by Sonia Shah
While the Chesapeake colonies suffered the consequences of their malarial contamination, the absence of the disease leveraged the unlikely success of those European settlers who headed farther north. New England’s generally cool weather slowed the development of the malarial parasite so that its life cycle far exceeded the average life span of an infected mosquito. (At sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit, P. vivax’s reproduction inside the mosquito slows to a twenty-day cycle, and P. falciparum’s to twenty-three days, while the average anopheline might live just over a week.) In addition, the rocky creeks and forested hills of New England provided few suitable habitats for the most efficient malarial mosquitoes.24
The Pilgrims and Puritans who settled the northern colonies knew the colder climate would be healthier. “A sup of New England’s aire is better than a whole draught of Old England’s ale,” wrote one New England colonist in 1629. “Experience doth manifest that there is hardly a more healthfull place to be found in the world that agreeth better with our English bodyes.”25
Indeed, although they suffered the hostility of the native peoples and the pioneer’s diseases of filth like the southern colonists, and had to put up with New England’s marginal growing conditions and brutal winters to boot, the New England colonists experienced a boom, right from the beginning. Within decades of settlement, the relatively small numbers of settlers there had created colonies as large as those in the Chesapeake Bay. By 1700, some twenty thousand settlers in New England, through birth and minimal immigration, grew colonies as big as those in Virginia and Maryland, where more than 140,000 migrants had landed. The average life expectancy hovered around sixty years, with each new generation doubling the size of the population.26 The superior disease environment of the North—in particular, its relative freedom from malaria—spelled the difference.
Oceans of ink have been spilled on the cruelty and waste of the so-called triangular trade that European colonists established in the Americas over the following centuries. For the love of sugar, easily grown in the tropical Americas, and silver, mined from its lush deposits, millions of Africans were shackled and enslaved and shipped across the sea, and the products they created were looted and pirated across the sea to sate Europe. That bloody trade, which cost millions of lives and disrupted countless cultures and economies, spread over four continents, and we tremble from its reverberations to this day. Malaria did not create it. But Plasmodium certainly helped carve its harsh contours.
By the mid-sixteenth century, labor had become a problem in the New World colonies. The local native peoples, enslaved to work the sugarcane crop and the silver and gold mines, were dangerously vulnerable to easily transmissible Old World germs such as smallpox and measles, broadcast on the Europeans’ breath, coughs, sneezes, and dirty blankets. Wave after wave of disease—a single smallpox epidemic during the 1560s, for example, felled thirty thousand native slaves in Brazil27—soon denuded the cane fields of workers.28
It might have seemed reasonable, at this point, to transplant American sugarcane colonies to West Africa, which was similarly amenable climatically and much closer to European markets. But falciparum malaria had already rendered such arrangements untenable.29 Instead, shorn of Native American slave labor, European colonizers in the New World turned to slave labor from Africa. A small Portuguese trade in African slaves had started in the 1400s, selling African slaves captured in wars to other African states. First the Spanish and Portuguese, but soon the English, French, and Dutch as well, increasingly turned to slaves to sate their labor needs in the American colonies.30
But by the eighteenth century, Africa’s trickle of war captives and outcasts would no longer suffice to service the increased demand for slaves. Soon raiders started plunging deeper into the interior of the continent to capture the terrified sons and daughters of peaceful farmers and villagers, to forcibly sell them into slavery. For fear of the raiders, whole villages in Africa abandoned their lands and long-established trade routes, and the exquisite balance between man and parasite forged over millennia was abruptly ruptured.31
The new labor arrangement proved costly for the Europeans as well. Ferrying slaves from Africa to the West Indies, and the West Indies sugar they produced back to Europe, involved a tremendous amount of difficult and time-consuming shipping—and thus exposure to disease. Slave raiders could avoid contact with foreign strains of P. falciparum and other diseases by passing their captives along a chain of traders, from the interior to the waiting ships on the coast. But the crews aboard the slave ships were dangerously vulnerable.32
The burden of disease decimated state-backed efforts by the Dutch, English, and French to monopolize the slave trade. Instead, ad hoc bands of merchants funded perilous voyages from Europe to Africa to the West Indies and back, coercing their crews into the job and not expecting to make more than one death-defying trip in a lifetime. As a result, crews aboard the slave ships usually had to wait for months at slave ports while their holds filled with screaming captives, who trickled in at a rate of two to three a day. Forty-five percent of European sailors on slave ships died, more than in any other trade of the era,33 from the “noxious vapour, arising from the swamps,” as a slave-ship surgeon of the time called it. “This trade,” he wrote, “may justly be denominated the grave of seamen.”34
Despite these conditions, between 1700 and 1800, European slavers brought some six million bound and shackled Africans to the Americas. With falciparum parasites roosting in their veins, they changed the face of the Americas forever.35
While malaria-experienced Europeans knew of the dangers of malarial fever, and the particular deadliness of Africa’s fevers, they had no way to predict what would happen upon flooding the Americas with falciparum-ridden Africans.
