1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [52]
By 1657 the governor of Connecticut colony, John Winthrop, was recording cases of tertian fever in his medical journal. Winthrop, a member of the Royal Society, was one of the most careful scientific observers in New England. “If he said he saw tertian fever, he probably was seeing tertian fever,” said Robert C. Anderson, the genealogist who is transcribing Winthrop’s medical journal. More than that, Anderson told me, the existence of malaria in the 1650s suggests a date of introduction before 1640—after that year, political convulsions in England shut down emigration to New England for decades. “There were few colonists to bring it over,” Anderson said. If Plasmodium vivax had come to Connecticut by, say, 1635, I asked Spielman, could one make any inferences about Virginia? “New England is cold,” he said. “It’s hard to believe that malaria would have established itself there before Virginia.” Could the parasite have invaded Chesapeake Bay as early as the 1620s? “Given that hundreds or thousands of people from malaria zones came into the area, I wouldn’t have trouble believing that,” he said. “Once malaria has a chance to get into a place, it usually gets in fast.”
Tracing the past movement of malaria parasites is difficult—their existence was not discovered until 1880, so all previous data are indirect. By combining health records, estimates of past wetland extent, and early-twentieth-century malaria surveys by the British military, one can see that southeast England must have been seething with malaria. Of the fifty-nine birthplaces of the first Jamestown colonists that have been tracked by the historic-preservation group Preservation Virginia, thirty-five occurred in the regions the military identified as “extremely” or “more” favorable to Plasmodium. In addition, all the colonists passed through London and the malarial Thames delta en route. It seems almost certain that some brought the disease with them to Chesapeake Bay.
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Indeed, malaria may have come in before 1620. Conditions for the disease were perfect between 1606 and 1612, when tidewater Virginia was struck by drought. (I mentioned the drought in the last chapter.) A. quadrimaculatus is happy when wet areas get dry. “In drought years little tributary streams turn into a series of pools,” explained David Gaines, public-health entomologist at the Virginia Department of Health. The larvae “thrive in that kind of environment.” Quads, as entomologists call them, prefer to breed in open areas rather than shaded forests. After the peace created by Pocahontas’s marriage in 1614, colonists cleared land for tobacco—making the environment, Gaines told me, “more quad-friendly, because it would have created those little open pockets of water they love.” The tassantassas were issuing “an invitation for malaria,” he said. “In my experience, malaria takes up invitations right away.” If Plasmodium arrived with the first colonists, it could help explain, along with salt poisoning, why they were so often described as listless and apathetic; they had malaria.2
Malaria’s precise date of arrival will always lie in the realm of speculation. What is clear is that malaria rapidly made itself at home in Virginia. It became as inescapable there as it was in the English marshes—a constant, sapping part of life.
When London investors shipped people to Virginia, Governor George Yeardley warned in 1620, they “must be content to have littell service done by new men the ffirst yeare till they be seasoned”—seasoning being the term for the period in which newcomers were expected to battle disease. The prolonged incapacitation of recent migrants was taken for granted. Jamestown minister Hugh Jones wrote a pamphlet