1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (19 page)

“What would be the attitudes of a population that had a relatively high rate of illness and short life expectancy?” asked the Rutmans. Some have suggested that the reckless insouciance and preoccupation with display said to be characteristic of antebellum southern culture are rooted in the constant menace of disease. Others have described a special calm in the face of death. Maybe so—but it is hard to demonstrate that southerners were, in fact, unusually rash or vain or stoic. Indeed, one could imagine arguing the opposite: that the steady, cold breath of mortality on southerners’ necks could make them timid, humble, and excitable.

Tara (shown behind Scarlett O’Hara in this publicity image from
Gone with the Wind
) was created on a studio backlot. Nonetheless, it was a faithful image of the classic southern plantation. High on a nearly treeless hill, with tall windows to admit the breeze, it was ideally suited to avoid mosquitoes and the diseases that accompanied them. (
Photo credit 3.3
)

More than four hundred species of mosquito belong to the genus
Anopheles.
Perhaps a quarter can transmit malaria, but only about thirty species are common vectors. More than a dozen of these thirty exist in the Americas, the most important being
A. quadrimaculatus, A. albimanus,
and
A. darlingi.
Their habitat range and the average temperature go far to explain why the history of certain parts of the Americas—and not others—was dominated by malaria.
Click
here
to view a larger image.

A different point is more susceptible to empirical demonstration: the constant risk of disease meant that the labor force was unreliable. The lack of assurance penalized small farmers, who were disproportionately affected by the loss of a few hands. Meanwhile, the Rutmans noted, “a large labor force insured against catastrophe.” Bigger planters had higher costs but were better insulated. Over time, they gained an edge; smaller outfits, meanwhile, struggled. Accentuating the gap, wealthy Carolinian plantation owners could afford to move to resorts in the fever-free mountains or shore during the sickness season. Poor farmers and slaves had to stay in the
Plasmodium
zone. In this way disease nudged apart rich and poor. Malarial places, the Rutmans said, drift easily toward “exaggerated economic polarization.”
Plasmodium
not only prodded farmers toward slavery, it rewarded big plantations, which further lifted the demand for slaves.

Malaria did not
cause
slavery. Rather, it strengthened the economic case for it, counterbalancing the impediments identified by Adam Smith. Tobacco planters didn’t observe that Scots and Indians died from tertian fever and then plot to exploit African resistance to it. Indeed, little evidence exists that the first slave owners clearly understood African immunity, partly because they didn’t know what malaria was and partly because people in isolated plantations could not easily make overall comparisons. Regardless of whether they knew it, though, planters with slaves tended to have an economic edge over planters with indentured servants. If two Carolina rice growers brought in ten workers apiece and one ended up after a year with nine workers and the other ended up with five, the first would be more likely to flourish. Successful planters imported more slaves. Newcomers imitated the practices of their most prosperous neighbors. The slave trade took off, its sails filled by the winds of
Plasmodium.

Slavery would have existed in the Americas without the parasite. In 1641 Massachusetts, which had little malaria, became the first English colony to legalize slavery explicitly. During the mid-nineteenth century, the healthiest spot in English North America may have been western Massachusetts’s Connecticut River Valley, according to an analysis by Dobson and Fischer. Malaria there was almost nonexistent; infectious disease, by the standards of the day, extremely rare. Yet slavery was part of the furniture of daily life—at that time almost every minister, usually the most important man in town, had one or two. About 8 percent of the inhabitants of the main street of Deerfield, one of the bigger villages in the valley, were African slaves.

On the other side of the hemisphere’s malaria belt, the southern terminus of the habitat for
Anopheles darlingi
, the main South American vector for falciparum, is by the Rio de la Plata (Silver River), the border between Spanish and Portuguese America. South of the river is Argentina. With few mosquitoes to transmit
Plasmodium
, Argentina had little malaria. Yet, like Massachusetts, it had African slaves; between 1536, when Spain founded its first colony on the Rio de la Plata, and 1853, when Argentina abolished slavery, 220,000 to 330,000 Africans landed in Buenos Aires, the main port and capital.