Sixteenth-century Westerners didn’t have a specific definition for the disease of malaria. They didn’t know about the parasite or the mosquito that carried it, and so their experience of malaria led them to consider it primarily a disease embedded in the landscape. Western medical authorities of the time attributed many diseases, including malaria, to smelly vapors they called miasmas, which purportedly rose from stagnant water, putrefying vegetation, and animal remains. According to miasmatic theory, miasmas grew more dangerous in warm climates, where everything got stinkier faster, whether it was spoiling food or decomposing vegetation. This was why, as Plymouth colony leader William Bradford wrote, “Hott countries are subject to grievous diseases.”36 The diseases of the hot climates frightened sixteenth-century Europeans so much they thought that sudden exposure to heat could literally melt the fat inside a person.37
The potency of miasmatic theory, which held sway from the Middle Ages until the end of the nineteenth century, may have derived partly from how well its teachings helped explain and prevent malaria. Before the nineteenth century, when miasmatic theory inspired sanitationists to separate food and water from waste, vanquishing many infectious diseases in the process, the teachings of miasmatism were relatively useless. Miasmatism’s admonition to avoid stagnant waters and stinky vapors did little to help people stay away from unwashed hands and food, which is what gave them dysentery and typhoid. Nor did it encourage them to avoid exposure to the exhalations of the sick, which gave them measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, influenza, and pneumonic plague. Miasmatic theory didn’t help much with leprosy, either, which people got from constant, long-term contact with sufferers, or with typhus, which they contracted from lice, or syphilis, which is transmitted through sexual contact.
It did help protect people from malaria, however. The miasmatic theorists may not have known it, but the larvae of many Anopheles mosquito species live in stagnant waters, feeding on and hiding from predators under the rotting vegetation that endows swamps and wetlands with their distinctive sulphurous odor. Minimizing exposure to this malodorous air—by avoiding swamps and closing doors and windows, as miasmatism suggested—certainly would have helped people avoid mosquito bites. Indeed, according to miasmatic theory, it wasn’t the mias
ma itself that was poisonous, but rather the “miasmata,” or bits of debris, it carried within it. Miasmatism’s prediction that warm climates threatened greater disease was especially true for malaria, for higher temperatures allowed the parasite to develop faster, ensuring that more infected mosquitoes would transmit the disease.
Miasmatic theory explained the deadliness of Africa’s tropical fevers, and the relative healthfulness of cool highland areas relative to marshy lowlands. But what it couldn’t foresee were the malarial parasites munching on the hemoglobin of enslaved Africans, and what would happen when American Anopheles took their first sips of the Africans’ infected blood.
By the 1500s, the crucial land bridge between the Pacific and the Atlantic—the isthmus that would become Panama—had been rendered a noxious “land of pestilence,” as medical historian James Simmons puts it.38 The Spanish used the isthmus to transport the fabulous riches of their American colonies back to Spain. Having slaves trek the loot on foot across Panama, where the distance between the Pacific and the Caribbean spanned just forty miles, saved weeks of shipping around the tip of South America.
