• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3098 0

in 1724 describing Virginia to Britons. The colony’s climate, he incorrectly explained, causes chills and fever, “a severe Fit of which (called a Seasoning) most expect, some time after their Arrival in that Climate.” Seasoning often was a path to the cemetery; during Jamestown’s first half century, as many as a third of new arrivals died within a year of disembarking. After that, Virginians learned by trial and error to live with vivax, avoiding marshes and staying indoors at dusk; those with acquired immunity carefully tended the sick, most of whom were children as in Africa today. Seasoning deaths fell from 20 or 30 percent around 1650 to 10 percent or lower around 1670—a considerable improvement, but still a level that represented much suffering.

Landon Carter had a prosperous Virginia plantation about sixty miles north of Jamestown. A devoted father, Carter agonized as malaria repeatedly hit his family in the summer and fall of 1757. Worst affected was his infant daughter Sukey, racked by chills and fever in the classic tertian pattern. Like Samuel Jeake, Carter recorded her struggle in a diary:

Dec. 7: Sukey lookt badly all this evening with a quick Pulse.

Dec. 8: ’Tis her usual Period of attack which is now got to every Fortnight.… Seems brisk and talkt cheerfully. Her fever not higher.

Dec. 9: Continues better though very pale.

Dec. 10: Sukey a fever early and very sick at her stomach and head ach. This fever went off in the night.

Dec. 11: The Child no fever to day but I thought her pulse a little quick at night.

Dec. 12: Sukey’s fever rose at 1 in the night.… This Child dangerous ill at 12, dead pale and blue.…

Dec. 13: Sukey’s fever kept wearing away Yesterday till one in the night when she was quite clear.

To live in Virginia, a heartworn Carter wrote that day, “it is necessary that man should be acquainted with affliction, and ’tis certainly nothing short of it to be confined a whole year in tending one’s sick Children. Mine are now never well.”

Sukey died the following April, short of her third birthday.

ABOUT-FACE

Malaria had impacts beyond the immediate sufferings of its victims. It was a historical force that deformed cultures, an insistent nudge that pushed societies to answer questions in ways that today seem cruel and reprehensible. Consider the seventeenth-century English entrepreneurs who wanted to make money in North America. Because Chesapeake Bay had no gold and silver, the best way to profit was to produce something else that could be exported to the home country. In New England, the Pilgrims depended on selling beaver fur. In Chesapeake Bay, the English settled on tobacco, for which there was huge demand. To satisfy that demand, the colonists wanted to expand the plantation area. To do that, they would have to take down huge trees with hand tools; break up soil under the hot sun; hoe, water, and top the growing tobacco plants; cut the heavy, sticky leaves; drape them on racks to dry; and pack them in hogsheads for shipping. All of this would require a lot of labor. Where could the colonists acquire it?

Before answering this question make the assumption, abundantly justified, that the colonists have few moral scruples about the answer and are concerned only with maximizing ease and profit. From this point of view, they had two possible sources for the required workforce: indentured servants from England and slaves from outside of England (Indians or Africans). Servants or slaves: which, economically speaking, was the best choice?

Indentured servants were contract laborers recruited from England’s throngs of unemployed. Because the poor could not afford the costly journey across the sea, planters paid for the voyage and servants paid off the debt by working for a given period, typically four to seven years. After that, indentured servants were free to claim their own land in the Americas. Slavery is harder to define, because it has existed in many different forms. But its essence is that the owner acquires the right to coerce labor from slaves, and slaves never gain the right to leave;