1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (14 page)

After the final defeat of the Virginia Indians in the 1660s, they were required to wear identifying badges—this one belonged to a native leader—if they wanted to enter English settlements. (
Photo credit 2.9
)

In the long run, though, the biggest ecological impact may have been wreaked by a much smaller domestic animal: the European honeybee. In early 1622 a ship arrived in Jamestown that was loaded with exotic entities: grapevines, silkworms, and bees. The grapes and silkworms never amounted to much, but the bees thrived. Most bees pollinate only a few plant species and tend to be fussy about where they live. But European honeybees, promiscuous little beasts, pollinate almost anything in sight and reside almost anywhere. Quickly they set up shop throughout the Americas. Indians called them “English flies.”

The English imported bees for honey, not to help their crops—pollination wasn’t discovered until the mid-eighteenth century—but feral honeybees pollinated farms and orchards anyway. Without them, many of the plants Europeans brought with them wouldn’t have proliferated. Georgia probably would not have become the Peach State; Johnny Appleseed’s trees might never have borne fruit; Huckleberry Finn might not have had any watermelons to steal. So critical to European success was the honeybee that Indians came to view it as a harbinger of invasion; the first sight of a bee in a new territory, the French-American writer Jean de Crèvecoeur noted in 1782, “spreads sadness and consternation in all minds.”

Removing forest cover, blocking regrowth on fallow land, exhausting the soil, shutting down annual burning, unleashing big grazing and rooting animals, introducing earthworms, honeybees, and other alien invertebrates—the colonists so profoundly changed Tsenacomoco that it became harder and harder for its inhabitants to prosper there. Meanwhile, it was easier and easier for Europeans to thrive in an environment that their own actions were making increasingly familiar. Despite starvation, disease, and financial meltdown, immigrants poured into Chesapeake Bay. Axes flashing, oxen straining before the plow, hundreds of new colonists planted spreads of tobacco across every accessible river bluff. When they wore out the soil, they gave the fields over to cattle and then moved on.

Ecologically speaking, Tsenacomoco was becoming ever more like Europe—the hallmark of the nascent Homogenocene. By 1650 the Indian empire was mainly inhabited by Europeans.

“SOE INFINITE A RICHES”

By all accounts, John Ferrar was a modest, pious, hardworking man who spent his life tending the family business. His father, Nicholas, was a cosmopolitan London leather merchant with a mansion on St. Sythe’s Lane, not far from the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange. One of the original stockholders in the Virginia Company, he sank £50 into Jamestown. The investment did not bear fruit, and Nicholas became convinced that the problem lay with the company’s well-connected but feckless managers. Rather than pulling out, though, the family invested another £50 in 1618, acquiring a plantation of several thousand acres, administered by another relative whom Nicholas dispatched to Virginia. A few months later, he participated in a sort of shareholders’ revolt. New corporate officers were appointed, among them two of Nicholas’s other sons: Nicholas Jr., who became the company counsel and secretary, and John, who was given the unsalaried office of deputy treasurer.

Despite his lowly position, John Ferrar found himself effectively in charge of the company’s finances—the actual treasurer, an important aristocrat, was too busy harassing the king in Parliament. The firm now was making money from tobacco sales but had piled up so much debt that Ferrar had to scramble to pay creditors. Worse, he claimed, the previous management had embezzled £3,000. Attempts to restore the funds were countered by the thieves’ attempts to smear him in court. The intrigue grew so all-consuming that Ferrar held daily crisis meetings at the family manse on St. Sythe’s Lane.

Maps like this one, from 1667, were surprisingly common in seventeenth-century Europe. Depicting North America as a narrow isthmus, it suggested to the Virginia Company’s English backers that their colonists at Jamestown (star on map) could easily walk to the Pacific. From there, they could sail to China. (
Photo credit 2.7
)
Click
here
to view a larger image.

In the end, his hard work didn’t pay off. Opechancanough’s attack in 1622 gave the company’s enemies the opening they sought; Nicholas and John, portrayed as reckless swindlers, were briefly thrown in prison. They managed to talk their way free, but cannot have been taken by surprise when the king put an end to the enterprise.

John Ferrar never reconciled himself to the loss. Twenty-five years after the company’s demise, he read William Bullock’s
Virginia Impartially Examined,
a sixty-six-page tract that blamed him and other managers for Jamestown’s troubles. Ferrar filled the margins of his copy with irate rejoinders. Bullock had written that the colony could prosper only by diversifying; rather than focusing exclusively on tobacco, the colonists should have grown wheat and barley. To Ferrar, this was like telling people who were riding off a cliff that they should wear jackets of another color. As far as he was concerned, Virginia’s mistake had been to ignore what Sir Francis Drake had learned during the 1570s, when he stopped in California during his round-the-world voyage. Drake had proven—proven!—that the Americas were at most a few hundred miles across. Jamestown’s failure to cut through the continent and pioneer a new route to Asia, Ferrar wrote, “is to this day the greatest Error and damadge that hath happened to the Collony all this while.” He was certain that only “8 or 10 days March[,] naye it maybe not a 4 days Journy” separated Jamestown and the Pacific. A single expedition west would have discovered “Soe Infinite a Riches to them all as a passadge to a West Sea would prove to them.” Instead, they had stupidly filled their days with “Smokey Tobaco.”