On the other side of the mosquito border were the much bigger Brazilian ports of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, where at least 2.2 million slaves arrived. Despite the difference in size, southern Brazil and Argentina were demographically similar: in the 1760s and 1770s, when Spain and Portugal first systematically censused in their colonies, about half of the population in both areas was of African descent. Yet the impact of slavery in them was entirely different. Slavery was never critical to colonial Argentina’s most important industries; colonial Brazil could not have functioned without it. Argentina was a society with slaves; Brazil was culturally and economically
defined
by slavery.

All American colonies, in sum, had slaves. But those to which the Columbian Exchange brought endemic falciparum malaria ended up with more. Falciparous Virginia and Brazil became slave societies in ways that non-falciparous Massachusetts and Argentina were not.

YELLOW JACK

In the 1640s a few Dutch refugees from Brazil landed on Barbados, the easternmost Caribbean island. Unlike the rest of the Caribbean, Barbados never had a large Indian population. English colonists moved in, hoping to capitalize on the tobacco boom. When the Dutch refugees arrived the island had about six thousand inhabitants, among them two thousand indentured servants and two hundred slaves. Tobacco had turned out not to grow particularly well on Barbados. The Dutch showed the colonists how to plant sugarcane, which they had learned during an ill-fated venture in Brazil. Europe, then as now, had a sweet tooth; sugar was as popular as it was hard to come by. Barbados proved to be good cane territory. Production rapidly expanded.

Sugar production is awful work that requires many hands. The cane is a tall, tough Asian grass, vaguely reminiscent of its distant cousin bamboo. Plantations burn the crop before harvest to prevent the knifelike leaves from slashing workers. Swinging machetes into the hard, soot-smeared cane under the tropical sun, field hands quickly splattered themselves head to foot with a sticky mixture of dust, ash, and cane juice. The cut stalks were crushed in the mill and the juice boiled down in great copper kettles enveloped in smoke and steam; workers ladled the resultant hot syrup into clay pots, where the pure sugar crystallized out as it cooled. Most of the leftover molasses was fermented and distilled to produce rum, a process that required stoking yet another big fire under yet another infernal cauldron.

The question as ever was where the required labor would come from. As in Virginia, slaves then typically cost twice as much as indentured workers, if not more. But the Dutch West India Company, a badly run outfit that was desperate for cash, was willing to sell Africans cheap in Barbados. Slaves and indentured servants there were roughly the same price. As one would expect, the island’s new sugar barons imported both by the thousands: the sweepings of English streets and luckless captives from Angolan and Congolese wars. Covered in perspiration and gummy cane soot, Europeans and Africans wielded machetes side by side. Then the Columbian Exchange raised the relative cost of indentured servants.

Hidden on the slave ships was a hitchhiker from Africa: the mosquito
Aedes aegypti
. In its gut
A. aegypti
carried its own hitchhiker: the virus that causes yellow fever, itself also of African origin. The virus spends most of its time in the mosquito, using human beings only to pass from one insect to the next. Typically it remains in the body no more than two weeks. During this time it drills into huge numbers of cells, takes over their functioning, and uses the hijacked genetic material to produce billions of copies of itself. These flood the bloodstream and are picked up by biting
aegypti
. For imperfectly understood reasons this cellular invasion usually has little impact on children. Adults are hit by massive internal bleeding. The blood collects and coagulates in the stomach. Sufferers vomit it blackly up—the signature symptom of yellow fever. Another symptom is jaundice, which gave rise to the disease’s nickname of “yellow jack.” (A yellow jack was the flag flown by quarantined ships.) The virus kills about half of its victims—43 to 59 percent in six well-documented episodes McNeill compiled in
Mosquito Empires
. Survivors acquire lifelong immunity. In Africa yellow fever was a childhood disease that inflicted relatively little suffering. In the Caribbean it was a dire plague that passed over Africans while ravaging Europeans, Indians, and slaves born in the islands.

The first yellow fever onslaught began in 1647 and lasted five years. Terror spread as far away as Massachusetts, which instituted its first-ever quarantine on incoming vessels. Barbados had more Africans and more Europeans per square mile than any other Caribbean island, which is to say that it had more potential yellow fever carriers and potential yellow fever victims. Unsurprisingly, the epidemic hit there first. As it began a man named Richard Ligon landed in Barbados. “We found riding at Anchor, 22 good ships,” he wrote later,

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

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

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

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