But those forty miles wended through one of the hottest and wettest places on the planet, covered with dense rain forest. A spine of steep mountains towering over seven thousand feet high sliced through its middle.39 Rain pelted down in sheets for three quarters of the year, after which the winds arrived, uprooting trees and turning the steaming jungles into a vine-covered matrix of still, green pools.40 Along the coasts, mangrove trees plunged their spiderlike roots into watery sands, creating sprawling coastal swamps, a dark netherworld of neither sea nor land. The difficult and exposed journey would have ensured steady contact between the African slaves’ parasites and Panama’s mosquitoes.
Once the American Anopheles started transmitting falciparum parasites, the Spanish found themselves utterly defenseless. By 1584, the fevers at Nombre de Diós, the Spanish village on the Caribbean side of the isthmus, were so bad that the king ordered it abandoned altogether. The new village they established, Portobelo, was not much better, and the Spanish soon knew it, too, as a “breeding place of malignant fevers,” according to Simmons.41 Portobelo was an “unhealthy place,” one visitor wrote in 1648, “very hot, and subject to breed Feavers, nay death.” The famous navigator-cum-pirate Sir Francis Drake died of fever not far from there, and was buried in a lead coffin under the soft Portobelo soil.42
In 1534, the Spanish had surveyed Panama in hopes of building a canal, but after contaminating the isthmus with falciparum malaria, they were forced to abandon Panama’s fevered jungles to the indigenous Kuna people and the bands of escaped slaves the Kuna sheltered.43 At the very height of its powers, the Spanish Empire managed to build just a single muddy mule track through the Panamanian jungle and two fever-racked villages at either end. Under constant attack by the pirates who prowled the Caribbean and by falciparum malaria and yellow fever on the isthmus, Panama became the notorious Achilles’ heel of the Spanish Empire.44
Falciparum malaria from African slaves similarly transformed the European colonies in the West Indies and Carolinas, where local mosquitoes and climate were amenable to year-round transmission. As the number of African slaves in the West Indies increased, so, too, did the number of deaths among the Europeans who lived there. In the West Indies during the 1650s, English planters died three times faster than their new babies could be baptized.45 European immigration, in the face of the death toll on the islands, ground to a standstill, and those who could do so made their fortunes as quickly as possible and then escaped.
Surviving letters and diaries from colonists in the Carolinas, after African slaves started disembarking in force, describe the arrival of a dreaded, deadly malignant fever. In 1684, one boatload of would-be settlers—warned by their ship captain that only two of the thirty-two “vigorous” people he’d previously carried from Plymouth to Carolina had survived their first year there—turned back before setting a single foot on Carolina’s plagued coast.46
In 1685, a band of Irish settlers arrived in Carolina hoping to gather timber to take to Barbados. They all sickened with fever. Twenty-nine died.47 A party of 150 Scots who arrived after a ten-week journey similarly abandoned their attempts to settle the area. “We found the place so extrordinerie sicklie that sickness seased many of our number,” one wrote, “and took away great many of our number and discouraged others, insomuch that they deserted us when we were to come to this place.”48 Two young men who fled Carolina in 1687 arrived in Boston “pitiable to behold . . . They say, they have never before seen so miserable a country, nor an atmosphere so unhealthy,” wrote a French settler who met them. “Fevers prevail all the year, from which those who are attacked seldom recover, and if some escape, their complexion becomes tawny.”49 Before they left Carolina, the refugees said, they’d seen a ship from London arrive with 130 people on board. By the time they left, 115 of those new arrivals were dead, “all from malignant fevers which spread among them.”50 The deadliness of Carolina’s fevers found its way into proverb. “They who want to die quickly go to Carolina,” said the English. Added a German commentator: “Carolina is in the spring a paradise, in the summer a hell, and in the autumn a hospital.”51
