The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years (9 page)

Once they passed the Tropic of Cancer, the trade winds that had rushed them across the ocean waned. The air grew hot and still. They stopped at some island colonies, and several passengers visited taverns. Undoubtedly, infected mosquitoes bit them, or stowed away on board. Soon a daily and horrifying spectacle unfolded.

Yellow fever was a special scourge of sailors.
Aedes
mosquitoes carried the virus and often preyed on ships. The virus descends rapidly, characteristically provoking terrifying black vomit. The infected either die or survive with complete, lifelong immunity. The virus takes what it can, then disappears as quickly as it arrived.

Yellow fever hit the Scottish voyagers with deadly force. Perfectly well in the morning, the infected colonists would spew black vomit and be dead by evening. The dumbfounded survivors heard the splash of three corpses hitting the water every day.

In time, the deadly scourge loosened its hold, and soon the bedraggled flotilla passed a cliff-covered spit of highland jutting into the sea. Cliffs lined one side; the other was bordered by mangrove swamps. The wind at their backs, the ships silently sailed into the narrow bay, carefully navigating around the submerged rocks at its mouth. They’d made it to the Darién coast of Panama, and on this high rocky peninsula, they’d build their settlement, New Caledonia.

Hungry, exhausted, and unnerved by yellow fever, they disembarked. While Paterson buried his wife, the others set about clearing
land and building huts. Their start in Darién couldn’t be called auspicious, but in fact their prospects weren’t bad. The New Caledonians had survived the shipboard typhus, dysentery, and typhoid, and yellow fever, too. Now they stood upon an untouched land as rich in fish, fowl, turtles, and monkeys as Wafer had written, on the threshold of a great step forward for their homeland. With just a few days’ work, a band of settlers could capture dozens of turtles—enough to feed more than a thousand men.

And yet they languished. The turtles and monkeys went unscathed as the colonists lay miserably in makeshift, insect-infested huts by the swamp, pathetically relying on the scarce and rotten supplies they’d brought from Scotland. For days they recorded nothing in their journals except the fact of rain: “much thunder, lighting and rain . . . great showers of rain . . . a prodigious quantity of rain . . . much wind and rain . . . wind and rain as above.” They drank prodigious quantities of alcohol, wrote in their journals of sad dreams of plundering for gold and fleeing Darién in shame, and buried another eleven of their fellow settlers. Months later, they’d broken no ground, and their fort and town lay half-built. When a small Spanish party encroached on the little colony, three quarters of the colonists were too sick to fight.
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This wasn’t yellow fever. The deaths and sickness likely stemmed from a variety of infections, including falciparum malaria. Expeditions to the area that suffered similar losses in later times—when the presence of
Plasmodium
could be discerned by its vulnerability to antimalarial drugs or by microscopic scrutiny—suffered demonstrably heavy burdens of
P. falciparum
infection. The parasite had many possible venues of access to the Scottish colony. It could have hitched a ride in a Scot drinking at a tavern during earlier stops in the Caribbean colonies. Or perhaps it had arrived with the Kuna leaders who promptly and regularly visited New Caledonia. Several colonists accepted invitations for feasts and overnight visits to open-air Kuna villages that offered no barrier to bloodthirsty mosquitoes, and where hammocks swung just a quick buzz from those of escaped African
slaves. Richard Long, sent by the English to recover sunken silver ships off Darién in the late 1690s, writes of encounters with “a Spanish Negro who was slave” to local Kuna leaders.
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Day and night, the colonists wrote in their anguished letters home, mosquitoes harassed them in their dank little thatch huts.
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“The air is abominable,” one wrote home, “and the Water Poyson.”
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Paterson, delirious and incapacitated with bouts of fever, wrote that his fellow colonists “daily grow more weakly and sickly.” “I was troubled with fever and ague that I raved almost every day,” one colonist wrote, “and it rendered me so weak that my legs were not able to support me . . . our bodies pined away . . . we were like so many skeletons.” Between January and May, nearly four hundred of the settlers died, with as many as ten to twelve deaths a day.
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“Halfe [
sic
] of the men in the Collony [
sic
] are al seeke at present with the great heats . . . Our fortifications are not done as yet neither wil be these twelve-moneths,” an ensign wrote to his family.
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They needed more oatmeal and cheese and brandy, they pleaded in letters sent back to Scotland. “I must be a beggar at present,” an ensign wrote to his father, “thogh [
sic
] I hope not to be long so.”
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But the English decreed that none of their subjects in the Caribbean should help the withering colony, with its abominable air and poison water, and the few ships that visited New Caledonia exhibited a justifiable lack of interest in the Scots’ wools and laces.

