from acquiring a deadly load of virus or plasmodium by keeping shiploads of infective humans at a distance.60

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Lind, the most widely read of medical writers on tropical climes, noted: “There is a large field for medical observations during a very sickly season the West Indies, when thousands of Europeans are sent thither at once, in case of a war in that part of the world.” This quotation appears in the 1768 edition of Lind’s book (p. 121), but not in the 1788 edition. I encountered it first in Alsop (2007:31). Jackson (1798:96–7); Gilbert (1803:80); and Moreau de Jonn`es (1817:41, 44) were among the first to point this out in print. Buckley (1998:19). The salubrity of highlands was known to a relative newcomer to Jamaica, Lady Mary Nugent, in 1805 (Nugent 2002:230). For example, Sir Gilbert Blane, who thought only “hired negroes” should go ashore (Lloyd 1965:193–4). For example, Lind (1788:113–31, 206–16). According to Crewe (1993:38), Admiral Vernon said sailors referred to sea breezes as “the doctor.” Pinckard (1806:3:81) noted that when the trade wind picked up at the end of the wet season, longtime residents of British Guyana would say, “here comes the doctor.” Quarantine measures are mentioned in the Old Testament and became routine in Europe during the fourteenth-century plague epidemics. Some ports employed them in the 1640s yellow fever epidemics. Sehdev (2002); Moreau de St. M´ery (1797–1798, 1:701–2) mentions quarantine against yellow fever on St. Domingue in the 1690s. Grmek (1997) on quarantine history.

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Preventive measures extended to prescribing ecological changes. Europeans normally thought that thorough deforestation would make a landscape healthier, opening it to the wind. “The healthy air of Barbadoes is owing to that island’s being entirely cleared of wood,” wrote the Jamaican planter Edward Long. In the 1760s, Diego Porcell, the Mexican medical writer, recommended both deforestation and swamp drainage as a means to make landscapes healthier. Some Spanish medical opinion concluded the opposite: that forests were healthy and forest soils unlikely to emit noxious miasmatic vapors. But this view remained a minority one.61 The environmental engineering endorsed by these medical men rarely took place because of the labor and expense involved. But doctors could urge commanders to seek out treeless landscapes as quarters for their troops. Governors and generals outranked doctors, however, and often preferred their own wisdom about preventive measures. For example, in Brazil in the early 1690s the Governor of Pernambuco, the Marquis de Montebelo, who had miraculously survived his doctors’ yellow fever treatments, ordered that Recife should be purified by thirty days of fire in the streets, artillery discharges at dusk, compulsory street cleaning, and the expulsion of prostitutes from the city (lest their presence anger God), among other measures. The epidemic continued, although fires in the street might have discouraged mosquitoes somewhat.62 Amid a yellow fever epidemic among his regiments on St. Lucia in 1795, Sir John Moore insisted that his troops would be healthy if they ate more, drank and bathed less, and took “Roman, instead of a modern exercise.”63 Moore’s law did not help: He himself fell ill, and one of his regiments lost 841 of its 915 men in its first twelve months on the island.64

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Long (1774, 2:508) and Pinckard (1804, 2:79–80) on Barbados; Porcell’s original: “Se deve tambien obligar a los Pueblos de la Yndias a´ tener limpieza en sus Casas y Calles, dar curso a las aguas secar los pantanos, desmontar los Montes a´ una legua de distancia de las poblaciones para dar curso a los Ayres, cultivar estas tierras: Este seria el modo de vicar sanos.” This is from a manuscript in AGI, Audiencia de Mexico, leg. 1681, quoted in Guijarro Olivares (1948:371). Urteaga (1987:168–73) for minority views. Brazil. Minist´erio da Sa´ude (1971:91–3). Oman (1953:157); at least one British army doctor also subscribed to the Roman exercise theory: Jackson (1798:360–3). Roman military exercises, as described by the authors Vegetius and Josephus, emphasized running, leaping, swimming, lifting heavy objects, and throwing and handling various weapons. Breen (1844:103).

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By far, the most cost-effective preventive measure available was to keep the troops at mosquito-free altitudes. Doing so was normally both pointless on campaign because nothing of strategic value lay at such elevations, and politically impossible for peacetime garrisons whose duties included deterring slave insurrection on lowland plantations. But the Spanish army in Mexico from the 1780s relocated sickly troops from the tierra caliente around Veracruz to higher elevations.65 In an interesting twist, the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies improved the health of the British Army. Prior to abolition in 1833, British garrisons lived in the lowlands, close to the plantations they were there to protect. On Jamaica in the early nineteenth century, about one in seven in the garrison died each year; other British Caribbean islands were slightly less lethal.66 Although everyone knew highlands were healthier, indeed that above 2,500 feet (800 meters) there was no yellow fever, Jamaican planters successfully foiled every effort to move garrisons away from plantations. Dr. Jackson in 1798 recommended a policy for the defense of the British West Indies whereby British garrisons would abandon the low coastlands and inhabit only the fever-free mountainous interiors. By stationing troops in the lowlands, British policy “lavishly sacrificed” human life, as Jackson put it. His plea fell on deaf ears until abolition moderated the planters’ anxieties about slave revolts and recruitment of blacks into the British army raised their anxieties about having regiments close by. In 1838, a detailed report by statistically astute army officers confirmed Dr. Jackson’s claims. In the meantime, abolition and the erosion of planter power in British politics made a new policy feasible. In 1840, the first companies of redcoats climbed up into Jamaica’s Blue Mountains, and their annual mortality plummeted.67

afro-caribbean medicine The European and Galenic approach to health and medicine was not the only one current in the Greater Caribbean. Indeed, as the region’s 65 66

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Massons (1994, 1:473). British Guyana was the most dangerous post. Pinckard’s regiment lost a quarter of its strength to fevers in one year. Pinckard (1804, 3:452). Jackson (1798:96–7, 101); Buckley (1998:17–19, 23, 299), citing Marshall and Tulloch (1838). PRO PC 1/4565, Staff Surgeon’s Report on Yellow Fever, 29 May 1850, has detailed accounts of the fate of regiments newly posted to Jamaica, 1816–1848, showing the decisive importance of elevation. Clyde (1980:21) says on Dominica, regimental doctors by the 1780s urged moving the garrison to high ground and draining swamps.

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population became increasingly African in descent and Afro-Caribbean in culture, most treatments for most ailments more closely followed West African traditions than Galenic ones. African healers used herbs and medicinal plants, often improvising in the Caribbean because the familiar favored West African plants could not be found.68 On West African coasts, the preferred treatment for fevers involved bathing sufferers and applying wet cloths to their foreheads, sometimes together with lime bush leaves. Slaves used the same methods in eighteenthcentury St. Domingue.69 Afro-Caribbean healers also routinely used spells and incantations, and probably learned some cures from the dwindling Amerindian populations.70 Many of them achieved good results when treating wounds and sores, more likely with herbs than with spells. Although none of this helped against yellow fever, it surely did less harm than bleeding patients or administering mercury.71 Afro-Caribbean medicine attracted some interest from whites. If Africans suffered less from deadly fevers, then (to some observers) it seemed logical to credit their medicines and healers. Poor whites sometimes went to Africans for affordable health care. A few European doctors tried to acquire African expertise. One, Nicolas Bourgeois, a physician in St. Domingue in the 1760s, wrote, “The slaves are more ingenious than we in the art of maintaining and obtaining health. . . . ”72 In Surinam in the 1770s an elderly African, Graman Quacy, maintained a lively business selling roots thought to be effective against 68

69

70

71

72

Using local plants for cures against local diseases may have seemed logical to African healers, as it did to the French military doctor N. P. Gilbert (1803:33–9) in St. Domingue. On West African fever treatment, see Winterbottom (1803, 2:17–18). I owe this reference to John Rankin. Weaver (2006:72–3) on St. Domingue. Pinckard (1804, 3:377–8). One of Pinckard’s friends recommended that he use “Indian” cures against yellow fever in Guyana, consisting of alternating hot and cold baths. Eymeri (1992:61–83, 267–70) has general remarks on Afro-Creole medicine; on slave women healers in the French West Indies generally, Moitt (2001:62– 8). On parallel matters in the nineteenth-century U.S. South, see Fett (2002: 60–83, 111–41); on British Guiana, De Barros (2004; 2007). Bourgeois (1788), quoted in Weaver (2002:429). Another example was the young French doctor Jean-Baptiste Patris, active in Guyana in the 1760s and 1770s, who showed interest in slave medicine (Touchet 2004:72). Another French doctor in Guyana, Bertrand Bajon, did as well (Bajon 1777–1778). The disaster at Kourou (see Chapter 4) may have been so severe as to open the minds of doctors to unfamiliar ideas about health and disease.

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fevers.73 George Pinckard, the British military doctor in Guyana in the 1790s, endorsed the (inaccurate) views of “Doctor Bob, the resident negro physician at the black hospital,” that fevers ebbed and flowed with the tides.74 Edward Long, a planter who normally held Africans in disdain, thought some slave herbal remedies “wonderfully powerful” against local diseases “which have foiled the art of European surgeons.”75 Some planters in South Carolina also admired the medical skills of slaves.76 But for the most part, European planters like Father Labat77 held slave and African medicine in contempt, regarding it as superstition and its practitioners as charlatans. Doctors generally agreed, an outlook bolstered by their own financial self-interest. In St. Domingue, the colonial legislature legally forbade slaves and people of African descent from practicing medicine. In any case, although African medicine had its successes with various conditions – Guinea worm, sores, and wounds, for example – yellow fever remained beyond anyone’s ability to cure, as did malaria until the discovery of the ameliorative properties of cinchona bark. Moreover, soldiers and sailors on expeditions, if less fortunate than John Grant of the Black Watch, normally found themselves in the clutches of military medical corps, a guild that, while often open to experimentation, was probably little inclined to learn from Africans.78 Disdain and prejudice notwithstanding, soldiers in garrisons (at least officers) sometimes did benefit from the nursing skills of women of African descent. The half-Scottish, half-Dutch soldier-of-fortune John Stedman fell ill frequently while in Surinam in the 1770s, but recovered each time with the help of Joanna, a half-African, half-Dutch teenager whom Stedman eventually “married.”79 In Jamaica in 1780, a black

73 74 75 76 77

78

79

Collis (1965:207). Pinckard (1806, 3:82). Long (1774, 2:381). Morgan (1998:624–9). Labat (1722, 1:449–51). Labat, a man of science as well as religion, found slave remedies “bizarre.” Handler (2000); Weaver (2002); Bougerol (1985); Sheridan (1985:77–97). See also Pluchon (1987); Pluchon (1985). De Barros (2007) is instructive on frictions among medical practitioners in nineteenth-century British Guiana. Collis (1965) features their relationship. Stedman (1988:47–8) describes “Surinam marriage,” a custom whereby European men paid for African or more often Creole young women to serve as their “wives” while they remained in Surinam. Stedman presents his own relationship with Joanna in a more romantic light.

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woman named Cuba Cornwallis nursed the future Lord Nelson, aged 22, back to tolerable health after a fever bout.80 Suffering from fever during the occupation of St. Domingue in 1797, Lt. Thomas Phipps Howard felt no better for the attentions of the distinguished army doctor Robert Jackson, and credited his survival to his “black Girl, Victoire Dieudonne, who had never quitted [his] bed side from the moment [he] was taken ill.”81 Officers often justified taking local mistresses on the (fully plausible) grounds that these women would see them through fevers more skillfully than would military physicians. Serving in Guyana early in the nineteenth century, Lt. Thomas Staunton St. Clair testified to the importance of keeping a nurse/mistress, even if it was expensive:82 Two of our officers were living in barracks with two of these girls; one in Demerara, Lieutenant Myers, had a beautiful young mulatto, and Lieutenant Clark, in Berbice, had with him a fine handsome black woman. Though I disapproved of this system, which, on first arrival, appeared to me an outrage on common decency and propriety, it being necessary to set a good example to the soldiers – for how was Hannibal’s army ruined but by women and luxury? – yet I was at last obliged to alter my opinion, as I saw both the above-mentioned officers saved from certain death by the uncommon care and attention which these two girls paid to them during a violent attack of fever. Rank and file could not afford these tender attentions, and probably died at slightly higher rates than officers as a result; mere provision of water and food to a fever-stricken soldier would have done much more good than bleeding and mercury. Soldiers on expedition did not normally have time to recruit or money to buy women euphemistically called “housekeepers” in the British West India regiments.83 80 81

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Keevil, Lloyd and Coulter (1957–1963, 3:141). Howard (1985:116). Jacques Norvins recalled that he survived yellow fever during the Haitian Revolution thanks to the devotions of a “mulˆatresse, Zabo Larivi`ere.” Norvins (1896), cited in Roussier (1937:13). In the same campaigns, Polish officers fighting for France maintained that black women’s herbs and poultices worked better against yellow fever than the efforts of French doctors (Pachonski ´ and Wilson 1986:55). St. Clair (1947:15–16), cited in Buckley (1998:165). Buckley (1998:164–5, 343–4). Captain C. Brown, campaigning in Venezuela in 1818, recovered from fever thanks to “an old negro-woman” (Brown 1819:152). Women followed every regiment in the British Army in the eighteenth century,

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Although not intended to keep yellow fever or malaria in check, one practice of West Indian slaves could have helped everyone: lighting smoky fires in the evenings to keep mosquitoes at bay. Long noted this practice among Jamaican slaves, and even linked it to human health: The custom of the Negroes in this respect, perhaps, may conduce as much as any thing to their enjoying health in such marshy soils, when white persons are affected by the malignant effluvia, and contract sickness; few of their huts have any other floor than the bare earth, which might possibly transmit noxious exhalations in the night, if they did not keep up a constant fire in their principal room or hall; the smoak of which, though intended to disperse muskeetos, has another good effect, the correcting of the night air, and disarming of its damp and chill, which might be prejudicial to their healths.84 The llaneros of Venezuela, people of slave ancestry (of whom more in Chapter 7), purposely used green wood to make their fires smokier with the intent of deterring mosquitoes.85 Some Europeans too relied on smoke as mosquito repellent. A 1687 visitor to Jamaica noted that some planters “shut up their windows and make a smoak in all their lodging romes to drive and keep [mosquitoes] hence.” Ship captains sometimes used smoke to improve the air below decks.86 Perhaps the appeal of tobacco smoking had something to do with its mosquitorepellent properties. Of course, inhaling smoke would in the long run damage smokers’ lungs, but if it prevented a few bites from mosquitoes loaded with virus or plasmodium, the practice prolonged lives rather than shortened them. In short, African health practices probably proved more effective than European medicine against several of the maladies prevalent in the Greater Caribbean. With respect to yellow fever, no remedies worked,

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so acquiring slave women in the West Indies amounted to an adaptation of a familiar pattern. Even Dr. William Gorgas, the American sanitarian (see Chapter 8) and reflexive racist, could write: “ . . . [I]n my experience the measures generally advocated by the negro mammy did little or no harm, and in looking back over a yellow-fever experience of thirty years, I cannot by any means make so strong a statement with regard to my professional brethren” (Gorgas 1915:65). Long (1774, 2:510). Vowell (1831, 1:41). Taylor (2008:175); Clark (1797:67–8). Sloane (1707–1725, 1:xxxvi) mentions that Jamaican planters also used mosquito nets over their beds.

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but Afro-creole ones probably hewed more closely to the medical profession’s Hippocratic principle (“First, do no harm”). The rank and file of European armies as opposed to their officers, perhaps the most vulnerable of populations in these environments, had minimal contact with Afro-creole cures, and if so unfortunate as to get any medical care at all got it from the heirs of Galen.

Conclusion Yellow fever announced itself loud and clear in the Greater Caribbean in the late 1640s. It revealed its selective lethality, killing adults and people of European ancestry more often than children or people of African origin. But having killed many and immunized the remainder, the virus lay low (and in places surely disappeared) for half a century. When it came back with a vengeance in the 1690s (of which more in the next chapter), it came to stay. Henceforth, it would demonstrate further partisanship, attacking newcomers and often sparing those born or long resident in the West Indies. Its presence, its demographic partisanship, and its perilousness posed a problem for susceptibles that neither European nor African medicine could solve. Medical science did score a surprising success against malaria with the adoption of cinchona bark, and basic nursing could raise the odds of surviving any fever. With time and observation, medical thinkers and practitioners accidentally figured out ways to limit exposure to disease-bearing mosquitoes by encouraging people to stay away from swamps and other landscapes that they thought emitted harmful vapors. The inability of medical science to do much of anything in the face of yellow fever, and the expense of doing anything useful about malaria, were two necessary conditions in the stories that follow. Ineffective medicine allowed yellow fever and malaria to exert brutal influence over imperial struggles and colonization schemes in the warm lowlands of the Greater Caribbean. The inability of medical thinkers to advance a convincing explanation of yellow fever and malaria, their high lethality and their partisanship, may also have carried important consequences. For Europeans, the baffling West Indies disease environment perhaps made it easier to suppose that the hand of God was at work, in which case surely righteous causes ought to prevail. For confirmed Protestants, of whom there were several in the corridors of British power, it seemed unlikely that God would smite them down and thereby help Spanish Catholics. Instead,

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surely He would protect them if they chose to attack Havana or Cartagena. When in the 1770s populations in the Americas began to rebel against European rule, surely God would not send down plagues on European armies dispatched to restore the proper political order. Moreover, in the absence of a clear logical explanation for epidemics, it may have been easier to believe that what had happened once or twice would not happen again. Thus, perhaps the intellectual confusion about yellow fever and malaria helps to explain why, time and again, European states sent armies to their fate in the Greater Caribbean. The intellectual and geopolitical environments encouraged such expeditions, whereas the disease environment usually doomed them.

PART TWO

IMPERIAL MOSQUITOES

efore yellow fever took root in the Americas, invading expeditions and settlement schemes enjoyed much greater chances of success. After it was firmly entrenched, they failed routinely amid scorching fevers. The next two chapters explain how expeditions, both of conquest and of settlement, fared in the evolving ecological and disease environments of the Greater Caribbean.

B

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CHAPTER FOUR

Fevers Take Hold: From Recife to Kourou

From Canada to Chile, the Americas in the seventeenth century served as a playing field for the ambitions of several European statesmen and countless independent warrior-entrepreneurs. The great prizes were land, labor and, above all, Spanish silver from Mexico and Peru. On the high seas, Spanish treasure fleets attracted relentless attention from pirates and privateers. On land, the most appealing targets were rich lands suitable for plantations and strategic points from which to dominate trade or undertake piracy. Early in the seventeenth century, some of these targets were poorly defended and thinly populated. Even modest forces might hope to take them. As long as there was no yellow fever and little or no malaria, the prospects for success in assaults in the Greater Caribbean were highly encouraging. The small island of St. Kitts changed hands seven times between English and French in the years before 1665. St. Kitts had good soils and held promise as a plantation island, so it was worth the trouble to take. Without much in the way of fortifications or population, St. Kitts could scarcely hold out against a force of a couple of hundred determined armed men. Slaves formed a potential fifth column on almost every island, inspiring efforts at conquest and sometimes helping them succeed. This chapter presents brief stories of two early episodes, the Dutch at Recife in Brazil, 1624–1654, and the English on Jamaica, 1655–1660, in which invading armies achieved significant conquests in the absence of yellow fever. In both cases, malaria hampered the invaders but not badly enough to prevent military success. It then presents two more stories, of Scots at Darien in Panama, 1698–1699, and of French at Kourou in Guyana, 1763–1764, in which state-sponsored colonization efforts failed 91

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disastrously because of deadly fevers. These were not efforts at conquest but they were intended as military colonies and led by soldiers. There was no sharp line between settlement and conquest. This tale of two catastrophes shows how yellow fever in particular, once it had taken firm hold by the 1690s, could foil geopolitical ambitions. As the Dutch and English found, until the 1690s opportunities for colonial expansion beckoned and risks, while often enough deadly, brought reward.

The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 The poorly defended but agriculturally promising landscapes of northeastern Brazil attracted the avaricious eye of the Dutch West India Company early in the seventeenth century.1 Northeastern Brazil was the sugar capital of the Atlantic world and sugar prices were rising. The Dutch were embroiled in a long war (1567–1648) with the Spanish Habsburgs and looking for ways to use their sea power to damage Spanish interests. The West India Company was founded in 1621 with the express purpose of making money and mischief at the expense of Habsburg holdings in the Americas. This included Brazil because after 1580, the crowns of Portugal and Spain were temporarily united when a Portuguese dynasty died out. A Dutch expedition in 1624 captured Bahia, the largest city in Brazil, but had to surrender it within a year under pressure from a large Spanish-Portuguese fleet. Retaining Brazil commanded a high priority for Habsburg Spain. The prospect of taking it, as a first step to seizing all of Habsburg America, tantalized the sober directors of the West India Company, commercially minded men often collectively known as The Nineteen. In 1628, when their employee Piet Heyn took a treasure fleet off the Cuban coast, filling the Company’s coffers as never before, the directors decided the moment to strike had come.

the dutch assault on brazil In 1630, the Dutch returned to Brazil with some 7,000 men – a giant invasion force for operations in the Americas – attacking the port town of Olinda and the surrounding area of Pernambuco.2 Pernambuco hosted 1

2

Boxer (1957), Cabral de Mello (1998), and Souza (1948) cover military details. For wider contexts, see Israel (1982). Patriotic Brazilian historians sometimes give larger figures. Abreu (1997:74) says the Dutch force had 3,700 sailors and 13,500 soldiers. I follow Israel (1982:202) here.

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Map 4.1. Northeastern Brazil

some 70,000–90,000 residents, by far the most populous part of Brazil, and the richest sugar zones.3 Pernambuco’s ports were not well fortified, 3

Cabral de Mello (1998:454) indicates that Pernambuco in 1637 had 107 of Brazil’s 149 sugar plantations.

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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.4 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.5 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.6 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.7 They did not rely on imported food, as the

4 5

6

7

An assessment drawing heavily on Maurits’ correspondence is Gouvˆea (1998). Guerra (1979), citing Raphael de Jesus, Castrioto Lusitano (Lisbon, 1679). The “Dutch” included many Germans, Poles, locally recruited Indians, and others. Cabral de Mello (1998:244–5). An excellent financial and economic history of Dutch sugar in Pernambuco is Souty (1988). Production spiked in 1640–1644. A point made by the contemporary observer Pierre Moreau (1651:197–8). 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 n´agua todo o dia e noite e sofrem os mosquitos, o que n˜ao podem sofrer os do Reino.” Cabral de Mello (1998:258), citing Livro primeiro do governo do Brasil (1633).

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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.8 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 1685.9 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.10 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.11 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 8 9 10 11

Detailed in van Hoboken (1955). Franco (1976:10). For example, Willem Piso, Historia naturalis brasiliae (Leiden, 1648). Richshoffer (1978) [1677]. The Portuguese translation of the sole passage mentioning disease (from the original German) is: “A 13 [of 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 honra 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 at´e agora t´em chegado. Muitos morrem por n˜ao poderem se habituar a esta terra quente e a` p´essima a´ gua meio salgada.” Van Hoboken (1955:74) says Dutch troops in 1648–1649 often fell sick upon arrival in Brazil, but generally recovered.

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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 11–21 percent in 1645 and 32 percent in 1646; or on the African island of S˜ao Tom´e, which Dutch forces overran in 1641. In West Africa and on S˜ao Tom´e, both malaria and yellow fever prevailed. But in Brazil, there was no yellow fever.12 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

12

Ratelband (1953:157–300); further data from Prof. Wim Klooster, personal communication, 26 June 2006; from Guerra (1979:474); and from Cabral de Mello (1998:255) 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 1998:255). For comparison, in the autumn of 1757 the British Army in North America reported 16% of its 18,385 men sick (Brumwell 2002:151). To judge from Guerra (1979:478), malaria was not prominent among the Dutch in Brazil, although I suspect it was present.

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Map 4.2. Jamaica

Brazil.13 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 1685.14 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 S˜ao Tom´e, 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 13

14

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).

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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.15 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.16 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), a former 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.”17

15

16

17

Capp (1989:87–91). The best account of the expedition is Taylor (1969). 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 1900:111–15. A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe (London: F. Gyles, 1742, 3:60), quoted in Rodgers (2004:22). See also Gage (1648).

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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.18 Cromwell’s Western Design, launched in early 1655, included 38 ships and some 9,000 men,19 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.”20 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.”21 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.22 In May, the survivors attacked Jamaica, then home to about 2,500 Spaniards and African slaves. Jamaica was a minor outpost in the 18 19

20

21

22

Morales Padr´on (2003:179–84). Estimates range from 7,000 to 9,500. Firth (1900:xix–xxx) reviews the evidence. See also Taylor (1969:19). Firth (1900:xxiii), quoting an anonymous account from the Harleian Manuscripts, British Library. Newgate was a London prison. 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 (1900:1–105). A thorough account with published documents from the Spanish side is Rodr´ıguez Demorizi (1956–1957).

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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 flickered on until 1660, but Spanish efforts to retake the island came to naught.23 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.24 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.25 Within three weeks some 3,000 men were sick, and in six months the original force of 9,000 men had dwindled to 3,720, of whom more than 2,000 were “sick and helpless.”26 Major-General

23 24

25

26

Morales Padr´on (2003:192–216); Taylor (1969:146–96); Wright (1930). Veterans of the Jamaica campaign did sack Santiago de Cuba and occupy it for two weeks in October 1661. Venables to Mr. Noel, 13 June 1655 (Firth 1900:49), in which he writes of the rains “which would kill us all.” Anonymous letter of 5 November 1655, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MSS, D1208, printed in Firth (1900:142); and see Firth (1900:xxxii). “Never did my

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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 . . . ”27 He did not know it, but Sedgwick was witnessing the birth of a new ecological-military order in the West Indies. Sedgwick at first thought the failing lay with the men, who were “so unworthy, so slothful [and] desired rather to die than to live.”28 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 29 – 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.30 Soldiers who had survived every infection known to England fell to Jamaica’s “flux and feavors.”31 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.32 Despite living in the Caribbean, these unfortunate pioneers, most of whom grew up in England rather than Nevis (which was settled beginning twenty years before), lacked sufficient resistance to the infections raging on Jamaica.

27 28 29

30 31 32

eyes see such a sickly time, nor soe many funerals, and graves all the towne over that it is a very Golgotha.” Thurloe Papers, vol. IV, pp. 153–4, quoted in Taylor (1969:91). Quoted in Long (1774, 1:254). 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. See Taylor (1969:205–6); Wright (1930:122). The figures are from Dunn (1972:153) and Taylor (1969:92). Taylor (1969:116–18).

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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.33 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.34 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 prominently, 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.35 The English soldiers by and large kept to the 33

34

35

An anonymous letter of 15 July 1655 mentions “flux and feavors (the usual diseases).” Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MSS D1208, printed in Firth (1900:140); 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” (19 April 1655), partially printed in Firth (1900:156). Komp (1942); Pan-American Health Organization (1993); Molez (1998). According to Trapham (1679:103–10), the ponds that Jamaicans used for drinking water in the 1670s were infested with mosquito eggs. According to Sedgwick, the island was “full of several sorts of cattle” until the English killed 20,000 head (Long 1774, 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.

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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 Nino ˜ may have compounded English misfortune. The early 1650s featured an unusual run of El Nino ˜ events (1650, 1652, 1655). ENSO ordinarily brings extra warm and wet weather to Jamaica so even the dry season is good for mosquitoes.36 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 Nino. ˜ 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 . . . ”37 As Edward Long, planter and historian of Jamaica, put it, “[i]t 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.”38 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.39 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 36 37 38

39

Quinn (1982). Taylor (2008:174–5). Long (1774, 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 (2002:22) in 1801 complained of the “innumerable musquitoes that have almost eaten us up . . . my face, neck, hands and arms have been martyrs.” Guerra (1994:264–5) 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 (1969:90) votes for malaria.

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failed of rendering the complaint more obstinate, if not mortal.”40 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.41 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 1655.42 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

40 41

42

Long (1774, 1:247). Firth (1900: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 1900:102). It remained a graveyard for Englishmen (among others), especially new arrivals, for a long time to come (Burnard 1999).

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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.43 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 (1991) offers the most complete description of imperial expeditions.

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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.44

the cold and hungry 1690s 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.45 In an age when the Dutch, English, and others seemed to be 44

45

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). 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

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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 1698.46 As much as a sixth of the Scottish population starved to death, or died from diseases amplified by malnutrition.47 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 entrepˆots, 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

46 47

of Failure” (pp. 148–69), does not mention disease. Helpful context is in Forrester (2004), Smout (1963), Armitage (1995), and Watt (2006). Crucial Scottish and English documents appear in the collections edited by Insh (1924) and Cundall (1926). Hart and Cundall also provide translations of Spanish documents. The most valuable and insightful eyewitness account is Borland (1715). Smout (1963:245–9). Flinn (1977:7) 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 1955).

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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.48 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 III 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.49 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.50 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.”

48

49

50

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 (1858, 1:117). 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. Wafer’s manuscript is in BL, Sloane MSS 3236. A slightly revised version was published in 1699 (see Wafer 1934).

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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.51 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,52 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.53 Each man was entitled to fifty acres of cultivable land, an irresistible 51 52

53

Quoted in Hart (1929:46–7). 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 1932:110). 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 1929:305).

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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.54 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 wayfarers 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.55 November was a good season to arrive, comparatively dry and cool. The coast around Darien looked green.56 Tall trees lined the shore. Rain forest here had grown up, as throughout the Caribbean region, after 54

55

56

Gallup-Diaz (2004:134), citing AGI, AP, legajo 161, fol. 230, and AGI, AP 164, ff. 604–18. Mackenzie (1699). 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. 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

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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. . . . ”57 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 “great Droves of Monkeys, which are extraordinary fat and good to eat.”58 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.”59 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.60 For nearly 200 years they had

57

58

59

60

of the isthmus about 1680 is Wafer (1934); an account of the local population and their uses of flora and fauna is Ventocilla, Herrera, and N´unez ˜ (1995). Borland (1715:6). 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 1932:172). 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 (1924:52). Philo-Caledon (1699:47). 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). On adders and mosquitoes, Anonymous, A Letter Giving a Description of the Isthmus of Darian (1699:6). The quotation is from a diary printed in Hart (1929:68). Borland (1715:13) 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 (1924:100–6; 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 (1994). Anonymous, A Letter Giving a Description of the Isthmus of Darian (1699:16–24) gives considerable

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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.61 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.62 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.63 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.64 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.”65 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 entrepˆot.

61

62 63

64 65

detail on the Cuna, although its reliability is open to question. Gallup-Diaz (2004) is the best modern source on the Cuna. This figure is a scholarly guess based on Spanish documents. Gallup-Diaz (2004:xiv); Jaen Su´arez (1998). Philo-Caledon (1699:43–60). “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. On Cuna diplomacy, Gallup-Diaz (2004:77–116). “A Journal kept from Scotland by one of the Company who sailed on board the ‘Endeavour’ pink,” printed in (Insh 1924:74).

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Despite unseasonable rains in November and December (1698),66 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.67 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.68 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 . . . ”69 In other words, good malaria country. Borland (at least in retrospect) recognized the 66

67

68

69

“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 (1929:192–216); and in Burton (1849:98– 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 (1924:78–96). 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. Canillas al Rey, 6 mayo 1699, AGI, AP legajo 162. A translation appears in Hart (1929:261ff). 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 (1999). Borland (1715:7).

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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.”70 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.”71 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.72 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.73 But more deadly sickness soon haunted the settlement. By April 1699 the rains returned, and with them the fever season. By late May, 70 71

72

73

Borland (1715:11). Mackenzie (1699). Also in Colin Campbell’s diary, in the National Library of Scotland, Ms 846. An excerpt is printed in National Archives of Scotland (1998:10). I estimate that rate at 30 per 1,000 per year. That 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. Letter of 28 December 1698 from the council in Caledonia to the directors of the Company, quoted in Hart (1929:79). 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 (1929:237). Bear in mind these authors were boosters.

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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.”74 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.”75 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,76 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.77 Efforts to secure relief from nearby English settlements came to grief through shipwreck. Then a rude blow came: word that King William III 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.78 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

75 76

77

78

Memorandum of the Company Directors, 28 November 1699, printed in Insh (1924:110). Walter Herries, quoted in Prebble (1968:144). 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 (1924:108–12; quot. p. 109). “Report by William Paterson to the Directors,” 19 December 1699, printed in Burton (1849:178–98). Paterson says he came down with “intermitting feaver” about 5 June 1698. 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 (1926:55). This lays too much at the King’s door: fever and fluxes killed the Scots, not starvation.

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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.79 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 a day . . . ”80 Misadventure dogged the fleeing colonists in the form of continuing epidemics that killed several hundreds, mast-snapping storms, and hostility 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.”81 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. . . . ”82 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

80

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82

His report is in AGI, AP 160, and cited in Gallup-Diaz (2004:139). Scottish sources put the total of deceased on shore from this expedition at around 300. John Borland to Daniel McKay, 7 September 1699 (writing from Boston). Printed in Burton (1849:152). Letter of 11 August 1699, National Library of Scotland, Darien Manuscripts. Quoted in Hart (1929:93). Sir William Beeston, 24 August 1698, quoted in Cundall (1926:91). 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 1932:148n, 160). Captain Long reported this sentiment: Long to the Duke of Leeds, 15 February 1699, printed in Insh (1924:105).

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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) letters83 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, 84 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. . . . ”85 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.”86 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.87 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

84 85 86 87

For example, Anonymous (1699). The History of Caledonia, pp. 18–20, which paints a picture of a land of milk, honey, and gold. Borland (1715:30). Borland (1715:30). Borland (1715:49). 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.

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300 could stand to their posts.88 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. . . . ”89 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. . . . ”90 The diary of the Spanish commander, Don Juan D´ıaz 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.91 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.)92 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.93 More horrors awaited the fugitive colonists. Fevers and fluxes carried off a dozen or more each day, 250 in all, en route to Jamaica.94 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 112.95 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.96 In all,

88 89 90

91

92 93

94 95 96

Borland (1715:71). Borland (1715:64). Letter of Shields, Borland and Archibald Stobo, 2 February 1700, printed in Borland (1715:55). Borland says the letter was written by Shields, although it was signed by all three men. D´ıaz de Pimienta’s diary is in the Archivo General de Indias, AP, legajo 164. It is translated and printed in Hart (1929:353–93). Borland (1715:17–18) also mentions Spanish ill health. Storrs (1999:25–6). It arrived after the Scots had departed. 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. . . . ” Borland (1715:79). Borland (1715:83). 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 (1929:143–4); Cundall (1926:99–100).

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the Darien venture killed about 2,000 of the 2,500 Scots who had sailed to the isthmus.97 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.98 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 1701,99 but nothing could make good the loss of £219,000 on the Darien scheme.100 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 1707.101 Thus Great Britain was born, with assistance from the fevers of Darien.102 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 97

98 99

100

101

102

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. 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. Of the £400,000, only £219,000 had been called in before the scheme failed (Hart 1929:41). 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 2004). 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.

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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 I am not yet able to walk alone now.103 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.”104 The Council in Darien mentioned “head and belly-aches, fevers, fluxes . . . ”105 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.106 103

104 105 106

Prebble (1968:183). The original is in the National Library of Scotland, Darien Papers, 49/353–60. Borland (1715:64, 78). Letter of 23 December 1699 to Company directors, quoted in Hart (1929:129). 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

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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.107 One diary indicates the Scots had taken a monkey as a pet by November 4, 1698.108 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.109

107 108

109

strong Liquors” on ship. Lesser exposure to mosquitoes is a likelier explanation. Memorandum of the Company Directors, 28 November 1699, printed in Insh (1924:110). McSherry (1986) favors dengue, using MacDowall’s description to make his diagnosis, but considers yellow fever and malaria possible alternatives. Borland (1715:15). “A Journal kept from Scotland by one of the Company who sailed on board the ‘Endeavour’ pink,” printed in Insh (1924:75); also quoted in Hart (1929:67). The monkey might have been from St. Thomas, or from Darien. And it might or might not have carried the yellow fever virus. This figure comes from National Archives of Scotland (1998:9).