From today’s vantage the story seems more complex. The goal of the Virginia Company had been to integrate Virginia, and thus poor England itself, into the rich new global marketplace. Although Ferrar never recognized it, the company had done exactly that—with “Smokey Tobaco,” the first American species to disperse into Europe, Asia, and Africa. Fun, exciting, and wildly addictive, tobacco was an instant hit around the globe—the first time people in every continent simultaneously became enraptured by a novelty.
N. tabacum
was the leading edge of the Columbian Exchange.

By 1607, when Jamestown was founded, tobacco was enthralling the upper classes in Delhi, where the first smoker, to the dismay of his advisers, was none other than the Mughal emperor; thriving in Nagasaki, despite a ban promulgated by the alarmed daimyo; and addicting sailors in Istanbul to such an extent that they were extorting it from passing European vessels. In that same year a traveler in Sierra Leone observed that tobacco, likely brought by slave traders, could be found “about every man’s house, which seemeth half their food.” Nicotine addiction became so rampant so quickly in Manchuria, according to the Oxford historian Timothy Brook, that in 1635 the khan Hongtaiji discovered that his soldiers “were selling their weapons to buy tobacco.” The khan angrily prohibited smoking. On the opposite side of the world, Europeans were equally hooked; by the 1640s the Vatican was receiving complaints that priests were celebrating Mass with lighted cigars. Pope Urban VIII, as enraged as Hongtaiji, promptly banned smoking in church.

From Bristol to Boston to Beijing, people became part of an international culture of tobacco. Virginia played a small but important part in creating this worldwide phenomenon. From today’s perspective, though,
N. tabacum
in the end was less important in itself than as a magnet that pulled many other nonhuman creatures, directly and indirectly, across the Atlantic, of which the most important surely were two minute, multifaceted immigrants,
Plasmo-dium vivax
and
Plasmodium falciparum
—names little known outside specialist circles, but ones that played a devastating role in American life.

¹
In recent years, advanced techniques have let researchers domesticate a few previously undomesticable species in laboratory settings—the silver fox is the most well-known example. In all previous history, though, only about forty large animals were domesticated. (That figure does not include domesticated insects, like the European honeybee and the Mexican cochineal, cultivated as a source of red dye.)

²
Europeans later hunted the beaver to near extinction—its fur makes especially good felt, then in demand for hats. In this way, they unknowingly replaced one dominant natural engineer with another, the earthworm.

³
Roanoke apparently did have one signal impact: introducing England to tobacco. Sir Francis Drake probably brought the plant to the nation in the previous decade—he had acquired it on his round-the-world expedition. But it wasn’t widely known until Roanoke colonists returned with strange, fiery clay tubes at their lips. “In a short time,” one courtly eyewitness moaned, “many men every-where … with insatiable desire and greediness sucked in the stinking smoak.”

⁴
Equivalents in contemporary money are hard to establish, but this sum surely translates into tens of millions of dollars. Even that vague claim may be misleading, because the pool of investment capital was then much smaller; the capital raised by the Virginia Company was a much bigger percentage of the total available than, say, $50 million would be today.

⁵
Not everything went badly for the
tassantassas.
In May 1623, a little more than a year after the assault
,
they staged a counterattack at a peace conference with Tsenacomoco’s leadership. At a celebratory toast, one witness recorded, the English passed out poisoned sack (a sherry-like wine), killing “some tooe hundred” Indians. Pursued by a stricken, enraged crowd, the colonists fled to their boats. As they left, they fired into the mob, killing “som 50 more,” including, they erroneously believed, Opechancanough. Afterward the English “brought hom parte of ther heades”—that is, they scalped some of their victims.

3
Evil Air

“EXTRACTIVE STATES”

In 1985 a bookseller in northeast Spain announced that he had possession of nine letters and reports by Cristóbal Colón, seven of them never seen before, including chronicles of all four of his American voyages. Later that year, Consuelo Varela and Juan Gil, editors of a definitive edition of the admiral’s writings, skeptically inspected the papers. Surprising their colleagues, Varela and Gil concluded that the manuscripts were handwritten copies of actual letters and reports by Colón—copies of the type routinely kept by wealthy people in the days before photocopiers. The Spanish government acquired the papers for an undisclosed sum; a facsimile edition was published in 1989. Nine years after that, an English translation appeared.

