1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [64]
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