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The Scots were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were both geopolitically and epidemiologically na¨ıve 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.110 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 na¨ıve 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

110

On weather: Endfield (2008). On weather and disease vectors, Acuna-Soto ˜ et al. (2002) and Chapter 2, in which the argument is made that drought followed by heavy rains is a pattern most favorable for A. aegypti.

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Map 4.4. Guyana and Kourou

too costly and chargable to maintain.”111 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.112 111 112

Borland (1715:19, 100). 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 (Minist`ere de la Marine et des Colonies, 1842), the

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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 2,000.113 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.114 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.”115 The land struck most of those who saw it as unpromising, if not accursed.116 The coastal plain, which extended 10 to 60 kilometers

113

114

115

116

originals of which are mainly in the Biblioth`eque Nationale, nouvelles acquisitions franc¸aises, MSS 2,571–2,583 and in the Collection Moreau de St. M´ery, Archives Nationales, S´erie Colonies, C14. A full sense of the context is provided by Polderman (2004), which also (pp. 596–698) prints many of the original documents. The most helpful recent articles are Pouliquen (2002), Rothschild (2006), and Hodson (2007), but see also Epstein (1984) and Lowenthal (1952). Polderman (2004:166) has lower figures for Amerindians in French Guyana: about 17,000 for 1676 and only a few hundred in 1763. 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 (2006:81–90). Thibaudault (1995:37) has similar data. “M´emoire concernant la colonie de Guyane,” 27 Mars 1749, quoted and translated in Epstein (1984:85). Michel (1989:28–34) for geographic description based on eighteenth-century sources. Bajon (1777–1778, 2:177–402) describes flora, fauna, and agriculture in French Guyana of the 1760s and 1770s.

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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.117 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,118 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.119 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.120 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.121 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.”122

117 118 119 120

121 122

Cardoso (1999:46–50) has climate details. Aublet (1775) catalogued and illustrated hundreds of them. Touchet (2004); Cardoso (1999:53–60). Aublet (1775, 4:xv–xviii) complained of mosquitoes, among much else. He collected plants there in 1762–1764. Cardoso (1999:217). On cotton and cacao, Cardoso (1999:231–4). Pr´efontaine (1764:7), quoted in and translated by Lowenthal (1952:26).

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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.”123 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 7,000.124 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.125 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 Choiseul (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 123

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Jefferys (1760:234). The officers of the French garrison lived “en orgie,” according to Aublet. Cited in Thibaudault (1995:75). Michel (1989:37–9); Cardoso (1999:329); Polderman (2004:269–453) on plantations, and p. 281 on population. Polderman (2004:232–53) and Thibaudault (1995:33–9) on the Kourou Jesuit mission. An eyewitness account is Artur (2002:555–6).

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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.126 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.127 This preference for white settlers came not so much from moral objections to the inhumanity of slavery,128 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 safeguard 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 Brˆuletout de Pr´efontaine (1717–1787), had come to the conclusion that the time was ripe for state-sponsored colonization in Guyana. A military man, Pr´efontaine 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.129 Choiseul thought he had found the man to bring about his geopolitical dream, awarded the planter a 126 127

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Minist`ere de la Marine et des Colonies (1842:3–4). Minist`ere 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 (2006:70). Choiseul’s plans: Daubigny (1892); Marcus (1905). 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 (1892:42); and in Minist`ere de la Marine et des Colonies (1842:4). Pr´efontaine (1763). By some accounts (e.g., Chaia 1958:6), the book was published by Choiseul’s order.

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medal, and charged him with finding the right location in Guyana. But Choiseul did not heed Pr´efontaine’s detailed suggestions: small numbers of colonists, sent out in increments over many years, together with imports of African slaves. Pr´efontaine 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.130 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 Franc¸ois 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 Pr´efontaine 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.131 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.132 Documents in French archives preserve the names of more than 13,000 luckless souls who passed through St.-Jean d’Ang´ely (near Rochefort) en route to Kourou. A large proportion of the family names are German; many of the migrants appear to be young families.133 130

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Pr´efontaine’s life is recounted in Thibaudault (1995:47–56). Michel (1989:44) 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. Minist`ere de la Marine et des Colonies (1842:15). The official text explaining the conditions of recruitment and settlement appears in Artur (2002:713–15). On Canadians and Acadians, Larin (2006). Hodson (2007:109–16) details the recruitment of Acadians and Germans. Thibaudault (1995:248–503) 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. . . . ”134 Some 40 percent of the 13,000 or 14,000 who sailed for Kourou were under eighteen years old.135 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).136

settlement and sickness Choiseul and Turgot wanted their new colony up and running in a hurry. In February 1763, Choiseul explained that the king “proposes to send a

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in four archives (p. 243). Larin (2006:179–232) lists Canadians recruited for Kourou (not all went) and gives brief biographies of many. Malouet (1802, 1:5). A slightly different translation from mine appears in Lowenthal (1952:29). On musicians and clowns, see also Minist`ere de la Marine et des Colonies (1842:5). Rothschild (2006:79) mentions an economist; Thibaudault’s lists show the great majority were laborers, with a leavening of bakers, carpenters, masons, and the odd wigmaker or two. On tambourine players, Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Colonies, B 117, Choiseul a` de Fraignes, 13 f´evrier 1763. I owe this reference to Jean-Franc¸ois Mouhot. Michel (1989:56, 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 (1802, 1:6) wrote 14,000. See also the review in Larin (2006:74–5). French slave trade data from Stein (1979:211). See also Klein (1999:211).

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large number of families incessantly to clear and cultivate the land.”137 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.138 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 (1725– 85), 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.139 Chanvalon surveyed some suitable sites for settlers’ estates along the banks of the Kourou as far as 90 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.140 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.141 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.142 They subsisted on supplies brought from France. Each convoy was a latterday Noah’s ark with cattle, sheep, pigs, horses, donkeys, goats, chickens, 137

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Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Colonies, B 117, Choiseul a` de Fraignes, 13 f´evrier 1763. Minist`ere de la Marine et des Colonies (1842:29). Correspondance de l’intendant (Chanvalon), lettre num´ero 4 (quoted in Minist`ere 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.” Minist`ere de la Marine et des Colonies (1842:40, 44–5). Chanvalon au Ministre, 18 f´evrier 1764, quoted in Michel (1989:63); and Chanvalon au Ministre, 29 Mars 1764, quoted in ibid (p. 79). Chanvalon (2004) even published a natural history book about Martinique in 1763. Michel (1989:81). Minist`ere 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.143 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.144 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 ˆIles du Diable, which he deviously rebaptised the ˆIles du Salut. In April 1764, Chanvalon reported 150 colonists were sick. Deadly epidemics took hold in June 1764. According to the French doctor Jacques Franc¸ois 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.145 No hospital had yet been built on the ˆIles 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.146 Almost all the apothecaries and surgeons at Kourou fell ill.147 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.148 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 “fi`evres malignes.” Food ran short, as too few healthy 143 144 145

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Larin (2006:72). Minist`ere de la Marine et des Colonies (1842:48). On the rainy season and tent shortage, Artur to Turgot quoted in Artur (2002:68). 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. According to a letter from Artur to Turgot, quoted in Artur (2002:47). Minist`ere de la Marine et des Colonies (1842:53–5). No evidence suggests any demoiselles of Martinique actually went to Kourou.

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men remained to hunt.149 His immune system primed by two decades of prior exposure to Guyana’s infections, Pr´efontaine remained among the living.150 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.151 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 1765.152 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.153 Among Europeans, the death rate came to 85 or 90 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 149 150

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Minist`ere de la Marine et des Colonies (1842:62–3); Thibaudault (1995:121). Michel (1989:82–4). See also a letter from a royal doctor in Guyana printed in Michel (1989:171–2). Thibaudault (1995:56) indicates Pr´efontaine 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. Minist`ere 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. Larin (2006:129). Raynal (1770, 1:26–9) gives 10,000, saying 12,000 arrived and 2,000 returned while 60 families stayed. Michel (1989:89–91); Eymeri (1992:236) 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.”154 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 “fi`evres 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.155 Campet also noted that a colleague in Cayenne died of “vomissement noir” in early 1765.156 Another doctor who treated the sufferers at Kourou, Bertrand Bajon, denied the infection in question was yellow fever. But Bajon was something 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 polymath Alexandre Moreau de Jonn`es, 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.157 154

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Letter of 2 mars 1766, printed in Michel (1989:171–2); and quoted in part in Thibaudault (1995:119). The original: “Les fi`evres aigu¨es accompagn´ees de vomissements noirs et sanguins qui emportent en cinq jours. . . . ” Patris noted this fever had not recurred since April 1765. Campet (1802:73). The original: “une maladie e´pidemique dans laquelle on vomit une mat´erielle noir comme l’encre.” Campet (1802:78). Moreau de Jonn`es (1820:75–80); 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.

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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.158 Pr´efontaine 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 90 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.159 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.160 His brother, serving the crown as intendant of Limoges (he later was a prominent 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

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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 (1802:74) mentions “fevers, scurvy, dysenteries” at Kourou. Thibaudault (1995:121). Bancroft (1769:396–7) 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. Choiseul (1904:410), cited in Rothschild (2006:84).

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quietly in Normandy, his family’s base, and followed his interests in agriculture and botany by planting Guyanan pepper trees on his estate. Pr´efontaine, 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.161

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. 161

The official inquests and aftermath of Kourou are treated in Michel (1989:107– 51), and in Rothschild (2006). For the effects on French approaches to Guyana, Mam-Lam Fouck (1996:66). Toth (2006) explores the history of the penal colony.

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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 Great1

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 1

Quoted in Houlding (1981:v).

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poorly defended settlement and sack it. But Spain’s enemies did not have the resources to take and hold anything of consequence.2

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.3 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 3

Hoffman (1980); Andrews (1978). Torres Ram´ırez (1981).

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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.4 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.5 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 5

Calder´on Quijano (1984b). Kuethe (1983:14). Gastelbondo (1753) notes that the crews of the flota suffered heavily from yellow fever at Cartagena and Portobelo; so did Alcedo (1786– 1789), as cited in S´anchez-Albornoz (1974:102–3).

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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.6 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 S´ebastien 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.7 In Europe, fortresses did hold out successfully in more than three fourths of sieges attempted between 1683 and 1815.8 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.9 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 intervention 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 6

7 8

9

Parcero Torre (1998:18–34); Albi (1987:130–5); Segovia Salas (1982); Calder´on Quijano (1984); Kagan (2000); Parker (2000). Vauban (1968:12). See also Duffy (1985). According to a list in Landers (2004:401–3), 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. Zapatero (1978) reviews Spanish military engineering in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See also Duffy (1979); Albi (1987:127–40); Pares (1936:240–52) on the often poor quality of French and British fortification in the West Indies.

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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.10 Jos´e de G´alvez, 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. . . . ”11 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.12 Throughout the coastal lowlands in the summer months, a “rain shower was enough to destroy a European army divison.”13 Maintaining a garrison 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.14 Locally recruited troops fared 10

11

12

13

14

SHM-Madrid, Secci´on Hist´orica del Dep´osito 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, Relaci´on del estado actual de las fortificaciones de la Plaza de San Crist´obal de La Habana y dem´as fuertes y castillos dependientes por el ingeniero D. Francisco Ricaud de Tirgale, 8 Julio 1761. AGI, Santa Fe, 577-A, Don Jos´e de G´alvez a Manuel Antonio Fl´orez, cited in Marchena Fern´andez (1983:195). 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). Informe del brigadier Fernando Miyares, 21 Junio 1815, SHM-Madrid, c. 97, quoted in Ortiz Escamilla (2008:39). Castro Guti´errez (1996:98). I owe this citation to my colleague John Tutino.

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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 commanders 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.15 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 15

Archer (1977:38–60); Archer (1971); Archer (1987); Albi (1987:132); Booker (1993); Bustamente (1958:80–3); Knaut (1997); Ortiz Escamilla (2008:52, 77– 80). 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 (1788:115) noted how much healthier Mexico City was than Veracruz.

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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.16 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.17 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 16

17

For example, among the garrison at Caracas in 1756–1757: “Not´ose que s´olo los soldados espa˜noles sucumbieron, mientras que no eran atacados por la epidemia ninguno de los hijos de Caracas” Archila (1961:375). Caracas suffered yellow fever epidemics in 1694, 1756–1757, 1787, 1793, and 1798. Writing from Havana, C´ordoba (1790) noted that yellow fever was the single most deadly disease among Spaniards. Marchena Fern´andez (1983:213).

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weeks while mounting a siege, combined with garrisons composed of either militia and seasoned regular troops or both.18 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.19 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 1690s 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.20 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 18

19

20

In the late eighteenth century, regular troops cost the Spanish Crown seven times as much to maintain as militia, also a crucial consideration (Albi 1987:97). Regular troops were always in short supply, even when there was money to pay them. Albi (1987:93–140); Parcero Torrre (1998); Archer (1997:10); McAlister (1954); Kuethe (1978); Kuethe (1984). Buchet (1997b:191) says, without citation, that the Spanish understood the defense value of yellow fever and called it “fi`evre patriotique.” I have not seen such a term in Spanish sources but the term would be fully appropriate. Guerra (1996:27) says yellow fever; the textual evidence is slender. The mortality of the expedition is noted in Ehrman (1953:609); Buchet (1992, 2:782). A fuller account in most respects but blind to disease is Moss (1966:14–26).

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and reefs because of a shortage of sailors to maneuver them.21 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.22 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.23 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.24 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 Colombia, was founded in 1533. Within a few decades, it had become the chief entrepˆot 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. 21

22

23

24

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 (1966:26–7). Keevil, Lloyd and Coulter (1957–1963, 2:182–3), citing Mather, The Ecclesiastical History of New England (Hartford 1854, 1:226). Moss (1966:27–9). Ehrman (1953); Keevil, Lloyd, and Coulter (1957–1963, 2:181–4); Moss (1966). Details appear in CSP (1693–1696:31–101). See for example pp. 100–1, Codrington 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. Buchet (1991, 2:782–4).

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It had more of both by 1697,25 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,26 the French landed unopposed 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 800 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.”27 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. 25

26 27

Solano Alonso (1998:79) says the “v´omito 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 (1966:52); Valtierra (1954:751–4). On the history of the city’s fortifications, Segovia Salas (1996); Zapatero (1979); Marco Dorta (1960). Pointis (1698:140). Pointis (1698:141). “Toutes les id´ees de triomphe et richesse e´taient effac´ees par celles de la maladie et de la mort. Je me croyais en e´tat de perdre dans le plus beau port du monde, non seulement le fruit de mes peines, mais l’escadre que le roi m’avait confi´ee.”

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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.”28 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.29 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.30 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 Nino ˜ and ENSO+1 years. El Nino ˜ in 1692 and 1694–1696 brought conditions ideal for hatching and sustaining A. aegypti, so the years 1692–1697 28

29

30

Nevill’s journal is in Merriman (1950:299–311), quotation from p. 306. He anchored for a day at Cartagena and his crews could have acquired the yellow fever virus there. Accounts include the memoirs of the principals (Pointis 1698; Ducasse 1699); as well as historical narratives (Morgan 1932; Porras Troconis 1942; Pritchard 2004:326–31) and the analysis of Buchet (1991, 1:482–6, 508, and 2:181, 193, 784). A detailed roster of Pointis’ armament and equipment appears in Buchet (1991, 2:1162–230), from Archives Nationales, Marine, 662/36, “Armament en course de l’escadre de M. le Baron de Pointis, 1697.” Matta Rodr´ıguez (1979) and Ru´ız Rivera (2001) for views using Spanish documents. The fullest study is Nerzic and Buchet (2002). 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 (1722, 4:211–12, 251–3) noted yellow fever in Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1698–1699. Moreau de St. M´ery (1797–1798, 1:701–2) recounts yellow fever outbreaks on St. Domingue in the 1690s.

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were good for mosquitoes and bad for people – worse for some than for others – in the Caribbean.31 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.32 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 Nino). ˜ 33 After visits to a few 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.34 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.35 A Spanish fleet sent – quite unnecessarily, as it turned out – to hamper Hosier in 1730 lost 2,200 men to yellow fever.36 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

31

32 33

34

35

36

Quinn and Neal (1992) and Quinn (1992) for ENSO chronology. Poveda et al. (2001) show that in Colombia both vivax and falciparum malaria spike during ENSO and ENSO+1 years. Buchet (1991, 2:784–8). According to a new ENSO chronology, the 1720s were an especially active decade. Garcia-Herrera et al. (2008). 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 (1774, 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. 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). Guerra (1966:27), citing Gastelbondo (1753).

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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, 1741 In the decades after Pointis’ attack, Cartagena resumed its roles as regional entrepˆot 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.37 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.38 Like every trading and naval port, Cartagena had a mobile and fluctuating population. That population was usually smaller than 10,000, made up mainly of people of mixed Amerindian, African, and European ancestry.39 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 38

39

Grahn (1997). The list of exports is from Zapatero (1957). 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 Fern´andez (1982:15–57); Segovia Salas (1996:14–34). G´omez P´erez (1983) says 6,000 for 1708 and 12,000 for 1778, based on archival census materials. Zulueta (1992:132) gives 20,000 as the city’s population in 1741, surely too high.

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Cartagena Bay

Map 5.2. Cartagena and Environs (c. 1741)

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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¸a˜ o, amounted to at least three times this figure, bringing the total to perhaps 40,000 or some 2,000 per year.40 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.41 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.42 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.43 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 Espanoles” (graveyard of Spaniards) by regularly killing a third to a ˜ half of the galleons’ crews.44 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. 40 41 42 43 44

Castillo Mathieu (1981:266–70, 275–6). Juan and Ulloa (1748, 1:ch. 5); Uprimmy and Lobo Guerrero (2007). McFarlane (1993:39, 41, 45–7) on sugar in the Cartagena hinterland. D´ıaz Pardo (2006); Chandler (1981). Juan and Ulloa (1748, 1:129–30). See also Gastelbondo (1753).

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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.45 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.46 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

46

Juan and Ulloa (1748, 1:59–61); Restrepo (2004:71). Moseley (1795:402) also says Spanish sailors suffered heavily in this outbreak. Gast Galvis (1982) has scattered information on yellow fever in and around Cartagena; see Bates (1946) on sylvan yellow fever in Colombia in the early twentieth century.

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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.47 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 in a 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.

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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 December, 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 Chagres’ 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.48 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 48

Houstoun (1747:241).

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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.”49 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.50

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.51 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, Sebasti´an 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. The area afforded abundant limestone, which slaves had hacked, hauled, and installed in a system of walls, bulwarks, and forts. Tall 49 50 51

Charles Knowles, quoted in Harding (1991:70). Houlding (1981:408) on regiments sent to Cartagena just after being raised. Quintero Saravia (2002) for a biography.

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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.52 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.”53 Vernon thought six weeks was all the time attackers would have at Cartagena.54 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.55 Supplementing the regulars were about 1,000 militia, 600 Amerindian bowmen, and 1,000 sailors.56 Of these (roughly) 4,700 men, only about 700 were new to the local disease environment. 52 53

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Marco Dorta (1960:210–15): Segovia Salas (1996); Zapatero (1989). Engineer Antonio de Ar´evalo, quoted in Segovia Salas (1996:30). Segovia Salas gives no citation for this, and I do not know its date. Ar´evalo worked on Cartagena fortifications for several decades beginning in 1742 according to Marco Dorta (1960:281–5). Vernon to Newcastle and Wager, 15 April 1741 (26 April old style), printed in Ranft (1958:229). Torres a` Marquis de Larnage, 26 f´evrier 1741, Library of Congress, Vernon-Wager MSS. On shortages: Quintero Saravia (2002:169–70). AGI, Audiencia de Santa F´e, leg. 572, f. 685, Estado de la Infanter´ıa, 24 diciembre 1740. Different accounts give different figures. Berm´udez (1912:16) says 3,300 in all; Zapatero (1957:132) says 2,800, the lowest figure I have seen (his is a very patriotic account); Segovia Salas (1996:54) has 6,000 in all, the highest, which corresponds to the paper strength of five Spanish regiments.

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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,57 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.58 The walled city stood against the Caribbean surf on a shore open to strong winds and currents, where shallow water imperiled naval ships.59 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

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Kuethe (1983:16); Helg (2004:100–5); Zapatero (1957:130) says of five militia companies, two were “pardos,” or blacks. 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 1962:481). Narratives of the siege include: Beatson (1804, 1:89–109); Fortescue (1910:63– 74); Berm´udez (1912); Ranft (1958:15–19); Nowell (1962); Kempthorne (1935); Richmond (1920, 1:101–37); Restrepo Canal (1941); Zapatero (1957:134–54); Harding (1991:83–122); Zulueta (1992); Quintero Saravia (2002:230–72); a useful day-by-day chronology appears in Marchena Fern´andez (1982:127–38). Documents from participants include Eslava (1894); AGI, Audiencia de Santa F´e, legajo 1009, “Informe de Navarrete sobre el Ataque de Vernon,” 27 mayo 1741; Servicio Hist´orico 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 (1958) 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 (1973).

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bombardments, troops began to disembark on March 20th.60 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.61 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 L´azaro, perhaps 20 meters in elevation and overlooking the city.62 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

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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. Vernon to Cathcart, 1 October 1740 (21 September old style), printed in Ranft (1958:127); Vernon and Ogle to Wentworth, 22 March 1741 (11 March old style), printed in Ranft (1958:185); 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 (1958:217). Descriptions are in Eslava al Marqu´es de Villadarias, 9 mayo 1741, and Carlos Desnaux, “Descripci´on de la Fortaleza o Castillo de San Phelipe de Barajas . . . ” 3 mayo 1741, both in AHN, Estado 2335.

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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.63 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.”64 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 Lu´ıs) 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.65 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.”66 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 L´azaro 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

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Anonymous (1744:8) mentions sickness on the diary entry for 20 March (9 March old style). PRO, SP, 42/90, f. 59, Vernon to Ogle, 28 March 1741 (17 March old style). ´ Z´uniga Angel (1997) on the Bocachica struggle. ˜ Vernon to Newcastle and Wager, 12 April 1741 (1 April old style), printed in Ranft (1958:211).

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(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 L´azaro, which Vernon thought a “paltry” fort,67 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.”68 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 L´azaro. Perhaps Vernon browbeat him into this decision,69 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.70 Before dawn on April 20th, some 1,500 British soldiers (Spanish accounts usually give 3,500) began the assault on San L´azaro, defended by some 250 Spaniards.71 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.72 The Spanish reported their losses as 2 killed 67

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Vernon and Ogle to Wentworth, 18 April 1741 (7 April old style), printed in Ranft (1958:219). 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. In the most careful analysis of this decision I have seen, Harding (1991:112–14) 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. Anonymous (1744:40), in a diary entry for 21 April (10 April old style) says sickness “hourly encreased.” Zapatero (1957:137) says 500 defenders. Lezo’s account says 600 British dead. “Diario de lo acontecido en Cartagena de Indias desde el d´ıa 15 de marzo de 1741 hasta el 20 de mayo del mismo ano,” ˜ AHN, Estado 2335. He says the British left their ladders, picks, shovels, and rifles behind when fleeing.

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and 13 wounded.73 Shortly before dying, a British colonel allegedly said, “The General ought to hang the guides and the King ought to hang the General.”74 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 L´azaro. 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. . . . ”75 Yellow fever raged more lethally each day, complemented, according to Spanish accounts, by dysentery the British acquired by drinking from wells of captured forts.76 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).77 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.”78 On April 26th, Wentworth wrote that he had 1,700 men fit for duty, of whom only 1,000 he considered reliable.79 Wrote one participant, “The army sickened surprisingly fast, and those that were killed being esteemed 73 74

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Carlos Desnaux al Marqu´es de Villadarias, 27 mayo 1741, AHN Estado 2335. According to Fortescue (1910, 2:71). In the novel Roderick Random (Chapter 33), Smollett wrote that in storming San L´azaro, 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). BL, Sloane MSS 3970, “An Account of Admiral Vernon’s Attempt Upon Carthagena in the West Indies.” “Diario Puntual de lo acaecido en la defensa que hizo de la plaza de Cartagena de Indias,” Servicio Hist´orico Militar (Madrid), Signatura 52116. I 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. Vernon to Newcastle and Wager, 7 May 1741 (26 April old style), printed in Ranft (1958:229). 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. Wentworth to Newcastle, 7 May 1741 (26 April old style), cited in Fortescue (1910:2:74).

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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. . . . ”80 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.81 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.”82 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. . . . ”83 He and Vernon wrote that dead soldiers were tossed overboard to the sharks. 80

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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. Anonymous (1744:47). Burnard to [his brother?], 6 May 1741 (April 26 old style) BL, Additional MSS, 34207, ff. 9–12. 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 a surgeon’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 L´azaro “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.

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A participant, Lord Elibank, indicated the sharks could thank yellow fever for their extra rations:84 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 3d 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.85 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.86 In an epidemiological irony probably lost on all those involved, 84

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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). Eslava (1894:214) wrote 200; most later historians prefer 600. “Diario Puntual de lo acaecido en la defensa que hizo de la plaza de Cartagena de Indias,” Servicio Hist´orico Militar (Madrid), Signatura 52116. See also: Marchena Fern´andez (1982:138). No other writer (to my knowledge) considers health among the Spanish troops at Cartagena. Marchena Fern´andez (1983:194– 237) treats the health of the entire Spanish army in America in the eighteenth century.

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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 gracing postage stamps and their names on city streets. Despite their frictions,87 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.88 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 2,100.89

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.90 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

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AGI, Audiencia de Santa Fe, legajos 572 and 940, include many letters to authorities in Spain accusing one another of malfeasance and cowardice. 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 Fern´andez Duro claimed it would (cited in Nowell 1962:501). Britain absorbed French Canada and Dutch South Africa soon after, and they held much less allure (at the time) than did Spanish America. For the return of 10 June (30 May old style), Harding (1991:124) 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.

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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.91 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.”92 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 Guant´anamo, 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.93 Attacking Santiago de Cuba from the landward side proved impractical. The track linking it to Guant´anamo 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

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Vernon to Newcastle and Wager, 7 May 1741 (26 April old style), printed in Ranft (1958:229–30): “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 10 November 1741 (31 October old style), BL, Additional MSS 32698, ff. 138, 240; Wager to Vernon, 2 July 1741 (21 June old style), printed in Ranft (1958:242–3). See also Pares (1936:92). Numbers from Portuondo Z´uniga (1996:59, 68). ˜ Narratives of this campaign include “Diario de lo occurido en Santiago de Cuba desde la primera noticia de la intentada invasi´on por los ingleses,” AGI, Audiencia de Santo Domingo, leg. 364; Portuondo Z´uniga (1996:69–72); Harding ˜ (1991:123–37); P´erez de la Riva (1935).

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harbor by sea. So the army stayed put, trying to fortify positions around Guant´anamo 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 1,400.94 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 Guant´anamo.95 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.96 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.97 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, 94

95

96

97

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). 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). Harding (1991:137–48).

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90 percent died.98 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.99 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 Guant´anamo, where sailors rowed ashore and mosquitoes surely flew aboard ships. If the proportion of sailors lost was equal to that in the army,100 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 Guant´anamo Bay, the Admiral did seem relieved to be alive: “[I]t has pleased God wonderfully to preserve me in health, in the midst

98 99

100

Keevil, Lloyd, and Coulter (1957–63, 1:78). The official returns are in PRO CO 5/41 and 5/42. Harding (1991:202–6) has arranged the data in useful tables. Of the Massachusetts contingent to Cartagena, only 10% returned home according to Ames (1881:365). Yellow fever probably did cross the Atlantic, albeit in Spanish ships, because there was an epidemic in M´alaga in 1741 (Reyes Sahagun 1742). Harding (1991:149) believes mortality among the sailors was “at least as severe” as among soldiers.

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of such sickness and divided councils.”101 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.102 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.103 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 101

102

103

Vernon to James Vernon, 7 December 1741 (26 November old style), printed in Ranft (1958:250). Mortality figures from Cantlie (1974, 1:93, 100). The seven major battles of the War of the Austrian Succession listed in Raudzens (1997:11) 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. O’Shaughnessy (1996:106–11). 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.

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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),104 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.105 Since the close of the last war, Havana 104

105

Guadeloupe’s inadequate fortifications allowed a conquest before fevers decimated the British force (Smelser 1955). McNeill (1985:173–6); Ortega Pereyra (1998). BL Additional MSS, 15,717, f. 35, “Estado que manifiesta las fuerzas marittimas del Rey de Espana,” (1771), ˜ says all ships of more than 80 guns in the Spanish navy were built in Havana.

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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 kilometers 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.106 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.107 Within fifty-seven days, an amphibious expedition was under sail, a feat of organization that testifies to the efficiency of the British military machine 106

107

Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid), Secci´on de Manuscritos, 20144, Jos´e Antonio Gelabert a Don Juli´an 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 (1985:162–6). Comparative production figures appear in Moreno Fraginals (1976, 1:40–2). No authoritative book covers the campaign. The most useful are: Parcero Torre (1998) and Syrett (1970); older narratives include Vald´es (1814); Guiteras (1856); Hart (1931); Zapatero (1964:264–75); Fern´andez Duro (1901, 7:39– 82); Pezuela (1868, 2:428–529); Corbett (1907, 2:246–84). Garc´ıa del Pino (2002) is highly patriotic, concerned to show the virtues of Havana’s popular classes. Keppel (1981) 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 (1990) 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 (1868, 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 Mart´ınez Dolmau (1943:65–101). 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 117/1 ff. 110– 18; and printed in Beatson (1804, 2:544–65). Anonymous (1762) (An Authentic Journal) is more revealing. Further documents appear in Archivo Nacional de Cuba (1948; 1951; 1963). The 1948 volume includes many documents from the private archive of the Albemarle family.

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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 officers 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.108 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.109 Albemarle bought and rented a few hundred slaves because “sailors and soldiers cannot possibly work in this country,” for exertion would bring fevers.110 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.111 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. 108

109

110 111

On medical officers: Cantlie (1974, 1:117–18). Albemarle’s orders appear in PRO CO 117/1, ff. 24–35. 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 (1948:79) is incorrect. Albemarle to Egremont, 27 May 1762, PRO CO 117/1, f. 70. 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.

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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.112 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.113 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.114 112

113

114

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 (Declaraci´on de Juan Ignacio de Madariaga, 14 abril 1763, AGI SD 1587) gives 40,000 to 50,000. This is based on a document in AGI, Contadur´ıa 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. 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;

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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.115 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.116 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 Cabana, ˜ overlooking the fortress and harbor.117 It carried a mantle of woods in 1762. Throughout the 1750s, Spanish authorities had proposed to perfect Havana’s defenses by fortifying these hills.118 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,

115

116

117

118

how fully Havana conformed to the island’s proportion is unclear. In 1762, Havana’s free black militia included over 800 men (Garc´ıa 2002:165). 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 (1930:63), another participant. Parcero Torre (1998:18–30) is the best description of Havana’s fortifications. Their historical development to 1762 is recounted in P´erez Guzm´an (2002:135– 43). See also Blanes Mart´ın (1998; 2001:76–87). Relaci´on del estado actual de las fortificaciones de la plaza . . . de La Habana y dem´as fuertes y castillos por el ingeniero D. Francisco Ricaud de Tirgale, 8 julio 1761, AHN, Estado 3025. For example, Informe y Consulta del Rey por el Gobernador de esta Plaza en favor del proyecto de fortificar la montana ˜ nombrada la Cavana ˜ (signed: Cagigal 1759), SHM 4.1.1.1.

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Juan de Prado, to fortify La Cabana. ˜ 119 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.120 Perhaps 2,000 healthy regulars were in Havana when the British arrived.121 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 1762.122 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 119

120

121

122

Arriaga a Prado, 23 agosto 1761, AGI, SD 1581. In a 1755 report, a bishop had raised the issue with King Ferdinand VI: AGI SD 534, Morell al Rey, 2 julio 1755. Several estados de tropas from May 1762 appear in AGI, SD 1581, 1584, 1585. Albi (1987:46–9) has an account of the defenders. 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. Estado de la fuerza de milicias, 6 junio 1762, AGI SD 1584; El Marqu´es 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 S.M.C. en este Puerto de la Havana, 7 junio 1762, PRO CO 117/2 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.123 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 continuous 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.”124

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.125 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.126 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 123

124

125

126

Noticias de la artiller´ıa que conceptuo hab´ıa montada y desmontada en la plaza de La Habana . . . 6 de junio de 1762, 16 junio 1763, AGI SD 1578. Relaci´on general e instructiva de la consistencia del Castillo de San Carlos, proyectado en la Eminencia llamada la Cabana ˜ al Este de esta Plaza de la Habana, 8 julio 1761, AHN Estado 3025. de la Fuente (1993:65–7). Lower figures, less well documented, appear in Le Roy y Cassa (1930) and Mart´ınez Fort´un (1952:29–30). L´opez S´anchez (1997:151–62); Espinosa Cort´es (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 (1741:73–4) 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.

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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 50,000 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.127 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. 127

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.128 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 v´omito” 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.129 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 3,000.130 Costly as it was, the yellow fever outbreak of 1761 128 129

130

Albi (1987:38). Gutierre de Hevia (the Marques del Real Transporte) a Arriaga, 28 julio 1761, quoted in Calleja Leal and O’Donnell (1999:93). 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. Fern´andez

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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.”131 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.”132 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

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Duro (1895–1903, 7:43) claimed 1,800 soldiers and sailors died in this epidemic, while Levi Marrero (1972–1992, 6:3) says 3,000, probably following Mart´ınez Fortun (1948). Guerra (1994:370) 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 (1948:376) 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. Garc´ıa 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. Relaci´on 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 . . . ” Johnson (1977 [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 (1985:102).

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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.133 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 Cabana ˜ remained bare of fortifications, British infantry took the hills, again with minimal resistance, on June 11th. 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 Cabana, ˜ 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 Cabana ˜ took a month. Twice, on June 29th and July 22th, the Spanish tried in force to retake La Cabana ˜ 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 Cabana ˜ 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.

133

On the rains: Anonymous (1762) (An Authentic Journal), entry for 7 June. Narration of the early days of the siege appears in the diary of Robertson (1930:49–63). Albemarle’s quotations from Mante (1772), cited in Keppel (1981:36).

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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 Cabana, ˜ and one of them, couched in wood instead of earth, caught fire and burned for days.134 Moreover the defenders of El Morro, under the naval captain Don Lu´ıs 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.”135 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.136

134

135 136

Memorandum of Lt.-Gen. David Dundas, printed in Syrett (1970:314–26). The quotation is from p. 323. Anonymous (1762) (An Authentic Journal). James Miller, “Memoirs of an Invalid,” Public Archives of Canada, Amherst Papers, Packet 54, f. 43 (quoted in Syrett 1970:xxix). Anonymous (1762) (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 Nino ˜ effect – was the best luck they could have had.137 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.138 But Pocock supplied sailors willingly for operations on land, and the soldiers and sailors building and manning the batteries on La Cabana ˜ 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.”139 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.”140 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

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139 140

same day Albemarle wrote to Pocock, “We are so distressed for water with this dry weather . . . ” (Keppel 1981:55). According to Quinn (1992), 1761–1762 witnessed an El Nino, ˜ which in Cuba usually means early summer drought, a result of unusually low sea-surface temperatures and reduced convection. The 1997–1998 El Nino ˜ brought Cuba its worst drought in 50 years (Jury et al. 2007). 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 117/1, 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. Dundas Memorandum printed in Syrett (1970:324). Anonymous (1762) (An Authentic Journal), 28–29 July entry. Mante (1772:430) also notes the sickness and suffering among British troops in late July.

