The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [5]
Soon, the filth, lack of nutrition, dehydration and rapid-fire spread of disease turned the transatlantic journey into a death voyage, with bodies being tossed overboard in the wake of the ship. In fact, slave ships were often trailed by sharks, which quickly learned that the vessels served as a source of food.
It was through this journey from the interior of West Africa, down the Niger and Benue rivers, to the coast, onto ships and into the blood of Europeans that yellow fever first made its way from the Old World to the new one.
Yellow fever, more than any other disease, would seem conjured by God and divinely directed. When the slave trade first began, every European country that profited from the purchase and sale of Africans would soon see a yellow fever epidemic: the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal. Though Asia had the ideal climate and the right mosquito, it has never had an epidemic of yellow fever. It also never participated in the African slave trade.
As the European powers crossed the Atlantic to establish West Indian colonies, which quickly became horrific holding pens for slaves, yellow fever settled its roots in the western hemisphere and proliferated. The first epidemic on this side of the world occurred in 1648. After that, the slave trade increased fivefold in the West Indies. And by 1702, as the trade of flesh spread to North America, yellow fever blossomed on the continent. From 1700 to 1750, the slave population in America doubled and then doubled again. As each slave ship arrived into the ports of the New World, bringing over ten million slaves to this hemisphere, yellow fever made a giant, evolutionary leap. It adapted. It spread. As one historian put it, “When the disease invaded the Atlantic and Gulf States, it struck with a force more powerful than the one which bombed Pearl Harbor more than two centuries later.”
Yellow fever became the most dreaded disease in North America for two hundred years. It did not kill in numbers as high as some of its contemporaries like cholera or smallpox, and it was not contagious; yet it created a panic and fear few other diseases, ancient or contemporary, can elicit.
During its tenure in this country, yellow fever would inflict 500,000 casualties and 100,000 deaths. The fever would stretch the length of North America, afflicting Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware, Maryland, Illinois, Missouri, Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida and Texas.
The U.S. capital would move from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., after a devastating yellow fever epidemic in 1793. Alexander Hamilton suffered the fever, while George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson fled the city; the United States government was paralyzed.
In New York, Greenwich Village would become known as “the Village” because it was the safe haven outside of the city during yellow fever epidemics.
Napoleon would abandon his conquests in North America after losing 23,000 of his troops to yellow fever in the colony of Haiti. He made a hasty and fearful retreat from this pestilent hemisphere, selling his large Louisiana holdings for cheap to Thomas Jefferson.
During the Civil War, yellow fever would serve as one of this country’s first forms of biological warfare. And the Spanish-American War, at the close of the nineteenth century, would be fought more against this fever than against the Spanish.
For the first century of its siege in the United States, yellow fever marked for destruction the heavily populated, northern port cities of Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Then, in 1807, the Atlantic slave trade was abolished, and the fever suddenly retreated from the North. By 1850, no other epidemics of yellow