For much of military history, deaths caused by mosquitoes far outnumbered, and were more decisive than, deaths in battle.
In 1698, five ships set sail from Scotland, carrying a cargo of fine trade goods, including wigs, woollen socks and blankets, mother-of-pearl combs, Bibles, and twenty-five thousand pairs of leather shoes. There was even a printing press, with which the twelve hundred colonists aboard planned to manage a future busy with contracts and treaties. To make space for the luxuries, the usual rations for food and farming were reduced by half. But farming wasn’t the point.
Winegard’s book offers a catalogue of such stories. It turns out that, if you’re looking for them, the words “mosquitoes,” “fever,” “ague,” and “death” are repeated to the point of nausea throughout human history. Malaria laid waste to prehistoric Africa to such a degree that people evolved sickle-shaped red blood cells to survive it.
Military strategists, from Saladin to the Nazis, used mosquitoes as direct weapons of war. At Walcheren, Napoleon breached dikes to create a brackish flood—the ensuing malaria epidemic killed four thousand English soldiers—and declared, “We must oppose the English with nothing but fever, which will soon devour them all.” Often, of course, malaria exacted a toll on both sides. It pushed English Protestants into Catholic Ireland, setting the stage for the Troubles centuries later.
The same deaths then drove the development of the transatlantic slave trade . The grim history is clearly told in the prices paid for slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: an indigenous slave, likely to die of imported disease, cost less than an also vulnerable European indentured servant, who cost less than a slave imported directly from Africa. Most expensive of all were Africans who had spent enough time in the Americas to prove their resistance to its mixture of diseases.
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