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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.141 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 Cabana. ˜ 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.142 But after El Morro fell, the rain of cannonballs and howitzers threatened the lives and property of all remaining Habaneros. 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.143 But in August, with the rains yellow fever set in with a vengeance. Several hundred Spanish sailors fell sick, as did several 141

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In 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. The anonymous diary printed in Mart´ınez Dalmau (1943) records deserters speaking of sickness on ten different occasions between 14 June and 5 August. Parcero Torre (1998:173–4); over a thousand more defenders had been wounded: Relaci´on 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.”144 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.145 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.146 And they had in their possession the

144

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of Wounds, Missing, and Dead since the Army landed on the Island of Cuba, to the 13th of August 1762,” printed in Beatson (1804, 3:406). Albemarle to Newcastle, 29 September 1762, BL Additional MSS 32,942, f. 388; printed in Archivo Nacional de Cuba (1948:195). Albemarle’s correspondence shows he was sick himself in August and September 1762. 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. 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.

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best harbor in the West Indies with the most formidable fortifications, which they quickly set about repairing.147 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.148 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.149 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 10th and remained there until October 28th, during which he wrote, “most of our men died of West Indian fever.” More died en route home.150 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.151 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.152 Almost his whole army was sick – or already dead. 147

148

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150 151 152

“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. Putnam (1931:5). His Connecticut regiment lost 220 men to disease at Havana and another 400 en route home. Gorham (1899:162, 168). Gorham’s Rangers also lost both of the “women of the corps” to disease en route home. Redfield (1798:3–9). Albemarle to Egremont, 7 October 1762, PRO CO 117/1, f. 149. “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.

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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.153 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 9th 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.154 So as of October 9th, 1,300 sailors had died from disease. If half of the sailors sick on October 9th 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.155 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.156 A reasonable guess is that the army lost 153

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“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. Pocock to Clevland, 9 October 1762, PRO ADM 1/237. 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. Keppel to Egremont, 31 May 1763, PRO CO 117/1, f. 221.

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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.”157 Samuel Johnson, looking back on the victory in 1771, summed it up thus: “May my country never be cursed with another such conquest!”158 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.159 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

157

158 159

B. Franklin to G. Whitefoord, 7 December 1762, BL AM Add MSS 36, 593, f. 53. Johnson (1977:374). 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 (1948:102–4).

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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.160 For the Spanish, the temporary loss of Havana came as a 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 Cabana. ˜ 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 Cabana ˜ 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.161 Juan de Prado and other senior officials were put on trial in Madrid, accused of failing to fortify La Cabana ˜ 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.162 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 Lu´ıs 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.

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This link is suggested by Syrett (1970:xxxv). Parcero Torre (2003); Abarca (1773) 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. BN-Madrid, MSS 10,421 has the 192 folios of the Proceso y [sentencia?] dada al Gobernador de la Habana Juan de Prado (1765).

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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

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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.”163 163

Dancer (1781:12); Hunter (1788:23). Moseley (1795:147) 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

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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)164 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.165 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.166 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

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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 (1884–85, 2:14). McNeill (1999). 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 I 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. 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). The best sources are Dancer (1781) and Kemble (1884–85); Moseley (1795:135– 48). Knight (2005:55–61) and especially Sugden (2004:148–75, 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.

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confirmed Spanish faith in the “climate” as a powerful ally.167 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. 167

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 1989:103–4, 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).

PART THREE

REVOLUTIONARY MOSQUITOES

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

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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.1 Runaway slaves gradually formed maroon communities in the sprawling swampy forestlands of the interior, and routinely raided the plantations, provoking counter-raids that became an 1

Goslinga (1979:100). Key texts include Herlein (1718); Hartsinck (1770); Pistorius (1763); Malouet (1802, v. 3). 195

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annual ritual by 1749 if not before.2 Beginning in 1772 the maroons, who now numbered several thousand,3 embarked on larger attacks against the plantations involving, according to one account, some 2,000 to 3,000 men.4 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.”5 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.”6 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.7 2 3 4

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Fermin (1778:138–72). See Thompson (2006) on maroons generally. Boomgaard (1992:216) says 5,000 to 10,000. Others say as many as 20,000. Extrait de la Resolution du Conseil de la Ville d’Amsterdam, 15 novembre 1774. British Library, Additional MSS 35,443, fol. 149. 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). Malouet (1802, 3:257). Stiprian (1993) gives a sense of the overall ecology of eighteenth-century Dutch Surinam. On rice-malaria links in Surinam: Hudson (1984); van der Kuyp (1950).

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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 particularly unhealthy spot for Europeans was well known.8 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; & murdered by the Climate. . . . 9 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. . . . 10 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 8 9

10

Fermin (1778:208–9). Stedman (1988[1790]:607). Dutch documents put the strength of Dutch forces at 1,650, not 1,200; see Hoogbergen (1990:104). 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). Stedman (1988:607). 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.

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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.”11 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 1775.12 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 11 12

Quoted (without attribution or citation) in Goslinga (1979:107). For the political and military history of the war, I relied on Mackesy (1965); Pancake (1985); Lumpkin (1981); Black (1996); Weintraub (2005); Middlekauff (2005); Wilson (2005); Ferling (2007).

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

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

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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.13 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 encountered 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.14 Moreover, many British soldiers had been inoculated against smallpox, a frequent practice since 1756. In some regiments by the 1770s, inoculation was obligatory.15 A smallpox epidemic raged nearly the length and breadth of North America during the American Revolution, and its 13

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Duncan (1931:371) 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 (1794, 2:262). In the Royal navy, the ratio was 16:1 say Keevil, Lloyd, and Coulter (1957–1963, 3:137). Kipping (1965) 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 (1863) makes frequent mention of disease among the Germans, but offers few specifics. Duncan (1931:372) quotes a British doctor as saying only two out of every nine British and German soldiers had not already survived smallpox. Kopperman (2007:69–70, 75–6).

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partisanship posed one of George Washington’s most vexing problems.16 Early in the war, he wrote he had “more to dread from it, than from the Sword of the Enemy.”17 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.18 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), 16

17 18

See the fascinating account in Fenn (2001:92–103), and the thorough discussion in Becker (2005). Washington to Dr. William Shippen, 6 January 1777 (quoted in Fenn 2001:92). The reduction of malaria in northern Germany is summarized in Blackbourn (2006:64). On the role of cattle, see Kjaergaard (2000:19). See also Dobson (1997:287–367); Bruce-Chwatt and de Zulueta (1980).

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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.19 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 great 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 19

Hunter (1788:56–8), Jamaica and St. Lucia; Kopperman (2007) and O’Shaughnessy (1996:106–11) on the general demographic plight. The navy’s difficulties in the 1770s and 1780s are analyzed by Wilkinson (2004). 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, L2001F518.

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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.20 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,21 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.22 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.”23 Sluggish rivers snaked through pine and broadleaf forests, and lost their way in cypress swamps and bogs before seeping into estuaries and the sea. 20

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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 2005:357). On Loyalists in the south, see Smith (1964); Lambert (1987); Piecuch (2008). The latter argues that the wagering on Loyalist strength was sound policy. Strictly speaking, Charleston was Charles Town until 1783, but I use the modern name throughout. Olwell (1998); Wood (1974); Coclanis (1989); Edelson (2006); Carney (2001). For the ecological situation, Silver (1990). On the adjacent Georgia coast, see Stewart (1996), especially chapter 3. “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 (1989:30) and Morgan (1998:30).

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By 1730, rice was the principal crop, well suited to the swampy lowlands from Cape Fear to Savannah, called the Lowcountry.24 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.”25 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.26 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.27 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.28 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

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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 (1988:41). Johan David Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation (1783–1784) (Philadelphia, 1911), vol. II, 180, cited in Morgan (1998:33). See Wood (1974); Littlefield (1981); Carney (2001); Edelson (2006); and Eltis et al. (2007) on the installation of the rice economy and the degree of African expertise involved. Numbers from Morgan (1998:61). Kaiser (1994); O’Malley (1992); Horsfall (1972:134–59). Wood (1974:86) 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 sufficient supplies of irrigation water, and surrounded fields with networks of ditches and canals.29 29

On the rice-Anopheles link in the U.S. South, see Steelman et al. (1981); 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 1998:48–50; Edelson 2006:90). 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 (2005:174–96).

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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.30 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.31 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.32 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. 30

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Coclanis (1989:68). The colony as a whole had about 175,000 people, nearly 60% of African descent (Gordon 2003:17). In Louisiana at least, higher cattle density in rice regions raises mosquito populations (McLaughlin and Focks 1990). Morgan (1998:52) has figures on livestock on Lowcountry plantations, 1730– 1776; Edelson (2006:113–24) explains land use patterns. The proliferation of cattle, hogs, and sheep attracted the attention of Thomas Ashe in 1682 (Ashe 1682), reprinted in Salley (1911:138–59, 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.33 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.”34 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.35 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

34

35

Climate data from Stahle and Cleaveland (1992); and Stahle, personal communication 2 August 2005. Eliza Pinckney quoted in Wood (1974:75–6); Ogilvie in Edelson (2006:145). A traveler quoted in Wood (1974:76) likened mosquitoes’ “venom” to that of rattlesnakes. Packard (2007:57–8).

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By the middle of the eighteenth century, everyone in the Carolina Lowcountry grudgingly accepted malaria as a routine fact of life and death.36 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 unknowingly 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. . . . ”37 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.”38 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.39 Gradually, people learned not to build their homes next to swamps or rice fields.40 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 36

37 38 39

40

Chaplin (1993) provides a sense of how fearsome and familiar whites in South Carolina found malaria, as do Merrens and Terry (1984). Miranda (1963:33) 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. Quoted in Duffy (1953:213). Quoted in Carney (2001:147). 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 1997:295–7). Wood (1974:74).

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hospital.”41 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.42 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 90 percent of those who died in their first year perished in those four malarial months.43 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 41

42

43

Johan David Schoeph, Travels in the Confederation (1783–1784) (Philadelphia, 1911, 2:172), cited in Merrens and Terry (1984:549). Duffy (1953:212–13). Fraser (1989) 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. Merrens and Terry (1984) and Terry (1981:92–3) cited in Packard (2007:58). Dobson (1989:271–3, 294) shows that malaria was the chief reason the southern colonies were less healthy than the northern. Settler demography is summarized in Coclanis (1989:42–3). Only the wealthiest could afford cinchona bark; see Wood (1974:76).

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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.44 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 granted 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.45 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.46 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.47 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 45 46

47

Wickwire and Wickwire (1970) and Frey (1981:18–19) for a biography. Piecuch (2008); Frey (1981:18–20). 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 (2005) reviews the southern campaigns before 1780. See Shy (1990:193–212).

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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.48 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.49 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 overwhelmingly 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 48

49

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 (1997) 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. Cantlie (1974); see also Frey (1981:22–52).

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own army). Thus, in the great majority of cases their immune systems were unprepared for the challenges they faced from malaria.50 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.51 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.52 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 50 51

52

Frey (1981:3–21); Babits and Howard (2009:79–94). See Chapter 3; Frey (1981:47–52). On American malaria remedies, Kalm (1771, 1:373–6); Stephenson (2007:168–9, 172). Middlekauf (2005:525–34) and Duncan (1931) 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 (1980:184). 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. P´erez-Mej´ıa (2002:32); Frey (1981:47).

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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.”53 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.”54 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.”55 53

54 55

Cornwallis to Germain, 20 August 1780, Germain Papers, Clements Library, University of Michigan (quoted in Duncan 1931:312). Wilson (2005:67, 71) on pre-1780 health problems of the British army in the south. Germain to Cornwallis, 4 June 1781, PRO 30/11/6, f. 215–16. Jackson (1791:300); Pancake (1985:82). McCandless (2007) 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.

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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.”56 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.57 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 Loyalists 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.58 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 56

57

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Quoted in Duncan (1931:313). Dr John Hayes was Cornwallis’ chief medical officer. By his “family,” Cornwallis presumably meant those officers on his personal staff. Savas and Dameron (2006:249–52) for the numerical data. Camden and other South Carolina battles are succinctly related in Gordon (2003) and Pancake (1985). Edelson (2006:130–2, 151–2) discusses transport and the spread of disease in civilian contexts.

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wrote that one regiment was “so totally demolished by sickness, that it will not be fit for actual service for some months.”59 Looking back six months later, he wrote that his army had been “nearly ruined” by disease in the fall of 1780.60 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 lawschool 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.61 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 60

61

Cornwallis to Clinton, 29 August 1780 (quoted in Pancake 1985:115). Cornwallis to Clinton, 10 April 1781, Clinton Papers, University of Michigan (cited in Frey 1981:43). 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 (1989); Bouma and Rowland (1995); 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 (1992:37–9).

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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.”62 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.”63 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], and a 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.”64 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.65 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

63 64 65

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. Jackson (1791:295). Jackson (1791:300–1). Jackson (1791:303–4).

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him about 200 men killed. Only by fighting and winning such battles could he hope to win the war.66 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.67 However, at most points roughly two-thirds of his force 66 67

Babits (1998) and Babits and Howard (2009) on these battles. Gillett (1990:119–24). 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 1869:448).

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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,68 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.69 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.”70 The Americans had slipped away, and the fever season would soon return – a most unwelcome prospect for the British Army. 68

69

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Greene to Governor Nash, 3 February 1781, quoted in Middlekauf (2005:510, n. 22). Details on origins of regiments from Wright (1983:195–351); 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 (1953:204–14) on the presence of malaria south of New England. Duffy uses words such as “universal” and “omnipresent.” See also Rutman and Rutman (1976). 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.”71 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 . . . a climate, at that season, peculiarly inimical to man. . . . ”72 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.73 Neither they nor Cornwallis knew it, but he was fleeing from An. quadrimaculatus. 71

72 73

Cornwallis to Clinton, 10 April 1781, Clinton Papers, University of Michigan (cited in Frey 1981:43). Tarleton (1787:507). Greene (2005:4–5, 7–9) has an interesting discussion of the move to Virginia.

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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.74 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.”75 He knew, as everyone did, that the shores of the Chesapeake were reliably malarial in summertime.76 Eight days later he returned to the issue, writing that his position “only gives us some acres of an unhealthy swamp.”77 74

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Useful narratives of Yorktown, albeit inattentive to disease, include Davis (1970); Bougerie and Lesouef (1992); Ketchum (2004); Hallahan (2004); Greene (2005); Grainger (2005). James’ journal (1896:111–29) provides an account of the siege from a naval officer’s viewpoint. Cornwallis to Clinton, 30 June 1781, PRO 30/11/74, f. 26. By the 1680s, malaria (including falciparum) was established around the Chesapeake, and deeply entrenched by the 1750s (Rutman and Rutman 1976). See also Kalm (1771, 1:365–76); Duffy (1953:204–14). 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.”78 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 1st 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.79 It was good mosquito country and a bad time: the hot and humid August of 1781.80 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

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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 (1970:138). 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. Every August is hot at Yorktown. Johann Conrad D¨ohla, the Hessian diarist, wrote on 31 August that the whole month had been “very hot” (D¨ohla 1990:160). 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-Cr`evecoeur 1972:57). 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 Pennsylvania Line,” (Linn and Egle 1896:716–33). 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/SOURCES/.LDEO/.TRL/.NADA2004/.pdsiatlas.html (consulted 14 July 2008).

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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.81 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.82 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.83 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. 81

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The fifteen volumes of Rochambeau Papers are in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. Sands (1983:1–92) covers naval aspects of the Yorktown campaign. 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.)84 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),85 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.86 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.87 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 85

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Jackson (1791:310–26) on his cures. Insofar as malaria is a strong suppressant of human immune systems, he was right in making this connection. D¨ohla (1990:162), a German serving with Cornwallis, mentioned dysentery and “the foul fever” in his diary for 11 September 1781. Jackson (1791:304–5, 329). According to the American doctor James Tilton, the French at Yorktown also eschewed the bark (Tilton 1822, cited in Duncan 1931:354). Becker (2005:181–7).

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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.88 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.89 Cornwallis was far from incompetent. He was not running low on stores, except possibly of medicines.90 But he did not have enough healthy men. 88 89

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Cornwallis to Clinton, 20 October 1781, PRO 30/11/74, ff. 106–10. Bonsal (1945:151–2). Grainger (2005: 109–10) and Greene (2005:115–23) have interesting discussions of this choice. James (1896:119–20) shows the British still expected relief as of 5 October. 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.91

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1781”), printed in Tarleton (1787:451–4), 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 (1896:120) nonetheless refers to a shortage of artillery ammunition. On the possible lack of medicines: the French officer Nicolas-Franc¸ois-Denis Brisout de Barneville wrote in his journal on 19 October 1781 of the English: “Leurs hˆopitaux pleins de malades et manquant de tout” (Brisout de Barneville 1950:277). Sgt. Roger Lamb of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, with Cornwallis at Yorktown, afterward wrote a memoir in which he quoted (without attribution) these words:

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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.92 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 19th – something he could expect to be investigated by a military board of inquiry93 – then Cornwallis’ army must have suffered grievously 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.94 By his account, then, more than half of his force – 51 percent – was too sick to fight.95 Cornwallis’s account is not the only one. The number of British Army troops sick at Yorktown is sometimes given as only 2,000.96 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%).97 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

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“ . . . 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 1809:378–9). Greene (2005:17, 33) says Cornwallis had 7,200 at the start of the siege, 8,900 by September 20, and over 9,700 counting sailors, plus 1,500 to 2,000 slaves and ex-slaves. 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 (2004:206); Savas and Dameron (2006:336); Ketchum (2004:247) says the British lost 556 dead and wounded at Yorktown. A British document printed in Tarleton (1787:451) reports 309 British killed at Yorktown. The French general staff recorded 389 killed and 679 wounded (Gallatin 1931:27). 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. 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. For example, Ferling (2007:536). Reiss (1998:211) and Duncan (1931:352) 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. Riley (1948:393).

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the condition of another 1,850 taken prisoner at Gloucester across the York River.98 Two British deserters reported some 2,000 in hospital on October 4th.99 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.100 Sgt. 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).101 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.”102 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 I 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.”103 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 98 99 100 101

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Gallatin (1931:9). Ketchum (2004:224). Lee (1869:514). Lamb (1809:380). 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). Ewald (1979:338–9). 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. James (1896:127–8).

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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.104 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.105 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. 104

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Duncan (1931:351); Reiss (1998:210). 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 (1942:292). 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. 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 (1976:403) is the only author I have come across to comment on the likely disease resistance of these troops.

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The allied army survived the siege almost intact. Few men (about two percent) died in combat.106 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.107 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.108 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,

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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 (2005) is less sure this was deliberate. 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). Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Rochambeau Papers, 9:215; Scott (1998:81, 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, Franc¸ois-Ignace Ervoil d’Oyr´e, “Notes relatives aux movemens de l’arm´ee franc¸aise en Am´erique,” Society of the Cincinnati Library, Manuscript Collection, L2008F163.1-5.

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and those from Maryland or the Delaware valley would likely have had nearly annual bouts all their lives.109 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.”110 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.111 According to the

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Details on regimental origins from Wright (1983:195–351). Lafayette to General Weedon, 16 June 1781, quoted in Gottschalk (1942:248). The relevant diary entries are from Atkins (1975:45, 49–50, 53, 55, 58, 61). Gillett (1990:121–2) says malaria was the chief ailment afflicting Continental soldiers at Yorktown. Batholomew (2002) gives the most frequent weather observations of the Yorktown diarists, and emphasized the heat in early August, and cooler weather 11–18 August and a “remarkable Cool” day 21 September. The “Diary of the Pennsylvania Line,” (Linn and Egle 1896:716–33) 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

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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.112 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.”113 Washington on October 19th reported that 1,430 French and American troops were sick.114 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.115

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late September and October, and thus more efficient communicating malaria before the bulk of the Franco-American force arrived. Blanchard (1876:145–50). Thacher (1862:286). Hallahan (2004:209). Washington busied himself trying to find more hospital space for sick men even before settling the terms of capitulation (Gillett 1990:123). 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.

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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.116 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.117 But given these circumstances, 116

117

Returning British troops even brought malaria to England, leading to a brief spike in mortality there (Dobson 1997:346, n. 226). 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

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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.”

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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 1793.118 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. 118

Duffy (1953:162).

CHAPTER SEVEN

Revolutionary Fevers, 1790–1898: Haiti, New Granada, and Cuba

If Nature is against us, we will fight it and make it obey us. – Simon Bol´ıvar1

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 ambition. 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 1

“Si se opone la Naturaleza, lucharemos contra ella y haremos que nos obedezca.” Quoted in Indalecio Li´evano Aguirre, Bol´ıvar (Bogot´a: Intermedio, 2001), 84. Bol´ıvar’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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Map 7.1. St. Domingue (c. 1790)

or reverse revolution. The rebels invariably had poorer weaponry and spotty military discipline. But they had greater resistance to the lethal diseases of their homelands, and in particular often had immunity to yellow fever. By and large, nature was on Bol´ıvar’s side, even if it did not obey him.

St. Domingue, 1790–1804 St. Domingue, now Haiti, occupied the western third of the island of Hispaniola.2 It had several small and fertile plains, divided by rugged chains of forested mountains whose crests reached 1,500 to 2,000 meters elevation. Formally acquired by France in a 1697 treaty, St. Domingue soon became the heart of the French colonial system. Its climate and soils, especially on the well-watered northern coastal plain stretching east of Cap Franc¸ais, suited sugar well. Its hills proved ideal for the cultivation of coffee, which boomed after 1750. The fertile parts of the colony stood to the north of protective mountain ranges, and rarely felt the wrath of hurricanes – unlike Jamaica or Cuba. Land was plentiful, soils still rich as late as 1780, so all in all it was the best place in the world to make money off of sugar and slaves. By the 1780s, St. Domingue had 2

St. Domingue is also rendered Saint-Domingue, St.-Domingue, Saint Domingue and, in some English sources of the eighteenth century, San Domingo.

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about 8,000 plantations in all, and accounted for nearly half of the sugar and coffee produced in the Atlantic world. Indigo, cotton, tobacco, and cacao also figured as export crops. The colony generated a third of France’s seaborne trade. Thirty ships a week visited its ports. As many as 30,000 African slaves a year arrived in St. Domingue, making it by far the most likely destination for slaves anywhere in the plantation zone of the Americas – indeed, anywhere in the world.

population and society Slaves made up more than 90 percent of St. Domingue’s population by the 1780s, numbering around half a million. About two-thirds of them were born in Africa. They came from many districts and spoke more than two dozen languages, although a considerable proportion were called “Congos” and hailed from northern Angola and West-Central Africa generally. On the lowland sugar estates, a larger proportion – roughly half – were locally born, and spoke the lingua franca ancestral to today’s Haitian Creole. Some of them also spoke metropolitan French. Like the slave populations elsewhere in the Caribbean, St. Domingue’s half million toiled mainly on plantations, and lived short lives marked by brutality and humiliation. Two-thirds of them were male. The 30,000 free people of African or mixed African and European ancestry, called gens de couleur in St. Domingue, made up about 5 to 6 percent of the colony’s population.3 Any discernible proportion of African ancestry qualified a free person as a “free colored.” A rich vocabulary of terms existed to describe people by their ancestry seven generations back, so there were words – probably seldom used – for people who were 127/128 African or 1/128 African.4 Unlike most American mulatto and mestizo populations, St. Domingue’s included many rich planters and slaveowners. Usually children of white fathers, they often inherited property. But many others toiled and scrimped to purchase land and slaves, and in the booming sugar or coffee markets had struck

3

4

The term sometimes included free blacks of purely African descent, and sometimes not. The vocabulary of St. Domingue’s sociology was not quite as simple as I present it here. Moreau de St. M´ery (1787–1788, 1:5–99) and Lacroix (1995[1819]:36–40) offer detailed vocabularies for St. Domingue society, but in practice few could distinguish the gradations and most used the three-category system that I use here and that most scholars of St. Domingue have long used.

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it rich. Perhaps a quarter of the property, and the slaves, of St. Domingue were owned by gens de couleur. Some free coloreds had received educations in France, and most spoke French rather than Creole tongues, and preferred Catholicism to African religions. They endured daily racist slights, could not hold political office, but could give some scope to their entrepreneurial talents. They also were prominent in the militia and rural constabulary. Almost all were born in St. Domingue. Women outnumbered men by about 6:5. The white population of St. Domingue, about 40,000 strong and 6 to 7 percent of the total in the 1780s, came mainly from France. Only a quarter were born in the colony. Among whites, men outnumbered women by about 4:1, and children were few.5 Some whites had accumulated or inherited vast fortunes as planters or merchants. Others had little more than the clothes they wore, and struggled through life as peddlers or artisans, or even wage laborers in sugar boiling houses, competing economically with gens de couleur and slaves. Their most valuable assets were their white skins. They alone as civilians could legally bear arms or hold political office. Although they had their differences, they could all agree on the indispensability of their privileges and the importance of keeping the gens de couleur and the slaves in their places.6

the disease environment Like the rest of the West Indies, St. Domingue was an unhealthy place for almost everyone but more so for some than others. Population growth came only through immigration. Infections killed people faster than others were born. In broad terms, the whites had the most to fear from disease, and the gens de couleur the least.7 Slaves, most of whom arrived in poor health after a harrowing ocean crossing, often died within a year. Even though most slaves arriving in St. Domingue were around fifteen to thirty years old, their life expectancy upon arrival was less than ten years – normal among Caribbean 5 6

7

Houdaille (1973:863). King (2001:43) says the ratio was 3:2. For sketches of St. Domingue population and society, Butel (2002:143–78); Geggus (2002:5–8); Garrigus (2006); Dubois (2004:5–71); King (2001); LaurentRopa (1993:97–155). All draw heavily on Moreau de St. Mery (1787–1788, 1:5– 99), as do I. Malouet (1802, v. 4) is another crucial primary source. Demographic data from parish registers, also used in these paragraphs, appear in Houdaille (1973:863–5). Gilbert (1803:10–26) for medical geography of St. Domingue.

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slave populations.8 Smallpox, typhoid, tetanus, yaws, hookworm, and a dozen other infections and parasites preyed on them. Frequent malnutrition and squalid conditions magnified the risk posed by their disease burden. The slaves, especially the African-born, were however comparatively resistant to malaria and likely to be immune to yellow fever.9 The gens de couleur lived healthier and longer lives than anyone else. Almost all were born locally, so they did not face the risks of “seasoning.” Their living conditions and nutrition generally were better than those of slaves, sometimes far better. Their African genetic inheritance provided some of them with resistance to malaria and (possibly) to yellow fever. Socially, the larger the proportion of African ancestry the lower one’s rank. But epidemiologically, the larger the share, on average the safer one was from malaria and possibly from yellow fever. (One must say “on average” because much depended on where within Africa one’s ancestors lived.) Women among the free colored population may have been at high risk for sexually transmitted diseases because one of the most promising life strategies for them was to become mistress to a wealthy or upwardly mobile Frenchman. These liaisons were usually temporary, hence numerous, and thus dangerous to all involved in terms of venereal infection. One French writer in St. Domingue maintained that syphilis was the most widespread malady in the colony.10 Although atop the social pyramid, the white population stood at the bottom in terms of health and life expectancy. Parish registers show their death rates were about twice as high as those of the gens de couleur.11 8

9

10

11

Weaver (2006:21) says half of St. Domingue’s African-born slaves died within three years of arrival. According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (http://www. slavevoyages.org), fewer than 4% of slaves arriving in St. Domingue (1750– 1790) came from southeastern Africa, where yellow fever was (probably) absent. A small share of the large proportion (about 55%) who hailed from West Central Africa might have been from the Angolan highlands, also likely to have been free of yellow fever, to judge from the map in Miller (1988:10); but the map in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database shows West Central slave ports of embarkation as entirely north of the Kuvo River, and therefore these slaves were unlikely to have come from the highlands (although one cannot be sure). Charles Mozard, editor of a newspaper, Affiches Am´ericaines, cited in McClellan (1992:29). King (2001:44) offers 84/1000 as the crude death rate among whites and 44/1000 among gens de couleur. Moreau de St. M´ery (1787–1788, 1:173) notes that in the 1760s at the military camp called Trou, white soldiers died at twelve times the rate of the “550 hommes de couleur.”

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Most whites were born in France, and thus at high risk when moving to the Caribbean, especially to malaria and yellow fever. Moreau de St. M´ery, the French lawyer whose work is the single best source for late colonial St. Domingue, wrote that the climate of Cap Franc¸ais, the largest city and chief port of entry, was “murderous” for sailors and other new arrivals.12 French peacetime garrisons in St. Domingue lost about 6 percent annually to disease, although only 3 percent in the 1780s.13 French males also presumably faced a high risk of contracting venereal disease thanks to the opportunities provided by their social position.14 As elsewhere in the West Indies, in St. Domingue malaria justifiably inspired anxiety among newcomers. In the eighteenth century, St. Domingue’s lowland swamps were expanding, in part a result of erosion in the hills owing to the coffee boom. Wetlands expansion improved breeding conditions for St. Domingue’s resident malaria vector, Anopheles albimanus.15 So did extension of irrigation for the plantations. The influx of people and livestock, also brought on by the growth of the plantation economy, duly improved feeding conditions. The annual arrival of tens of thousands of slaves ensured constant renewal of the supply of malarial plasmodia. By the 1750s, malaria in both vivax and falciparum form was routine in St. Domingue, waxing with the rains from April to October, and waning in the drier months. Yellow fever was not routine: Among susceptibles, it inspired terror.

yellow fever in st. domingue West and Central Africans and adult Afro-Creoles raised in St. Domingue had little to fear from yellow fever. But among whites, and especially new arrivals, yellow fever provoked outright dread. Whites lived mainly in cities and on sugar plantations, habitats they shared with Aedes aegypti. In St. Domingue all cities were port cities, and all contained the infrastructure of water storage, both against the dry season and for shipping, that made ideal breeding habitat for A. aegypti. Behind 12 13 14

15

Moreau de St. M´ery (1787–1788, 1:528). King (2001:44–5) discusses health. Geggus (1979:49), citing Moreau de St. M´ery. The correspondence of a young French merchant in the early 1790s, Michel Marsaudon, gives a remarkably detailed sense of the sexual adventures he and his friends engaged in with free colored women. Georgetown University Lauinger Library, Special Collections, Michel Marsaudon Papers. A description is available at: http://www.library.georgetown.edu/dept/speccoll/cl158.htm Molez, Desenfant, and Jacques (1998); Higuera-Gundy et al. (1999:168).

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the ports were the sugar plantations of the coastal lowlands, also suitable habitat (see Chapter 2). Deeper inland stood forests, dwindling by the day as slaves hacked out new plantations, but still quite likely (there is no way to be sure) home to monkeys hosting the yellow fever virus. Mosquitoes in search of blood meals had about a million large mammals to choose from in the 1780s, including 580,000 humans, 350,000 head of livestock, and a few thousand additional wild or feral animals in the woods. A French naturalist, M. E. Descourtilz, found that mosquitoes were everywhere in St. Domingue, but especially around dwellings by the sea and rivers, where they “obscured” the sky morning and evening. Like many West Indian locales, St. Domingue hosted hordes of mosquitoes of several sorts but with growing ports, population, and plantations, habitat improved daily for A. aegypti. So yellow fever vectors were rarely in short supply.16 Neither was virus. The heavy traffic from West Africa meant that new virus (and mosquitoes) continually arrived. However, nonimmunes were growing scarce by the 1780s. Moreau de St. M´ery recorded yellow fever outbreaks on St. Domingue in 1691, 1733–1734, 1743, and 1755.17 The French army doctor Nicolas Pierre Gilbert mentioned another, which he regarded as acute, in 1739–1741.18 Before the 1750s, new French migrants (nonimmunes) accounted for a goodly share of the population, creating scope for outbreaks. After the 1750s, the proportion of immunes on St. Domingue was so large that yellow fever had fewer opportunities to spread. The virus might kill a few sailors, soldiers, and other newcomers but could not circulate freely because mosquitoes too often took their blood meals from immunes. Herd immunity confined the virus. Moreover, the 1780s saw extended drought in St. Domingue, which may have temporarily reduced mosquito strength and correspondingly the incidence of yellow fever.19 In short, in the eighteenth century yellow fever was endemic in St. Domingue, a sporadic deadly risk to newcomers, but limited in its scope by herd immunity, which was sustained by the numerical preponderance of people born and raised in the yellow 16

17

18 19

Descourtilz (1935:62–7) on mammals; p. 97 on mosquitoes. Moreau de St. M´ery (1787–1788, 1:100) for livestock numbers. Moreau de St. M´ery (1787–1788, 1:534–5). Moreau de Jonn`es (1820:70–1) agrees but adds another in 1766. Poupp´e-Desportes (1770, 1:40–186) is the source for some of these dates. Gilbert (1803:97). Geggus (1979:44). This could help account for the improved health of the garrison, noted previously.

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fever zones of Africa or St. Domingue itself. This was fortunate for all concerned because in St. Domingue, as elsewhere, doctors did more harm than good in cases of yellow fever.20 Epidemic yellow fever would require a large influx of susceptibles. This is just what the Haitian Revolution provided: tens of thousands of nonimmunes, enough to undermine herd immunity and give the virus its greatest opportunity for mischief in the history of the Americas.

the haitian revolution begins In the 1780s, St. Domingue was a cauldron of thwarted political ambition. Slave uprisings in St. Domingue for decades had been fewer and smaller than elsewhere. But every group wanted something it did not have. Whites wanted more political representation in Paris, appropriate to their wealth and status. Most gens de couleur wanted legal equality with the whites. Most slaves wanted freedom. These ambitions proved difficult to reconcile. When word came of the events in Paris in 1789, these smoldering political ambitions ignited. The ideals of the French Revolution – liberty, equality, fraternity – were radical enough in France. In St. Domingue, they were explosive. As the Revolution unfolded in France, authorities in Paris did not know what to do with St. Domingue (and the French Caribbean generally). Some felt that revolutionary principles should apply everywhere, and thus that even African slaves should be free and equal. Most felt otherwise. St. Domingue provided useful revenues that depended on the maintenance of the plantation system. Thus, Parisian revolutionaries argued and acted inconsistently. They granted gens de couleur legal equality and withdrew it more than once. They abolished slavery and then reinstated it. Ultimately, events in St. Domingue followed their own chaotic logic, well beyond the control of anyone in Paris – or anywhere else. Violence first erupted in 1790 in the form of a revolt organized among the gens de couleur. Many of them had military experience in a regiment recruited to fight in Georgia during the American Revolution. Others had served in the militia. Despite their skills, they were soon crushed by the colonial authorities. Outwardly, calm reigned. The National Assembly in Paris voted to give political rights to some free coloreds in 20

Gilbert (1803:90) describes the “creole” cures of bleeding, emetics, purgatives, quinine, and baths.

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St. Domingue, to the irritation both of whites and those free coloreds who did not qualify. Turmoil continued. Then in August 1791, in the northern plain, a slave revolt began that soon involved as many as 100,000 slaves. Plantations burned. Murders, reprisals, and atrocities abounded. A French army contingent arrived in December 1791, but before it could affect the struggles underway its troops fell ill.21 Half were dead within a few months. Violence ebbed and flowed, alliances shifted, and each rumor of the twists and turns of the Revolution in France provoked new outrage or relief and reshuffling of coalitions in St. Domingue. When Paris proclaimed the legal equality of all free people (April 1792), most gens de couleur and whites made common cause, and gradually got the upper hand in war against the rebel slaves. Then in February 1793, the French Republic, fighting for its young life within Europe, declared war on Britain. This widened the Wars of the French Revolution, more than two decades of struggle (1792–1815) pitting France (and lands France occupied) against a shifting coalition that usually included Britain, Austria, and Russia, and sometimes Prussia. Combat took place in Europe from Portugal to Russia, in Egypt, India, the West Indies, and on a small scale in South Africa and Southeast Asia. By and large France, which created a huge citizen army, had the edge in land warfare in the heart of Europe. France’s enemies fared better on the poorer fringes, in Spain and in Russia, where the French army’s methods of living off the land worked less well. Britain’s strategy involved paying other members of the coalition to fight in Europe, and using naval power and expeditionary forces against French colonial possessions – and those of the Dutch as well after France conquered the Netherlands in 1795. This strategy, associated with William Pitt the younger (1759–1806) and his war secretary Henry Dundas (1742–1811), made the West Indies crucial. Caribbean trade revenues could help Britain to subsidize Austrian, Prussian, and Russian armies fighting France. (Indeed, in 1796 Dundas considered offering St. Domingue to Catherine the Great as a sweetener to commit her and Russia to the anti-France coalition.)22 Revenues denied to France and directed to Britain were doubly valuable. Using the small British army across the ocean made sense because the French could deploy only a fraction of their much larger army overseas. 21

22

Geggus (1979:50) says the French losses approximated those of later contingents of British soldiers, which he puts at 50–75% per annum. Duffy (1997:86).

