The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

by Timothy C. Winegard

The salty sea stories of ghost ships like the Flying Dutchman are based on true accounts; whole crews might succumb to yellow fever, months passing before the aimlessly drifting ships were corralled.

Another popular Roman malaria remedy was to wear a piece of papyrus or amulet inscribed with the powerful incantation “abracadabra.” While the origin of the word is unclear, it appears to be borrowed from the Aramaic, meaning “I will create what I speak,” essentially summoning a cure.*

Caesar crossed the frontier boundary of Italy at the Rubicon River and purportedly uttered his immortal phrase “The die is cast.”

The etching on the gravestone of Veturia, the wife of a centurion, relates the life of an average Roman: “Here I lie, having lived for twenty-seven years. I was married to the same man for sixteen years and bore six children, five of whom died before I did.”

The Antonine Plague or the Plague of Galen, given his firsthand account, spread through the empire like wildfire. It first struck Rome, before spreading throughout Italy and causing large-scale depopulation and hordes of nomadic refugees and itinerant migrants. It took the life of Emperors Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius, whose family name, Antoninus, became associated with the outbreak.

Beginning in 541, an unprecedented pandemic of bubonic plague, known as the Plague of Justinian, tore through the Byzantine Empire. Thought to have originated in India, the plague swiftly made call at every major port on the Mediterranean Sea and plunged northward into Europe, reaching Britain within three years. It is recorded as one of the deadliest epidemics in history, killing between 30 and 50 million people, or roughly 15% of the world’s entire population.

Early Christian communities regarded the nursing of the sick as an obligation of faith and established the first true hospitals. This concern, along with other charitable Christian practices, reinforced a strong sense of community and belonging, and a greater network for those in need.

Beginning in 64 CE, in the wake of the Great Fire of Rome—for which Christians were blamed—this eighty-four-foot-tall red-granite pillar became the site of state-sponsored martyrdom for many Christians, including Saint Peter, who was allegedly crucified upside down in the shadows of the obelisk.

At Verden in 782, for instance, Charlemagne ordered the massacre of over 4,500 Saxons who refused to prostrate themselves before his power and his Christian god. As Charlemagne consolidated his military, political, and spiritual clout, a distressed and scorned Pope Leo III appraised the Frankish king as a means to safeguard and strengthen his own authority and rule.

The Christian soldiers of Barbarossa were shepherded onward alongside the armies of Philip II of France, Leopold V of Austria, and a newly crowned Richard I “Lionheart” of England. These mustering Crusaders led by the greatest rulers of Europe marched headlong into a maelstrom of death driven by mosquitoes and by Muslims defending their homeland.

Robin Hood is a fictional representation and a symbol of hope and change during this dark and somber period of poverty and oppression in England at the hands of King John.

These concepts, regardless of their meaning in 1215, ushered in the age of modern democracy, common law, and the footing for the universal unalienable rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the protection of property. The Magna Carta was one of the most profound shifts in all the history of political and legal thought.

In 1220, Genghis divided his army into two prongs, and accomplished what Alexander could not—the binding together of the two halves of the known world. For the first time, the east officially met the west, albeit in cruel and hostile circumstances.

The Mongols were willing to allow traders, missionaries, and travelers to navigate their entire empire, opening China and the rest of the east to Europeans, Arabs, Persians, and others for the first time.

Small communities of Christian and Muslim converts soon appeared across these formerly unknown and untapped eastern lands, taking their place among the major eastern faiths of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Hinduism. These new land routes opened by Mongol military expansion created an immeasurably smaller global society by fusing two larger, previously distinct geographical worlds.

A prized possession of Christopher Columbus was his well-worn and heavily marked-up copy of Polo’s book.

Prior to the Columbian Exchange, deadly Anopheles and Aedes mosquitoes had not yet penetrated the Americas. While pulsating vivacious mosquito populations thrived in the Americas, they were disease-free, and were nothing more than irksome, itchy pests. The Western Hemisphere remained quarantined and free from the forces of foreign occupation for the time being. Since their arrival in the Americas at least 20,000 years ago, at the onset of permanent European contact in 1492, the roughly 100 million indigenous residents had not yet been subjected to her scourge nor witnessed her wrath and so remained unseasoned and defenseless to her diseases. American mosquitoes did not shred human populations, at least not yet.

Columbus set sail into the great unknown in August 1492 determined to reopen access to the riches of the Asian east by sailing west. He believed the world was undersize and that it was composed predominantly—six-sevenths, to be exact—of land. “Columbus changed the world not because he was right,” comments author and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Tony Horwitz, “but because he was so stubbornly wrong.

