1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [51]
“The marshes would have these bursts of mortality,” Dobson told me. “About every ten years they’d have a year in which 10 or 20 percent of the population would die. A few miles away, in higher ground, were some of the healthiest parts of England.” Inured to the cavalcade of suffering, residents viewed their circumstances with fatalistic cheer. (Readers of Charles Dickens will recall the stoicism of the fen-dwelling Gargerys in Great Expectations, raising the child Pip within a short walk of the “five little stone lozenges” that marked the resting places of his “five little brothers.”) Traveling in feverish Essex County, writer Daniel Defoe met men who claimed to have “from five or six, to fourteen or fifteen wives.” Explaining how this was possible, one “merry fellow” told Defoe that men thereabouts brought in wives from healthier inland precincts.
[W]hen they took the young lasses out of the wholesome and fresh air, they were healthy, fresh and clear, and well; but when they came out of their native air into the marshes among the fogs and damps, there they presently changed their complexion, got an ague or two, and seldom held it above half a year, or a year at the most; and then, said he, we go to the uplands again, and fetch another.
The marshman laughed as he spoke, Defoe wrote, “but the fact, for all that, is certainly true.”
In 1625 the bubonic plague engulfed England. More than fifty thousand people died in London alone. Many of the urban wealthy fled into the malarial eastern marshes, with results later described by the satirical poet George Wither:
In Kent, and (all along) on Essex side
A Troupe of cruell Fevers did reside:…
And, most of them, who had this place [London] forsooke,
Were either slaine by them, or Pris’ners tooke…
As this nineteenth-century copy of a now-lost earlier drawing suggests, malaria was long a constant fear in England’s southeastern marshlands. (Photo credit 3.2)
In the end, Wither explained, “poorest beggers found more pitty here [London], / And lesser griefe, then richer men had there.” The implication is mind-boggling: people who fled to vivax country would have been better off staying home with the bubonic plague.
Data are sketchy and incomplete, but according to the Brandeis University historian David Hackett Fischer about 60 percent of the first wave of English emigrants came from nine eastern and southeastern counties—the nation’s Plasmodium belt. One example was the hundred-plus colonists who began Jamestown. Fifty-nine of their birthplaces are known, according to Preservation Virginia, the organization that backs Jamestown archaeology; thirty-seven were in malaria-ridden Essex, Huntingdonshire, Kent, Lincolnshire, Suffolk, Sussex, and London. Most of these men, one assumes, set off from higher, inland areas that were less malarial than the coastal wetlands. But many would have come from the marshes. Even those who didn’t come from the malaria zone usually passed through it just before departure, their ships waiting for weeks or months at Sheerness, a Kent harbor town near the mouth of the Thames that was a malaria center. Other ships waited at the almost equally pestilential Blackwall, east of London on the same river.
People in malarial paroxysms would have been unlikely candidates for an arduous sea voyage. But Plasmodium vivax, one recalls, can hide itself inside the apparently healthy. Colonists could board a ship without symptoms, land in Chesapeake Bay tobacco country, and then be struck by the teeth-chattering chills and sweat-bursting fevers of malaria. At which point, alas, they could unknowingly pass the parasite to every mosquito that bit them.
“In theory, one person could have established the parasite in the entire continent,” said Andrew Spielman, a malaria researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health. Almost certainly many of the tassantassas at Jamestown were infectious. At some point one of them was bitten by Anopheles