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The outbreak of the Wars of the French Revolution brought largescale expeditionary warfare back to the West Indies. Several islands of the Lesser Antilles, poorly fortified and defended by tiny garrisons, quickly changed hands. In St. Domingue, expeditionary warfare came in two phases. First, a British army sought to occupy the colony beginning in 1793. A French army sent out in 1802 tried to undo the revolution in St. Domingue and restore the colonial plantation system. Both interventions failed amid catastrophic epidemics.

the british in st. domingue, 1793–1798 The decree of legal equality among all free people in St. Domingue provoked a backlash among white colonists, deepened by the policies of commissioners sent from republican France. Many whites emigrated. Others turned for help to Britain and Spain, each of which saw a beckoning opportunity to weaken revolutionary France. With the blessing of many French planters, the British assembled an army to invade St. Domingue. Pitt and friends sought to add St. Domingue’s wealth to Britain’s empire, to deny it to France, and to uphold the slave plantation system. To this end, they sent an initial contingent of some 2,000 troops to occupy the ports in the autumn of 1793. But before they arrived, the Revolution’s commissioners in St. Domingue, without the endorsement of the government in Paris, took the step of abolishing slavery (August 29, 1793). That changed everything. Most factions in the slave rebellion had formerly sided with conservatives and the king against the Revolution (partly to secure assistance from Spanish Santo Domingo). But now the insurgent slaves fought to defend their freedom, siding with the Revolutionary government in Paris and against Britain, which represented the old regime and the preservation of plantation slavery. When the British army arrived in September 1793, the planters and whites in general welcomed them. So did the yellow fever virus, as a Jamaican planter noted: The season of the year was unfavourable in the highest degree for military operations in a tropical climate. The rains were incessant; and the constant and incessant fatigue, and the extraordinary duty to which the soldiers, from the smallness of their number, were necessarily subject, co-operating with the state of the weather, produced the most fatal consequences. That never-failing attendant

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on military expeditions in the West Indies, the yellow or pestilential fever, raged with dreadful virulence, and so many, both of the seamen and soldiers, perished daily, that the survivors were stricken with astonishment and horror at beholding the havock made among their comrades!23 Late 1793, however, was the best of times for the British army in St. Domingue. Most of the first troop contingents were seasoned men who had spent a year or more in Jamaica. In any case, by November the fever season subsided, the British recruited a few thousand gens de couleur and blacks to their side, and occupied nearly a third of the colony by June 1794, with combat losses of only about fifty men. The fortunes of revolutionary France were at a low ebb, in Europe and in St. Domingue, and so Britain’s only effective enemy (in a chaotic situation with many civil wars afoot) was the ex-slave army. The Royal Navy ensured that France, even if it wished to, could not reliably send supplies and soldiers to St. Domingue. Pitt and Dundas had reason to smile. But in June 1794, yellow fever broke out with a vengeance among the British troops in Port-au-Prince, a major seaport. Port-au-Prince, which a German aristocrat in 1789 likened to a “Tartar camp,” stood in a dry part of the colony with no year-round rivers or streams.24 It relied on stored water and canals, and probably had abundant A. aegypti as a result. Some 650 British soldiers died within two months, none in combat. From June to November 1794, the British army in St. Domingue lost roughly 10 percent of its men each month. By the end of the year, the British army had only 1,100 men fit for duty and held only four pockets of territory around the biggest ports, all isolated from one another except by sea. Port cities were important for the British to hold militarily but disastrous to inhabit. The British army again enjoyed a respite in the dry winter months in 1794–1795. But 1795 soon proved deadlier than the year before. In the fever season from July to December of 1795, the remnants of the British army died at a rate of 13 to 22 percent per month. The newly arrived died with astonishing quickness, seemingly disembarking from ships straight to their graves. Some British officers concluded the effort was not worth the cost. Pitt saw his strategy fall to ruin but, worried by

23 24

Edwards (1797:149). von Wimpffen (1817:208).

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a slave rising in Jamaica, chose to stay the course. He sent a new army to St. Domingue.25 In 1795–1796, about 27,000 British soldiers (and nearly a thousand women) headed to the West Indies under the command of an aged Scot, Sir Ralph Abercromby. He had not seen battle in thirty years but was a kinsman of Dundas. His force, mainly Irish, included large numbers of Germans and French e´ migr´es, as well as a sprinkling of Poles, Swiss, Dutch, and others. About 13,000 went to St. Domingue, arriving in dribs and drabs from February 1796 onward. Yellow fever assaulted them soon after they landed. Doctors once again proved helpless. One of them, Robert Jackson, noted that British and French medicine was about equally effective, “ . . . on the sea-coast, two-thirds at least, of any given number of European soldiers, will be found to perish before the expiration of the year, whether treated by French or English physicians.”26 By March 1796, the British had already lost some 6,000 dead in St. Domingue. In July, Lt. Col. Thomas Maitland wrote that “All our boasted Army has dwindled to nothing.”27 This lament was a modest exaggeration, but the toll taken by yellow fever in the summer of 1796 discouraged everyone in the British army. Lt. Thomas Phipps Howard, who had sailed for St. Domingue with a regiment called the York Hussars, kept a journal. He arrived at the naval base of Mˆole St. Nicolas on May 1, 1796, at a time when the British army was losing an average of twenty men daily to disease. Howard knew what to expect: “In the West Indies the Months of June, July, August, Sept. & the beginning of October are what are called the sickly Months. . . . ”28 By early July, now at St. Marc, Howard’s regiment was firmly in the grip of the yellow fever virus. In ten days his regiment lost 23 percent of its men, dead from fevers. He continued: It is impossible for words to express the horror that presented itself at this time to those who were still able to crawl about. 30 Negroes were constantly employed in digging Graves & burying the unhappy wretches that perished; & scarcely could they working the whole of the Day, from sun rise to sun set, again dig Holes 25 26

27

28

The numbers come from returns in PRO WO 17, cited in Geggus (1979:44–50). Jackson (1798:297). Cantlie (1974, 1:240) gives 31,000, mainly Irish, as Abercrombie’s total strength, including 4,500 foreigners, mainly Germans. Thomas Maitland to James Maitland, 15 July 1796, PRO, WO 1/64, ff. 343–54, quoted in Buckley’s introduction to Howard (1985:xxxv). Howard (1985:43).

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enough for the Dead, tho’ three, four & five were tumbled into the same Grave together. The Dead Carts were constantly employed, & scarcely was one empty, tho’ they held from 8 to 12 each, but another was full. Men were taken ill at dinner, who had been in the most apparent Health during the Morn: & were carried to their long Homes at Night. In short, the putridity of the Disorder at last arose to such an hight that hundreds, almost, were absolutely drowned in their own Blood, bursting from them at every Pore.29 In the summer of 1798, just before Howard’s regiment was withdrawn to Jamaica, the commanding general of the British forces in St. Domingue noted that the York Hussars and two other regiments “are suffering severely from the Yellow fever.” When they left St. Domingue, Howard’s regiment counted 231 officers and men, the survivors of an original 688.30 Nearly two-thirds died, almost all of disease. The quality of the evidence for the last years of the British occupation of St. Domingue is poor and perhaps was deliberately falsified by the government, which faced fierce criticism over the West Indies campaign. But it seems that in 1797–1798 the death rates declined. This stands to reason because with few exceptions only men immune to yellow fever and experienced with malaria remained alive by 1797. The question of the magnitude of the losses to the British army in St. Domingue became a political issue and subject to wild claims. The most careful students of the question estimate that in the course of the occupation, 1793–1798, the British multinational army committed a total of about 23,000 to 25,000 troops to St. Domingue. Roughly 15,000, or 60 to 65 percent, died there.31 The experience of the York Hussars then was only slightly more gruesome than average. 29 30

31

Howard (1985:49–50). Maitland to Dundas, 6 July 1798, PRO, WO 1/68 (printed in Howard 1985:147– 56, quotation p. 152); regimental returns in PRO WO 1/899 and 17/1990, cited in Howard (1985:li, 131). The York Hussars may have received reinforcements during their St. Domingue stay, in which case the mortality rate would be higher than that indicated here. Geggus (2002:20). Geggus (1979:48) offered 12,700 of 20,200 (or 63%). Duffy (1987:328, 332) gives 13,590 out of 23,000 (or 60%). Discrepancies may arise from counting, or not counting, foreign troops under British command, of which there were about 4,500. Jackson (1798) provides a detailed account of the epidemic, albeit entirely wrong from the medical point of view.

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The British campaign in St. Domingue formed part of a larger West Indian struggle against the French. It also involved taking Spanish Trinidad and Dutch posts in South America. Everywhere British forces went, they encountered yellow fever and malaria. On Guadeloupe in 1793, Cooper Willyams found: “That dreadful malady the yellow fever, which, though it had subsided when we first came to the West Indies, was now, as it were, awakened by the arrival of fresh victims.”32 At sea, matters were equally grisly. The surgeon of the HMS Alfred in 1796 recorded a shipboard epidemic: “The symptoms as they appeared on board the Alfred at the worst period were prostration of strength; heavy, sometimes acute pain of the forehead; a severe pain of the loins, joints, and extremities; a glazy appearance of, with a bloody suffusion of the eye; nausea or vomiting of bilious, sometimes offensive black matter, not unlike coffee grounds. . . . ”33 Estimates of the total loss of life to British forces range from 40,000 to 100,000, but something around 50,000 to 70,000 is probably best. Next to deaths from disease, mainly yellow fever, battle casualties were “trivial.”34 Edmund Burke wrote that Pitt was fighting to conquer a cemetery.35 St. Domingue was the biggest part, but only a part, of this graveyard of the British army.

32

33 34

35

Willyams (1796:101). Bartholomew James, then a Royal Navy lieutenant on Martinique in 1794, wrote in his journal: “The dreadful sickness that now prevailed in the West Indies is beyond the power of the tongue or pen to describe. In a few days after I arrived at St. Pierre I buried every man in my boat twice, and nearly all of a third boat’s crew, in fevers; and shocking and serious to relate, the master, mate, and every man and boy belonging to the Acorn transport, that I came from England in, and had continued my pennant on board during the whole of the time up to May 12. The constant affecting scenes of sudden death was in fact dreadful to behold, and nothing was scarcely to be met but funeral processions in this town, of both officers and soldiers; and the ships of war was so extremely distressed that many of them had buried almost all of their officers and seamen” (James 1896:241–2). Surgeon’s journal, 1798, HMS Alfred, PRO ADM 101/87/3. Duffy (1987:338). His estimates and those of Geggus (1982, 1983, 2002) are the most careful. Willyams (1796:58–60) gives data for officers serving in the West Indian campaign under Lt.-Gen. Charles Grey. In 1794, 197 were reported dead, of whom 86% died of “the yellow fever, and other diseases incidental to the climate.” Of the enlisted men, 5,000 of 7,000 (71%) died in the 1794 campaign (Cantlie 1974, 1:236). Geggus (1983:699).

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toussaint louverture The British army in St. Domingue had the misfortune to confront a strategist who understood the power of differential resistance to yellow fever and malaria: Toussaint Louverture (1743?–1803). Toussaint was born a slave around 1743, perhaps on the Br´eda plantation in the northern plain of St. Domingue. He worked as a coachman and horse handler, acquiring an unusually large knowledge of the region. He knew the geography, roads, and tracks of St. Domingue the way a veteran taxi driver knows a city. He became a skilled rider. He also learned to read, to write (although he usually preferred to use a secretary), and became a devoted Catholic, although he may at times also have practiced vodun (voodoo). He spoke French, the Creole tongue of St. Domingue, and probably the West African language of his father (Ewe). His master freed him when Toussaint was about thirty, after which he sometimes rented and sometimes owned slaves himself. He was a culturally versatile man who could move easily among slaves and gens de couleur, and who could win the good opinion of whites. It turned out that in his fifties, he also had extraordinary stamina, physical courage (he collected many battle wounds), and political cunning.36 Toussaint also knew his way around the herbs, plants, and potions of Afro-Creole medicine, and apparently had some acquaintance with European medicine. He had worked for a while at Jesuit hospitals. In the early days of the slave uprising in 1791, in correspondence he styled himself “m´edecin g´en´eral” of the slave army. It seems he was unusually informed about and attentive to matters of health and disease. And as we shall see, he knew that his enemies would suffer far more grievously from disease than would his brothers-in-arms. Toussaint’s role in the early months of the slave uprising is unclear. But by 1792, he emerged as one of several commanders. From mid-1793 he served with the Spanish forces against the French and gens de couleur. He showed political skills of the highest order, and soon built an army of several thousand followers, including some whites and gens de couleur. He adopted the name Louverture (“the opening”) to emphasize the new dawn that he claimed to represent. In the spring of 1794 he gradually switched sides, deserting the Spanish (who were not fighting much in any case) and joining the French. Perhaps he thought they would win; 36

Biographies include James (1989[1938]), Pluchon (1985), and Bell (2007).

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perhaps he thought their Republic represented the best chance the slaves had for freedom. (The Republic did abolish slavery throughout the French Empire in February 1794, but Toussaint had turned on the Spanish before word of abolition reached St. Domingue.) In any case, from the spring of 1794 Toussaint led the ex-slave army against the remaining Spanish troops, who gave up in 1795, and against the British. Matters were clearer now: The French and their Revolution stood on the side of freedom for all, including slaves, and the British stood for plantation slavery. Now perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 strong, Toussaint’s army stood with the French. Factions and warlords abounded, and alignments varied markedly from one part of St. Domingue to another. A free colored leader, for example, Andr´e Rigaud (1761–1811), controlled most of the southern province. But the central conflict was that between Toussaint and the British. Toussaint soon showed himself to be a master of guerilla warfare. He avoided set-piece battles, preferring to ambush isolated British units when he could. He tempted them deeper into the hills only to trap them. He kept them guessing about where he might strike next, and always seemed to know where they were. He used the intelligence network provided by the large slave and ex-slave population to good effect. Above all, he kept the British confined to the ports and plains, where yellow fever killed them quickly. By the 1790s, everyone knew that higher ground was healthier ground for Europeans in the West Indies. But the British needed to hold the ports to ensure re-supply, and they needed to hold the plains if they were to rejuvenate the plantation economy. This suited Toussaint perfectly, for he knew that in the rainy season yellow fever would scythe down his enemies, leaving him in control of the strongest faction in St. Domingue. While fighting the British in St. Domingue, Toussaint also had to outmaneuver competing factions. Many rival leaders disappeared. Others were shipped off to France. He cooperated with Rigaud against the British until that battle was won. As the British finally left in 1798, Toussaint attacked all rivals, especially Rigaud, and stood supreme in St. Domingue by 1800. He had perhaps 20,000 to 40,000 men at his command. Toussaint chose to remain nominally subordinate to France but did everything short of declaring independence. He awarded land to his generals and used the army to force other ex-slaves back onto estates as sharecroppers; they got a quarter of the crop, and estate-owners got three-quarters. He annexed the formerly Spanish part of the island

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without consulting Paris. He betrayed a French plan to start a slave uprising in Jamaica. In effect, he ran his own foreign policy. He made himself governor for life. All this was too much for France’s new strongman, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821). Napoleon had come to power via coup d’etat in 1799, and like Toussaint stood vaguely for revolutionary principles but extinguished political freedoms, crushed rivals, and gathered power unto himself. In St. Domingue Napoleon, like Toussaint, hoped to reconstitute the plantation economy, but he wanted its revenues to flow to his coffers, not Toussaint’s. By 1801, Napoleon decided to risk an army to recapture St. Domingue. A temporary peace with Britain, which would allow safe passage of fleets across the Atlantic, gave him his chance.

leclerc For this mission, Napoleon selected his brother-in-law, General Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc (1772–1802). A man of modest bourgeois origins and boundless determination, Leclerc had volunteered for the army in 1791. Although the youngest in his battalion, he was quickly elected (this was a revolutionary army) lieutenant. He fought with distinction in French armies at Toulon, in Italy, and in Germany. He rose rapidly through the ranks, and married Napoleon’s favorite sister, Pauline, when she was seventeen – a relief to her elder brother as her conduct, even in the libertine 1790s, was cause for scandal. Leclerc supported his brother-in-law in the coup of 1799 that brought Napoleon to the summit of power. The choice of Leclerc indicated how seriously Napoleon took this expedition.37 Napoleon intended that Leclerc should, by stealth or force, restore the plantation economy to St. Domingue, restore St. Domingue to France, and end the de facto independence of Toussaint. Leclerc was to resurrect the plantation regime, including forms of forced labor, as Toussaint was already doing. Leclerc eventually was to reinstitute slavery but to keep quiet about it until he had disarmed the blacks and deported all black leaders. This was to be the first step in the re-establishment of a lucrative French Empire in America. Napoleon envisaged black armies in the service of France conquering far and wide in the West Indies, 37

M´ezi`ere (1990:16–120). Ad´ela¨ıde-Merlande (2007:286–7) shows that Napoleon was not trying to get rid of his sister and excessively Republican troops by sending them to St. Domingue, as some authors have supposed.

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cutting off vital funds to Britain and taking the Gulf Coast (beyond Louisiana, already French) before the new United States could. Like Choiseul before him, Napoleon dreamt of reversing the verdict of 1763 and making France once again a great power in America. His strategy was a bit like Cromwell’s vision of virtuous Protestants carving up the papist Spanish Empire a century and a half before, for which Jamaica was to serve as the launching pad. For Napoleon, the reconquest of St. Domingue was to re-launch France on the path of American empire, at Britain’s expense.38 In late 1801, the French assembled a fleet of 35 ships of the line, 26 frigates, 22,000 soldiers, and 20,000 sailors. They were delayed a month in French ports by contrary winds, shipping shortages, and in some accounts by Pauline’s tardiness. The first contingents arrived in St. Domingue at the end of January 1802. In subsequent months still more men arrived, making about 65,000 soldiers and sailors in all. Many were excellent soldiers, veterans of many campaigns along the Rhine, Danube, or Nile. Among them were large numbers of Poles, Swiss, Germans, Italians, and other nationalities. A few hundred were white St. Domingans who had recently fled their homes but who now hoped to return in triumph.39

war fevers When Leclerc invested the ports in February 1802, Toussaint had perhaps 30,000 or 35,000 soldiers.40 Despite help from the U.S. and Britain, they had little in the way of training or equipment to match the French. 38

39

40

Auguste and Auguste (1985:11–19); Ad´ela¨ıde-Merlande (2007:287–9). The text of Napoleon’s instructions to Leclerc, which show a brilliantly devious mind at work, is printed in Roussier (1937:264–73). Participants’ views appear in: Leclerc’s letters printed in Roussier (1937); Lacroix (1819); Moreau de Jonn`es (1858); and, less reliably, in Norvins (1896). Descourtilz (1935) is another eyewitness account, by a civilian naturalist who lived through many harrowing adventures. Classics include Metral (1825). Of modern works, the best is Auguste and Auguste (1985) and Dubois (2004); but see also the brief analysis of Ad´ela¨ıde-Merlande (2007) and the coverage of naval affairs in Girard (2008). Considerable confusion surrounds the numbers of French military personnel sent to St. Domingue, with totals in the literature ranging from 60,000 to 82,000. Leclerc estimated only 15,000 plus 2,000 cavalry (Leclerc au Ministre de la Marine, 9 f´evrier 1802, printed in Roussier 1937:80), but modern scholars credit Toussaint with more.

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Toussaint said his army was as “naked as earthworms.” Things began well for Leclerc. Many of Toussaint’s generals joined the French. Several were now men of property and could see a fine future for themselves within Napoleon’s dream. But Toussaint and his closest lieutenants, Henri Christophe (1767–1820) and Jean-Jacques Dessalines (1758– 1806), took to the hills once more and organized guerilla resistance in the spring months of 1802. Like the struggle against the British this was asymmetrical warfare, requiring clever use of the weapons of the weak – Toussaint’s strength. Toussaint employed mobility, surprise, ambush, and scorched-earth tactics. In the dry season until April, the towns, plantations, and woodlands burned easily. Christophe’s men converted Cap Franc¸ais, a town of 20,000, into a “pile of cinders.”41 A frustrated Leclerc described the struggle in a letter to Napoleon as a “guerre d’arabes,” in which ambush and flight replaced the set-piece battles Leclerc had mastered in Italy and Germany.42 He could hold the ports and sometimes the plains, but Toussaint’s men ruled the woods and the mountains. Leclerc could not force a decisive battle, and he knew almost as well as Toussaint that when the rains came yellow fever would turn fortune against him. Nonetheless, many of Toussaint’s followers wavered in the spring of 1802. Although ill-supplied by their standards, the French had far better weaponry than Toussaint’s “naked earthworms.” They had more money, although Leclerc regularly wrote for more, and used it to buy allegiance. Many rebels seemed to think that the French would win, and voted with their feet against Toussaint. But Toussaint knew the fever season was coming, and that it would count for more than guns and money. He wrote Dessalines in February: “Do not forget that while waiting for the rainy season, which will rid us of our enemies, we have only destruction and fire as our weapons.” He explained that he would fight defensively until July and August but then go on the attack – when the French would be far weaker.43

41 42

43

Moreau de Jonn`es (1858, 2:120). Leclerc a` Bonaparte, 19 f´evrier 1802, printed in Roussier (1937:101–2). Moreau de Jonn`es (1858, 2:131–3) describes the ambush tactics the French faced. Toussaint a` Dessalines, 7 f´evrier 1802, printed in Lacroix (1819:320), and quoted in Auguste and Auguste (1985:151–2). The original: “N’oubliez pas qu’un attendant la saison des pluies qui doit nous d´ebarrasser de nos ennemis nous n’avons pour ressources que la d´estruction et le feu.” The letter was intercepted by French forces. Ad´ela¨ıde-Merlande (2007:289) indicates Toussaint recommended this strategy

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Toussaint could not follow through on his own strategy. In early May 1802, he rode to meet Leclerc and agreed to retire to his country plantations, of which he owned several. Leclerc momentarily thought he had won, and described his position to his brother-in-law as “belle et brillante.”44 But Toussaint was probably playing a double game. Letters intercepted by Leclerc’s agents in June indicate Toussaint was biding his time until yellow fever weakened the French.45 Many of his lieutenants and rival warlords had already gone over to the French – an excellent way to acquire weapons and ammunition. If Toussaint continued to scramble through the mountains while others loaded up on weapons, he would be in a weaker position should the French ultimately leave, as he expected they would. So his surrender probably represents a political calculation based on his faith in yellow fever and his fears about his fellow rebel commanders. His intercepted letters seem to have moved Leclerc to eliminate Toussaint once and for all: In June, Toussaint incautiously agreed to meet another French general, was captured, and bundled off to France. Locked up in a dungeon in the frosty Jura mountains, he wrote an unreliable, self-justifying memoir intended to convince Napoleon of his loyalty, and died of lung ailments in April 1803.46 Toussaint had predicted that his own arrest and deportation would not win the war for Leclerc. He was correct. Generals Christophe and Dessalines, fighting for the French, used their talents to disarm and kill their former comrades. Leclerc was delighted with Dessalines’ reign of terror against the insurgent blacks, most of whom were African-born and saw their interests as different from those of Dessalines.47 But Dessalines too trusted in the fever season. In March 1802, he had told his men to take courage, that the French could not long remain, that they would prosper at first but soon would fall ill and die like flies.48

44

45 46 47

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to his subordinate Laplaume as well, but I have not seen any document to this effect. Leclerc a` Bonaparte, 7 mai 1802, printed in Roussier (1937:145). He also asked for botanists and mining engineers to be sent out to develop the colony. Leclerc au Ministre de l’Int´erieur, 8 mai 1802, printed in Roussier (1937:148). Leclerc au Ministre de la Marine, 11 juin 1802, printed in Roussier (1937:168–9). Roussier (1937:311–49) for Toussaint’s memoir. Leclerc a` Bonaparte, 16 septembre 1802, printed in Roussier (1937:228–37). Leclerc called Dessalines (230) “the butcher of the blacks.” Paul´eus Sannon (1920, 3:121); Fick (1990:211-12) where it is attributed to an eyewitness, the naturalist Descourtilz (1935:212).

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Dessalines was also right. In the summer of 1802, Leclerc’s men controlled the most valuable parts of the colony. In May, it had seemed he had won the war. But the fever season came as Toussaint and Dessalines had foreseen. Leclerc noted the onset of the rains in early April, and in May complained he had 6,000 men in hospital and was losing thirty to fifty men daily to disease.49 In June, he ordered his health commission to prepare a report on the epidemic, and was duly informed that it was yellow fever, made especially virulent by the miasmas caused by burned houses.50 A month after boasting that his position was “brilliant,” he wrote to Napoleon to say it grew worse daily as disease carried off his men.51 By early July he was losing 160 men to disease each day, and at the end of the summer 100 to 120 daily.52 Leclerc thought he needed 25,000 men to subdue the rebellion but had at best half that. He asked for men who had served in Egypt, in hopes that they would be resistant to the ills of St. Domingue, although he eventually concluded they died as readily as anyone else.53 According to the French General Pierre Boyer, commandant at Cap Franc¸ais, the hospitals overflowed, and as the epidemic waxed, his enemies “calculated its progress with a secret joy.”54 By late summer, uprisings sprouted all over the colony. The French did not have enough men left standing to counter them. As of 49

Leclerc au Ministre de la Marine, 9 avril 1802 and 8 mai 1802, printed in Roussier (1937:124, 151). Leclerc reported the following numbers of soldiers in hospital in the spring of 1802: 9 February 15 February 17 February 27 February 1 April

600 1,200 2,000 3,500 5,000

Source: letters in Roussier (1937: 84, 90, 94, 109, 120, 145, 151). 50 51 52

53

54

Leclerc au Ministre de la Marine, 6 juin 1802, printed in Roussier (1937:154–5). Leclerc a` Bonaparte, 6 juin 1802, printed in Roussier (1937:161–5). Leclerc au Ministre de la Marine, 6 juillet 1802, printed in Roussier (1937:186– 7). On 2 August, he wrote that over the past month 100 men died daily in the hospitals of Cap Franc¸ais alone: Leclerc au Ministre de la Marine, 2 aoˆut 1802, printed in Roussier (1937:196–9). Leclerc au Ministre de la Marine, 21 avril 1802 and 11 juin 1802, in Roussier (1937:131, 168); Leclerc a` Bonaparte, 15 f´evrier 1802, 11 juin 1802, and 16 septembre 1802, Roussier (1937:90, 172, 233). Egypt might have provided some experience with malaria, but not with yellow fever. Quoted in Anonymous (1971[1818], 163).

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September 16th, Leclerc reported 28,000 dead, 4,500 in hospital, 1,500 convalescents, and 4,000 fit for duty among his European troops.55 They did not have enough medical men to care for their sick (health officers and engineers seem to have been in shortest supply to judge from Leclerc’s desperate letters – perhaps because they remained in ports more consistently than others).56 Leclerc vainly hoped that because the epidemic had begun in early May, a month earlier than he expected, it would end in September rather than October.57 But it did not abate. European sailors as well as soldiers died in droves. One Swedish vessel at Cap Franc¸ais lost all its men but one cabin boy to disease. Some 4,000 Dutch sailors died “sans combat, ni gloire.”58 In late September, Leclerc forecast that if the epidemic lasted into the month of Brumaire (roughly October 23rd to November 21st), then the colony was lost.59 Leclerc, too, was correct. As the epidemic raged among the French, word came (July 1802) that French authorities in Guadeloupe, after defeating an ex-slave insurrection, had reinstated slavery. Rumors about the return of slavery to St. Domingue flourished. Napoleon had been won over by the planter lobby, and had indeed authorized both the slave trade and slavery. (His wife Josephine came from a Martinique planter family that had lost everything in a slave revolution there.) Leclerc’s entreaties that this plan should remain concealed could not scotch the rumors, and no official denials came from Paris.60 The news about slavery strengthened the resolve of the rebels in August and September. For want of healthy Frenchmen, Leclerc had become demographically dependent on blacks in his army, and thus found himself hostage to their loyalty, which the news from Guadeloupe undermined.61 Leclerc 55 56

57 58

59 60 61

Leclerc a` Bonaparte, 16 septembre 1802, printed in Roussier (1937:233). For example, Leclerc au Ministre de la Marine, 6 juin 1802, 11 juin 1802, 24 juin 1802, 26 aoˆut 1802, and 16 septembre 1802, printed in Roussier (1937:155, 167, 176–7, 220–1, 228). According to the memoir of Jean Le Roux (1957:101–2), of a contingent of 17 engineers who arrived in St. Domingue on 1 July 1802, only one remained alive sixteen days later; the climate “devoured” five sixths of the men who accompanied Le Roux to St. Domingue. Leclerc a` Bonaparte, 11 juin 1802, printed in Roussier (1937:171–3). Metral (1985[1825]:112–14). M´ezi`ere (1990:232) says yellow fever killed 4,000 French sailors. Girard (2008) discusses yellow fever in the French navy. Leclerc a` Bonaparte, 26 septembre 1802, printed in Roussier (1937:245–7). Dubois (2004:284–6). Lacroix (1819:369) says Leclerc understood the vulnerability he accepted by relying on blacks, who at the Cap comprised seven-eighths of the French army

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responded with a terror campaign aimed at intimidating the blacks into submission; it backfired. Uprisings and resistance continued and coalesced. Despite their recent betrayals, Christophe and Dessalines went back over to the rebels’ side (mid-October) and with some misgivings were reinstated; Dessalines became the foremost rebel leader harrying the French in the northern province. Most of Leclerc’s black and freecolored troops, the majority of his army, went over to Dessalines. In early October, Leclerc concluded that to prevail the French would have to kill all the blacks in the mountains over age twelve, and half of those in the plains – a couple hundred thousand people.62 In early November, yellow fever killed Leclerc.63 Pauline and her toddler son accompanied the yellowed corpse back to France with its tongue, eyes, and brain preserved in an urn by her express wish. Leclerc’s remains are in the Pantheon; Pauline married again and lived on, mostly in Italy, until 1825. The St. Domingue command fell to General Donatien-Marie-Joseph comte de Rochambeau (1755–1813), the son of George Washington’s comrade-in-arms. Rochambeau the younger had served with his father in America, and in 1792 become a general of France’s revolutionary army. In St. Domingue, he acquired a reputation for outstanding cruelty in a war marked by massacre and torture. Leclerc had admired him for his hostility toward blacks. Rochambeau inherited a near-hopeless situation. Of the 34,000 soldiers sent to St. Domingue, 24,000 were dead and 7,000 sick. Only 3,000 (9%) were fit for duty.64 But soon more than 12,000 reinforcements65 arrived, just in time to allow Rochambeau to vent his genocidal urges. For another year, the French fruitlessly persisted. In the dry months, they played a game of cat-and-mouse with Dessalines’ forces, which were also engaged in destroying Dessalines’ Haitian rivals. In April 1803, with the rains yellow fever flared up yet again and thousands more Frenchmen died. By May, the peace with Britain came to an end, meaning that

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in October 1802, but he had no choice. M´ezi`ere (1990:189) says Leclerc began to recruit blacks in February 1803. On events on Guadeloupe, R´egent (2004). Leclerc a` Bonaparte, 7 octobre 1802, printed in Roussier (1937:256). Gilbert (1803:60–2) gives his case history, and recounts Pauline’s health, too. Auguste and Auguste (1985:246–7); M´ezi`ere (1990:275) has similar figures, and says 21,000 deaths were due to yellow fever and 700 to combat. Lacroix (1819:382, n. 2). Leclerc had been promised 9,500. Ministre de la Marine a` Leclerc, 5 d´ecembre 1802, printed in Roussier (1937:299). Leclerc was dead by this point but the news had not reached Paris.

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France could no longer reliably re-supply the army in St. Domingue, and Britain began to arm Dessalines. This sealed Rochambeau’s fate. Napoleon lost interest in St. Domingue, gave up his grand plans for a French empire in America, and sold Louisiana to the United States. The end came in November 1803, when Dessalines bested the French near Cap Franc¸ais. Within days, Rochambeau and about 8,000 French troops and civilians departed for good, boarding British warships as prisoners of war. (Rochambeau remained a British prisoner until 1809, then rejoined the French army and died of wounds incurred at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813.) Dessalines slaughtered most of the few French left behind and proclaimed a new country, Haiti, in January 1804, the first and only country born of a slave revolution. In the prologue to the act proclaiming Haiti’s independence, Dessalines contrasted Haitians to French, pointing to skin color, a French penchant for cruelty, and “our avenging climate.”66

reckoning dead In all, the French sent some 60,000 to 65,000 men to suppress the revolution in St. Domingue. About 50,000 to 55,000 died there, roughly 80 to 85 percent.67 Some died in combat or massacre; in the biggest battle of the war, an eighteen-day siege of a position held by Dessalines, the French lost as many as 2,000 dead.68 But most engagements involved small numbers of French troops, as Toussaint and Dessalines had more sense than to fight large contingents. In any case, most of the soldiering 66

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The English text is given in Armitage (2007:194). Lacroix (1819:415) says after the revolution the blacks believed themselves “invincibles sous la protection de son climat.” An example came in a speech Dessalines made 28 April 1804 in which he gave yellow fever its due. Challenging any nation to attack his, he proclaimed: “Let that nation come who may be mad and daring enough to attack me. Already at its approach, the irritated genius of Hayti, rising out of the bosom of the ocean appears; his menacing aspect throws the waves into commotion, excites tempests, and with his mighty hand disperses ships, or dashes them in pieces; to his formidable voice the laws of nature pay obedience; diseases, plague, famine, conflagration, poison are his constant attendants.” He went on to say he could rely on the people of Haiti, a more conventional case for a ruler to make. This translation appeared in the periodical Balance and Columbian Repository, (Albany) 19 June 1804, Vol. 3, Issue 25, p. 197. I owe this reference to my colleague Adam Rothman. Auguste and Auguste (1985:316). Dubois (2004:298); Fick (1990:236). At Crˆete-`a-Pierrot in February–March 1802 (Ad´ela¨ıde-Merlande 2007:290).

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and combat involved black and free-colored troops, whether in France’s army or the rebels’. The great majority of the 50,000 died as Leclerc did, of yellow fever in the ports, in garrisons and hospitals, or onboard ship. Figures presented by General Lacroix imply that disease accounted for upward of 75 percent of French military deaths. Partial figures from Leclerc for one month in the late summer of 1802 indicate that disease killed 3,000 of 3,350 (89%).69 A reasonable guess is that 35,000 or 45,000 died of disease, overwhelmingly of yellow fever.70 France’s foreign troops suffered acutely. Of 840 Swiss mercenaries in St. Domingue, only 11 returned to Europe (less than 2%). Swiss mercenaries never agreed to serve overseas again. Some 5,000 Poles fought for France in St. Domingue as well (some changed sides near the end and joined Dessalines), and about 4,000 (80%) died, mainly of yellow fever.71 In percentage terms, the losses of the French and their allies in St. Domingue exceeded those of any other Napoleonic campaign except the disastrous (and much larger) Russian one of 1812–1813, in which Napoleon lost perhaps 90 percent of his army to all causes. In absolute terms, about 171,000 French soldiers died in Russia (and many nonFrench too); about 84,000 in the Iberian campaigns (1808–1813), and maybe 13,000 in Egypt (1800–1801). Thus, the St. Domingue fiasco was distinguished not for its scale but for its lethality, and the role of disease as a cause of death.72 The Haitians lost many lives, too. French army sources estimated they killed 4,000. General Lacroix wrote that 13,000 blacks died fighting for the French, of whom 54 percent died in battle, 31 percent in executions, 69

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Lacroix (1819:431) gives 5,000 soldiers killed in war and 20,651 by disease. This does not count sailors, likely to have died even more disproportionately from disease, or officers, of whom the same was true, at least of health officers (750 died of disease) and engineers. And it applies only to the nine months before Leclerc’s death. So these estimates are only a rough guide. Leclerc au Ministre de la Marine, 26 septembre 1802, printed in Roussier (1937:242–5). Pluchon (1985:366) estimates that the French army sent 59,000 men to St. Domingue between 1791 and 1804, that 10,000 survived, that 8,000 died in combat or of wounds, and about 40,000 died of yellow fever and, to a lesser extent, of malaria. Anex-Cabanis (1991:184). Pachonski and Wilson (1986:12, 305–6). A line in ´ “Pan Tadeusz,” the Polish epic poem of Adam Mickiewicz, laments the fate of a Polish general in St. Domingue. Lynn (2005:210). Chandler (1966:1118–21) for casualties in major Napoleonic battles. Lacroix (1819:415) compares the Russia and St. Domingue campaigns.

