THENEWYORKER,AUGUST 5 &12, 2019 69
The insects are estimated to have killed more people than any other single cause.
BOOKS
BUZZ OFF
They’ve ravaged humanity and derailed history. And mosquitoes aren’t finished yet.
BY BROOKEJARVIS
ILLUSTRATION BY ARIEL DAVIS
I
n 1698, five ships set sail from Scot-
land, carrying a cargo of fine trade
goods, including wigs, woollen socks and
blankets, mother-of-pearl combs, Bi-
bles, and twenty-five thousand pairs of
leather shoes. There was even a print-
ing press, with which the twelve hun-
dred colonists aboard planned to man-
age 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. The ships’ destination was the
Darien region of Panama, where the
Company of Scotland hoped to create
a trading hub that would bridge the isth-
mus and unite the world’s great oceans,
while raising the economic prospects of
a stubbornly independent kingdom that
had just struggled through years of fam-
ine. The scheme was wildly popular in
the desperate country, attracting a wide
range of investors, from members of the
national Parliament down to poor farm-
ers; it has been estimated that between
one-quarter and one-half of all the money
in circulation in Scotland at the time fol-
lowed the trade winds to Panama.
The expedition met with ruin. Col-
onists, sickened by yellow fever and strains
of malaria for which their bodies were
not prepared, began to die at the rate of
a dozen a day. “The words that are re-
peated to the point of nausea in the di-
aries, letters, and accounts of the Scot-
tish settlers are mosquitoes, fever, ague,
and death,” the historian Timothy C.
Winegard writes in his sprawling new
book, “The Mosquito: A Human His-
tory of Our Deadliest Predator” (Dut-
ton). After six months, with nearly half
their number gone, the survivors—ex-
cept those too weak to move, who were
left behind on the shore—returned to
their ships and fled north. Still, they kept
dying in droves, their bodies thrown over-
board. When a relief mission arrived in
Darien, they found, of all the wigs and
combs and shoes and ambition that had
left Scotland, only a deserted printing
press on an empty beach.
But, Winegard writes, the expedition
did have some lasting results: the over-
whelming debt from the failure drove
the reluctant Scottish to at last accept a
unification offer from England. The mos-
quitoes of Darien led, by an unexpected
route, to the birth of Great Britain.
W
inegard’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. (And be-
fore: Winegard suggests that, when the
asteroid hit, dinosaurs were already in
decline from mosquito-borne diseases.)
Malaria laid waste to prehistoric Africa
to such a degree that people evolved
sickle-shaped red blood cells to survive
it. The disease killed the ancient Greeks
and Romans—as well as the peoples
who tried to conquer them—by the
hundreds of thousands, playing a major
role in the outcomes of their wars. Hip-
pocrates associated malaria’s late-sum-
mer surge with the Dog Star, calling the
sickly time the “dog days of summer.”
In 94 B.C., the Chinese historian Sima
Qian wrote, “In the area south of the
Yangtze the land is low and the climate
humid; adult males die young.” In the
third century, malaria epidemics helped
drive people to a small, much persecuted
faith that emphasized healing and care
of the sick, propelling Christianity into
a world-altering religion.
Winegard finds first-person descrip-
tions of death and suffering caused by
mosquito-borne diseases in many eras.
Florence Nightingale called the Pontine
Marshes, near Rome, “the Valley of the