In June, with news of another Spanish attack looming, the colonists fled New Caledonia. Those too weak to make it to the boats were derided as “poor, silly fellows” and left behind to die. One ship made it to Jamaica in seven weeks, losing 140 lives along the way. Another arrived in New England, losing 105.
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Paterson lay in his cabin unable to move, his dream in pieces.

Later historians made much of the great profusion of brandy bottles that littered the colony’s ruins, half-jokingly suggesting that the Scots had squandered their colony on a long drunken party, but the truth is that they’d had no better medicine—besides opium—to fight Panama’s malaria.

•    •    •

By the time the sole surviving ship of the Scots expedition to Darién made it back home, Scotland had descended further into famine, and three hundred hungry new settlers, inspired by the land of plenty described in Lionel Wafer’s recently published journals, had already set sail for Darién to join the others. Goldsmiths, distillers, ministers, and the wives of the colonists sailed off to Panama hoping to civilize New Caledonia. While they stalled around the Isle of Bute, they heard that the earlier colonists had abandoned the settlement, but dismissed the news as vicious English gossip. Who could have taken out those hardy souls, endowed with all the best assets of Scotland?

When the news became unavoidable—letters from the terrified Caledonians had started to arrive—the directors of the expedition remained stalwart. The earlier colonists had “shamefully deserted” and the latest expedition was to “repossess yourself [of New Caledonia] thereof by force of arms.” The first settlers had conspired with their northern rivals, obviously, and betrayed the Scots. Nobody could imagine there might be a worse, and much tinier, enemy than the English.

When the second wave of colonists arrived in Darién, they found the colony in ruins, discovered the sad scrum of gravestones. They, too, started to go hungry, forced to cut rations when one of their ships caught fire and sank with all its provisions after someone on board tripped over a candle while getting a nip of brandy. They, too, started to fall ill. Soon, two thirds of the second wave of Scottish colonists were sick with fever.
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“I was brought to the gates of death,” one of the chaplains on the colony wrote in a typically sad letter to Scotland,

by a long and severe fever . . . and about 150 persons were cut off by death, beside what have dyed since . . . instead of the comfortable settlement we expected, nothing left but a vast howling wilderness
in the properest sense . . . here all the circumstances of unpassable woods, vast desolations never frequented by mankind, Retired Recesses and resting places of tigers, Buffaloes, monkeys and other wild beasts, all manner of dangers and difficulties . . . we are a poor graceless shiftless and heartless company labouring under all discouragements: having no lodging, but either on board the ships . . . or under the shadow of trees in the woods or little huts made of the branches; and not provisions but what we brought from Scotland, which is now musty, rotten, old and salt, and yet like to be very soon exhausted; which if we get no supply speedily from Scotland will reduce us to the greatest extreamity.
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Slowly, Spanish soldiers—fighting off an outbreak of fever themselves—surrounded the weakened colony.
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Like those before them, the new New Caledonian leaders didn’t even bother to organize a defense. Hundreds were ill, and another accidental fire burned down more huts.
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The Spanish demanded a surrender, and with more than a third of the New Caledonians too sick even to stand, and sixteen a day falling into their graves—“our Fort indeed like a hospital of sick and dying men” one later wrote—they did.

Crowded onto their leaky boats, even more New Caledonians succumbed to the “malignant fevers and fluxes . . . [that] swept away great numbers from among us,” a survivor noted. “They would sometimes bury in the sea eight in one morning . . . and when men were taken with these diseases, they would sometimes die like men distracted, in a very sad and fearful-like manner.”