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and 15 percent of disease. The General’s educated guesses refer only to the nine months of Leclerc’s leadership. The real death toll among blacks and gens de couleurs, combatants and noncombatants, was surely far greater than these figures suggest. Some historians say perhaps 5,000 to 13,000; some say as many as 80,000. Haiti’s 1805 census implies a loss of population of about 180,000 since the 1780s, but its accuracy is in question. Nor can one tell how many died and how many left among the (putative) 180,000. However, it is plausible that only 15 percent of blacks who died while fighting in the French army fell to disease, for the great majority of them were resistant or immune to yellow fever.73 No doubt other infections claimed many lives, too. The French accounts usually mention only yellow fever, and their descriptions of symptoms correspond to yellow fever.74 But St. Domingue had its share of malaria too, and the wartime conditions surely exacerbated it. The slaughter of almost all the colony’s livestock75 would have sharpened the feeding focus of anophelines on remaining mammals. The widespread burning of the woodlands would have killed millions of anopheline mosquitoes, but at the same time would have added to upland erosion, siltation, and the creation of more lowland swamps – and more mosquitoes. As with all armies in the field, dysentery and typhus no doubt took a toll. But the seasonality of death, which peaked strongly in the rainy season and especially the late summer, implicates the mosquito-borne diseases. The geography of it, concentrated in the port cities, supports the idea, held by all contemporary commentators, that yellow fever was by far the greatest killer.

the genius of toussaint Some historians have objected (and some readers will object) that emphasizing the power of yellow fever diminishes Toussaint’s 73

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Auguste and Auguste (1985:314); Lacroix (1819:431). The 80,000 figure is from Pachonski and Wilson (1986:303). Lacroix (1819:395) says 50,000 blacks died ´ in the “troubles,” which probably means 1791–1804, but it is not clear. One mystery of the Leclerc campaign is the seeming lack of herd immunity for the French army. More than the British in the 1790s, the French moved easily among the local population, recruited thousands of locals into their army, and in the towns lived among larger populations of presumably immune Haitians. Perhaps the density of infected mosquitoes was high enough to offset the presence of hundreds of thousands of immunes. Gilbert (1803) and Mouli´e (1812) provide the most detailed narratives; Navarranne (1943) is a medical history. Auguste and Auguste (1985:318).

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achievement. Leclerc, whose letters are full of laments about losses to yellow fever, is sometimes accused of exaggeration. Some racist historians have indeed found it impossible to credit Toussaint and Dessalines with effective leadership and strategy or their followers with martial prowess.76 The latter view is easily refuted by the eager recruitment of blacks into every army fighting in St. Domingue as well as by many references to their bravery, skill, and implacability. The former proposition is undermined by the record of guerilla campaigns fought by Toussaint and Dessalines. But it is decisively refuted precisely by their wily reliance on yellow fever. Toussaint’s challenge as a military commander was that he faced, in the British and especially the French, formidable veteran armies and had at his disposal ex-slaves, most of whom had no military experience, no skill with firearms, and no fondness for discipline. Those Africans who had been soldiers in their homeland had been trained in several different military traditions, and had never worked together before 1791.77 He had almost no engineers, limited artillery, and modest (although effective) cavalry. He could not expect to win set-piece battles of the sort Abercrombie and Leclerc longed for, but could fight only guerilla campaigns. His particular problem was to survive the dry seasons, when European troops enjoyed comparatively good health, with a force intact. So he hid in camps in the mountains, kept on the move, slid across the border into Spanish Santo Domingo, and told his followers to be patient, to wait until “the climate” worked its magic. Even surrendering, as he did in May 1802, or surrendering and fighting against comrades, as his lieutenants did, made strategic sense. It allowed them to maintain fighting forces, and even replenish their supply of weapons and ammunition courtesy of the French, until thousands upon thousands of their enemies had died and others lay helpless with fever. Then and only then could they strike decisively. Toussaint and Dessalines would have been poor commanders indeed had they not exploited the power of differential resistance to yellow fever. In the virus, they had an ally that they recognized would mow down their enemies without risking their own troops. The experience of the British army in 1793–1798 confirmed what everyone in St. Domingue knew about the vulnerability of European newcomers to yellow fever. In that conflict, Toussaint avoided decisive battles and held the mountains, confining the British to the pestilential ports and 76 77

The champion in this regard is Stoddard (1914). Thornton (1991) on African soldiers in the Haitian Revolution.

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plains. When fighting the French he did the same thing, and in his letter intended for Dessalines (of February 1802) explicitly mentioned the power of the rainy season, by which he meant the killing power of mosquito-borne diseases. Yellow fever was the weapon they wielded to overcome the sharp inequalities in firepower, training, and (usually) manpower they faced. Christophe told a French general that the insurgents had fought more than they ought to have out of pride, instead of following more strictly the “system of Toussaint.”78 The former hospital worker and self-styled “m´edecin general” of the slave army, Toussaint understood better than anyone that yellow fever was the supreme weapon of the weak and conducted his wars accordingly. Whereas in earlier wars Spanish defenders also relied on yellow fever to kill off their attackers, their tactics differed from Toussaint’s. They built costly fortifications to slow besiegers until “the climate” weighed in. He could not do that. Nor could the Spanish have pursued guerilla tactics, at least not by the late eighteenth century. They had too much to lose in the form of plantations and property. Only at Veracruz did they seem willing to contemplate abandoning their coastal wealth and retreating to the interior while waiting for disease to come to their aid (see Chapter 2). When defending their small islands against one another, the French and British had to try to hold on to the ports and plantations, even at the cost of entire garrisons (small in any case). Toussaint did not feel constrained to protect the ports and plantations against invaders. Indeed, he and his men wielded the torches that burned them (even though Toussaint had become a planter himself). Freed from the necessity of defending plantations, he had therefore the freedom to pursue the strategy that best fit the environment of the eighteenthcentury Caribbean.79 In Toussaint’s war against the French, yellow fever played a political role as well as a military one. Not only did it kill tens of thousands of French soldiers, but belief in its power affected decisions that thousands

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Lacroix (1819:366). Toussaint did have a predecessor or two, for example, the French commander defending Guadeloupe in February 1703, who took to the rugged interior with his troops when an English force swooped down on the island. This outraged the planters, whose fields and houses the English burned, but it was sound strategy because in May the rains came, the mosquitoes hatched, and the English became so sickly they abandoned the island. See Pritchard (2004:376–7) for an account of this campaign.

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of men made. Morale among the French (and their friends) plummeted as the epidemic spread. As a Polish officer put it: Downcast, discouraged and wearing an unkempt uniform the soldier, as yet untouched by the disease, had a grim foreboding that he would not be spared, that he would leave his bones far from his native land and never again lay eyes upon the thatched roof of home. Some therefore abandoned themselves to wild dissipation and lawlessness ‘in order to live life to the hilt,’ others readied themselves for death, in a state of self-preoccupied detachment. The hospitals were overflowing with invalids – who often lay on the ground uncared for. All respect for authority has ceased, a private was the equal of a general, no one dreamt of glory and victorious battles. Friendships withered, hearts froze over, neither soldier’s song nor the rattle of arms was audible . . . everyone feared for himself.80 French and Polish troops deserted and defected in hopes of escaping yellow fever. Toussaint prudently accepted many defectors into his ranks (Dessalines was less welcoming). Leclerc’s soldiers calculated their chances of survival might improve by fleeing the ports and plains for the mountains, known to be healthier. Living in the mountains meant siding with the black rebels, usually an ideological leap for Europeans, but one that some of them found reason to make. Moreover, in a revolutionary war in which men changed sides for gold, fear, ideology, or the hope of being on the winning side, yellow fever’s power was magnified. Everyone could see that the disease ravaged Leclerc’s army but left Toussaint’s unharmed. For those of a religious bent, this offered proof of God’s partiality in the conflict. For opportunists, yellow fever’s destruction of the French seemed to foretell the winner. Toussaint’s (and Dessalines’) claims that the climate would destroy their French enemies, borne out by events, marked them as prophets and showed to one and all that destiny stood on their side. Thus, yellow fever’s partisanship and the fear it provoked affected morale and the political choices made by tens of thousands. The Haitian revolution affords a fine opportunity to reflect on the role of yellow fever and malaria in shaping human history. Recall Chapter 1, 80

Pachonski and Wilson (1986:56–7). M´etral (1985[1825]:110, 115–17, 127–8) ´ on disease and indiscipline.

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which claimed that pathogens, like people, made history but did not make it just as they pleased. Although powerful, their impact depended on circumstances. Given that yellow fever and malaria, by making (disease-resistant) African labor especially attractive to Caribbean and Brazilian planters, helped cause untold misery for millions of Africans over centuries, it is altogether fitting that these two infections should have helped world history’s largest slave revolt succeed. The virus and plasmodium initially promoted African slavery in the Americas, then helped destroy it. Toussaint and Dessalines had yet another ally, one of which they remained unaware. As Leclerc noted in his correspondence, the rainy season in 1802 started early and lasted longer than usual.81 He did not live to see it, but the same was true in 1803 and 1804. The French expedition by chance coincided with a long ENSO event (1802–1804), which probably meant more and longer rains, and thus (other things being equal) more and more vigorous mosquitoes. Indeed, the British army had suffered similar bad luck, if not as acutely. The years 1790– 1793 featured one of the strongest El Nino ˜ events of the last millennium, with blistering droughts in India (where British forces were doing rather well) and Australia but heavy rains in the big islands of the West Indies and droughts further east in the Leewards and Windwards. In the Caribbean it seems to have lasted to 1795, and its effects on mosquito populations probably ended in 1796, the ENSO+1 year. British suffering from yellow fever continued in 1797–1798 at a diminished rate, which might indicate reduced mosquito populations but surely also reflects the fact that most British soldiers in St. Domingue by that time were either dead or immune. In St. Domingue, as in earlier episodes, ENSO likely exacerbated epidemics that would have happened in any case.82 81

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Leclerc a` Bonaparte, 11 juin 1802, printed in Roussier (1937:171–3). Ministre de la Marine a` Leclerc, 5 d´ecembre 1802, printed in Roussier (1937:299–302) notes the sickly season lasted longer than normal. Quinn (1992); Quinn and Neal (1992); Quinn, Neal, and De Mayolo (1987); Garcia-Herrera (2008) for ENSO sequences. Grove (2007) on the 1789–1795 ENSO effects. ENSO in Haiti is inconsistent in its effects, sometimes bringing wet winters and summer drought, sometimes longer, wetter, rainy seasons. Any deviation from the norm could boost A. aegypti strength (because people store more water in droughts), but only wetter weather could favor anophelines. Interestingly, Gilbert (1803) argued for correlation between yellow fever outbreaks and drought in St. Domingue in the years 1733–1734, 1739–1741, and 1743 (cited in Pluchon 1985:366).

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Toussaint and Dessalines used their environment to help them win against the French. However, they had other enemies against whom neither virus nor El Nino ˜ offered any help. Before the fighting in Haiti was over and Dessalines was in power, he had to destroy several other factions of gens de couleur and ex-slaves. In these struggles Dessalines, like Toussaint before him, had to rely on more conventional political and military talents.

aftermath The yellow fever epidemics in St. Domingue had their counterparts elsewhere in the West Indies wherever European armies went. Altogether, British, French, and Spanish armies lost perhaps 180,000 men. On St. Lucia, a British force under the future hero of the Peninsular War, Sir John Moore, fought an anti-guerilla campaign against ex-slave insurgents in 1795–1796; one of his regiments lost 96 percent of its men in its first year, as “every description of fever prevailed amongst them.”83 On Jamaica where there was no combat, 8,000 British soldiers died (1793– 1815). Yellow fever spread within armies, navies, and beyond. Yellow fever killed 5,000 British merchant seamen annually in the West Indies in the 1790s.84 Military and refugee migrations created unusual opportunities for the virus to spread around the Atlantic world. In the 1790s, especially 1793–1796, the virus raged in New Orleans, Havana, Veracruz, Guyana, most of the Lesser Antilles, Bermuda, New York, and Philadelphia where, apparently introduced by refugees from St. Domingue, it killed perhaps 5,000.85 The virus ranged even further afield in the aftermath of Leclerc’s campaign. In 1803–1805, it spread to many of the same ports in the greater Caribbean and North America, and to Puerto Rico as well, but also to Gibraltar, where 5,600 died, M´alaga, and Cartagena in Spain, where 5,000 died. In Spain as a whole, yellow fever killed more 83

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Breen (1844:103–7). BL Additional MSS, 57320, 57321, 57326, 57327, give a sense of that campaign. Arthy (1798). Holliday (1796); Geggus (1979); Rodr´ıguez Arg¨uelles (1804:pr´ologo) Havana; Bustamente (1958:80–3) Veracruz; Carrigan (1994:20–9) Louisiana; Powell (1993) Philadelphia; PRO CO 37/164, f. 250, “Epidemic Fevers at Bermuda,” Bermuda; Wellcome Library, American MSS 113, Certificats de Guadeloupe, f. 26, in which a French doctor named Bazin recalled that in 1794 on Guadeloupe “presque toute l’arm´ee fut moissonn´ee,” by yellow fever.

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than 100,000 victims in 1801–1804, roughly one percent of Spain’s population. On a limited scale the virus spread to Italy, the Netherlands, Mecklenburg, Saxony, Hungary, Prussia, and Austria. Presumably, some of the refugees and surviving troops fleeing Haiti, or perhaps other Caribbean locales, brought the virus and mosquito across the Atlantic, where in summer heat they could both thrive for a few months before cold closed their European careers.86 The transatlantic yellow fever pandemic of 1791–1805 helped confirm the reputation of the Caribbean as a death trap for Europeans. Armies seeking to maintain garrisons in the region increasingly had to imitate Leclerc’s example and recruit local slave and ex-slave manpower. Of course, this aroused fervent resistance in colonial councils, where arming blacks and training them could not have been more unpopular. But the death rates among European troops had reached such proportions that any force that feared it was bound for the Caribbean would likely mutiny before sailing. So the British army raised twelve regiments of slave troops, beginning in the 1790s. Their resistance to diseases “incidental to the climate,” as it was often put, was the argument that trumped slaveowners’ objections. Indeed, the British army became the largest purchaser of slaves in the West Indies, and maybe the world, between 1795 and 1807.87 In 1807 slave soldiers were freed, but black regiments remained a feature of the British army in the West Indies. Composed mainly of locally born ex-slaves, they proved much healthier than European troops in the garrisons of the Antilles. Their service helped draw attention to the moral quandaries of slavery, and thereby contributed to the growing momentum for abolition, which came to the British West Indies in 1833.88 The catastrophic mortality among European troops in these wars also shaped larger geopolitical ambitions. After the St. Domingue 86

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Rigau-P´erez (1991) Puerto Rico; Moreau de Jonn`es (1858, 2:184–200) Martinique; Sawchuk and Burke (1998) Gibraltar; Soler Cant´o (1970, 1984) Cartagena; Guijarro Olivares (1968:187) Spain as a whole; Rupp (1981) northern and central Europe. Yellow fever hit Seville in 1800, too (Hermosilla Molina 1978). A Dutch force that occupied St. Eustatius in 1803, and lost a quarter of its men to yellow fever, may have brought the virus to the Netherlands. Wellcome Library, American MSS 113, Certificats de Guadeloupe, fol 41, Laport`ere a` Chervin, 10 Avril 1818. The Prussian government sought British expertise in handling yellow fever in 1805: PRO PC 1/3740, Dr. Blane to Baron Jacobi 28 September 1805. Duffy (1997:95). It bought 13,400 slaves. Buckley (1979); Duffy (1997).

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Map 7.2. The Viceroyalty of New Granada (c. 1810)

debacle, Napoleon soured on the prospect of a restored French Caribbean empire and sold Louisiana and the heartland of North America to the United States. The British never again mounted a major military expedition to the West Indies and gradually lost interest in acquiring new territories in the Americas (though they did attack Buenos Aires in 1806–1807 and New Orleans in a modest way in 1814). Instead, they shifted to a strategy of increasingly informal empire in the Americas through commercial dominance, made feasible by the cheap textiles of the industrial revolution. Their efforts at empire-building moved to the shores of the Indian Ocean, where malaria but not yellow fever menaced their troops. France retired from major military operations in the West Indies after 1804 until its quixotic assault on Mexico in the 1860s. But Spain remained willing to throw away thousands of young men’s lives on expeditions to fever-ridden coasts.

New Granada, 1815–1820 The Viceroyalty of New Granada comprised roughly the northern fifth of South America. Its location and its ports, especially Cartagena, were more important than its products. It was crucial to the defense and trade of Spanish America. In 1800, Spanish America had about 16 million people, few of whom gave any thought to independence from Bourbon Spain. Some of those who did were high-minded thinkers, for whom the principles of the Enlightenment called into question the legitimacy of Bourbon monarchy in the Americas. A few were favorably impressed by the

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recent revolutions in North America, France, and Haiti, and hoped to liberate their people or to enjoy the exercise of power – or both. Still others felt deep grievances against the Bourbons, whose policies discriminated against criollos – people of European descent born in America – and against people of Indian, African, or mixed ancestry. The Bourbon reforms of the late eighteenth century had sought to modernize the empire and strengthen the hand of Spain, but in the process they had raised false hopes and created new dissent especially among criollo elites. The reforms had also spread military skills widely among the Americanos89 by enrolling criollos in the regular army and by expanding the militia, in particular by including large numbers of pardos, or people of partly African descent. Thus, by 1800, Spanish America had only a few revolutionarily minded people but a lot of men familiar with the use of arms.90

revolution in spanish america The few got their chance when in 1807–1808 Napoleon invaded Spain, forced the king to abdicate for his son Ferdinand VII, and then packed both father and son off to exile in France and substituted his own brother Joseph as monarch of Spain and its empire. This provoked six years of mainly guerilla warfare in Spain – a large reason for Napoleon’s eventual downfall. A rump government loyal to Ferdinand VII survived in Cadiz. The British army joined the fray in 1809, fighting Napoleon’s armies in Portugal and Spain in the Peninsular War. In Spanish America, Napoleon’s actions brought a crisis of sovereignty. Few Spanish Americans felt loyalty to the Bonapartes. Many maintained their attachment to their exiled king, but many others saw a chance for something altogether new.91 Spanish America came untethered from Spain. Defeats at Cape St. Vincent (1797) and Trafalgar (1805), and subsequent neglect, had reduced Spain’s formerly formidable navy to a low ebb. Spanish American commerce tilted toward the Anglo-Atlantic, as the British

89

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I use this term to refer to all people living in Spanish America, following Chasteen (2008). On the causes and courses of Spanish American revolutions, Lynch (1973); Rodr´ıguez O. (1998); Ramos P´erez (1996); Kinsbruner (2000); Adelman (2006); Chasteen (2008); and Blanchard (2008). On military reforms in New Granada, Kuethe (1978). Adelman (2006).

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fleet prevented normal traffic between Spain and the Indies. The political turmoil in Spain and the almost total absence of Spanish naval power opened political vacuums. This allowed local revolutionary councils – juntas – to spring up almost the length and breadth of Spanish America. Composed mainly of the wealthier strata of society, these juntas followed all sorts of agendas, which in some cases, particularly in Caracas, included independence from Spain.92 As Spain’s crisis deepened, the juntas succeeded in forming the kernels of new states and governments. They quickly fell into rivalry, and frequently into warfare, with one another. Many personal and economic interests were at stake but in broad political terms, the juntas divided between those seeking independence and those royalists loyal to the Cadiz government in Spain and the exiled Ferdinand VII. Several years of chaotic struggle followed, mainly in Mexico, New Granada, and the River Plate basin (Argentina and Uruguay). The government in Cadiz had only meager resources with which to influence the outcomes of struggles an ocean away. It sent small contingents of troops when it could, but they often deserted at the first opportunity. Nonetheless, as of 1813 royalists had put themselves in power almost everywhere but the River Plate and New Granada. Spanish America was forging its own destiny. Then in 1813–1814, Napoleon withdrew from Spain, his brother Joseph fled Madrid, settling in rural New Jersey for most of the next quarter century, and Ferdinand VII assumed the Spanish throne. He turned out to have firm ambitions to absolute rule, in Spain and in America. With peace at home and thousands of experienced war veterans at hand, he quickly tired of considering political compromises and settled on a military solution.93 He charged an expedition with the task of the reconquest of Spanish America, and put the matter in the hands of an experienced and highly competent general, Pablo Morillo (1775–1837), recommended for the job by, among others, the Duke of Wellington, Britain’s hero of the Peninsular War. Morillo had joined the marines in 1791, been wounded at Trafalgar, and fought with distinction against the French since 1808, rising through the ranks from sergeant to field marshal.94 92

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McKinley (2002) provides details on the growth of revolutionary sentiment in Caracas. Costeloe (1986) considers the Spanish response to the revolutions in America. Quintero Sarav´ıa (2005) is the best biography, but see also R´evesz (1947). Morillo’s service record is detailed in Rodr´ıguez Villa (1908, 2:1–7).

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Morillo commanded the largest expedition Spain had ever sent to America: 12,250 soldiers and 1,800 sailors crammed into 18 warships and 42 transports. They were well-supplied by the standards of Spain in 1814, and almost all hardened veterans of the war against France. They included 1,430 cavalry and 600 artillerymen, but only one senior medical officer. The men were selected for their resistance to republican ideas rather than to disease.95 After much deliberation, the king himself decided where to send Morillo’s legions. They were told their target was the River Plate, a hive of revolutionary activity and a comparatively healthy destination. Only once they were out to sea did they learn the truth: They were sailing for Costa Firme, the coast of the former viceroyalty of New Granada, a contender for the title of the unhealthiest region in the Americas. The news was met, wrote a soldier, with “consternation.”96

fervor and fevers in new granada, 1808–1815 New Granada included most of what are now Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and part of Panama. After 1777, Venezuela became a quasiautonomous captaincy-general within New Granada. Venezuela had just under a million people before 1808. About one-fifth were white, almost all criollos. They included a small landed aristocracy, very jealous of its status and privileges. Nearly half the population was of mixed descent, pardos, some of whom, like the Haitian gens de couleur, had achieved a measure of prosperity, although the mass had not. Roughly 95

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P´erez Turrado (1992:193, 206–9); Albi (1990:147–8, 402); Gonz´alez Garc´ıa (1961:131–2). Many authors give Morillo’s strength as 10,200 or 10,500 men, but Albi’s archival work is probably more trustworthy. See also Quintera Sarav´ıa (2005:245–7), whose documents give a total of 12,254 soldiers and officers, plus about 1,500 marines. By 1821 the army had 1 surgeon major, 7 assistants, and 39 practitioners and 4 hospitals. Cuerpo de Cirug´ıa militar del Ej´ercito pacificador de Tierra Firme, Caracas, 23 febrero 1821, AHN Estado 8728. Sevilla (1916:24). On the puzzling choice of the Costa Firme, Albi (1990:146–7). On the campaigns of 1815–1820, the literature is enormous and usually patriotic. Thibaud (2003) might be the single most useful book. The original sources include Morillo’s papers in the Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid (which I have not seen, but abstracts of 2,902 of his letters are in Contreras 1985); his correspondence with subordinates in AHN Estado 8717– 8718; his French-language M´emoires (Morillo 1826); Sevilla (1916); Brown (1819); Flinter (1819); Vowell (1831); Montalvo and S´amano (1918); P´aez (1973); and O’Leary (1952).

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a tenth of Venezuelans were slaves, and a twentieth were free blacks. Caracas was by far the largest city, with perhaps 45,000 people. In Colombia, also with just under a million people, whites comprised about 35 percent of the population, mestizos about 45 percent, Amerindians perhaps 15 percent, and African slaves 5 percent. Ranches and plantations dominated the economy of Colombia and Venezuela. In Colombia’s Caribbean coastal lowlands, sugar and cotton plantations dotted the otherwise forested landscape (see Chapter 4). Venezuela’s coasts, and the nearby low hills, featured plantations of cotton, indigo, tobacco, and especially cacao. Most of the population and the wealth of both countries was concentrated on the plantations and in the coastal cities. Venezuelans cultivated less than 1 percent of Venezuela, almost all of it near the coast; the rest of the country was forest or grass.97 Inland from the coast lay the sea of grass known as the llanos, or flatlands. Stretching from the foothills of Colombia’s Andes to the mouth of the mighty Orinoco, the llanos were (and are) a low-lying tropical savanna about twice the size of Spain. Their weathered soils support coarse, tall grasses with occasional groves of trees, often palms. Thick bush lines the riverbanks. Humboldt, who had passed through in 1800, found the landscape “sad and lugubrious in its spectacular uniformity,” although ecologists consider it teeming with biodiversity.98 During the wet season from May through November, heavy rains splash down almost every day, streams and rivers swell, the grasslands become wetlands and lakes, and hillocks become islands. In 1800, about a million cattle roamed the Venezuelan llanos, together with vast herds of wild horses and mules. They shared the llanos with a congeries of carnivores, including jaguars, caymans, anacondas, and trillions of insects, including “incredible” swarms of mosquitoes.99 97

98 99

Population figures from Lynch (1973:190, 227–8); Lombardi (1976, esp. 67–87); Chen and Picouet (1979:18–20); Izard (1979:42–64, 175–9), and ibid. (p. 84) for land use. Humboldt (1994, 1:88). O’Leary (1952), quoted in Humphreys (1969:2). Morillo complained of “snakes, bats, and other creatures raised in this land where even fish are the enemy of man,” but admired the cayman, as “the most noble and beautiful of all.” Morillo a La Torre, 3 julio 1818, AHN Estado 8717. Humboldt (1994) includes a detailed description of the llanos, as does Flinter (1819:95–135); Brown (1819); Vowell (1831, 1:18–59, 136–56); and Thibaud (2003:161–73). Flinter (1819:126) also noted the dense mosquito swarms. The cattle population figure comes from

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If anopheline mosquitoes had their way, the whole world would be like the llanos. It is always hot and usually humid. Standing water for breeding sites, with plenty of vegetation amid the water, is never in short supply except in the most severe of droughts. The seasonal puddles, ponds, and lakes are full of tasty organic debris for mosquito larvae. Millions of big bags of blood stroll around just waiting to be bitten. An. darlingi and An. Albimanus, excellent malaria vectors both, and twenty other species of anophelines abounded in the llanos in recent times, and probably have for many centuries.100 Everyone along the Orinoco suffered the attentions of those “nightly tormentor[s]”, but by some accounts the llanos’ mosquitoes showed a “decided preference” for the blood of “Europeans and new-comers.”101 Although such powers of discrimination among mosquitoes are not impossible, it is more likely that the locals had more experience keeping mosquitoes at bay through the use of smoke.102 Any anopheline paradise is usually hell for malaria-susceptible humans. Since the sixteenth century, Africans had continually entered the llanos, bringing malarial parasites with them. Ever since, plasmodia have circulated among human, livestock, and wild animal populations. Before mosquito eradication efforts in the mid-twentieth century, the Venezuelan llanos had malaria infection rates as high as anywhere in South America, especially in the wet months.103 The roughly 200,000 people who lived on the llanos of New Granada, known as llaneros, were mainly cowboys who hunted the cattle and tamed the horses. They were a wild bunch. Mostly pardos, they migrated with their cattle to high ground in the wet season and to low ground in the dry. They swam swollen rivers and covered great distances on

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Rausch (1984:240), but may be high. The original source (Pons 1806, 1:10) gives 1.2 million for regions of Venezuela that do not correspond exactly with the llanos. Rejm´anko, Rubio-Palis, and Villegas (1999) found two thirds of wet habitats hosted anopheline larvae in the eastern llanos, including good malaria vectors such as An. darlingi. Vowell (1831, 1:41); Brown (1819:59). Vowell (1831, 1:41) comments on their use of smoke as mosquito repellent. Over 150 species of mosquitoes were found within a ten-mile radius of a town in the Colombian llanos in 1948 (Rausch 1984:8). Ayala et al. (1973); Renjifo and de Zulueta (1952); Gabaldon and Berti (1954). In the last seventy years, for which data are best, malaria in the llanos has come often in epidemic form in ENSO+1 years. But in Colombia, outbreaks are most likely in ENSO years (Gagnon et al. 2002).

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horseback as a matter of course, wielded lances and lassos (for cattlehunting) with practiced skill, and weathered burning sun and drenching rain all their short lives. “Fording a deep river or battling an enraged bull is a mere game” for the llaneros, recalled General Morillo.104 They made excellent irregular cavalry. They also weathered malaria well. George Flinter, an English soldier of fortune serving with royalists in Venezuela, spent eight months in the llanos and maintained the llaneros were a healthy lot. They apparently sometimes slept in their corrals, among their cattle, for the purpose of avoiding mosquito bites – a practice that the modern medical literature suggests would have increased their malaria exposure. Presumably, they were often carrying plasmodia but resistant to malaria either by virtue of repeated exposure or by West (or Central) African ancestry – or both. On the other hand, for Spaniards the llanos, especially during the rainy season, were a death trap. By 1819 if not before, Morillo understood the seasonality of sickness on the llanos as it constrained his military operations.105 While the llanos hosted malaria, yellow fever stalked the Caribbean coasts. The ports, for reasons described in Chapter 2, suited A. aegypti perfectly. From the late seventeenth century, yellow fever epidemics had figured in the history of urban Colombia and Venezuela (Chapters 2 and 4), as throughout the northern coast of South America. Of one coastal town, Flinter maintained that “yellow fever [was] raging in it throughout the year, with unabated violence.”106 It often attacked Isla Margarita, an important staging point for Morillo’s army, as in an 1818 outbreak when it killed about fifty people per week. Yellow fever also periodically rampaged through the towns of the lower Orinoco (the eastern llanos), especially Angostura, now Ciudad Bol´ıvar, a strategic 104

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Morillo (1826:168). Thibaud (2003:165) for the population figure, and pp. 173– 214 on llaneros generally. Flinter (1819:122–3); Vowell (1831, 1:41) writes of the mosquito: “It even pierces through the hides of horses and cows; and seems to prefer their blood to that of mankind. This predeliction has given rise to a common custom among the natives, in the cattle farms, of sleeping in the corral, or pen, among the cows; as being there, in a great degree, free from the attacks of this insect.” The modern literature on malaria zoopotentiation (cited in Chapter 2) says that people who live among their livestock suffer higher rates of malaria. In any case, this applied only to those who kept cattle; many llaneros hunted wild cattle instead. For Morillo’s recognition: Morillo a La Torre, 12 julio 1819, AHN Estado 8717. Flinter (1819:53).

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point usually occupied by one or another army.107 As Morillo remembered it, “the least of the perils menacing [a Spanish soldier] was enemy arms.” He pointed to caymans, rays, snakes, and scorpions, but, had he only known, the General would have included in his list anophelines and A. aegypti.108 Morillo and his 12,000 had much more to fear from mosquitoes than from men in New Granada. The local population was menacing enough. Some Venezuelan republican revolutionaries had declared themselves independent in 1810, the first South Americans to do so. Several of them organized their own armies and became independent warlords – called caudillos. They fought one another, and royalist warlords as well. Vicious little wars, marked by atrocities, massacres, and mass executions, sprouted all over New Granada, but especially in Venezuela. Spain’s army in New Granada, about 7,000 strong, was composed mainly (about 80%) of Americanos, some of whom preferred revolution to duty to their exiled king, as did many of the roughly 10,000 militia.109 The most effective military force was an army of llaneros following a charismatic and particularly brutal caudillo, Jos´e Tom´as Boves. A former Spanish naval pilot, smuggler, and convict, Boves gathered a few thousand desperadoes into the terrestrial equivalent of a pirate crew, preying on all who had

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Brown (1819:106–7, 144); Vowell (1831, 1:33, 151–2). Angostura had about 5,000 to 10,000 people according to travelers, and 6,500 according to Chen and Picouet (1979:20). An 1819 outbreak of yellow fever there is briefly described (pp. 173–4) in the journal of U.S. naval chaplain John Hambleton, printed in Hambleton and Vivian (1967:166–83). Morillo (1826:227). Thibaud (2003:29–31, 36–7). Figures for the Captaincy-General of Bogot´a, printed in Kuethe (1978:217–18), suggest 3,600 regulars and 7,730 militia. Spaniards predictably suffered poor health when stationed in New Granada. Flinter (1819:82–3) recalled the siege of Puerto Cabello, Venezuela’s most important fortress, in 1813: “The unhealthiness of the climate . . . soon reduced the Spaniards to a very low ebb, and they were again reduced to the mortifying necessity of confining themselves to defensive operations within their lines. . . . ” A document from the Venezuelan national archives gives a snapshot (perhaps representative, perhaps not), showing for August 1788 an infantry unit of 290 men, of whom 129 entered hospital that month, 49 were sick as of 1 September, and two had died during August. “Relaci´on del estado de la fuerza del cuerpo veterano de infanteria de Trinidad, correspondiente al mes de agosto,” 1 septiembre 1788, printed in: Su´arez (1979:338–9). Pons (1806, 2:5–95) describes Venezuela’s military as of 1804.

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anything worth taking. Boves liked to call his followers the “Legions from Hell,” and they acquired a reputation as bold, skilled, and merciless guerilla fighters. They fought as royalists while Boves lived, until 1814, with a special passion directed against the white criollos. Of the several republican caudillos, the most charismatic, and the luckiest, was Simon Bol´ıvar. Bol´ıvar was born to great wealth in 1783. His family owned estates, mines, many slaves, and a few townhouses in Caracas. Both his parents died before he turned nine. Tutors saw to his education, inculcating a fondness for Rousseau and anticlericalism if not atheism. He joined the militia at age fourteen, traveled to Europe while still a teenager, married Teresa del Toro in Madrid at eighteen (she was twenty-one), and returned home to what he later called the happiest six months of his life on his estates with his bride. However, she caught a fever that killed her in five days, leaving Bol´ıvar, orphaned at nine, widowed at age nineteen. He returned to Europe, where he learned French and some Italian, and witnessed Napoleon’s battlefield triumph at Marengo. He studied philosophers such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, and Spinoza with approval. According to a close comrade, he detested Machiavelli but could recall passages a quarter century after having read them.110 His favorite reading was history, ancient and modern. Leaving Europe, he briefly visited the U.S. and in 1806 settled down to the snake-pit of politics in Venezuela. Like Toussaint, he was small and slender, vain and touchy, imperious and authoritarian, charming and generous when it suited him – and Machiavellian day and night. Like Toussaint, he could withstand great privations and showed uncanny stamina. The llaneros, men almost born in the saddle, called him culo de hierro (“iron-ass”) in recognition of his endurance on horseback. Unlike Toussaint, when Bol´ıvar turned to revolution he was young, rich, irreligious, and white (and disdainful of blacks). As a military commander he made countless blunders, and more than once abandoned his men and materiel to his enemies while fleeing to safety. But when his fate looked darkest he was at his best, both resolute and lucky.111

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O’Leary (1970:18–19). Of the dozens of biographies, Harvey (2000) is detailed yet readable; Lynch (2006) readable and thoughtful; O’Leary (1970: 139–42) gives a portrait on which most others rely; Vowell (1831, 1:66–7) gives another.

