1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [65]
Hidden on the slave ships was a hitchhiker from Africa: the mosquito Aedes aegypti. In its gut A. aegypti carried its own hitchhiker: the virus that causes yellow fever, itself also of African origin. The virus spends most of its time in the mosquito, using human beings only to pass from one insect to the next. Typically it remains in the body no more than two weeks. During this time it drills into huge numbers of cells, takes over their functioning, and uses the hijacked genetic material to produce billions of copies of itself. These flood the bloodstream and are picked up by biting aegypti. For imperfectly understood reasons this cellular invasion usually has little impact on children. Adults are hit by massive internal bleeding. The blood collects and coagulates in the stomach. Sufferers vomit it blackly up—the signature symptom of yellow fever. Another symptom is jaundice, which gave rise to the disease’s nickname of “yellow jack.” (A yellow jack was the flag flown by quarantined ships.) The virus kills about half of its victims—43 to 59 percent in six well-documented episodes McNeill compiled in Mosquito Empires. Survivors acquire lifelong immunity. In Africa yellow fever was a childhood disease that inflicted relatively little suffering. In the Caribbean it was a dire plague that passed over Africans while ravaging Europeans, Indians, and slaves born in the islands.
The first yellow fever onslaught began in 1647 and lasted five years. Terror spread as far away as Massachusetts, which instituted its first-ever quarantine on incoming vessels. Barbados had more Africans and more Europeans per square mile than any other Caribbean island, which is to say that it had more potential yellow fever carriers and potential yellow fever victims. Unsurprisingly, the epidemic hit there first. As it began a man named Richard Ligon landed in Barbados. “We found riding at Anchor, 22 good ships,” he wrote later,
with boats plying to and fro, with Sails and oars, which carried commodities from place to place: so quick stirring, and numerous, as I have seen it below the bridge at London. Yet notwithstanding all this appearance of trade, the Inhabitants of the Islands, and shipping too, were so grievously visited with plague (or as killing a disease) that before a month was expired, after our arrival, the living were hardly able to bury the dead.
Six thousand died on Barbados alone in those five years, according to one contemporary estimate. Almost all of the victims were European—a searing lesson for the island’s colonists. McNeill estimates that the epidemic “may have killed 20 to 50 percent of local populations” in a swathe from coastal Central America to Florida.
The epidemic didn’t kill off the sugar industry—it was too lucrative. Incredibly, Barbados, an island of 166 square miles, was then on its way to making more money than all of the rest of English America. Meanwhile sugar had expanded to nearby Nevis, St. Kitts, Antigua, Montserrat, Martinique, Grenada, and other places. (Cuba had begun growing sugar decades before, but production was small; Spaniards were much too preoccupied by silver to pay attention.) A heterogeneous mass of English, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese was clearing these islands as fast as possible, sticking cane in the flatlands and cutting trees on the slopes for fuel. Deforestation and erosion were the nigh-unavoidable result; rainfall, no longer absorbed by vegetation, washed soil down the slopes, forming coastal marshes. In the not-too-distant future workers would be ordered to carry the soil in baskets back up the hills—“a true labor of Sisyphus,” McNeill remarked in Mosquito Empires. McNeill quotes one Caribbean naturalist marveling at “the inconsideration or rather stupidity of west Indian planters in extinguishing many useful woods that spontaneously grow on those islands.” Writing in 1791, the