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Even the worst ecological mismanagement benefits some species. Among the winners in the Caribbean was Anopheles albimanus, the region’s most important malaria vector. A resident of the bigger Caribbean islands and coastal areas in Yucatán and Central America, A. albimanus is a reluctant malaria host, hard for falciparum to infect and slow to pick up vivax (many mosquitoes have bacteria in their gut that inhibit the parasite). It likes to breed in coastal, algae-covered marshes under the open sun. Erosion and deforestation are its friends. Field experiments have shown that albimanus can reproduce in huge numbers when it has favorable habitat. Given its preferences, the European move into the Caribbean must have marked the beginning of a golden age. As the mosquito population soared, P. vivax had more opportunities to overcome the mosquito’s reluctance to host it. (Indeed, it may have beaten the mosquito while traveling with Colón; in addition to the reference to çiçiones in the admiral’s second voyage, his son Hernán later claimed that “intermittent fever” appeared on his fourth voyage.) From the Caribbean, vivax malaria spread into Mexico. Falciparum came much later, the delay partly due to A. albimanus’s more complete resistance to the parasite.

Sugar plantations denuded Barbados, as shown in the background of this photograph of workers’ huts in the 1890s. (Photo credit 3.5)

Another beneficiary was Aedes aegypti, the yellow fever vector. A. aegypti likes to breed in small amounts of clear water near human beings; naval water casks are a well-known favorite. Sugar mills abounded with equivalent vessels: the crude clay pots used to crystallize sugar. Plantations had hundreds or thousands of these vessels, which were only used for part of the year and often broken. Today we know that aegypti likes to breed in the puddles that collect in the interior of cast-off automobile tires. Sugar pots were a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century equivalent. McNeill noted that the pots would have been full of sugary residue, fodder for the bacteria that aegypti larvae feed upon. Sugar plantations were like factories for producing yellow fever.

Incoming Europeans didn’t know these details. But they were entirely aware that the Caribbean was, as historian James L. A. Webb wrote in a recent history of malaria, “a lethal environment for non-immunes.”

Malaria percolated from the Caribbean into South America, and thence up the Amazon. The river has a plenitude of hosts: a 2008 survey of the Madeira River, an important Amazonian tributary, found no less than nine Anopheles mosquito species, all of which carried the parasite. The first Europeans to visit Amazonia described it as a thriving, salubrious place; malaria and, later, yellow fever turned many rivers into death traps. By 1782 the parasite was sabotaging expeditions into the upper reaches of the river basin. For two centuries the disease was a sometime, scattered thing: big stretches of Amazonia, depopulated by smallpox and slavery, had too few inhabitants to sustain the parasite. It may have been more common in the far western tributaries like the Madeira, because they experienced fewer Dutch and Portuguese slave raids, and thus had more people to infect. Malaria nearly killed French naturalist Alcide d’Orbigny in 1832 in the Madeira region, but a decade later another naturalist, the U.S. amateur William Henry Edwards, “encountered but one case” of it on the river, despite camping for days near its mouth.

Much worse was the northeastern bulge of South America, the region the geographer Susanna Hecht has called the Caribbean Amazon. Bounded to the south by the Amazon River in Brazil and to the west by the Orinoco River in Venezuela, it was a watery place that Arawak and Carib people controlled with sprawling networks of dikes, dams, canals, berms, and mounds. Large expanses of forest were managed for tree crops, especially the palms that in tropical places provide fruit, oil, starch, wine, fuel, and