Because I am interested in Colón, I bought a copy of the translation when I spotted it in a used-book store. Part of a series the Italian state published to honor the five hundredth anniversary of his first voyage to the Americas, the book is a big, lush, cream-colored object that doesn’t fit on a standard bookshelf. Disappointing to readers like me, Gil and Varela announced in the introduction that “these previously unknown texts do not present any spectacular revelations” about Colón’s life and character. But halfway through the newly revealed chronicle of the admiral’s second voyage I came across a curious detail—one that wasn’t in the fine biographies by Samuel Eliot Morison and Felipe Fernández-Armesto.

In the translation, Colón explains that after the expedition arrived at La Isabela “all my people went ashore to settle, and everyone realized it rained a lot. They became gravely ill from tertian fever.”
Tertian fever
, an old-fashioned term, refers to bouts of fever and chills that occur in a regular forty-eight-hour pattern—a day of sickness followed by a day of quiet, then a day of sickness as the pattern repeats (
tertian
, taken from the Latin for “three days,” derives from the Roman custom of counting time from the beginning of one period to the beginning of the next). Tertian fever is the fingerprint of the most important types of malaria, one of humankind’s most intractable scourges. Taken literally, Colón seemed to be saying that at La Isabela his men contracted malaria. No wonder the colonists didn’t want to work, I thought, and marked the passage with a pencil.

In 2002 Noble David Cook, a historian at Florida International University, in Miami, published an article entitled, alarmingly, “Sickness, Starvation, and Death in Early Hispaniola,” which detailed the island’s catastrophic history after Colón’s landing. Researchers generally agree that human malaria did not exist in the Americas before 1492 (some believe a kind of monkey malaria was present). If Colón’s men contracted malaria, Cook explained, they must have brought the disease with them from Spain, which like much of Europe then was rife with the disease. It was a textbook case of the Columbian Exchange, recorded by its progenitor himself.

Remembering the cream-colored book, I hauled it from my bookshelf and turned to the relevant passage. The original Spanish, printed on the facing page, didn’t use the Spanish words for malaria or tertian fever. Instead Colón wrote that his men had contracted something called
çiçiones
, a term I had never encountered. Why did Cook and the translator of Colón’s letter think this meant malaria?

Çiçiones
is hard to find in modern Spanish dictionaries—I consulted the dozen or so in my local library without success. Google, too, was no help. Nor was Colón himself. He provided no description of the symptoms of
çiçiones
, perhaps because he believed they were familiar to his readers. All he said about the disease, in fact, was to guess that it was spread by the native women around La Isabela, “who are abundant there; and since they [that is, the women] were immodest and disheveled, it is no wonder that they [that is, the men] had trouble.” To me, this sounded like the admiral thought
çiçiones
was some kind of venereal disease.

But that doesn’t jibe with other sources, as I learned when I contacted an expert in sixteenth-century Spanish, Scott Sessions of Amherst College. The first dictionary of the Spanish language appeared in 1611, Sessions told me. In it is an entry for
çiçiones:
“the fever that comes with chills, which is attributed to the
cierzo
[mistral wind], because it is the most acute, cold and penetrating.” The next authoritative Spanish dictionary, issued in multiple volumes by the Royal Spanish Academy between 1726 and 1739, similarly defines
çiçiones
as “the fever that starts with chills, which from being acute and penetrating like the mistral wind, as [the first dictionary] says, one derives the word: but it more likely refers to tertian fever”—malaria. Cook and the translator, in other words, were correct: Colón may well have been describing malaria.

The scenario isn’t implausible. Malaria can lie dormant in the body for months, only to reemerge at full strength. The disease is transmitted by mosquitoes, which take in microscopic malaria parasites when they drink blood from infected people and pass them on to the next people they bite. Colón left on his second voyage in September 1493. If one of his crew had a malaria relapse after landing in La Isabela, only one bite from the right type of mosquito would be necessary to spread the disease—and those mosquitoes are abundant on Hispaniola.

All of this is highly speculative, to say the least. Today we know that many different diseases cause chills and fevers, including influenza and pneumonia. But for centuries people couldn’t distinguish one from another; they didn’t understand that malaria was a specific disease. Sessions, the Amherst historian, told me that
paludismo
, the Spanish word for malaria, didn’t appear in Royal Spanish Academy dictionaries until 1914. Even then, few realized that it was caused by a mosquito-borne parasite—the 1914 dictionary defined
paludismo
as a “group of deadly phenomena produced by marshy emanations.” (The English word “malaria” comes from the Italian
mal aria
, evil or bad air.) Colón was using a word that probably indicates malaria, in other words, but he could well have been describing ordinary chills and fever. A single word is not enough to make a diagnosis.

