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Bay, sealing in Cornwallis. Meanwhile, Washington marched south from New York. The revolution was so short of cash and supplies that his army had twice mutinied. Nonetheless an opportunity had arisen. The British army was unable to move; Cornwallis later estimated that only 3,800 of his 7,700 men were fit to fight. McNeill takes pains to credit the bravery and skill of the revolution’s leaders. But what he wryly referred to as “revolutionary mosquitoes” played an equally critical role. “Anopheles quadrimaculatus stands tall among the Founding Fathers,” he said to me. With Cornwallis’s troops falling to the Columbian Exchange in ever-greater numbers, the British army surrendered, effectively creating the United States, on October 17, 1781.

Click here to view a larger image of this entire map.

Click here to view a larger image of this entire map.

1 It may seem odd that malaria, a tropical disease, flourished in England of the Little Ice Age. But history is an interplay of social and biological processes. Just as Elizabethan marsh-draining techniques unintentionally helped vivax flourish, the improved drainage methods of the Victorian era dramatically cut malaria, because they didn’t leave the brackish pools, thus simultaneously eliminating mosquito habitat and creating better pasturage for cattle, which A. maculipennis, if given the choice, prefers to feed upon. Even so, researchers routinely found “thousands” of the insects roosting “in the dark and ill-ventilated pigsties” of poor coastal farmers as late as the 1920s. Today some fear that global warming will foster the spread of malaria. But if people continue destroying mosquito habitat by draining wetlands the hotter weather may have no impact on malaria rates.

2 Early arrival of the parasite could help explain, too, why Opechancanough never expelled the colonists, even after almost wiping them out in 1622. Debilitated by disease, the Powhatan might have had difficulty mounting a sustained war. Unhappily, these intriguing speculations have the disadvantage of having no empirical support.

3 These figures do not include Indians seized in other colonies. During a vicious Indian war in 1675–76, for instance, Massachusetts sent hundreds of native captives to Spain, Portugal, Hispaniola, Bermuda, and Virginia. And the French in New Orleans seized thousands more. Carolina was a bigger slaver than others, but every English colony in North America was in the same business, with or without the cooperation of local Indians.

PART TWO

Pacific Journeys

4

Shiploads of Money

(Silk for Silver, Part One)

“THAT EXTRA LITTLE EFFORT”

Vastness was its greatest characteristic, with wonder close behind. The vastness—intimidating, confounding, beyond credence—spoke clearly from a hundred miles away. It is said that kings in their palaces looked over the ocean to see a new mountain range on the horizon: wide-bellied ships by the hundred, rigged fore and aft, soldiers massed at their bulwarks. Strange warlike banners snapped from the topgallants. The armada was larger than any before or since. It must have seemed geographic. Wonder attended its sails, followed by capitulation and obeisance. These were the great maritime expeditions sponsored by the Ming emperor Yongle in the early fifteenth century. Such a mark did they leave that some historians believe they were the font of the stories of Sinbad the Sailor.

Built in enormous dry docks, encrusted with precious metals, replete with technical innovations—double hulls, watertight compartments, rust-proofed nails, mechanical bilge pumps—that Europe would not discover for a century, the Chinese ships were marvels for their time. The flagship of their commander, Zheng He, was more than 300 feet long and 150 feet wide, the biggest wooden vessel ever constructed. Records claim it had nine masts. Zheng’s grandest expedition had 317 ships, an amazing figure even now. The Spanish Armada, then the largest fleet in European history, consisted of just 137; the biggest was half the size of Zheng’s flagship.

Zheng himself was among