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his gratitude by immediately hatching a plot to separate the freed slave (now referred to as “my Negro”) from his secret recipe. Southall broke out the good stuff, enticing the Jamaican with “one piece of beef, some biscuits and a bottle of beer,” after noting how “all Negroes being greedy of Flesh, when they can come at it.” As the day progressed, the brew flowed freely until “all the bottles we emptied of beer were fill’d with liquor.” Southall, however, remained sober enough to make notes about ingredients, quantities, and procedures, and after returning to England he marketed the pesticide along with his services as an early pest-control specialist. Unlike his long-forgotten Jamaican “business partner,” Southall did not divulge the secret ingredients of his elixir—which he christened Nonpareil.*102

Southall also endeavored to determine just how bed bugs came to England, and in doing so he shows off his modest side, informing the reader how he overcame “difficulties, which might have discouraged a less enterprising Genius.” The great man consulted “as many learned, curious, and ancient men” as he could find, affirming that before the Great Fire of London in 1666, bed bugs “were never noted to have been seen.”

They were then so few, as to be little taken notice of; yet as they were only seen in Firr-Timber, ’twas conjectur’d they were then first brought to England in them; of which most of the new Houses were partly built, instead of the good Oak, destroy’d in the old.†103

(John Southall, A Treatise of Buggs, 17)

Southall’s interviews supported the claims made in several early European dictionaries and encyclopedias that bed bugs did not exist in London prior to the Great Fire but were subsequently carried to England in timber imported from the American colonies. Years later, documents would reveal that the bloodsucking pests had actually been recorded in England since 1583 (nearly one hundred years before the famous London blaze).

Miffed Americans returned fire in the eighteenth century by nicknaming the tiny bloodsuckers “red coats” and insisting that their own bed bug problems had arrived from Europe with the early colonists. In this regard, the Yanks were apparently correct since entomologists now believe that Cimex lectularius spread from an origin somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean region, across much of the world, via human colonization and overseas trade.

Finally, Southall set out to describe bed bugs for his readers—with decidedly mixed results:

A Bugg’s Body is shaped and shelled, and the Shell as transparent and finely striped as the most beautiful amphibious Turtle; has six legs most exactly shaped, jointed and bristled as the Legs of a Crab. Its Neck and Head much resembles a Toad’s. On its Head are three Horns piequed and bristled; and at the end of their Nose they have a Sting sharper and much smaller than a Bee’s. The Use of their Horns is in Fight to assail their Enemies, or defend themselves. With the Sting they penetrate and wound our Skins, and then (tho’ the Wound is so small as to be almost imperceptible) they thence by Suction extract their most delicious Food, our Blood.

(John Southall, A Treatise of Buggs, 19)

Currently, scientists recognize around seventy-five species in the family Cimicidae, but only three of them regularly feed on the blood of humans: Leptocimex bouti, which also preys on bats in western Africa and South America; Cimex hemipterus (sometimes known as the tropical bed bug), which feeds on poultry and bats in the New and Old World tropics (including Florida); and Cimex lectularius, the common bed bug, which preys on humans, bats, poultry, and other domesticated animals just about anywhere in the world.

Reflecting their worldwide distribution, Robert Usinger listed over sixty native names for bed bugs. Besides “red coats” and “heavy dragoons” (after the scarlet-coated British cavalry), additional English nicknames included “mahogany-flat,” “B. Flat,” and “scarlet ramblers.” “Norfolk Howard” was a goof on the aristocratic family name of the Dukes of Norfolk,