Yet the impossibility of finding definitive answers does not mean historians should stop seeking them—the question is too important. Despite a global eradication program that began in the 1950s, malaria is still responsible for unimaginable suffering: more than three-quarters of a million deaths per annum, the great majority of them children under the age of five. Every year about 225 million people contract the disease, which even with modern medical care can incapacitate for months. In Africa it afflicts so many people so often that economists believe it is a major drag on development; since 1965, according to one widely cited calculation, countries with high rates of malaria have had annual per capita growth rates 1.3 percent less than countries without malaria, enough to ensure that many of the former lost ground to the latter.

As it does today, malaria played a huge role in the past—a role unlike that of other diseases, and arguably larger. When Europeans brought smallpox and influenza to the Americas, they set off
epidemics
: sudden outbursts that shot through Indian towns and villages, then faded. Malaria, by contrast, became
endemic,
an ever-present, debilitating presence in the landscape. Socially speaking, malaria—along with another mosquito-borne disease, yellow fever—turned the Americas upside down. Before these maladies arrived, the most thickly inhabited terrain north of Mexico was what is now the southeastern United States, and the wet forests of Mesoamerica and Amazonia held millions of people. After malaria and yellow fever, these previously salubrious areas became inhospitable. Their former inhabitants fled to safer lands; Europeans who moved into the emptied real estate often did not survive a year.

The high European mortality rates had long-lasting impacts, the Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson have argued. Even today, the places where European colonists couldn’t survive are much poorer than places that Europeans found more healthful. The reason, the researchers said, is that the conquering newcomers established different institutions in disease zones than they did in healthier areas. Unable to create stable, populous colonies in malarial areas, Europeans founded what Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson called “extractive states,” the emblematic example being the ghastly Belgian Congo in Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
, where a tiny cohort of high-collared Europeans forces a mass of chained, naked slaves, “shadows of disease and starvation,” to build a railroad to ship ivory from the interior.

Tobacco brought malaria to Virginia, indirectly but ineluctably, and from there it went north, south, and west, until much of North America was in its grip. Sugarcane, another overseas import, similarly brought the disease into the Caribbean and Latin America, along with its companion, yellow fever. Because both diseases killed European workers in American tobacco and sugar plantations, colonists imported labor in the form of captive Africans—the human wing of the Columbian Exchange. In sum: ecological introductions shaped an economic exchange, which in turn had political consequences that have endured to the present.

It would be an exaggeration to say that malaria and yellow fever were responsible for the slave trade, just as it would be an exaggeration to say that they explain why much of Latin America is still poor, or why the antebellum cotton plantations in
Gone with the Wind
sat atop great, sweeping lawns, or why Scotland joined England to form the United Kingdom, or why the weak, divided thirteen colonies won independence from mighty Great Britain in the Revolutionary War. But it would not be completely wrong, either.

SEASONING

Malaria is caused by the two hundred or so species in the genus
Plasmodium,
ancient microscopic parasites that plague countless types of reptile, bird, and mammal. Four of those two hundred species target humankind. They are dishearteningly good at their jobs.

Although the parasite consists of but a single cell, its life story is wildly complex; it changes outward appearance with the alacrity of characters in a Shakespearean comedy. From the human point of view, though, the critical fact is that it is injected into our flesh by mosquitoes. Once in the body, the parasite pries open red blood cells and climbs inside. (I am here skipping several intermediate steps.) Floating about the circulatory system like passengers in so many submarines, the parasites reproduce in huge numbers inside the cell. Eventually the burgeoning offspring burst out of the cell and pour into the bloodstream. Most of the new parasites subvert other red blood cells, but a few drift in the blood, waiting to be sucked up by a biting mosquito. When a mosquito takes in
Plasmodium,
it reproduces yet again inside the insect, taking on a different form. The new parasites squirm into the mosquito’s salivary glands. From there the insect injects them into its next victim, beginning the cycle anew.

In the body,
Plasmodium
apparently uses biochemical signaling to synchronize its actions: most of the infected red blood cells release their parasites at about the same time. Victims experience these eruptions as huge, coordinated assaults—a single infection can generate
ten billion
new parasites. Overwhelmed by the deluge, the immune system sets off paroxysms of intense chills and fever. Eventually it beats back the attack, but within days a new assault occurs; some of the previous wave of parasites, which have hidden themselves inside red blood cells, have produced a new generation of
Plasmodium,
billions strong. The cycle repeats until the immune system at last fights off the parasite. Or seems to—
Plasmodium
cells can secret themselves in other corners of the body, from which they emerge a few weeks later. Half a dozen episodes of chills and fever, a bit of respite, then another wave of attacks: the badge of full-blown malaria.