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war to the death In 1813, when leading rebel factions of perhaps 10,000 to 15,000 men112 against local royalists, Bol´ıvar declared that henceforth his was a “war to the death.” His chief opponent, Boves, needed no encouragement, and shortly before he was run through with a lance in battle in December 1814, he chased Bol´ıvar out of Venezuela to Cartagena. This struggle between Boves and Bol´ıvar was a Venezuelan civil war, with few Spaniards on either side. By 1815, about half the whites of Venezuela were killed, and about 150,000 people in all – nearly a sixth of the population.113 Into this spasm of violence stepped Morillo’s legions in April 1815, with instructions to “pacify” Venezuela and Colombia, and then to send his men on to Peru and Mexico. Morillo, who enjoyed the nickname “El Pacificador,” was appointed captain-general of Venezuela and field marshal of the army. Upon arrival, Morillo had by far the most formidable force in New Granada.114 Now leaderless, Boves’ men had only bamboo lances, lassos, and horses, and were vulnerable outside the llanos and helpless against well-trained and armed infantry. Bol´ıvar’s and other republican factions usually consisted of only a few hundred ill-armed and ragged men – or boys – each. They were little more than teenage gangs: In 1815, the average age of a “patriot” soldier was seventeen, and sergeants twenty-two (Bol´ıvar himself was thirty-two).115 No one had much popular support, especially after they began routinely expropriating and stealing property, conscripting men, and raping women. By contrast, the Spaniards were well-trained, well-armed, and better disciplined. As events would reveal, they were just as brave and could be just as murderous as the Venezuelan factions. But Morillo’s Spaniards also had the great liability of all European troops new to the Greater Caribbean: unprepared immune systems.

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Albi (1990:111) says 8,000 to 20,000. Rausch (1984:170); Izard (1979:135). Accounts of Morillo’s campaigns include Ej´ercito de Colombia (1919); Sevilla (1916); Quintero Sarav´ıa (2005:237–444); Stoan (1971); and Morillo (1826:1– 253). Adelman (2006:272–80, 285–7, 295–9) covers political and financial aspects. Thibaud (2003:225).

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They were not the only ones. As the Napoleonic wars wound down in Europe, many men with none but military skills sought employment wherever they could find it, and a few thousand, mainly English and Irish, washed up in New Granada to fight beside Bol´ıvar. With them came a teenager from Cork, Daniel O’Leary (1802-54), a butter merchant’s son with no military experience, who learned Spanish quickly and became one of Bol´ıvar’s trusted officers, his aide-de-camp, and eventually his biographer and custodian of his papers.116 Most of the Albion Legion, as the Venezuelans came to call them, died of disease before the war was out (O’Leary lived into middle age as a diplomat and author). Of one contingent arriving in 1818, half died within weeks of setting foot in South America; a Captain Brown, then serving on the lower Orinoco, wrote: “Never did the yellow fever commit in so short a time such dreadful ravages.”117 The volunteers and mercenaries might have heeded the concerns of a Colonel Gordon, who when objecting to a proposed British military intervention in Caracas in 1808 wrote, “My fears on that subject are the climate, the climate, the climate.”118 Morillo more than once predicted disease would finish off the British.119 But while they lasted, the foreign legions provided helpful military experience to Bol´ıvar’s revolutionaries. Nonetheless, at first, things went well for the Spanish army. Up and down the Venezuelan coast, cities accepted Morillo’s rule, and some 10,000 local recruits flocked to his banners.120 By July 1815, he felt he had Venezuela safely in hand and marched off to besiege Cartagena, by far the strongest fortified place in New Granada, and strategically its most important city. At his approach to Colombia, royalists took

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118 119

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O’Leary (1879–1888) is 3 volumes of biography and 29 volumes of Bol´ıvar’s papers. O’Leary (1970) is a translation and abridgement of the biography. Brown (1819) and Vowell (1831) are also rich accounts of the experiences of British mercenaries and volunteers. On the foreign legions, Hasbrouck (1928); Rodriguez (2006); and Thibaud (2003:384–94). Brown (1819:106–7). Thibaud (2003:389). F. B. O’Connor in 1820 lost 539 of his 800 Irish troops within a few weeks in Venezuela. I owe this datum to my colleague Erick Langer. Gordon to General Craig, 7 May 1808, BL Additional MSS, 49512, f. 17. For example, Morillo a La Torre, 19 novembre 1819, AHN Estado 8717. “Todas la noticias que tenemos de los Ingleses que se hallan a Barlovento son muy favorables, pues las enfermedades, el mal alimento y el clima va acabando con ellos.” Albi (1990:152); Gonz´alez Garc´ıa (1961).

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heart and revolutionaries either laid down their arms or gathered inside Cartagena’s walls. Bol´ıvar fled to Jamaica. Engineers had greatly strengthened Cartagena’s defenses since the days of Eslava and Vernon in 1741. With 5,000 Spaniards and perhaps 2,000 Americanos, Morillo knew the city’s design in detail and understood its reliance on “the climate” to destroy besiegers. He chose to starve it out, surrounding it from the landward side and avoiding the sea defenses that had held up Vernon in 1741. For 100 days, he kept a tight ring around the city. Six thousand, a third of Cartagena’s population, starved to death. The victors fared no better. The siege lasted into the rainy months of October and November, a fever season, before the city surrendered in December 1815. Morillo lost 3,100 of his 7,000 men, mostly Spaniards, almost all to disease. Intriguingly, one of his captains, Rafael Sevilla, in his memoirs attributed most of the deaths to “bites of long-legged mosquitoes of the swamps.”121 Morillo’s second-incommand noted that Spanish troops were much likelier to fall ill than local ones.122 A very few on each side died in skirmishes. Morillo, wisely, was in a hurry. He knew what fevers would do to his army (and perhaps to him). After Cartagena fell, he quickly completed the occupation and intimidation of Colombia. In the eight months stretching from the latter weeks of the siege through July 1816, Morillo lost only 151 men killed in combat, less than one twelfth the combat deaths of his enemies.123 It seemed he had won in Colombia and no force could resist his regiments. He returned to Venezuela to hunt down its revolutionary caudillos. By the end of 1816, he controlled all its main cities. Meanwhile, Bol´ıvar assembled a few hundred men to launch an invasion from Haiti, but he dallied for a month to pursue one of his 121

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Sevilla (1916:71): “La mayor parte de las defunciones fueron causadas por las picadas de los mosquitos zancudos de la ci´enagas. . . . ” This sounds as if Sevilla meant malarial mosquitoes, but he goes on to say, “ . . . las cuales produc´ıan unas llagas gangrenosas en las piernas, que causaban la muerte so no se hac´ıa muy pronto la amputaci´on de dichas extremidades.” No mosquito produces gangrenous wounds, so what Sevilla had in mind is hard to say. I acknowledge the help of Colombian historian of medicine Emilio Quevedo on this frustratingly inconclusive point. Accounts of the siege appear in Quintero Sarav´ıa (2005:277–306); Ej´ercito de Colombia (1919:91–125); and Morillo (1826:32–64). Miguel de la Torre, quoted in P´erez-Tenreiro (1971:63). Quintero Sarav´ıa (2005:316). A detailed account of these campaigns is Ej´ercito de Colombia (1919:126–202).

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amours. His pursuit eventually succeeded but the invasion quickly failed, and he had to scurry back to Haiti where the president, Alexandre P´etion, proved a forgiving and stalwart supporter. Morillo seemed to be positioned to win. But time, malaria, and yellow fever were against him: If he could not win quickly, he could not win at all. Morillo could not win quickly. His Spanish infantrymen proved nearly invincible in battle along the coasts and in the coastal mountains. He could recruit local men, most easily whites from the upper classes, to his banners. Putting aside his contempt for blacks, he also recruited them. But he could not keep weapons, gold, foreign mercenaries, and volunteers, or Bol´ıvar, from slipping into Venezuela. The Spanish navy, at its historical nadir, could not blockade New Granada effectively. Caribbean merchants, eager to see New Granada become independent, provided ships and supplies to Bol´ıvar. Beyond that, Morillo’s men could not control the llanos. Gradually, more and more llaneros chose revolution, or at least the plunder promised by revolutionary caudillos, over royalism.124 The llanos provided “inexhaustible” numbers of horses for the rebels, and thus mobility. And they offered a refuge into which Morillo’s infantry ventured only at its peril, because on the open savanna they were vulnerable to surprise cavalry attacks – and to malaria.125 In instructions to a colonel written probably in 1815, Morillo cautioned him not to “send Europeans down to the llanos, except in case of great necessity, because the fevers will finish them.”126 In 1817, writing of the sufferings of his men on a rare march in the llanos, he called the region “sickly and feverish.”127 In 1819, he described the llanos as “unhealthy and prejudicial to Europeans,” a land where “hunger, fatigue, and the climate are more dreadful than

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On this switch, Thibaud (2003:149–61, 332–41). Morillo (1826:122–3, 168) on the immensity of the llanos, the countless horses, and his troops’ vulnerability. Vowell (1831, 1:38, 119–20); Pons (1806, 3:270–1) on llanos livestock. Instrucciones al Coronel D. Sebasti´an de la Calzada, AHN Estado 8717 (“No deben bajar al llano los Europeos, sin una gran necessidad, pues las Calenturas los acabar´ıan”). He went on to suggest the colonel segregate American and European hospitals in cases of “malign fevers.” Morillo al Ministro de la Guerra, 1 abril 1817, printed in Rodr´ıguez Villa (1920, 1:287–295, quot. p. 291): “enfermizo y calenturiento pa´ıs.” On another occasion in early 1817, he complained that he lost “in a few days a great number of men who fell ill in that swampy terrain.” Quoted in R´evesz (1947:87): “en pocos d´ıas un gran n´umero de soldados que enferman en aquel pantanoso terreno.”

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combat.”128 He feared “deadly results” if he sent troops to the lower Orinoco (Ciudad Guayana) where the “black vomit . . . reigned.”129 In effect, his army was hemmed in by mosquitoes. A stalemate of sorts emerged, with the coasts and mountains in Morillo’s hands but neither the sea nor the sea of grass. Revolutionary caudillos enjoyed an edge in mobility and access to horses. They could escape to the llanos, or to Haiti, rather than squarely face Morillo’s infantry. Unable to win quickly, Morillo’s army faced a slow death. It fought many battles, usually victorious, and lost some men in combat. But it lost all battles with malaria and yellow fever, and lost almost all its men that way.130 In May 1816, Morillo complained that he could not recruit men fast enough to replace those lost to disease.131 He instructed his subordinates early in 1817 to recruit men “of the country” because diseases threatened to leave the army “without Europeans.”132 In September 1817, he wrote that he had lost at least a third of his army to disease and, more accurately than he knew, that “The mere bite of a mosquito often deprives a man of his life. . . . ”133 By 1819, Morillo wrote to Spain that he had less than a quarter of his 12,000-man European army left.134 Looking back in his M´emoires, Morillo alluded to the effects of differential immunity, writing that to appreciate the rigors of the campaigns, “One must above all consider the insalubrity of the climate, almost always mortal for Europeans.”135 He also noted the allowances he had to make in his warfighting strategy, saying the wet season was too sickly to conduct operations, and he had to seek higher elevations to keep 128

129 130

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134

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Morillo al Ministro de la Guerra, 12 mayo 1819, quoted in Quintera Sarav´ıa (2005:353). Morillo a La Torre, 7 marzo 1817, AHN Estado 8717. I acknowledge the work of Rebecca Earle (2000a, 2000b), which makes a similar case and which led me to many of the original sources. Morillo al Ministro de la Guerra, 31 mayo 1816, printed in Rodr´ıguez Villa (1908 ed., 3:164–9). Recruitment was hampered by his requisition of property from Venezuelans and his king’s refusal to sanction the recruitment of slaves until December 1818. Morillo did recruit free blacks (Stoan 1970:394). Morillo a La Torre, 28 enero 1817, AHN Estado 8717. Morillo al Ministro de la Guerra, 10 septiembre 1817, printed in Rodr´ıguez Villa (1908 ed., 3:442–3). Morillo here was not attributing malaria or yellow fever to mosquitoes, but blaming them for all manner of ailments. Morillo al Ministro de la Guerra 13 septiembre 1819, quoted in Rodr´ıguez Villa (1908 ed., 1:409–15), cited in Ullrick (1920:558). Thibaud (2003:262–3) has some corroboratory data from AGI, Gobierno, Caracas, leg. 55. Morillo (1826:167).

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his troops healthy – an indication that the ailments that most troubled the Spaniards were temperature-related, and thus almost certainly mosquito-borne.136 Morillo’s problems with mosquitoes probably worsened as the war went on. In 1812, before much combat had taken place, Venezuela had about four or five million head of horses, mules, and cattle. Eleven war-filled years later, it had a quarter million head left, a reduction of 94–95 percent. Before the war began, livestock had outnumbered humans in Venezuela by about five to one, giving anophelines and A. aegypti many targets. As the war progressed, while human population declined, the livestock numbers fell far faster, leaving humans a majority among the large mammals of Venezuela. Blood-seeking mosquitoes had fewer targets, but a far bigger share, at least two out of three of them, were people. The mosquitoes’ feeding focus narrowed, to the annoyance of everyone and the grave misfortune of many of those susceptible to malaria and yellow fever.137 The Americanization of his army meant that Morillo was far more vulnerable to desertion as time went on, and therefore to propaganda and shifting political winds. As in Haiti, so too in Venezuela: Because the war was increasingly a civil war, yellow fever and malaria acquired political as well as military significance. Morillo constantly asked for more troops and twelve times asked to be relieved of his command – understandable, especially after he had been skewered by a lance in the battle of La Puerta in 1818.138 Meanwhile, Bol´ıvar took advantage of the growing weakness of the royalist forces. He managed to forge a reasonably unified coalition among republican factions, successfully courted the once-royalist llaneros, and executed his most effective ally and most promising rival caudillo. He changed his mind about blacks and recruited many to his army. In 1819 he gambled on a most risky march, taking a few thousand men, and hundreds of women, west across the llanos in the wet season (wading for 136

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Morillo (1826:180). Typhus, dysentery, and other routine army diseases would be unaffected by elevation. Brown (1819:94) also noted the restrictions imposed by the wet season. Brito Figueroa (1973, 1:221) says Venezuela had 4.5 million cattle, horses, and mules in 1812 and 256,000 in 1823. These are estimates, of course. Quintera Sarav´ıa (2005:392, 394); Morillo (1826:147–8). He was wounded again in 1819 (Morillo 1826:186). Sailors also suffered extreme manpower losses while serving off the Costa Firme, prompting routine calls for reinforcements (P´erez Turrado 1992:188–93).

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a week in water up to their waists while fending off piranhas, according to one account) and then over chilly 4,000-meter passes in the Andes to arrive on the plateau northeast of Bogot´a.139 A good portion of his army died on this march, including a quarter of his British legion (and one child was born in one of the mountain passes).140 But when the 2,000 survivors got to Colombia, the few dispirited royalists there – all Americanos – were unprepared. Bol´ıvar recruited a few hundred locals, at gunpoint when necessary, won a decisive battle with only thirteen killed (Boyac´a, August 7, 1819), occupied Bogot´a after Spanish authorities fled, and at a stroke claimed Colombia for the revolution. The epic march and victory clinched Bol´ıvar’s status as the supreme caudillo of the revolution in New Granada, “El Libertador” as he liked to be called. It may not have been necessary for the ultimate defeat of Spain, but it hastened the result. Ferdinand VII did not give up easily. In 1819–1820, he authorized another expedition to the Americas with 20,000 men, for which he had to buy Russian ships because Spain had too few of its own. While it assembled in and around Cadiz, some of the few survivors of Morillo’s war returned to Spain and spread both sedition and yellow fever. The new army mutinied in January 1820 so as to avoid sailing to America. Their official destination was the River Plate, but veterans of Morillo’s expedition remembered that theirs had been too in 1814–1815. The mutineers particularly objected to the idea of service in the tropics, with the attendant risks that Morillo’s veterans no doubt carefully explained. One of the participants, Antonio Alcal´a Galiano, wrote that the rebellion succeeded where others failed simply because of the “repugnance of the rank and file against embarking for America.”141 The mutiny sparked a liberal revolution in Spain, which for three chaotic years (1820–1823) forced constitutional government on the king.142 Within three months of the Cadiz mutiny, Morillo had instructions to seek an armistice with Bol´ıvar, which their underlings concluded by November 1820. Afterwards they met briefly, dined and drank many a toast together, and slept under the same roof, indeed in the same room, 139 140 141 142

Vowell (1831, 1:156–68). O’Leary (1970:158–9). Quoted in Carr (1966:127). Woodward (2000:306–9, 314). Woodward says the second expedition included 14,000 men; every other source I consulted said 20,000.

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sleeping “soundly, making up, perhaps, for the many wakeful nights they had caused each other.”143 The next morning they parted amicably. Morillo soon turned the war over to a subordinate of lesser talents and went home (December 1820) to join in the turmoil of Spanish politics. For all intents and purposes, Spain had lost New Granada, although desultory fighting lasted until 1823. In August of that year, the final remnants of Morillo’s army together with their local recruits – about 1,000 men in all – departed Venezuela for Cuba. By 1826, all of Spanish America was free except for Cuba and Puerto Rico.144

arithmetic and aftermath In all, perhaps 16,000 or 17,000 European troops went to serve Ferdinand VII’s cause in Venezuela in 1813–1821. Morillo’s successors in 1821 wrote that 1,700 survived. Perhaps 700 returned to Spain.145 Something like 90 to 95 percent of the men sent out to pacify New Granada died there. If one counts the roughly 2,000 Spaniards already serving in New Granada, then about 91 to 96 percent of those who served the king died on the job. Of course, many died in combat or were executed as prisoners. Some deserted – a much more severe problem among the locally recruited in royalist armies. But most died from disease, and some of those who deserted probably did so because they feared epidemics or hospitals.146 The surviving evidence permits no more precise statement. Diseases annihilated Morillo’s army – but slowly. The catastrophe that befell Spain’s army in New Granada unfolded over five or six years. It was perhaps more complete but less sudden than what befell Leclerc, Abercrombie, Albemarle, or Vernon. It took place in bits and pieces, over a broad territory, rather than as a single epidemic around one or a few ports. This was not a result of better medical care: Spanish medical theories and practices around 1815 were no more helpful than those that helped kill many hapless soldiers and sailors over the previous 143

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O’Leary (1970:184). The cordial correspondence between Bol´ıvar and Morillo is printed in Morillo (1826:319–40). Elsewhere, Morillo spiced his M´emoires with derogatory asides about Bol´ıvar. Deadly fevers continued to plague what was left of the Spanish army after 1820. Jaime Arbuthnot a La Torre, 23 febrero 1822, AHN Estado 8739. For the 1,000 figure, Gonz´alez Garc´ıa (1961:148). Albi (1990:404). Earle (2000b:288–92) on fear of hospitals in Morillo’s army. Thibaud (2003:460– 5) on desertion.

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centuries.147 Conceivably, almost the opposite was true: The tiny military medical corps that accompanied Morillo could do little damage, and soldiers profited by staying out of its reach. The absence of any strong El Nino ˜ (there were moderate ones in 1817 and 1819) may have checked the ravages of mosquito-borne disease slightly. Probably, two other factors mattered more. First, at times Morillo’s men were at altitudes of a few hundred meters in the coastal cordillera of Venezuela, or higher still in the Colombian Andes, and thus outside the comfort zones of both A. aegypti and anopheles mosquitoes. Morillo took them to higher elevations during the rainy seasons expressly to avoid disease.148 But they could not all stay there all the time; they had to occupy the cities and ports for political and military reasons. But while at altitude they probably enjoyed much better health, as British troops stationed in Jamaica demonstrably did.149 Second, Morillo’s Spaniards served among locally born and raised recruits to the royalist cause. They often lived among local civilians. Thus, they probably benefited at times from herd immunity with respect to yellow fever. The political circumstances, which allowed them to merge into local populations, brought different epidemiological experiences. It took viruses and plasmodia longer to find them. But in the end, sooner or later, they almost all died. In that respect, the Spanish reconquest expedition under Morillo was very much of a piece with the British and French expeditions to St. Domingue. In its larger quest to reconquer the Americas, Spain committed by far the largest chunk of its military manpower (about 43%) to the Costa Firme, the unhealthiest of all possible destinations. Sending Morillo to the River Plate almost surely would have produced happier results for Spain. In 1819–1820, Argentina was ripe for reconquest, but Spain had squandered its armies. Feeble though Spain was after 1808, it is not implausible to suppose it might have held on to America for some time longer had it not wagered so heavily on New Granada. Throughout its American colonies, royalists and revolutionaries fought for years before achieving any clear result: A less suicidal intervention in a healthier landscape might have tipped the balance for the royalists, at least in 147

148 149

Viceroy Francisco Montalvo castigated the Spanish medical establishment in Venezuela in his instructions to his successor: Montalvo a S´amano 30 enero 1818, printed in Montalvo and S´amano (1918:136–40). Morillo (1826:180, 216). Tulloch (1838).

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part of the empire. Despite its negligible navy and political factionalism, Spain held the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico easily. Of course, all this is mere conjecture: We can only know for certain that Spain chose to place its bet on New Granada, and lost. Nor does the evidence allow a confident judgment about the precise roles of various infections in dooming Morillo’s army. Yellow fever surely was responsible for a large share of deaths; the barracks and hospitals along the coast were the deadliest locations, as in Haiti.150 The towns of the lower Orinoco also regularly hosted yellow fever. But malaria just as surely played a large role, and in the llanos (for ecological reasons noted previously) ought to have been predominant. Accounts mention dysentery and smallpox (especially among Amerindians) as well, and no doubt typhus made an appearance as it almost always did among armies in those days.151 Perhaps Bol´ıvar and his allies knowingly exploited differential resistance and immunity as part of their strategy. Morillo seemed to think that they did. He wrote to a subordinate in 1816: “They are just waiting for us all to die of infection and disease.”152 He complained afterward that his enemy “almost constantly avoided combat.”153 Bol´ıvar and his allies used the malarial llanos as their stronghold and their highway. He seems to have been content to see Morillo’s men pinned along the coast, where yellow fever was most dangerous, and happy to lure them into the llanos. He was apparently aware that disease was a more serious problem for Morillo’s army than for his own. He wrote to a fellow general on June 26, 1816 that, “We must lament the infinite sickness that has considerably reduced our troops; but we are consoled by the fact that the enemy must suffer greater losses, partly because of the nature of his soldiers, and partly because of the positions he occupies.”154 After the 150 151

152

153 154

Morillo a Miguel de la Torre 4 octubre 1815, AHN, Estado 8717. Morillo a La Torre, 4 octubre 1815, AHN Estado 8717 mentions dysentery, “a ruinous ailment . . . that destroys humankind.” The “Relaciones de Enfermos,” in AHN Estado 8728, scattered documents from 1820, give diagnoses for a few dozen sick soldiers, among whom venereal diseases predominated. Bol´ıvar a Miguel de la Torre, 19 mayo 1816, AHN, Estado 8717, cited in Earle (2000b:292). Morillo (1826:224). Bol´ıvar a General Arismendi, 26 Junio 1816. Bol´ıvar (1964, 9:285–6). The quotation (p. 286): “Tenemos que lamenter las infinitas enfermedades que nos disminuyen considerablemente las tropas; mas nos consolamos con la consideraci´on de que el enemigo debe sufrir mayores p´erdidas, tanto por la naturaleza de sus soldados, como por

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victory at Boyac´a, before Bol´ıvar returned to Venezuela, he tried to fill his ranks with slaves from lowland Colombia, noting that “men from the cold uplands will all die in Venezuela, as sadly we have learned.”155 He seems to have appreciated the significance of disease and adjusted his recruitment policies accordingly. The scant data on the health of Bol´ıvar’s forces suggest roughly 10 percent were sick at any given time, which if true means his men were much healthier than the Spaniards.156 Their own words suggest that Morillo and Bol´ıvar both recognized the partisan effects of disease, which implies that yellow fever and malaria were more prominent than, say, smallpox, which would have killed more Venezuelans than Spaniards. It is tempting to suppose that Bol´ıvar took a page from Toussaint’s book. In his visits to Haiti in 1815 and 1816, he conferred with veterans of the Haitian revolution. He negotiated for their support (in exchange for a promise to free Venezuela’s slaves). He and his Haitian friends surely saw the similarities between Morillo’s mandate and Leclerc’s of thirteen years before. An inquisitive man seeking every edge he could get, Bol´ıvar might well have asked the Haitians how they succeeded, and might well have been told, among other things, about “Toussaint’s system” (as Christophe had called it). It is also possible, perhaps likely, that Bol´ıvar and his allies knew that Mexican insurgents had successfully pinned a Spanish regiment at Veracruz in 1814, where half its men died from yellow fever soon after arrival.157 Admittedly, this is pure speculation. Nothing in the very limited surviving correspondence between Bol´ıvar and the Haitians contains any hint that he sought or received advice on how to win a revolutionary war against militarily

155

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157

las posiciones que ocupa.” In referring to “la naturaleza de sus soldados,” Bol´ıvar seems to be recognizing differential resistance. In referring to “las posiciones que ocupa,” he clearly recognizes the unhealthier nature of the coastal positions held by Morillo. In referring to sickness that was more than infinite, Bol´ıvar revealed that he was no mathematician. Bol´ıvar a Santander, 14 abril 1820, printed in Santander (1988–1990, 2:82). Morillo, too, recruited black soldiers specifically for their disease resistance (Blanchard 2008:70). He requested and received permission to raise a battalion of slaves who could, he thought, withstand the rigors of “unhealthy countries” (pa´ıses malsanos). Morillo al Ministerio de la Guerra 25 enero 1818; Ministerio de la Guerra a Morillo, 4 diciembre 1818, printed in Rodr´ıguez Villa (1908, 3:494 and 3:700). Thibaud (2003:359–62); Blanchard (2008:130) has some data on disease among Bol´ıvar’s forces. Earle (2000b:283).

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superior forces, and nothing in his twenty volumes of papers shows he learned from the Veracruz experience.158 In 1819–1822, as in the aftermath of the Haitian revolution, yellow fever ricocheted around the Atlantic world. The presence of new Spanish troops in Havana, Veracruz, and every other strongpoint in the Spanish Empire led to local outbreaks, and ships – probably often troop ships – carried the virus (and perhaps mosquitoes) to distant shores. Epidemics occurred in the major cities of the east coast of the United States and in Iberian ports. Barcelona perhaps suffered the most: About a sixth of the city’s population died between August and December, some 20,000 people.159 After Venezuela and Colombia became free, Bol´ıvar continued the fight against Spain in the Andes. He hoped for a unified Hispanic republic in South America, which might become a great power with him at its helm. But instead he got a series of unstable republics dominated by caudillos. Looking back on his career, he said that those who served the revolution had “plowed the sea,” a poignant image of futility. He died of lung ailments (again, like Toussaint) in 1830. Spain’s empire in the Americas now consisted only of the islands of Puerto Rico and Cuba. For some decades yet, the combination of sugar planters eager to retain preferred access to the Spanish market and the presence of large military establishments kept these islands loyal to Spain.

Immigration, Warfare, and Independence, 1830–1898: Mexico, the United States, and Cuba After Morillo’s army died off and Spanish America secured its independence, the stakes in geopolitical struggles in the Greater Caribbean shrank. No longer did the destiny of the Americas or control of the world’s silver hang in the balance. But warfare continued, and with it new generations of young men with unprepared immune systems ventured into the domains of malaria and yellow fever. Once again, they were not alone. Civilian migrants streamed to the region as well. The slave trade ebbed after the 1840s, thanks to 158

159

Verna (1980:477–96) prints the correspondence of 1815–1816. He asked for ships, guns, and money. PRO PC 1/4169 Hamilton to Castlereagh 7 September 1819, on Boston, New York, and Baltimore; Reese (1819) on Baltimore; Waddell (1990) and Molina de Munoz ˜ (1977) on Cadiz; Chastel (1999) on Barcelona, where the disease was thought to have come from Havana.

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abolition in the British and French empires. But hundreds of thousands of Indians and Chinese came in the following decades to work the plantations of Trinidad, British Guyana, and Cuba. Many of these laborers went home after a few years of toil, but many lived out their lives in the Caribbean. Often those lives were cut short by disease, but both Chinese – who mainly came from southern provinces – and the Indians would often have had resistance to malaria through personal experience of the disease, and thanks to bouts of dengue may also have had some resistance, if not immunity, to yellow fever.160 In addition to this Asian influx, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards, especially from the poor northern villages of Galicia and Asturias, headed for Cuba and Puerto Rico, whereas Irish and Germans fled potato famines and revolutionary upheavals for destinations such as New Orleans. Malarial plasmodia soon circulated among all these immigrant populations, as well as within the bodies of the long-resident Caribbean population. With growing populations in most parts of the region, and with continual ecological disturbance resulting from further spread of plantations, the odds that newcomers might avoid malaria dwindled. The yellow fever virus, even if it did not survive easily in the bloodstreams of the new Asian immigrants, flourished among the European newcomers. When they came in surges, or when over time their numbers grew large enough to overwhelm the protection of herd immunity, epidemics resulted. Even when they did not, the newcomers often died, unremarked, in dribs and drabs from what in New Orleans and Charleston was often called “strangers’ disease.”161 The general growth 160

161

Ashcroft (1979a) found that Indians in nineteenth-century British Guyana suffered little from yellow fever. Alckin (2001:134) cites a PRO CO 111/250 report of Dr. Bonyun (1848) showing that among indentured workers in British Guiana the (annual?) death rate among Africans was 1.8% and that of people recruited from Madras 8.1%, whereas those from Madeira fared worst (14%). Dr. Bonyun thought the miasmas that were deadly to Portuguese were “a congenial stimulant to the natives of Africa.” Humphreys (1992); Pritchett and Tunali (1995). It is possible, though far from certain, that the establishment of dengue as an endemic disease in much of the West Indies, circa 1825–1860, helped build the resistance of resident populations to yellow fever via “cross-immunization” (see Chapter 2). It could be that the influx of Indians and Chinese helped establish dengue, as the slave trade brought yellow fever and malaria, but this seems a remote possibility because the voyages in question took so long, and thus infected travelers would recover (or die) before reaching the West Indies. It could only have happened if A. aegypti and virus made the trip together with many susceptibles, and thereby could keep the virus in circulation for the weeks and months needed.

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of population, and of cities in particular, improved the chance of yellow fever surviving among newborns, newcomers, and mosquitoes, so as to be ever-present in the region. Josiah Nott, a doctor in Mobile, Alabama (and one of the first to suggest that insects communicated yellow fever), put it this way in 1847: Generally, along the southern seaboard, when the forest is first levelled, a town commenced, intermittents and remittents spring up, and in some places of a malignant, fatal type. As the population increases the town spreads, and draining and paving are introduced, yellow fever, the mighty monarch of the south, who scorns the rude field and forest, plants his sceptre in the centre, and drives all other fevers to the outskirts.162 What Nott observed along the Gulf Coast obtained elsewhere in the Greater Caribbean as well: More and bigger cities meant more civilian yellow fever. Yellow fever more often spread outside the Greater Caribbean after 1840, too. More frequent and faster ship travel connected Caribbean ports to distant shores, exporting mosquito and virus continually. Moreover, the more widespread the virus was in the West Indies, the more likely it would find its way aboard ships to Baltimore, Barcelona, or Buenos Aires.163 Military expeditions to Caribbean shores continued to provide ideal opportunities for malaria and yellow fever to wreak havoc on human designs. A Spanish attempt to recover Mexico in 1829 met with defeat at the hands of Antonio L´opez de Santa Anna (1794–1876), and with disaster in the grip of yellow fever in the tierra caliente near Tampico. Santa Anna, a native of Veracruz province and a yellow fever survivor, with an army of mainly local men, seems deliberately to have kept the Spaniards cooped up along the coast, besieging rather than attacking them, so as to invite yellow fever to do its worst. He used his immunity and that of his men, especially the Afro-Mexican jarochos, to good advantage in his struggles with rival caudillos in the chaotic warfare of the 1820s and 1830s. Connections between Mexico City and the outside world necessarily went through Veracruz, and only 162

163

Quoted in Cowdrey (1996:86). Nott had only the most general idea that insects might serve as disease vectors. See Chernin (1983). See Coleman (1987); Buno ˜ (1983); Forrest (1856); Scenna (1974); Bloom (1993); Hillemand (2006) for epidemics outside the Caribbean.

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Santa Anna among the caudillos could safely occupy the port city in summer.164 While Santa Anna consolidated the independence of Mexico, its northern neighbor beginning in 1830 undertook to remove the Amerindians of the U.S. southeast to new homes across the Mississippi. The most challenging part of this program of ethnic cleansing was the Second Seminole War in Florida (1835–1840). The Seminoles were an amalgamation of mainly Creeks, other Amerindians, free blacks, and runaway slaves who had coalesced in the eighteenth century into an independent force in Spanish Florida. After Florida became part of the U.S. in 1819, new settlers arrived leading to conflicts with the Seminoles, and to calls for their removal. The Seminoles resisted and fought a dogged guerrilla war for more than five years. The American generals at first thought it imprudent to fight in the summer months for fear of malaria, which allowed the Seminoles to plant, harvest, and survive the otherwise effective harrying of the U.S. Army. This prolonged the campaign until a new general chose to accept greater losses and fight through the summer. Malaria resistance and mobility were among the few advantages the Seminoles had in this struggle. They had all grown up in the lowland South and most of them in Florida, where malaria was endemic. Many had some African ancestry. In addition, so-called Black Seminoles, people of predominantly African descent, served as their allies. Thus, acquired resistance and in some cases heritable resistance as well helped the Seminoles cope with Florida’s endemic malaria. The U.S. Army eventually prevailed, thanks to superior numbers, weaponry, quinine, and by 1840 its new willingness to fight year-round. It lost 14 percent of its force to disease. Afterward, it escorted most Seminoles to Oklahoma. A handful fled to the Everglades. Thus ended the longest war fought by the U.S. Army between the Revolution and Vietnam.165 Shortly after the end of the Second Seminole War, the U.S. Army marched on Mexico. In the tradition of rising powers with weaker

164

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Fowler (2007:9, 63–4, 137–8); Ortiz Escamilla (2008:215). Why the Barradas expedition attempted to reconquer Mexico by landing in July on a coast known for its deadly fevers is a mystery. Of the many caudillos in nineteenth-century Mexico, few if any had a strong regional base like Santa Anna’s. Gillett (1987:53–72). Some 14% of U.S. soldiers (1,466 regulars by official count) in the war died of disease, and 3% (328) from combat (Mahon 1991:325). Mahon covers every aspect of the war.