Of the four thousand Scottish colonists who set out for Darién in the late seventeenth century, two thousand had died. Survivors trickled into New England and the West Indies. Just a handful made it back to Scotland. Their disappointed relatives and neighbors considered these hardy souls—who had survived typhoid and typhus, yellow fever, malaria, and the Spanish—personae non gratae. Angry mobs surrounded them and derided them as weak and cowardly. Their own fathers felt too ashamed to see them. “They were a sad reproach to
the nation from which they were sent,” wrote Francis Borland, a chaplain of the Church of Scotland.
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Thousands of Scots found themselves bankrupted by the Darién misadventure.
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William Paterson ended his life in ignoble obscurity, teaching mathematics to poor children.
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England offered to repay Scotland’s debts, in exchange for its forfeiting its national autonomy to become part of a new Great Britain. The Scots accepted, and the independent nation of Scotland was no more.

The force of malaria’s tide rumbles to this day. Descriptions, reenactments, and artifacts from the Scots’ disastrous foray into Darién fill the libraries and museums of Britain. Malaria continues to repel foreigners from Africa. Standing on the coast of Cameroon you can see a gray blob shimmering on the horizon: Bioko Island, in the Gulf of Guinea. In the early 2000s, the Ohio-based Marathon Oil company built a giant natural gas liquefaction plant on Bioko, along with hundreds of neat ranch houses of the type that are commonly found in Texas. The ranch houses are supposed to be full of American oil workers and their families, but they are all empty. “Too much damn malaria,” a malariologist who consulted for Marathon says.
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Nobody wants to come and risk the bite of a local mosquito.

It’s not easy to find written record of malaria’s foray into North America. Some of the most comprehensive explorations have long fallen out of print. You cannot order Erwin Ackerknecht’s 1945 analysis of malaria in the Upper Mississippi Valley, St. Julien Ravenel Childs’s 1940 book on malaria in the early Carolinas, or Gordon Harrison’s masterful 1978 study,
Mosquitoes, Malaria, and Man
, from any bookstore. You can’t even find them at your local library. I acquired a beaten-up copy of Ackerknecht’s book from the rare-book vendor Alibris. Seminal works by the malariologists who tackled American malaria, such as Paul Russell and Lewis Hackett, are even harder to find. The last remaining copies, it seems, gather dust in the noncirculating collections of university medical libraries.

I won Harrison’s book on an eBay auction. It wasn’t much of an auction. I think I was the only one who bid for it. It arrived wrapped in library-edition plastic, with a call number on its spine and the words
DENNY JR. H. SCHOOL
stamped on its cover. Apparently, the librarians at Denny Junior High, a public school in Seattle, had decided that even the nation’s twelve-year-olds would not bother to check out this thoughtful history of malaria and had purged it from the collection. More damning evidence of authorial oblivion can hardly be imagined.

But grasping malaria’s American legacy does not require a book so much as a map, for the disease is impressed upon the culture and demography of the United States. Disparate malarial burdens across the nation created deep cultural prejudices and settlement and demographic patterns that persist to this day.

Regional biases were born. Northerners, who suffered relatively little malaria, considered Southerners, with their endemic malaria, “voluptuary,” “indolent,” “unsteady,” and “fiery,” as Thomas Jefferson put it in a 1785 letter. (Northerners, by contrast, were thought to be cool, sober, laborious, and persevering.)
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Racial biases also emerged. By the late eighteenth century, with
P. falciparum
restricting the growth of the European population, people of African descent had coalesced majorities and near-majorities in the southern colonies. Africans comprised 40 percent of the population of the Chesapeake colonies,
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and the majority of the Carolina colonies.
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As the slaves started to outnumber the European planters who owned them, the threat of slave rebellion loomed, and the novel and peculiar notion of solidarity based on skin color evolved, allying white planters of divergent class and ethnic backgrounds against the feared black majority.
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