Certainly, Columbus did not discover the Americas, as indigenous peoples breathed in this world for millennia before his blundering arrival. Columbus was not even the first foreigner to discover the Americas. Columbus was, however, the first to open the doors permanently to the prevailing presence of Europeans, African slaves, and their diseases in their new world.

At its core, the Columbian Exchange was always predicated upon the European accumulation of wealth derived from African slave labor in plantation and mining colonies in the Americas.

While I do not want to trivialize Spanish cruelty, known as the Black Legend, it did not play the main role in the cataclysmic demise of local populations. Across the Spanish dominion, malaria, smallpox, tuberculosis, and eventually yellow fever were the paramount killers.

Disney would have us believe that Jamestown, though a fledgling settlement, was a peaceful and promising one. In its vision, Pocahontas and Smith run barefoot through the utopian natural splendor of the New World, frolicking in its idyllic waterfalls. In truth, the situation at Jamestown was a cannibalistic, mosquito-ravaged mess. The early, improvident colonists were devoured by malaria. It was reported that a first-wave settler was burned at the stake for murdering and cooking his pregnant wife during the winter of 1609–1610, known as the “Starving Time.”

The French presence in North America was kindled by a handful of young French adventurers who sought out peaceful relations with the indigenous Algonquian and Huron peoples to trade in furs.

Needing the French settlement at New Orleans to survive, the Mississippi Company arranged for French male prisoners to be set free on the conditions that they marry prostitutes and embark for New Orleans. These newly married couples were chained together until their vessels reached open waters.

Spain was basking in the opulent waters of the Americas, while England was confined to “outrageous, common, and daily piracies.” As an antidote to this unequal balance of world power and profit, Elizabeth let loose, to be legal “privateers” in her service, two of the most famous pirates and merchants of terror—Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh.

During his colorful life, perhaps most significant among his other “achievements” is that Sir Walter Raleigh popularized tobacco in England, acquired during one of his many swashbuckling raids against Spain.

Throughout the literary record, the original settlers to Jamestown have been pigeonholed as lazy and apathetic by historians and commentators. They probably were; they had chronic malaria.

As true starvation set in, their gourmet meals consisted of tree bark, mice, leather boots and belts, engorged rats, and each other. It was later reported that ravenous colonists clawed at the earth to “dig up dead corpse out of graves and to eat them.” One starving settler, as we’ve seen, killed his pregnant wife and, as an onlooker recorded, “salted her for his food.”

Although Jamestown was not established primarily as a penal colony like Australia, over 60,000 British prisoners were shipped to colonial America. The company also sent over nonindentured “Tobacco Brides,” for arranged marriages to independent men.

Pocahontas was kidnapped in 1613 and used as leverage by the English. Rolfe was on the negotiating committee, and a deal was struck with Chief Powhatan. It was also agreed that Pocahontas, now seventeen, would remain with the English. More specifically, she would marry John Rolfe. This union certainly served as a pragmatic political tool to promote peace, similar to marriages among the monarchies of Europe. From all accounts, however, it appears that in the course of their three-year friendship, the two had genuinely fallen in love.

According to Rolfe, she died uttering “all must die, but tis enough that her child liveth.”*

Africans were introduced to Jamestown in 1619 by English pirates sailing on the White Lion under the Dutch flag. The ship was carrying a cargo of Africans stolen from a Portuguese slaving vessel bound for Mexico.

The disaster at Darien also signaled to English colonial plantation owners the danger of using Scots as indentured servants. There was no purpose and, more importantly, no profit in hiring a Scottish workforce if four of every five died within six months. Darien had made it all too clear that Scots, and other Europeans, died too fast of mosquito-borne disease to be of any use. “Individual Britons and their families continued to make their way to the Americas,” recaps Mann, “but businesspeople increasingly resisted sending over large groups of Europeans. Instead they looked for alternative sources of labor. Alas, they found them.”

Tobacco was so profitable, however, that the Virginia Company was willing to shell out enormous sums to send settlers, criminals, prostitutes, indentured servants, and eventually African slaves, to the colony to ensure its survival and its own accumulation of wealth. Tobacco farmers and plantation owners were making a mind-boggling 1,000% margin and taxable return on their initial investments.

Their god had instructed the Puritans to “be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it.” The Puritans, never ones to shirk responsibility or to sidestep the proverb of an honest day’s work, diligently set forth to follow this command. And they did just that, at a prolific, indefatigable rate. It is estimated that 10–12% of Americans today are direct descendants of this small group of Puritans.