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neighbors, the U.S. in 1845–1846 launched a war that would bring it half the national territory of Mexico by 1848. The U.S. invaded first through Texas, but found that battlefield success in the north did not yield Mexican surrender. The climactic blow came when a veteran of the Second Seminole War, Winfield Scott (1786–1866), led an army to the halls of Montezuma. Scott had a college education (William & Mary) and a brief career as a lawyer before embarking on a half century of active army duty, serving every president from Jefferson to Lincoln. He was a student of military history and translated French military manuals. He knew what yellow fever had done to Leclerc’s army in St. Domingue. As a veteran of the Second Seminole War (among many others), he knew what price malaria had exacted from the U.S. Army in Florida. He had an appropriate fear of fevers’ consequences for unacclimatized troops. A meticulous planner, in late 1846 Scott devised a campaign against Mexico that involved landing on the coast of the tierra caliente, the shortest route to Mexico City. His most urgent concern was to take the port of Veracruz quickly and get his army inland and upland before summer began and yellow fever struck. One of his officers, Ulysses S. Grant, shared his concern, writing to his fianc´ee soon after arrival on the Mexican coast: “We will all have to get out of this part of Mexico soon or we will be caught by the yellow fever which I am ten to one more afraid of than the Mexicans.”166 As Scott put it, the Veracruz region presented an enemy “more formidable than the defences of other countries: I allude to the v´omito.”167 Scott succeeded. Despite landing in March, two months later than he wished (ships proved difficult to find), Scott had his army in the mountains en route to Mexico City by late April. His opposite number, Santa Anna, hoped the fortress at Veracruz could hold out long enough to pin the Americans in the killing fields of the tierra caliente, letting yellow fever come to his aid, as he had done to the Spanish army in 1829.168 But U.S. artillery made short work (twelve days) of Veracruz in late March 1847, and routed Santa Anna near Xalapa, 166

167

168

Grant to Julia Dent, 25 February 1847, quoted in McCaffrey (1992:62). On the war generally, I relied on McCaffrey (1992); Winders (1997); Eisenhower (2000); and for some matters, Miller (1978). Major-General Winfield Scott, “Vera Cruz and Its Castle,” Quoted in Espinosa (2009:71–2). Eisenhower (2000:253–4) summarizes Scott’s plan. De Palo (1997:120).

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where the mountains begin, in mid-April. Scott soon astounded all students of military affairs by taking almost his entire force up into the mountains, leaving his supply and communication lines almost undefended, and obliging his troops to live off the land in enemy territory. The Duke of Wellington allegedly proclaimed that now Scott “was lost.”169 (The Duke would later proclaim Scott a genius.) His gamble had the effect of shielding his dwindling force (many were volunteers entitled to go home) from yellow fever. Once at elevation and free from the yellow fever zone, Scott could take his time to prepare his final assault. By September, he was in control of Mexico City. Roughly 12,000 men served with Scott. Among them were Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and several others who would soon become famous. Officially, only 109 died from yellow fever.170 This good fortune had little to do with advances in medicine: The quinine, cupping, bloodletting, enemas, and mercury used by the U.S. Army doctors did not help yellow fever victims.171 Instead, it owed everything to Scott’s determination to avoid summer in the lowlands, his gamble concerning his supply lines and, of course, his army’s ability to prevail in the field quickly. Like Vernon, Albemarle, and Leclerc before him, Scott had only a few weeks to succeed or see his army melt away from yellow fever. Unlike them, he constructed his war plan accordingly, and, unlike them, he was able to get his army to higher ground, where A. aegypti would not follow, before the summer. His victory led to the cession of all the lands from California to Texas to the U.S. in 1848, consolidating its position as the greatest power in the American hemisphere.172 Scott, Lee, Grant, and tens of thousands of others enjoyed a brief respite but soon enough found themselves at war again. To the surprise of most and the disappointment of many, in the American Civil War (1861–1865), yellow fever did not matter – despite a few small outbreaks among Union soldiers occupying posts in Florida and the 169

170

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172

Quoted in Eisenhower (2000:298). The original source is Scott’s memoirs, probably not to be trusted because few soldiers cared more about their public image and legacy than Scott. Gillett (1987:116–17). Perhaps the real total was a few hundred: Vandiver (1947:382) cited in Espinosa (2009:72). Of the 115,000 U.S. soldiers who fought in the war, about 10% died from diseases. Porter (1852–1858) gives a detailed account of treatments. He ran an army hospital in Veracruz. In the U.S. view, Texas was already part of the Union as of 1845, but Mexico recognized this only in the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo (1848).

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Carolinas. Only 436 Union soldiers died from yellow fever, and only 1,355 cases were recorded – notwithstanding the best efforts of a Confederate surgeon arrested for trying to import yellow-fever infected (or so he thought) clothing into northern ports in 1863.173 When Union forces took New Orleans in April 1862, most expected (and many hoped) that yellow fever would lay waste to the northerners. Four serious outbreaks in the 1850s in New Orleans had killed some 20,000 people, mostly immigrants. Hence, the expectation that for the Union the city would prove “a prize which will cost them vastly more to keep than [it] is worth, if his Saffron Majesty shall make his usual annual visit. . . . ”174 But it did not. The Union quarantine of arriving vessels apparently worked. Too few (if any) infected A. aegpyti and infected people arrived in occupied New Orleans to set the virus loose among the Union army. Yellow fever returned in 1867, and several times thereafter until 1905.175 Malaria scarcely affected the outcome of the Civil War either. Malaria was not sufficiently lethal, and not sufficiently partisan in its effects, to play a decisive role. Although the Union army reported well over a million cases of malaria (among 2.1 million men who served in it), it tallied only 4,760 malaria deaths.176 This put malaria a distant third, after dysenteries and typhus, as a cause of death among the quarter million disease deaths recorded in the Union army. Quinine, which the Union army used in abundance, helped.177 Malaria probably afflicted more Confederate soldiers because more of them spent more summers in malarial zones and because the Union blockade kept quinine scarce in Confederate territory – Lee’s troops resorted to many substitutes, including coating their bodies in turpentine.178 But malaria probably killed fewer Confederates because their acquired resistance was probably greater. The records have not survived, so nothing more than guesswork is possible. 173

174 175 176 177

178

Bollet (2002:296–302); Schroeder-Lein (2008:222); Robertson (1995:370). The disease history of the Civil War will become much clearer with the forthcoming publication of Andrew Bell’s Mosquito Soldiers: Malaria, Yellow Fever and the Course of the American Civil War (Boton Rouge, LA: LSU Press). Unidentified Virginia newspaper, quoted in Carrigan (1994:84). Carrigan (1994:58–95) on yellow fever in New Orleans, 1850–1867. Bollet (2002:289). Schroeder-Lein (2008:219) says 10,063 malaria deaths. Bollet (2002:236) says the Union army used ten tons of cinchona bark and about twenty tons of quinine (Gillett 1987:273). Hasegawa (2007). This might have helped if anophelines disliked turpentine. More often, they tried using powders from roots thought to resemble cinchona, such as dogwood and willow.

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In the American Civil War, yellow fever and malaria did not shape outcomes for three main reasons. First, interventions such as quinine and quarantine kept infection at bay or cured some of the sick. Second, the technology of killing had improved so much that disease in general killed only twice as many soldiers as combat, compared to six times as many in the Mexican-American War and eight times as many in the American Revolution. At Antietam in 1862, each army lost more men killed in a single day than the U.S. Army lost to all causes in the Mexican War. Third and most importantly, most soldiers spent most of the war outside the domains of endemic yellow fever and malaria.179 It is also possible there was a fourth reason: Soldiers who fell ill found themselves in the care of sympathetic civilians who could provide food and water more often than in other campaigns where population densities were lower or mercy rarer.180 The campaigns of the nineteenth century show the continued power of differential immunity and resistance to shape military and political history, but they also show that people and organizations learned a few more lessons. Even though no one as yet understood how yellow fever and malaria spread, the emergence of routine quarantines (from the 1820s onward) helped check the diffusion of all microbes. The importance of elevation as a shield against malaria and yellow fever became common knowledge, as did the efficacy of quinine against malaria. Armies tried to use resistant or immune troops when they could – which as they understood things usually meant black soldiers – as the British did throughout the West Indies from the 1790s,181 as Leclerc did in Haiti, as Bol´ıvar and Morillo did in Venezuela, and as the U.S. Army did to some extent in the Civil War.182 Santa Anna in his struggles also used soldiers accustomed to the tierra caliente, often the Afro-Mexican jarochos. In one extraordinary episode, the French army recruited a battalion of mainly Dinka slave soldiers from Darfur, in what was then the Egyptian Sudan, to fight in the Veracruz lowlands during 179

180

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182

In addition to Bollet (2002) and Gillett (1987), see Steiner (1968) on yellow fever, malaria, and the Civil War. Northern soldiers at Vicksburg in 1863 fell ill (with malaria) at high rates, but many found succor at local convents (Oakes 1998). Buckley (1979). In dire emergencies, blacks had been recruited to armies and militias throughout the eighteenth century (Pares 1936:255–7). The U.S. Army tried to use black troops in the most malarial environments (Gillett 1987:277–8).

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their near-conquest and partial occupation of Mexico in 1862–1867. Napoleon III explicitly sought troops resistant to yellow fever, which had reduced one of his battalions from 1,000 to 118 men. Apparently, most of the Dinka were immune to yellow fever, although they had troubles with typhus and tuberculosis.183 Somehow, all these lessons did not sink in among the upper echelons of the Spanish army. It suffered greatly from both yellow fever and malaria while trying to restore Santo Domingo to its empire in 1861– 1865, while trying to win back some of Mexico during the French intervention in 1862, and even more grievously in trying to prevent Cuba from gaining independence.184

cuba: a ghastly little war Nineteenth-century Cuba was a fast-growing bastion of colonial capitalism. The sugar business, which had expanded in the wake of the destruction in Haiti, prospered decade after decade, deforesting the island and supporting a very wealthy and worldly elite. Planters seized on the latest technologies, bringing railroads and telegraphs to Cuba before they came to Spain. They used steam engines to process sugar on their plantations. By the 1870s, Cuba provided 42 percent of the world’s sugar. As the slave trade wound down after 1850 (and ended in 1867), Cuba attracted immigrants in larger and larger numbers. By the 1880s, more than 100,000 Chinese had come to work in the cane fields and stayed. Each year, tens of thousands of Spaniards came to Cuba, some as soldiers, some as seasonal laborers (10,000 to 20,000 per year) to work the sugar and tobacco harvests, and some as immigrants expecting to stay. About 8 or 9 percent of the 1.7 million inhabitants of Cuba in 1890 had been born in Spain. Counting sojourners, more than half a million Spaniards had come to Cuba between 1868 and 1894. This high rate of influx kept the yellow fever virus in rapid circulation. From

183

184

Hill and Hogg (1995, esp. 30–5, 61, 103); Dabbs (1963:226–7); Edwards (2002). A Spanish army withdrew from Veracruz in this campaign on account of yellow fever, ignoring its orders (Moreno Fraginals and Moreno Maso 1993:79). On disease in the Santo Domingo war, Massons (1994, 2:185–8); Moreno Fraginals and Moreno Mas´o (1993:83). Spain lost 15,000 men in this war, 93% to disease. The Dominicans once again showed the efficacy of guerilla war when combined with differential immunity.

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Map 7.3. Cuba

1854 onward outbreaks occurred almost every year, especially when large troop movements took place, as in 1868–1878.185 For most of the nineteenth century, Cuban elites had preferred to remain under Spain rather than become independent. Apart from sentimental ties among those born in Spain or of Spanish parentage, practical reasons made Cubans want to remain Spanish. The slave trade, which brought about 800,000 additional Africans to Cuba between 1790 and 1867, also brought what seemed to whites like the Africanization of Cuba. Slave revolts heightened white anxieties. Spain and its garrisons remained the guarantor of the social order. But as the slave trade wound down, more and more slaves won their freedom (slavery ended in 1886). Immigration from Spain altered Cuba’s 185

Mart´ınez Fortun y Foyo (1952:28–37) lists Cuban epidemics and says during 1868–1878 some 11,600 civilians and 20,000 soldiers died of yellow fever. Moreno Fraginals and Moreno Mas´o (1993:63–4, 81–5, 99–101, 144) say that in the years 1868–1880 the Spanish army sent about 15,000 men annually to Cuba, whereas about 5,000 died from disease each year; slightly more than half of disease deaths (among Spanish soldiers in Cuba, 1868–1880) were attributed to yellow fever. Guerra (1999:654) has similar data and shows that 21–57% of soldiers admitted to military hospitals with yellow fever (1868– 1897) died of it. Raw monthly data from thirty-five Spanish military hospitals appears in “Estado general comparativo de los individuos invalidos y muertos de fiebre amarilla . . . 1867–1879,” a manuscript in the National Library of Medicine (Bethesda, MD). On demography and immigration generally, Palaz´on Ferrando (1998); Amores Carredano (1998:145–8). In the late nineteenth century, Havana recorded between 500 and 1,000 civilian yellow fever deaths in most years, mainly among new arrivals (Gorgas 1915:71; Guerra 1999:654). Smallman-Raynor and Cliff (1999) review the disease environment of Cuba in the 1890s.

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complexion: Whereas in 1830 Afro-Cubans accounted for nearly 60 percent of the population, by 1870 they comprised about 40 percent, and only one in four Cubans was a slave. The Cuban elites’ eagerness to host the Spanish army diminished accordingly. Now Cuban grievances against Spain weighed more heavily in the balance. Spain taxed Cuba heavily and withheld political rights from Cubans that were granted in Spain itself. Additional taxes imposed to pay for the unsuccessful Spanish war (1861–1865) in the Dominican Republic provided the straw that broke the camel’s back. A revolution in Spain in 1868 provided the opportunity. Cubans in the poor and provincial east raised the standard of rebellion in 1868 and soon gathered thousands of slaves and free blacks. For years, Spain was too weak and distracted to do anything much to counter the Cuban rising. But after (yet another) Bourbon restoration in 1875, the divisions among the Cubans told. With the help of many Cubans, especially from the west of the island, the Spanish army restored at least the appearance of the former status quo by 1878. A cordon sanitaire across the narrow waist of the island confined the revolt, known as the Ten Years War, to eastern Cuba, making it easier to stamp out. Spain remained poor, committed to costly imperial wars in Morocco, and thus obliged to squeeze Cuba harder than ever. The rise of sugar beet in Europe, in Spain especially, also cut into Cuba’s sugar exports and thus its prosperity. The U.S. market for sugar briefly came to the rescue, but in the 1890s new tariffs, the emergence of Hawaiian and Louisiana sugar, and an international depression combined to put the Cuban economy into crisis. Two particularly damaging hurricanes added to the misery. Nationalist-minded intellectuals found ever more reasons to deny Spain’s right to govern Cuba. In 1895, another rebellion broke out.186 The rebellion arose in the backward eastern part of the island, led by veterans of the Ten Years War, notably the ex-Spanish officer M´aximo G´omez (1836–1905) and the Afro-Cuban Antonio Maceo (1845–1896). Born in Santo Domingo, G´omez had fought for Spain in Caribbean wars as a young man, but in 1868 had thrown in with Cuban revolutionaries and now fought at their head in his early sixties. Maceo was one of many exiled revolutionaries who hurried back to Cuba to join the insurrection. His father, a white Venezuelan, had fought in Bol´ıvar’s 186

On the evolution of Cuban independence, Amores Carredano (1998); Ferrer (1999); P´erez (1983, 2001); Tone (2006).

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war before moving to Cuba. Both G´omez and Maceo proved themselves skilled guerilla commanders, and utterly merciless in pursuit of their goals. With no more than a few thousand ill-armed, ill-clad, ill-fed men under their command at any single time, they could ill afford pitched battles with the Spanish army; in their two most famous victories they killed fewer than a hundred Spaniards.187 The rebels had more horses and greater mobility than the Spanish forces, and could when necessary melt away into the general population. But little else stood in their favor, so they resorted to a war of ambush, massacre, and the torch. They burned the towns and plantations wherever they could, in an effort to destroy Cuba’s economy and its value to Spain. They sought to force men to join the rebellion by depriving them of their livelihoods and sustenance. Most who joined were Afro-Cubans, young and unmarried, with little to lose. Perhaps 40,000 men served in the insurgents’ armies over the course of three years, but no more than a fraction of this total at any one time. Cubans fought on both sides; more fought for Spain than for independence. Militarily the mambises, as they came to be known, posed little risk to the Spanish army, but politically they prevailed. They marched from east to west almost the length of the island, burning as they went. They goaded the Spaniards into unpopular policies, courted foreign support – especially in the U.S. – and, most of all, used their mobility to avoid Spanish forces except when they found patrols in vulnerable situations. Thus they kept their rebellion alive, like Washington, Toussaint, and Bol´ıvar before them, and emerged victorious because time and the “climate” was on their side.188 In the Spanish army, G´omez and Maceo faced a force composed of scrawny, conscripted Spanish peasants, undernourished like their own men, although much better armed. Almost everyone who could afford to buy his way out of Spanish military service did so. The Spanish army in the late nineteenth century had plenty of experience crushing strikes and mounting coups. Its doctrines, borrowed from Prussian examples, aimed to prepare it for conventional warfare in Europe, although it fought mainly colonial anti-guerilla wars, mainly in Morocco, but also in the Philippines, Santo Domingo, and Cuba.

187 188

Tone (2006:80, 125), battles of Peralejo, 28 killed, and Mal Tiempo, 65 killed. G´omez (1975:273–369) wrote a diary of the war that reveals just how ill-armed and improvisational the rebellion was.

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In Cuba in early 1895, the Spanish army had 13,000 men, soon raised to 100,000, plus 20,000 to 30,000 Cuban irregulars. In the course of the war, more than 200,000 Spaniards served in Cuba. They were the poorest – or the keenest – in the Spanish army: Soldiers with a little money could buy their way out of Cuban duty.189 At first they were led by General Arsenio Mart´ınez Campo, a political general who had negotiated the end to the Ten Years War, overthrown a republic in Spain, and overseen a catastrophe in a Moroccan campaign. Instructed to fight “to the last man and the last peseta,” he found the measures he considered necessary for success too distasteful to execute and asked to be recalled in favor of General Valeriano Weyler (1838–1930), soon to earn the sobriquet “the Butcher Weyler.”190 Weyler, whose father was Prussian but a Spanish officer, had a distinguished military career from age sixteen. He was first in his class at the army staff college, volunteered for Caribbean duty (and survived a bout with yellow fever) as a young man, and by age twenty-five had become rich by winning the national lottery. A less driven man might have retired to his home on the island of Mallorca. However, Weyler fought again in the Caribbean, in civil wars in Spain, and in counterinsurgency warfare in the Philippines, before becoming a senator. With the support of a conservative government in Spain, Weyler assumed full powers in Cuba in February 1896. He used those powers fully. Weyler developed a strategy that he and others had used in the Philippines, and to a small extent in the Ten Years War, which came to be known as “reconcentration.” It involved moving the rural population into the towns and cities, into camps on their edges when necessary, so as to isolate the insurgents from the surrounding population and thereby deny their enemy cover, food, horses, and new recruits. Commanders had used versions of this policy against guerillas for millennia, and would do so many times again, although rarely with Weyler’s efficiency. Beginning the spring of 1896, Weyler’s army relocated half a million Cubans, almost a third of the population. This had the desired effect of making conditions much more difficult for the insurgents, who suffered a further blow when Maceo was killed in a skirmish in 1896. But reconcentration backfired politically. About 189

190

P´erez (1983:74). Pascual Mart´ınez (1996) gives the official figures for the Spanish army size in Cuba. Slightly higher ones appear in Moreno Fraginals and Moreno Mas´o (1993:132). Amores Carredano (1998:251–312, esp. 251–3); Beldarra´ın Chaple (2005:57).

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150,000 Cubans (9% of the island’s population) died of disease or starvation in the camps and Spanish-held towns, which became a propaganda disaster for Weyler and the Spanish.191 Smallpox, allegedly brought by Spanish conscripts, and yellow fever, to which rural Cubans were introduced when dragged to the cities, carried off many thousands. In Spain, the political opposition seized on the inhumanity of Weyler’s policies to lambaste the government, and in the U.S. the jingoist press and politicians, keen to see Cuba become American, trumpeted Weyler’s brutality and Spain’s unfitness to rule. But Weyler and Spain had a more serious problem: the murderous campaigns of A. aegypti. The Spanish army in the 1890s had many defects but kept reasonably good records, which allow a more precise accounting of casualties than for earlier campaigns.192 In the Cuban War of Independence, the Spanish army lost 3,100 men to combat and 41,000 to disease (and occasional accidents). Thus, about 91 percent of all military deaths came via microbes. According to official counts, 16,329 died of yellow fever, or 36 percent of all military deaths. The others were attributed to malaria, typhus, dysentery, and other infections. But journalists claimed Spanish medical authorities systematically under-reported yellow fever deaths and attributed thousands of them to other causes to reduce panic among conscripts and hide their own ineffectiveness. A recent estimate puts yellow fever deaths in the Spanish army above 30,000, or about one sixth of all soldiers sent to Cuba.193 More still – at least 4,000 – died en route home, on vessels known as “cemetery ships.”194 Beyond the death toll, the Spanish soldiers who stayed alive were often sick. One hospital chief estimated that half of all soldiers entered hospital within two months of setting foot on Cuba. In January 1898, when 114,000 Spanish soldiers remained on the island, 64,000 were too sick to perform duties. In the course of the war, 191

192

193 194

Beldarra´ın Chaple (2005:65) cites several larger estimates, up to half a million, but Tone (2006:223) has sorted through the evidence most carefully. Official figures for 1896 were printed in Larra y Cerezo (1901). His figures show yellow fever accounted for about 75% of disease deaths in 1896 (p. 26). Pascual Mart´ınez (1996:484) summarizes the official data. The ultimate source is the Diario Oficial del Ministerio de la Guerra. Espinosa (2009:71). Moreno Fraginals and Moreno Mas´o (1993:151) say at least 4,000 died on transport ships bound for Spain. Their inquiry appears more detailed than P´erez (1983:75), who gives 3,000.

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Spanish soldiers were admitted to military hospitals about 900,000 times – several times per man.195 Medical standards remained miserable. Quinine was in short supply, and much of it wasted on yellow fever patients. The hospitals served as foci of infection in which sick soldiers swapped diseases, sometimes rising from their beds after a bout with yellow fever only to fall victim the next day to malaria. To prevent ants, roaches, and other crawling vermin from preying on the sick, hospitals carefully put all four legs of every bed into pots or pans of water. This kept the ants at bay but served to maximize the A. aegypti population within the hospitals, ensuring rapid transmission of yellow fever. When hospitals overflowed, yellow fever victims piled up in the sugar warehouses along the wharves of Havana. One harborside hospital became so notorious for yellow fever that the Spanish closed it.196 Some Spanish officers tried to shield themselves from yellow fever by drinking cold champagne, which could not have helped the war effort.197 The role of mosquitoes as disease vectors as yet had not become well known, although it would very soon.198 G´omez’ ragtag soldiers had even less in the way of medical care, but they needed less. As (mainly) Afro-Cubans, they probably carried some inherited resistance to yellow fever and malaria, and many had grown up with and survived both (although rural Cubans might have avoided yellow fever). They lost about 1,300 men to disease, according to official estimates, only 30 percent (as opposed to the Spaniards’ 91%) of military deaths. To some small extent, this derived from the fact they were in the countryside and not in the urban centers where yellow fever lurked. But the main reason was differential immunity and resistance. The insurgents were almost all immune to yellow fever and resistant to malaria, although malaria still probably accounted for most of their disease deaths.199 195

196 197 198

199

Tone (2006:97–100); Esteban Marfil (2003:176). Tone (2002:284) inadvertently wrote 9 million hospital admissions. The yellow fever epidemics began in Oriente and moved westward because Spanish units followed the rebel army (Smallman-Raynor 1999:340–2). Smallman-Raynor and Cliff (1999:342); Espinosa (2009:69). Tone (2006:154). Esteban Marfil (2000); Esteban Marfil (2003) details the travails of the Spanish military medical establishment. See also Massons (1994, 2:164–73); P´erez (1983:74–8). Tone (2006:97–100).

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The Cuban insurgents fully recognized the ally they had in yellow fever. All Cubans knew that yellow fever attacked newcomers to the island. All with military experience knew that for decades, Spanish army units had routinely suffered heavily from yellow fever, and some expected it to kill half the newly arrived Spanish troops. The grisly experience of the Spanish army in Cuba after 1895 was plain for all to see. Maceo and G´omez, like Toussaint (and perhaps Bol´ıvar) before them, prudently exploited the fact of differential immunity and resistance, avoiding the sort of battle that could lose the revolution at a stroke, and instead fighting small engagements and letting yellow fever do its worst. In his field diary, G´omez in July 1897 predicted that the “lack of health” among Spanish soldiers, together with financial problems, would force the Spanish to withdraw from Cuba.200 He acknowledged his reliance on yellow fever, often saying that his best generals were “June, July, and August.” He might have awarded September and October equal rank, and brevetted the modest El Nino ˜ of 1897 as colonel.201 Spain could not stamp out a competent guerilla insurgency with nearly a quarter of its army dying from disease and most of the rest of it sick. Political disenchantment with the Cuban war brought a new government to power in Spain, which recalled Weyler, and began to seek a political solution. Before it got far, in the spring of 1898 the U.S. declared war on Spain. Various voices in the U.S. had sought to add Cuba to the republic many times since the time of John Quincy Adams, but in the 1890s the American appetite for overseas expansion was at its height. Although the U.S. remained officially neutral before 1898, Americans had covertly aided the rebels throughout the war. Then a battleship, the Maine, sent to Havana to safeguard American lives and property, exploded, probably by accident, killing 266 sailors. That provided reason enough for the U.S. to declare war, attack Spanish forces on land and sea, in Cuba and the Philippines. The war in Cuba lasted only a few weeks. The U.S. lost some 332 soldiers killed in action, and nearly 3,000 to disease, many of whom died after the fighting stopped. Spain lost Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. The U.S. diplomat, John Hay, famously called it a “splendid little war.” Cuba became a U.S. dependency until 1902. Thereafter it was nominally free, thanks to G´omez, Maceo, and their guerillas, thanks to 200 201

G´omez (1975:333). Espinosa (2009:68–9). For G´omez’ quotation, Souza y Rodr´ıguez (1936:228–9).

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the U.S. intervention, and thanks to yellow fever and malaria. Cubans have lionized their heroes. Americans venerated theirs, and elected one, Theodore Roosevelt, to the presidency before carving his likeness on Mt. Rushmore. There are no monuments to mosquitoes, far and away the most lethal foe of the Spanish army in Cuba.

Conclusion A long chapter deserves a short conclusion. By the 1790s the plantation economy filled most of the suitable landscapes of the French and British Caribbean, and reached its apogee in St. Domingue. The ecological and demographic effects of the plantation system ensured that plentiful infected mosquitoes would greet almost all newcomers to the region, and those susceptible would likely contract yellow fever and malaria. By the 1890s, the same was true throughout the island of Cuba. Thus, the large expeditionary forces sent from Europe between 1793 and 1898 met the same horrible fate as had those under Vernon and Albemarle in earlier times. In Haiti, New Granada, and Cuba, their mission was the same as Cornwallis’ in North America – to defeat revolution. Like Cornwallis, they all failed in large part due to the partisan impacts of mosquito-borne disease. In the changed political world after the 1770s, differential immunity served to support revolutionaries in their struggles. In the cases of Toussaint, Santa Anna, and G´omez, and possibly Bol´ıvar and others as well, it seems highly likely that revolutionary strategists recognized the effects of yellow fever and adjusted their war plans with it in mind – as had Spanish imperial defense planners in the eighteenth century. Winfield Scott explicitly planned his campaign in Mexico in 1847 around yellow fever. For the moment no one yet knew how to fight against yellow fever, but by the end of the nineteenth century more and more people understood how to fight their wars with it.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Conclusion: Vector and Virus Vanquished, 1880–1914

Both randomness and regularity exist in history, but in variable proportions. The settlement, empire-building, warfare, and revolutions of the Greater Caribbean involved regular patterns not clear to all participants, if surely to some. The varying valor and skill of the generals and admirals, the arc of the cannonballs as affected by the wind – these may have been random. But the outbreaks of yellow fever and malaria upon the introduction of thousands of nonimmunes into the region were regular events and highly predictable, even if puzzling, to those familiar with the region. These outbreaks were not random except in their timing, which depended mainly on the timing of new arrivals of virus-fodder, and in their severity, which depended on many things. Instead, they formed a regular pattern that constrained randomness, and severely narrowed the range of likely outcomes of the political struggles in the Greater Caribbean. The pattern did not quite determine political outcomes because highly unlikely things can always happen – Finns or Maori might somehow have conquered the whole region – but it dramatically raised the probability that the Spanish Empire in the Americas would stay Spanish until 1800 and that the revolutions fought between 1776 and 1826, and that of 1895–1898, would succeed militarily.

The Argument Recapitulated Put less philosophically, the aim in these pages has been to convince readers of the strength of the linkages between ecological and political affairs in general, and in particular of the power of yellow fever and, to 304

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a lesser extent malaria, to shape settlement, empire-building, imperial rivalries, and revolutions in the Greater Caribbean from the 1640s to the 1910s. Before the 1640s, yellow fever played a minimal role, if any, in the Americas. But its virulence, its communicability, and its capacity to confer full immunity on survivors meant that the gulf between those susceptible to it and those safe from it acquired great political and military implications. The same was true of malaria but to a lesser extent because it was less lethal and there are many gradations of resistance from full to zero. The Atlantic powers of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, try as they might, could not take and hold chunks of the Spanish Empire in America. Britain in particular tried time and again, most determinedly in 1741–1742 and in 1762, and found that the more men it committed to the effort, the more thoroughly yellow fever destroyed its soldiers and sailors. If composed of men born and raised outside of yellow fever zones, an attacking army could not remain intact for more than a couple of weeks in the Caribbean, especially in the rainy months, and in a span of eight weeks would almost certainly lose half or more of its manpower. Despite these discouraging odds, the prospective rewards in the Greater Caribbean moivated many predatory efforts. The notion of controlling the silver and trade of Spanish America dazzled the imaginations of first buccaneers and then statesmen; the idea of acquiring new sugar islands whetted appetites almost as keenly. But (apologies to Jimmy Cliff) the harder they came, the harder they fell, and the clearer it became to Spanish officials that building fortifications and relying on fevers was their best defense posture. Mosquitoes served as unpaid and unacknowledged auxiliaries in the defense of the Spanish Empire and proved far more deadly than militia or regular army troops. Yellow fever and malaria later functioned as fifth (and sixth) columns in the revolutionary wars that began in Atlantic America in the 1770s. The power of pathogens, and differential resistance to them, radically improved the otherwise doubtful military prospects of the ragged legions of Washington and Greene, Toussaint and Dessalines, Bol´ıvar, G´omez and Maceo. Cornwallis, LeClerc, Morillo, and Weyler, and the doctors who served them, had no answer for yellow fever’s assaults on their armies, and insufficient response for malaria’s. Thus, as claimed in the Introduction, the mosquitoes that carried yellow fever and malaria underpinned the geopolitical status quo in the Greater Caribbean before the 1770s, and thereafter undermined it.

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Vector and Virus Vanquished It is interesting to note how these matters affected the early history of the United States. Malaria helped win the American Revolution, and yellow fever helped convince Napoleon to sell the heartland of North America to Jefferson in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Together with the Constitution, these are perhaps two of the three foundations of the country. The emergence of the U.S. as an imperial power after the 1890s also was bound up with yellow fever: The U.S. Army in Cuba after 1898 played a central role in taming yellow fever, and armed with that knowledge the American military was able to undertake the construction of the Panama Canal. These are oft-told tales, and I shall retell them only briefly. They bring down the curtain on a 250-year long era in which pathogens and people were co-regent over human affairs in the Greater Caribbean.

cuba and yellow fever control, 1898–1900 When the U.S. Army began its occupation of Cuba in 1898, its generals and doctors recognized that yellow fever posed a stern challenge. They had paid close attention to the Spanish army’s debacle. By June 1900, the U.S. Army Yellow Fever Commission, headed by Dr. Walter Reed, had opened shop. Reed had earned an M.D. from the University of Virginia at age seventeen and since the 1870s had been an army doctor mainly in the West. He attended to Geronimo as well as to many a U.S. soldier.1 When sent to Havana, Reed and his associates already suspected the Aedes aegypti. In the course of the nineteenth century, several medical authors had suggested diseases might be transmitted by mosquitoes. A Cuban doctor, Carlos Juan Finlay (1833–1915), a multilingual polymath of Franco-Scottish parentage educated in France and Philadelphia, had even fingered the A. aegpyti as the likeliest yellow fever vector in 1881–1882.2 Finlay conducted experiments that he

1

2

Reed’s biography appears in Delaporte (1991), Bean (1982), and on the University of Virginia’s Philip S. Hensch Walter Reed Fever Collection website that includes many original documents: http://yellowfever.lib.virginia.edu/ reed/story.html. L´opez S´anchez (2007) for a treatment of Finlay; more briefly, Chaves-Carballo (2005). I have come across one tantalizing piece of evidence that there may

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himself regarded as inconclusive, and his views attracted little support. The idea that insects might carry diseases was still a strange one. However, in the early 1890s ticks were implicated as disease vectors, and in 1897 a British military doctor had decisively shown that mosquitoes carried malaria. Thanks to the microbiological work of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, among others, medical research in general was in tumult and old theories more vulnerable than usual. The reigning theories about yellow fever involved filth, miasmas, and mysterious particles called fomites. Reed’s group first had to discredit the filth and fomites view favored by their boss, the U.S. Surgeon General, before conducting the experiments that clearly incriminated A. aegypti. Those experiments cost the lives of a few of the volunteers who allowed themselves to be bitten by infected mosquitoes. What Reed’s commission did that Finlay had not was to allow for the fact that humans are infective for only about three days, early on, and that mosquitoes are infective only a week or so after they have ingested the virus. Once they had that figured out, they could infect people reliably via A. aegypti. They won over the U.S. Army’s military governor of Cuba, General Leonard Wood, who had a medical education and firmly supported the commission against its bureaucratic enemies. Their work attracted ridicule, for example from The Washington Post (November 2, 1900), which opined that: “Of all the silly and nonsensical rigamarole of yellow fever that has yet found its way into print – and there has been enough of it to build a fleet – the silliest beyond compare is to be found in the arguments and theories generated by a mosquito hypothesis.”3 But with the support of key figures in the Army, the Commission completed its proof and set about controlling A. aegypti in Cuba. That work fell to another army doctor, William Gorgas (1854–1920). A skeptic won over by Reed’s experiments,4 Gorgas was in outlook a typical American sanitarian of the late nineteenth century. He believed in systematic science, in its application as a public duty, and in the special charge of the “white man” (as he often put it) to bring health to

3 4

have been a popular belief in mosquitoes as vectors: In the 1850s a British doctor noted, with amusement, that his servant believed mosquitoes carried malaria (White 1859:3). Quoted in Oldstone (1998:64–5). Gorgas (1915:72–109) prints some of their correspondence.

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the tropics.5 He looked forward to the day when white Americans could live safely in the tropics and claim them for progress and prosperity. Indeed, he maintained in 1903 that the purpose of taking Cuba was to rid it of yellow fever.6 His father, Josiah Gorgas, had seen American soldiers die “by the hundred of yellow fever” in Veracruz in 1847.7 Gorgas the younger had survived a bout of it in Texas as a young man and made the conquest of yellow fever his life’s ambition. First in Havana and then throughout urban Cuba, Gorgas and his anti-mosquito brigades attacked A. aegypti breeding sites, covering rain barrels, cisterns, and so forth. They put up screens and nets to keep mosquitoes from moving freely. The fussy breeding habits of the mosquito and its limited flying range made it the easiest to control of any major disease vector. The military authority accorded Gorgas facilitated the intrusive measures needed for mosquito control. By 1902, yellow fever had disappeared entirely from Havana, perhaps for the first time since 1647.8

panama Gorgas next turned his talents to Panama, which had recently burnished its reputation as a graveyard for Europeans thanks to an ill-starred French attempt to build a trans-isthmian canal. The Spanish conquistador Balboa had convinced his king of the virtues of a Panama canal and many afterwards, including the irrepressible William Paterson and the ubiquitous Humboldt, had entertained the same thought. In the 1850s, a railroad was built across the isthmus at the cost of 5,000–10,000 lives lost to disease. The railroad carried very heavy traffic but, of course, required expensive transshipment. A canal would not.

5 6

7

8

For example, Gorgas (1915:284–92). Address Delivered to the D.C. Medical Association, Gorgas Papers, Library of Congress. Vandiver (1947:382). Josiah Gorgas may have exaggerated; officially U.S. Army losses to yellow fever on Scott’s Mexican campaign totaled only 109. Gillett (1987:116–17). For Gorgas’ biography: Gorgas (1915); Gorgas and Hendrick (1924); Litsios (2001). On yellow fever eradication in Cuba: Gillett (1995); Oldstone (1998:45– 66); Chaves-Carballo (2005); Pierce and Writer (2005); and the University of Virginia’s Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Yellow Fever Collection website: http://yellowfever.lib.virginia.edu/reed/story.html.