Characteristic of communities suffering P. falciparum’s appetites, infant mortality skyrocketed. Eighty-six percent of European American babies born in South Carolina died before they reached the age of twenty. In one parish, over a third of European American infants died before their fifth birthday, with most dying in their first year between August and November, when the malarial mosquitos were biting. One typical South Carolina couple, married in 1750, bore sixteen children, of whom just six survived to adulthood.52 Those who could afford to do so fled to the coast and the highlands during the late summer and fall, when malaria broke out most virulently, establishing the still-popular South Carolina resort communities of Summerville, Pawley’s Island, and Sullivan’s Island, among others. Medical authorities warned them not to return until after the first killing frost.53
Ironically, P. falciparum’s heavy toll on the European populations of the West Indies and North America’s southern colonies deepened the colonists’ reliance on the labor of enslaved Africans. Battered, overworked, underfed, and housed in miserable, filthy conditions, most of the enslaved Africans nevertheless possessed Duffy-negative red blood cells that made them completely immune to the Europeans’ vivax malaria, and 30 to 40 percent carried sickle-cell genes and other inherited antimalarial blood cell deformities, which effectively protected them from the worst ravages of falciparum malaria.54 European physicians marveled at African slaves’ apparent resilience to the malarial fevers, such as the three-day-cycling “tertian intermittent,” which swept away their own people. “I have not met among them with a pure tertian intermittent in the whole of my practice,” an amazed doctor in the West Indies wrote, “and those of forty years’ experience mention it as a rare occurrence.”55 “The white man is seen shivering with ague, his countenance cadaverous and his temper splenetic,” a Carolina physician noted. But “the black, is fat plump and glossy, in the full enjoyment of health and vigor.”56 (This was surely an exaggeration: falciparum malaria killed sufficient numbers of infants that the sickle-cell gene circulated among generations of African slaves in Carolina as lushly as it did in West Africa.57)
Planters in the West Indies and the southern colonies were willing to pay top dollar for slaves from Africa. West Indies planters would pay three times more for an African slave than an indentured European worker, with slaves “seasoned” to the local malarias attracting even higher prices than those newly arrived.58 Southern planters would spend twice as much on a slave from Africa as on a native slave.59 Thus the institution of African slavery thrived.
One wouldn’t guess that malaria has much to do with the history of Scotland, tucked away in the cool, misty northern highlands.
But even there, in the waning years of the seventeenth century, the bounty of the New World
beckoned. Scotland, a poor struggling nation, was banned from trading with the colonial possessions of its more powerful neighbor, England.60 But the Scottish entrepreneur William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England, dreamed of Panama.
Unlike the Spanish, who considered a canal, Paterson imagined a road through the isthmus. “The time and expense of navigation to China, Japan, and the Spice Islands, and the far greatest part of the East Indies will be lessened by more than half,” he mused, “and the consumption of European commodities and manufactories will . . . double . . . Trade will increase trade, and money will beget money.”61 With a road built across Panama, everyone could get a piece of the trade in sugar, slaves, silver, and spices that had made the Spanish Empire and Britain’s East India Company so fabulously wealthy.
Paterson knew precious little about Panama from his own experience. But he’d read journals and books, and studied the maps and drawings of pirates, missionaries, and shipmasters.62 The journal of the young pirate Lionel Wafer, in particular, inspired him as to the possibilities. Wafer grew up in the Scottish highlands and went to sea at age sixteen as a surgeon to East Indies merchants and, later, Caribbean pirates. After suffering an injury, he was left behind to recover in Darién, the eastern part of the Panamanian isthmus, where steep jungle-covered hills collided with the palm-fringed, white-sanded Caribbean coast. For several months, he lived in the jungle with the Kuna, who nursed, fed, and indulged the bedraggled pirate, painting his body and allowing him to sleep in their hammocks under their plantain-leaved ranchos.
Wafer was mesmerized. He wrote in his journal of the emerald forests full of fat, tasty monkeys, the rivers lined with cinnamon, sugarcane, and prickly pear, the sea teeming with sweet-tasting turtles and crabs. Thick honey and wax, free for the taking from sting-free bees, hung from swollen hives in the trees. Tobacco, plantain, yams, cassavas, and pineapples abounded, as did fabulous trees so useful to humankind that in just six months, a force of three hundred Europeans, Wafer mused, could fell enough to pay for an entire expedition.63