The association of the Mason-Dixon Line with chattel slavery, plantations, and mosquito-borne disease is not a coincidence. Tobacco and cotton did not grow in the northern states; therefore, the plantation-slave system was nonexistent. These crops grew in the warmer climes of the South, where mosquitoes thrived. These plantations also needed slave labor to produce profit. The imported slaves added to the robust mosquito landscape by introducing falciparum and yellow fever, and perhaps vivax.

loosely organized group of radicals led by Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, Benedict Arnold, and Patrick Henry. In the wake of the Stamp Act of 1765, these future insurgents met in the dank basement of Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern and Coffee House, which gained the historical reputation as the “Headquarters of the Revolution.” I like to envisage the Green Dragon as something akin to the Prancing Pony tavern from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, where scheming, shifty-eyed, cloaked and hooded colonists sip on bitter tea or coffee while sneeringly conspiring to plot revolution.

Thomas Paine published his short pamphlet “Common Sense; Addressed to the Inhabitants of America” in January 1776, and it sold 500,000 copies in its first year. It remains in print and is the all-time bestselling American-authored title. Paine, offering “nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” made a persuasive argument for independence and the creation of a democratic republic as “an asylum for mankind.”

A letter to King George III proclaiming the colonies’ sovereignty, and a groundbreaking philosophical and political statement, was drafted by Jefferson, Franklin, and John Adams—the stirring words of the Declaration of Independence.

The British military was battle-hardened, trained, and equipped with modern weaponry and military kit, and it was the most proven and potent fighting force on the planet. They complemented their formidable national contingent by contracting 30,000 German Hessians as mercenaries, including Sleepy Hollow’s legendary Headless Horseman, a practice demonized in the Declaration of Independence.

The shockingly young, dazzlingly brilliant, and bilingual French general Marquis de Lafayette, a close friend and confidant of Washington, coordinated the combined Franco-American forces along with his comrade Count Rochambeau.

In one of the darkest chapters in American history, as many as 100,000 indigenous peoples were force-marched to Indian Territory along what was dubbed the “Trails of Tears.” It is estimated that 25,000 died during the wars of removal and on the somber journey, from starvation, disease, hypothermia, murder, and general neglect.

Cotton production and slavery were inseparable in the South. The global demand for American cotton was literally infinite. Northern American and British textile mills, and other foreign markets, would take as much raw cotton as slave labor could produce, which fostered a skyrocketing demand for slaves. In 1793, the US produced 5 million pounds of cotton. Thirty years later, thanks to Eli Whitney’s cotton gin and the proliferation of slave labor, this output rose to 180 million pounds. On the eve of the Civil War, the South produced 85% of the world’s raw cotton, and “King Cotton” in some form accounted for 50% of the total American economy.

This territorial push and the realignment of the American economy in the South from tobacco to cotton during the first half of the nineteenth century breathed new life into the waning institution of slavery. Southern cotton fed a northern industry-fueled economic rejuvenation. This newfound export wealth in southern cotton and northern manufactured goods required additional trading ports.

The Mexican-American War was the training ground for many Civil War generals, most of whom were acquaintances, if not friends, including Grant and Lee. On the Union side: George McClellan, William Tecumseh Sherman, George Meade, Ambrose Burnside, and Ulysses S. Grant.

Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad kicked into high gear, shuttling runaways and those in the north to Canada, to terminuses like Josiah Henson’s farm in southern Ontario. Between the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and the onset of the Civil War in 1861, over 60,000 African Americans found safe refuge and freedom in Canada.

Writing in response to the Fugitive Slave Act, Stowe highlighted in unadulterated, graphic prose the evils and brutality of slavery. The influence of Stowe’s book in garnering support for the abolitionist movement cannot be overstated. Uncle Tom’s Cabin cleaved a deep wound between North and South over the future of slavery. When President Lincoln met Stowe as his honored guest at the White House in 1862, he supposedly greeted her by saying, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started a great big war.”

“Those who deny freedom to others,” remarked Lincoln, “deserve it not for themselves.”

On January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation legally liberated (at least on paper) roughly 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in select areas of the Confederacy, specifically those states still in rebellion.* It also officially sanctioned and authorized the enlistment of African Americans to fight in a war that Lincoln whispered “was in some way about slavery.”

Of the roughly 200,000 African Americans who eventually served in Union forces, two-thirds had formerly been southern slaves. With their newfound freedom, they enlisted to ensure the emancipation of their captive brethren by fighting on the front lines and battlefields of a war that was now being waged to decide the fate of slavery itself.