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The French effort took shape in the 1880s, organized by another irrepressible impresario, the moving spirit behind the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps (1805–1894).9 A career diplomat of distinguished ancestry, de Lesseps among other things hoped to restore France to its rightful position, much damaged by the humiliation of the FrancoPrussian War of 1870–1871. Another engineering triumph and a profitable canal would answer nicely. In 1879, he bribed enough deputies to win French government support for a sea-level canal through Panama, for which purpose he courted investors and formed a company. Digging began in 1882. Workers came from a dozen European countries, but mainly from the West Indies, especially Jamaica. An October 1884 company count indicated 19,000 employees, of whom 85 percent were black West Indians.10 The labor force averaged about 10,000, at first working mainly with picks and shovels rather than steam machinery. Putting thousands of fresh arrivals, especially Europeans, within reach of the mosquitoes of Panama provoked epidemics of yellow fever and malaria. The ports, much expanded for the canal effort, suited A. aegypti well, as did the new-built camps and barracks with their water barrels and cisterns. Anopheles albimanus flourished in the new landscapes torn up by diggers: millions of new puddles perfect for mosquito eggs, and no way for fish to get at them.11 The consequences of sending thousands of men (and not a few women and children) within range of vector mosquitoes were predictably dismal. Estimates of the total death toll range from 5,000 to 23,000. Gorgas put the figure at 22,189, and calculated the annual death rate among employees of the French company at 24 percent.12 Contingents of European laborers died fastest, about one-third of them in all. But many of African descent died too, of pneumonia, tuberculosis, and dysentery as well as yellow fever and malaria.13 French authorities tried to hide 9 10 11

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Diesbach (1998) for a biography. Heimermann (1996:109). Sutter (2007) touches on the improvement of the Canal Zone from the An. albimanus point of view. Gorgas (1915:149, 157). Bear in mind Gorgas may have felt a temptation to make the French look bad in comparison to his own record. No figures exist for mortality among the West Indians, let alone figures on deaths from specific diseases. The infrequency of yellow fever in nineteenthcentury Jamaica could have reduced the resistance in that population to the virus, although if a genetic shield against yellow fever exists among people of West African descent, many Jamaicans should have been immune.

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the truth, but as it came clear many French engineers refused to go to Panama. One who did go and took over the management of daily operations was Jules Dingler, who maintained upon arrival that only drunks and dissipated men suffered from yellow fever.14 To show what clean living could do, Dingler brought his family to Panama. His teenage daughter died of yellow fever within three weeks and her elder brother not long after, followed by Dingler’s wife. As the corpses piled up, morale plummeted. Thousands left for fear of an early grave, like the painter Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), who came to Panama to escape the suffocating constraints of French society in 1887. He found long days of spadework under the hot sun lacked charm, and at night was “devoured by mosquitoes.”15 However, he was among the lucky ones, returning to France before dying in Polynesia. Another lucky survivor was M´aximo G´omez, who spent part of his exile from Cuba supervising canal laborers in Panama. In 1885, the death toll peaked and investors panicked. Progress on the ground in Panama was slow, partly because of the shortage of healthy bodies but partly because of mudslides, floods, and the physical difficulties of digging a sea-level canal through the river-crossed rugged terrain of the isthmus. The French hospitals, like those of the Spanish army in Cuba, put the legs of beds into pots or cans of water to prevent crawling insects from reaching the sick, creating A. aegypti breeding sites within their wards. They organized patients by nationality and race, following prevailing segregationist notions, so that those most vulnerable to yellow fever and malaria were kept close together and easily infected one another. Those least susceptible, such as the Jamaicans and Guyanese, could provide no herd immunity if kept to themselves in the hospitals. As Gorgas later noted, if the French had been trying to create epidemics in their hospitals, they could not have done better. Digging stopped with about 40 percent of the work done when the company went bankrupt in 1889.16 The Americans would finish what the French began. Determined to show the qualities of American enterprise and engineering and to 14 15 16

McCullough (1977:154). McCullough (1977:174). The French story is told in McCullough (1977:147–203); Parker (2007:49–195); Heimermann (1996:80–149); Gorgas (1915:138ff). On West Indian labor, Jos (2004).

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improve its strategic position, the U.S. encouraged a revolution that separated Panama from Colombia, acquired title to a trans-isthmian strip, and bought out the French company in 1903 before successfully building a canal between 1904 and 1914. Some 75,000 men worked on the project, as many as 40,000 at once. Fresh off his success in Cuba, Gorgas became chief sanitary officer. Gorgas faced three main obstacles in Panama. One was the U.S. Army hierarchy, initially reluctant to believe in the value of expensive efforts to eradicate mosquitoes – despite the record of success in Cuba. At one point President Roosevelt had to intervene to support Gorgas, who would otherwise have been relieved of his duties. Second were Panamanians who objected to house-to-house searches, fumigation, and the quarantining of individuals in an effort that made little sense to them and seemed (because it was) intended to safeguard the health of foreigners. Gorgas tried diligently to use a light hand and recruited important allies among Panamanians. Third was the scale of the problem of mosquitoes in the Canal Zone. There were two small cities and many miles of forestland, much of it torn up during the 1880s and full of puddles and swamps. As had the French construction, the American effort improved the landscape for An. albimanus and at first raised the risk of malaria. But Gorgas was nothing if not determined. He prevailed over bureaucratic and diplomatic challenges, and in the cities used similar methods to those worked out in Cuba to eliminate A. aegypti breeding sites, to keep mosquitoes away from people where possible, and to keep infected people away from mosquitoes at all costs, sequestering them behind screens in “fever cages.” He even insisted on periodically changing the holy water in Panama’s cathedral when mosquito larvae were found in the baptismal font. By 1906, these measures had succeeded, and yellow fever disappeared from the Canal Zone. Gorgas also took on An. albimanus, the main malaria vector. This mosquito posed a vexing challenge because it had countless breeding sites in rural areas. Malaria was more difficult to control than yellow fever because people who have lived through the disease and show no symptoms can serve as carriers. No thorough eradication was possible, but Gorgas’ mosquito squads succeeded in containing An. albimanus populations sufficiently that malaria rates declined by about 90 percent. They drained puddles and ponds, cut down grass and bush, used sprays and oil in efforts to attack the vector. They used hospitals and quinine against the plasmodia. Officially, 5,609

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died of disease and injury from 1904 through 1914. The Canal Zone in 1905 had a death rate three times higher than that of the continental U.S. By 1914, it had a death rate half that in the U.S.17 The methods used in Cuba and Panama soon spread. U.S. cities along the Gulf Coast experienced their last yellow fever epidemic in 1905, in which the army’s techniques proved their worth. U.S. health officers, doctors, and foundations took the crusade to Ecuador and Peru, and then to Brazil in the 1920s. Local health officials translated techniques into new contexts and – not without some resistance – matched the U.S. Army’s success. Mosquito control, especially of A. aegypti, worked wonders. Yellow fever by 1930 had become very rare. Then in the 1930s, researchers developed a safe, highly effective yellow fever vaccine. With mosquito control and vaccination programs, yellow fever in the Americas soon was confined to the sylvan cycle and ceased to matter much in human affairs. It lost all political significance after 1914, and by 1950 was a trivial public health problem.18

Disease and Power Gorgas thought the sanitation work in Panama would ultimately prove more important than the Canal itself because it would pave the way for white settlement of the tropics.19 He was wrong about the white settlement, but right about the relative importance of disease control 17

18

19

A forthcoming book by Paul Sutter will explore the connections among health, environment, ideologies, and power in the making of the Panama Canal. The conventional story is told briefly in Ziperman (1973), Christie (1978), and Litsios (2001), as well as at length in McCullough (1977) and Parker (2007). When interpreting the death rate data, it is well to remember the Canal Zone had a population mainly of young adults rather than a normal age distribution, and some sick people left and died elsewhere. Moreover, the canal laborers – the bulk of the population – came from all over, but a large proportion hailed from Jamaica (about 12,200), Barbados (9,700), Panama (6,800), Martinique (1,800), and elsewhere in the Caribbean, and thus would likely have carried resistance if not immunity to malaria and yellow fever. Some 9,747 came from the U.S., with New York and Pennsylvania contributing more than 1,000 each. Canal Zone census data appear in Greene (2009:396–9). Cueto (1997); Farley (2004:88–106); on Brazil, where yellow fever control is especially well studied, Cooper (1975); Stepan (1976); Franco (1976:73–199); Chalhoub (1996); Benchimol (1999; 2001); Britto and Cardoso (1973); L¨owy (2001). Gorgas (1915:291–2).

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and the Canal. Effective control of malaria and yellow fever changed the balance of power in the Americas and in the world. The marginalization of yellow fever and containment of malaria in the Americas are often presented as triumphal stories of human (and sometimes more specifically as European and American) conquests of terrible diseases. They are also sometimes presented as part of European, and especially American imperialism. Without wishing to dispute either viewpoint, I offer here a slightly different outlook. Before the sanitation triumphs of Cuba and Panama, yellow fever and malaria carried political significance because of differential resistance and immunity, as this book has sought to show. With the inauguration of a golden age of health, sometimes called a “sanitation revolution” around 1885–1920, differential protection against infectious disease increasingly correlated with the wealth of the society in which one lived, rather than with one’s personal prior disease experience and that of one’s ancestors. Through the provision of clean water, vaccination programs, and eventually effective drug treatments, most infectious diseases became either avoidable or treatable – if one lived in the right societies. The source of differential vulnerability changed. In this new world of effective vaccines and drugs, the richer and better organized societies and states could safeguard their populations’ health at home, and in many cases even abroad. This capacity tended to make these fortunate societies richer and more powerful still. Thanks to their populations’ good health, a positive feedback loop took shape that tended to widen the gulf between rich and poor societies in the last century. In effect, the rich got healthier and the healthy got richer (and more powerful). This differentiation may prove just a passing phase. Long ago, when control of fire provided a great advantage to some human (or hominid) groups over others, those without fire either got it or disappeared. So after a while, all human groups had control of fire, and it no longer served to differentiate among them. It may be that the same pattern will play out with respect to effective disease control: For the past century or more, some societies have had it and others not, but eventually all will have it. There is much evidence for this, as almost every society now has far lower death rates from infectious disease than seventy or a hundred years ago. But it is also possible that the golden age of health will never become universal, and indeed may fade away. Vectors and viruses evolve. Many Anopheles mosquitoes developed resistance to DDT and other

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insecticides, while some malarial plasmodia evolved resistance to all the various drugs used against them. Malaria, once thought to be a disease that public health efforts could drive to extinction, is mounting comebacks in many parts of the world. Unfamiliar viruses still lurk in corners of the biosphere and could break loose, as have HIV, Marburg, and Ebola in recent decades. Even a virus as familiar as yellow fever could make a comeback. Vaccination regimes have lapsed since the 1970s because yellow fever became such a minimal risk that for some people, and for some public health programs, the cost no longer seemed justifiable. Mosquito control programs lapsed as well, for the same reasons. Meanwhile, the warmer climate since 1980 has favored the geographic spread of A. aegypti both in the Americas and in Africa. The resurgence of A. aegypti is part of the reason for recent dengue epidemics. Happily, it took a lot – a concatenation of contingencies – for yellow fever to become a terror in the Americas in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, and it would take more still today. Yellow fever probably will break out more often and more widely in the decades ahead. But its career as a governing factor in human history, mercifully, has come to a close.

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Index

Abarca, Silvestre, 141, 187n161 Abercromby, Gen. Sir Ralph, 246 Acadians at Kourou, 128 Aedes aegypti, 32, 39, 147, 149, 190, 306–308, 312 at Cartagena, 146, 151, 157 in Cuba, 300, 301 drought and, 59, 181 ecology and habits of, 40–44 habitat for at Darien, 121 at Havana, 175–176, 177 in New Orleans, 293 in Panama, 310 in St. Domingue, 240–241 ships and, 42, 43, 167 slaving voyages and, 64, 151 sugar plantations and, 47–52 in Surinam, 196, 198 Africa (see also: Angola, Gambia) Aedes aegypti in, 40 home of yellow fever virus, 32–33, 45 sylvan yellow fever in, 47 Africans (see also: slaves and slavery) in Cuba, 172, 176, 296–297 disease resistance of, 44–46, 53–54, 67–68, 189–190, 288n160 as healers in Caribbean, 81–86 in New Granada, 272 in St. Domingue, 237–238 as soldiers, 266, 294–295 Albemarle, George Keppel Earl of, 171, 178, 181, 183, 184, 185, 187 American Revolution, War of, 20 Germans (Hessians) in, 200, 214, 223

Loyalists in, 202, 203, 210, 213, 214, 217 in Nicaragua, 189–191 smallpox in, 198, 200–201 South Carolina campaigns of, 198–203, 209–18 Yorktown campaign of, 220–32 Amerindians, 21, 22–3 at Darien, 111–112, 115 disease experience of, 16 in Florida, 290 at Kourou, 124 in Nicaragua, 189 in South Carolina, 203 Amsterdam, 24 Anglo-Dutch wars, 19, 95 Angola, 17, 45, 96, 237 yellow fever in 97n15, 239n9 Anopheles mosquitoes An. albimanus, 55–56 in Jamaica, 102 in Venezuelan llanos, 272 in Panama, 120, 309, 311 preference for biting women of, 36n64 An. aquasalis, 55 An. arabiensis, 205n29 An. darlingi, 55, 56, 196, 272 An. gambiae, 54, 55 An. quadrimaculatus, 55 in South Carolina, 204–207, 215n61 drought and, 60 drug-resistant, 313–314 ecology and habits of, 54–57 livestock and, 56–57 armies, see British Army, Continental Army, French Army, etc.

363

364

INDEX

Atlantic geopolitics, 15–21, 91, 126–127, 144 Atkins, Josiah, 230 Bajon, Bertrand, 133, 134n157 Barbados ecological change on, 27–29 malaria absent on, 28–29 monkeys on, 49 mosquitoes on, 56 population of, 25 yellow fever on, 64 Belem, yellow fever at, 37 Bermuda, yellow fever on, 37 Blanchard, Claude, 231 Bol´ıvar, Simon, 3, 235n1, 276, 278–279, 282–283 Haitians and, 286 march over the Andes of, 281–282 strategy of, 285–287 youth and education of, 275 Bolivia yellow fever in 40, 47 Borland, Francis, 111, 122 Bonaparte, Joseph, 269 Bonaparte, Josephine, 256 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 251, 252, 256, 258, 259, 267, 268 Bonaparte, Pauline, 251, 252, 257 Bourgeois, Nicolas, 82 Boves, Jos´e Tom´as, 274–275, 276 Boyac´a, Battle of, 282 Brazil, 17, 18 dengue fever in, 39 Dutch in, 92–97, 105 malaria among Dutch in, 95 sugar in, 23–4 yellow fever in, 40, 65, 73 British (English) Army assault on Havana (1762), 171, 178–183 assault on Jamaica (1655), 99–101 at Cartagena, 154–155, 158–162 doctors in, 212 at Guant´anamo, 165–166 health of in War of American Revolution, 201–202, 211–216, 219, 220–221, 222–224, 226–227, 231, 233 mortality of in European campaigns of 1740s, 168 mortality of at Havana, 184–186

mortality of in 1741–1742 West Indies campaigns, 166–167 mortality of in 1790s West Indies campaigns, 247–248 in St. Domingue, 244–248 in South Carolina, 209–219 at Yorktown, 219–221, 222–223, 223–227 British Empire in the 17th century, 18–19 Buenos Aires (or River Plate), 43, 267, 284 Burke, Edmund, 248 Camden, Battle of, 214 Cayenne, 125, 126, 133 Cartagena, 17 ecology at, 149–152 fortifications at, 155–156 French campaign against (1697), 145–147 mosquitoes at, 157n58 population of, 149, 151 siege of (1741), 149–164, 188 siege of (1815), 277–278 Spanish imperial defense and, 138, 139–140 yellow fever at, 65, 146, 151–152, 161–164 Chagres, 154 Chanvalon, Jean-Baptiste Thibault de, 130–132, 134 Charles II, King of England, 72–3 Charleston (South Carolina), 43, 203, 209, 213, 234 Choiseul, Etienne-Franc¸ois Duc de, 126–129, 134, 135 Christophe, Gen. Henri, 253, 254, 257, 262 cinchona tree or bark, 74–75, 185, 212, 216, 223, 233, 293n177, 293n178 (see also: quinine) Clark, James, 77 Clinton, Sir Henry, 203, 209, 210, 220–221, 223, 224 Colt, Sir Henry, 27 Columbian Exchange, 23, 54 Continental Army, 191 health of, 200–201, 217–218, 227–231 Cornwallis, Maj. Gen. Charles, 209–210, 212–227, 231–234 Cornwallis, Cuba, 84 Cowpens, Battle of, 216

INDEX Cromwell, Oliver, 97, 100, 101 Cuba deforestation on, 30, 295 immigrants to, 295 independence in, 295–303 population of, 25, 295–297 slave trade to, 296 sugar plantations on, 170, 295 War of Independence (1895–1898), 297–303 yellow fever on, 64, 295–296, 300–303 Dancer, Thomas, 75, 189, 190 Darien colony ecology at, 110–11 Scots in, 105–123 disease in, 119–122 deforestation on Barbados, 27 Caribbean 23, 27, 28n35, 29–30 on Cuba, 30 mosquitoes and, 48, 55 de Grasse, Adm, F. J. P., 220, 221–222 de Lesseps, Ferdinand, 309 dengue fever, 32, 34n54, 39–40, 46n90, 133, 288n161 Descourtilz, M.E., 241, 254n48 Desnoux, Carlos, 159 Dessalines, Gen. Jean-Jacques, 253, 254, 255, 257, 258, 261 differential immunity (to yellow fever), 4–5, 46, 60, 197–198, 261–262, 280, 285, 294, 295n184, 301–302 differential resistance (to malaria), 4–5, 231–233, 285, 294, 301–302 Dingler, Jules, 310 Dinka soldiers, 294–295 disease (see also yellow fever, malaria, smallpox, dysentery, dengue), 32 fear of 65–67, 168 fortification and, 138–144 nonchalance toward on part of high command, 167–168 power and, 312–314 warfare in general and, 9–10 doctors, 68–81, 212, 292 role in yellow fever research of, 306–308 drought in Havana (1762), 180–181 mosquito ecology and, 41, 59–60, 122 in St. Domingue, 241

365

Dublin, 43 Dundas, Henry, 243, 245, 246 Dutch empire (see also: Brazil, Dutch in) in the 17th century, 18 in Surinam, 195–198 Dutch West India Company, 24, 92, 95, 96 dysentery at Cartagena, 161 in Cuba, 300 in Jamaica, 102, 104 at Kourou, 133 in New Granada, 285 in Panama, 309 among Scots en route to or in Panama, 110, 120 at Yorktown, 223, 230 ecology (see also: deforestation, soil erosion) on Barbados, 27–29 Caribbean, 22–32 at Cartagena, 151–152 creole, 23, 26–32 at Darien, 110–111 in French Guyana (Kourou), 124–125 at Havana, 175–176 impact on history, 6–8 on Martinique, 29 on Montserrat, 29 in New Granada, 271–274 of St. Domingue, 236–237 in South Carolina, 203–208 sugar plantations and, 47–52 yellow fever and, 32–40, 47–52 at Yorktown, 220–221 ENSO (El Nino), 59–60, 64, 103, 147, 148, ˜ 181, 264, 284, 302 epidemics and warfare in general, 8–11 of yellow fever in 17th century, 64–68, 147–148 of yellow fever in 1790s, 265–266 Eslava, Viceroy Sebasti´an de, 155, 156, 157, 159, 164 Ewald, Capt. Johan, 227 Ferdinand VII (of Spain), 268, 269, 270, 282 Ferreira da Rosa, Jo˜ao, 75, 76n44 Finlay, Carlos Juan, 306–307 Florida, Second Seminole War in, 290 Fort San Juan (see: Nicaragaua)

366

INDEX

fortification, 138–144 at Cartagena, 155–156 at Havana, 173–174 Franklin, Benjamin, 186 French Army assault on St. Domingue, 251–252 disease and mortality among in St. Domingue, 255–259 in Mexico, 294–295 French empire (see also: St. Domingue, Kourou) in the 17th century, 17–18 fuelwood, 24, 28n31 on Barbados, 27–28 on Cuba, 27n25, 30 Gage, Thomas, 31, 98, 99, 101 Galvez, Jos´e de, 141 Gambia Aedes aegypti in, 51n99 yellow fever in, 38n69 Gates, Gen. Horatio, 210, 214 Gauguin, Paul, 310 Germain, Lord George, 213 Gilbert, Nicolas Pierre, 241 God, as explanation for epidemics, 86–87, 189 G´omez, M´aximo, 297–298, 302 Gorgas, William, 307–309, 311–312 Gorham, Maj. Joseph, 184 Grant, Ulysses, S., 291 Greene, Gen. Nathanael, 217, 218 Guadeloupe, 126, 169 slavery reinstated in, 256 yellow fever in, 64, 248 Guanabacoa, 179, 181 Guant´anamo, British attack on (1741), see: Santiago de Cuba Guilford Courthouse, Battle of, 216 Guyana, (see also: Kourou) seventeenth-century pestilence in, 106n44 Haiti and Haitian Revolution, see St. Domingue Havana, 17, 31 ecology of, 175–176 fortifications at, 174–174, 179, 187 population of, 172 siege of (1762), 169–188 sugar at, 170

Spanish imperial defense and, 139, 140, 169 yellow fever in 51, 64n3, 175–178, 181–186, 265, 308 healers, Afro-Caribbean, 81–86 herd immunity, 44, 57, 61, 143, 288 at Cartagena, 152, 164 in Panama, 310 in St. Domingue, 241–242 in Venezuela, 284 Heyn, Piet, 92 Hispaniola (see also St. Domingue), 17 English attack on, 99 Hosier, Vice-Admiral Francis, 1–2, 148 Howard, Lt. Thomas Phipps, 84, 246–247 Humboldt, Alexander von, 71, 271 Hunter, John, 36n61, 189 immigration to Caribbean, 61–62, 287–288 imperial rivalries, 15–21 Jackson, Robert, 66, 68, 76, 81, 84, 216, 223 Jamaica English conquest of, 97–105 health on, 81, 202, 265, 284 population of, 25 slave trade role of, 151 source of labor for Panama Canal, 309 turtles on, 31 Vernon at, 154, 166 James, Bartholomew, 227, 248n32 Jefferson, Thomas, 70, 208 Jesuit bark, see: quinine Jesuits, 74 at Kourou, 126 Joanna, 83 Johnson, Samuel, 178, 186 Juan, Capt. Jorge, 65, 151 Kemble, Stephen, 190 King’s Mountain, Battle of, 215 Kourou ecology and geography of, 124–126 disease at, 131–134 French at, 123–135 population of, 124 Labat, Jean Baptiste, 31, 83 Lafayette, Marie-Joseph Y. R. G du Motier, Marquis de, 220, 223, 228, 230, 231

INDEX Lamb, Sgt. Roger, 225n91, 227 Leclerc, Gen. Charles V.E., 251–252, 256, 257, 261 Lee, Henry, 227 Lewis, Matthew, 36n61 Lezo y Olavarrieta, Admiral Blas, 155, 156, 157, 159, 164 Ligon, Richard, 27, 31, 64 Lind, James, 35, 36n61, 76 Lining, John, 67 Little Ice Age, 58, 122 Llaneros (of Venezuela), 272–273, 274–275, 276, 279, 281 medical practices of 85 llanos (of Venezuela), 271–272, 279–280, 285 Long, Edward, 69, 80, 83, 103, 104 Louisbourg, 140, 169 Louisiana, 17, 126, 186 Louverture, Toussaint, 3, 249–254, 258, 260–265 capture and death of, 254 exploitation of yellow fever, 253–254, 260–262 as guerilla commander, 249–250, 253 medical background of, 249 MacDowall, Patrick, 119–120 Maceo, Antonio, 297–298, 302 killed, 299 Madeira, 23 malaria, 40 absent in Barbados, 28–29 awareness of in South Carolina, 208 ecology of in Caribbean, 52–57, 61–62 in Europe, 201 immigration to Caribbean and, 61, 288 livestock and, 56–57 on Jamaica, 102–103 in South Carolina, 206 in St. Domingue, 260 in Venezuelan llanos (or Venezuela generally), 273, 281 in New Granada, 272, 280, 285 in Nicaragaua, 189–190 in Panama, 311–312 resistance to, 53–54, 71–72 rice and, 57 in St. Domingue, 240, 260 slave trade and, 54 in South Carolina, 207–209, 212–219

367

susceptibility to, 67–68, 71–72 symptoms of, 52–53 in U.S. Civil War, 293–294 at Yorktown, 223–224, 226–232 maroons, 21, 30, 100 in Surinam, 195–198 Martinique, 126, 131 ecological change on, 29 turtles on, 31 yellow fever among British navy at, 248n32 Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, Jan de, 94–96 medicine and medical ideas, 63–87 Afro-creole, 81–86 European, 68–81 folk remedies, 77, 212 mercury as a cure, 76–77 venesection, 74–74 quarantine, 79, 293 preventive medicine, 78–81 race and, 67–68 in Spanish army, 283–284, 301 Mexican-American War (1846–1848), 290–292 Mexico (see also: Veracruz) French occupation of (1862–1867), 294–295 yellow fever in, 38, 289–292, 294–295 militia, 138 at Cartagena, 156–157 disease resistance and, 143–144 at Havana, 174, 182 in Jamaica, 100 in Mexico, 142–143 in New Granada, 268, 274 in Panama, 117 in St. Domingue, 238, 242 at Santiago de Cuba, 165 in South Carolina, 210, 213, 214, 218 at Yorktown, 222 monkeys, 28 at Cartagena, 149, 152 at Darien, 111, 115, 121 at Havana, 176 at Kourou, 125 in St. Domingue, 241 yellow fever and, 47, 49–50, 65 Montebelo, Marquis de, 73, 80 Montserrat, ecological change on, 29 Moore, Sir John, 80, 265 Morgan, Henry, 107, 108

368

INDEX

Morillo, Gen. Pablo, 269–270, 278–283, 285–286 army of, 270, 276, 281 attitude towards blacks, 281 strategic problem of, 279–281 mosquito control, 306–308, 311–312, 314 mosquito determinism, 6–7 mosquitoes, see: Aedes aegypti and Anopheles Napoleon, see: Bonaparte, Napoleon Napoleonic Wars, 20, 259 (see also: St. Domingue) navies British, 18 yellow fever and, 144–145, 185 at Yorktown, 222 French, 35n59, 221–222 disease mortality in, 78n54 hospitals of, 78 Spanish, 138, 174–175, 183, 268 yellow fever and, 38n74 Nelson, Horatio, 84, 189, 190 New Granada, Viceroyalty of, 267–287 disease environment of, 273–274 economy, 271 malaria in, 280–281, 285 population, 270–271 society, 267–268, 270–271 yellow fever in, 273–274, 277, 280–281, 284–285 New Orleans, 267 quarantine of in U.S. Civil War, 293 yellow fever in, 265, 293 Nevill, Adm. John, 147 Nicaragua British campaign in (1780), 189–191 Nine Years War, 19, 144 Nott, Josiah, 289 O’Leary, Daniel, 277 Panama, 146, 166, 308–312 Canal in, 308–312 French canal-building efforts in, 309–310 Scots in, 105–123 yellow fever in 309–312 Paris, Peace of (1763), 126, 186 Paterson, William, 107–109, 110, 115, 116, 117, 119 Penn, Adm. William, 99, 104

Pernambuco, Dutch in, 92–97, 105 Peru yellow fever in, 38, 40 Philadelphia yellow fever in, 38, 265 Pinckard, George, 68, 75, 83 Pitt, William (the Elder), 169, 170 Pitt, William (the Younger), 243, 244, 245–246 plantation complex, 23–4 plantations in French Guyana, 125 fuelwood on, 24 at Havana, 170 malaria and, 55–57 rice, 55, 57, 196, 204–206, 208 in St. Domingue, 237 in South Carolina, 204–206 sugar, 23–6, 47–52, 55–57 in Surinam, 195–196 yellow fever and, 47–52 Pocock, Vice-Admiral George, 171, 178, 181, 185, 187 Pointis, Jean Bernard Louis Desjeans Baron de, 146–147, 158 population Barbados, 25 Caribbean, 25–6 Cartagena, 149, 151 Cuba, 25 Darien isthmus, 112 Havana, 172 Jamaica, 25, 99 Kourou, 124, 126 Pernambuco, 93 St. Domingue, 25, 237–238 St. Lucia, 25 Santiago de Cuba, 165 Scotland, 107n47 South Carolina, 206 Porcell, Diego, 71, 80 Port-au-Prince, 245 Portobelo (see also: Panama), 17, 113, 139, 151, 154 Portuguese empire (see also: Brazil) in the 17th century, 17 Prado Mayera Portocarrero y Luna, Gov. Juan, 174, 182, 183, 187 Pr´efontaine, Antoine Brˆuletout, 127–128, 130, 132, 134, 135 Putnam, Israel, 184

INDEX Quacy, Graman, 82 quarantine, see under: medicine and medical ideas Quebec, 43 quinine, 63, 74–76, 290, 293, 294, 301, 311 Redfield, Levi, 184 Reed, Walter, 306–307 Richshoffer, Amrosij, 95, 96 Rigaud, Andr´e, 250 Rochambeau, D.-M.-J, Comte de, 257–258 Rochambeau, J.-B. D. de Vimeur, Comte de, 222, 223, 224, 228, 229 Roderick Random, see Smollett, Tobias Rodr´ıguez Arg¨uelles, Anacleto, 76 Roosevelt, Theodore, 118n96, 303, 311 Royal Navy (see navies, British) St. Domingue, 17, 126, 228, 236–267 British occupation of, 244–248 disease environment in, 238–242 ecology of, 236–237 malaria in, 240, 260 mosquitoes in, 241, 260 population, 25, 237–238 slave uprising in, 242–244, 249–251 Poles in, 259, 263 Swiss in, 259 yellow fever in, 65, 240–242, 244–248, 253–260 St. Kitts, 91, 144 St. Lucia, 25, 80, 104, 202 St. Nazaire, yellow fever epidemic at, 37 Santa Anna, Gen. Antonio L´opez de, 289–290, 291 Santiago de Cuba British attack on (1741), 164–166 population of, 165 yellow fever at, 166–167 S˜ao Tom´e, 23, 96 Scotland, 18n7 Darien expedition of, 105–123 Jacobite rising (1745), 168 seventeenth-century conditions in, 106–107 union with England (1707), 119 Scott, Gen. Winfield, 291–292, 303 Second Seminole War (1835–1840), 290 Sedgwick, Gen. Robert, 101 Seminoles, 290 settlement, foiled by disease, 105–136

369

Seven Years War, 20, 126–127, 128, 169 Havana campaign of, 169–87 Slaves and slavery, 25–6, 38, 45, 171, 210 abolition of slavery and army health, 81 in Cuba, 172 healers, 81–86 imperial rivalry and, 143 rebellions, 21 reinstated in Guadeloupe (1802), 256 in St. Domingue, 237, 238–239, 242–244 slave soldiers, 266, 294–295 slave trade, 26, 96–97 to Cartagena, 149–151 to Cuba, 296 to St. Domingue, 239n9 in South Carolina, 204, 205, 208 in Surinam, 195–198 in Yorktown campaign, 223 Sloane, Sir Hans, 73 smallpox American Revolution and, 198, 200–201, 223 in Cuba, 300 in St. Domingue, 239 in New Granada, 285 Smith, Adam 26 smoke (as mosquito repellant), 85, 272 Smollett, Tobias, 69n18, 155, 161n74, 162 soil erosion, 27–28, 55 South Carolina ecology in, 203–207 mosquitoes in, 207 population in, 206 Spain revolution in (1820), 282 yellow fever in, 265–266, 287 Spanish-American War, 302–303 Spanish Army at Cartagena, 155–156, 160–161 in Cuba (1890s), 298–301 expedition to New Granada, 270, 276, 277–281 at Havana (1761–62), 174–175 health of in Caribbean, 143 health of at Cartagena, 163–164 health and mortality of in Cuba (1890s), 300–301 health and mortality of at Havana (1761–62), 177–178, 182 health and mortality of in New Granada, 279–281, 283–285

370

INDEX

Spanish Empire in America in the 17th century, 16–17 defense of, 137–144, 188–189 Havana and, 169 independence in, 267–287 Stedman, John, 83, 197–198 sugar (see also: plantations) in Brazil, 23 in Cuba, 170, 295, 297 ecological effects of, 26–32 revolutions in Caribbean 23–32 sugarcane, 23–4 Surinam, 82, 104 rice in, 55, 196 malaria in, 196 maroon wars in, 195–198 yellow fever in, 196, 198 Tarleton, Col. Banastre, 215, 219, 224 Thacher, James, 231 Thucydides, 8 Trinidad, 104 Toussaint Louverture, see: Louverture, Toussaint Tupac Amaru, 21, 189 Turgot, Etienne Franc¸ois, 128, 132, 134 turtles and turtle meat, 31–32, 115, 125 Ulloa, Capt. Antonio de, 65, 151 United States Army of, 290–294, 311 (see also: Continental Army) Army Yellow Fever Commission, 306–307 Civil War, 292–294 as imperial power, 5, 306 Indian removal in, 290 intervention in Cuba, 302–303, 306–308 war with Mexico (1846–1848), 290–292 Vauban, S´ebastien le Prestre de, 140 Velasco, Capt. Don Lu´ıs de, 180, 187 Venables, Gen. Robert, 99, 100, 102, 104 venesection, see under: medicine and medical ideas Venezuela, see: New Granada, Viceroyalty of Veracruz, 17, 81, 139, 291 mosquitoes in, 41 yellow fever in, 64n3, 141–142, 265, 286, 295n184

Vernon, Adm. Edward, 2, 153–155, 158–62, 164–167, 178 Virginia (see: Yorktown) Wafer, Lionel, 108, 109, 110 War of the Austrian Succession, 20, 153, 168 War of Jenkins’ Ear, 20 Cartagena campaign, 153–64 Santiago de Cuba campaign, 164–66 Portobelo expedition, 166 War of the Spanish Succession, 19, 20, 148 Wars of the French Revolution (see also: St. Domingue), 243, 244 Warren, Henry, 67 Washington, George, 3, 6–7, 198, 201, 202, 222, 223, 229 Wentworth, Gen. Thomas, 154, 158–162, 164–167 Weyler, Gen. Valeriano, 299–300, 302 Wheler, Rear-Admiral Francis, 145 William III, King of England, 108, 110, 115 Wilmot, Adm. Robert, 145 women, 63 Afro-creole healers, 83–84 in Darien colony, 109n53 in St. Domignue, 237–238, 239 yellow fever and, 35–36 Wright, Capt. Lawrence, 144 yellow fever Commission of the U.S. Army, see under: United States, Army ecology and, 32–40, 47–52, 60–62 cities and, 50–51 episodic character of, 64–65 in Europe (1803–1805), 265–266 immigration to Caribbean and, 62, 288–289 immunity and resistance to, 44–47, 60, 71–72 jungle (see yellow fever, sylvan) mortality, 37–39 political role in St. Domingue, 262–263 sailors and, 51–52 shipping and, 51–52 susceptibility, 34–36, 67–68 sylvan, 47, 49–50 symptoms, 33–34

INDEX vaccine, 37 virus 32–33 evolution of, 39 Yorktown, 221 (for siege, see: American Revolution, Yorktown campaign)

Yucatan, yellow fever in, 34n54, 34n57, 64 Zoopotentiation, 57 Zooprophylaxis, 57, 102n35

371