The_New_Yorker__August_05_2019

70 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST 5 &12, 2019

Shadow of Death”; a German mission­
ary visiting the southern United States
wrote that it was “in the spring a para­
dise, in the summer a hell, and in the
autumn a hospital”; a Mayan survi­
vor of post­Columbus epidemics re­
membered, “Great was the stench of
death....All of us were thus. We were
born to die!” And yet human beings lived
with, and died from, mosquito­ borne
diseases for thousands of years without
understanding how they were reaching
us. Not until the end of the nineteenth
century was it scientifically established
that mosquitoes transmitted malaria.
Before then, the miasma theory, hold­
ing that fevers travelled independently,
through fetid environments, held sway,
reflected in the very word “malaria”: we
thought we were the victims of “bad air.”
That these tiny biting insects might be
affecting our lives so profoundly was a
leap beyond imagining.
Winegard is particularly interested in
wars and conquests, and argues that, for
much of military history, deaths caused
by mosquitoes far outnumbered, and
were more decisive than, deaths in bat­
tle. Malaria has many strains, of varying
deadliness, but survival rates are lowest
for people encountering new varieties to
which they have not been “seasoned”—
to which they have gained no immunity.
As a result, endemic malaria has often
acted not only as a local curse but also
as a strange sort of protector. Fifteen
centuries before the Scottish tried to col­
onize Panama, the Romans tried to col­
onize them, and were thwarted by a strain
of malaria local to Scotland which is es­
timated to have killed half of the eighty
thousand Roman soldiers sent their way.
Endemic strains decimated Hannibal’s
forces as they made their way through
Italy, turned the armies of Genghis Khan
away from southern Europe, prevented
European crusaders from conquering the
Holy Land (malaria killed more than a
third of them), and sided with North
American colonists and Latin Ameri­
can revolutionaries in their rebellions
against armies brought in from a distant,
ruling continent.
Military strategists, from Saladin to
the Nazis, used mosquitoes as direct
weapons of war. At Walcheren, Napo­
leon breached dikes to create a brackish
flood—the ensuing malaria epidemic
killed four thousand English soldiers—

and declared, “We must oppose the En­

glish 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 Cath­

olic Ireland, setting the stage for the Trou­

bles centuries later. But Oliver Crom­

well, the Englishman who conquered

Ireland, died of malaria, in 1658, rather

than take quinine, the only known treat­

ment, because he associated it with its

Catholic discoverers, making him a vic­

tim of both parasitosis and sectarianism.

T

he most dramatic conquest by mos­

quitoes came when old diseases en­

countered a new continent. When Co­

lumbus arrived in the New World, the

mosquitoes there were pesky but car­

ried no diseases. (Winegard chalks this

up to different farming practices here:

far less cultivation and disruption of

natural ecosystems, and less direct con­

tact with animals through husbandry.

Syphilis was perhaps the only disease

to ride the Columbian Exchange east­

ward.) But the blood of the new arriv­

als, and the mosquitoes that crossed

with their ships, changed everything.

Just twenty­two years after Columbus

stepped onto Hispaniola, a census re­

vealed that the local Taino population

had dropped from between five and

eight million people to just twenty­six

thousand. Along with smallpox and in­

fluenza, mosquito­borne diseases led,

by Winegard’s estimate, to the deaths

of ninety­ five million indigenous in­

habitants of the Americas, from a

pre­contact population of about a hun­

dred million.

To the colonizers, who spread more

slowly than the diseases they brought,

these were largely invisible deaths, which

helped create the pernicious myth of an

empty continent and a Manifest Des­

tiny to fill it. A rare account from a ma­

rooned Spanish sailor who made his way

from Florida to Mexico City in 1536 de­

scribed seeing native people “so bitten

by mosquitoes that you would think they

had the disease of Saint Lazarus the

Leper....It made us extremely sad to

see how fertile the land was, and very

beautiful, and very full of springs and

rivers, and to see every place deserted

and burned villages, and the people so

thin and ill.” By the seventeenth cen­

tury, the losses were so great that a French

explorer considered them a justification

for racism: “It appears visibly that God

wishes that they yield their place to new

peoples.” As the recent arrivals cleared

land for their own purposes, they also

created fresh habitats for mosquitoes,

allowing their populations to skyrocket.

The same deaths then drove the de­

velopment of the transatlantic slave trade

(and the arrival, with the first African

slaves, of the particularly virulent ma­

laria parasite Plasmodium falciparum,

which also decimated the newly arriv­

ing Europeans). The grim history is

clearly told in the prices paid for slaves

in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen­

turies: an indigenous slave, likely to die

of imported disease, cost less than an

also vulnerable European indentured ser­

vant, 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 re­

sistance to its mixture of diseases.

Similar calculations could be made

about slave owners. In the Caribbean,

an eighteenth­century French mission­

ary observed that the death toll of Eu­

ropean colonizers corresponded to the

length of time that a colonizing force

had had to grow accustomed to “the new

air,” which is to say, yellow fever and un­

familiar strains of malaria: “Of ten men

that go to the islands” from a particular

nation, “four English die, three French,

three Dutch, three Danes, and one Span­

iard.” Today’s Caribbean nations reflect

these mortality rates: those colonized by

the English, the Dutch, and the French

tend to have populations that are of ma­

jority African descent; only the former

Spanish colonies have significant pop­

ulations descended from Europeans.

In total, Winegard estimates that mos­

quitoes have killed more people than

any other single cause—fifty­two bil­

lion of us, nearly half of all humans who

have ever lived. He calls them “our apex

predator,” “the destroyer of worlds,” and

“the ultimate agent of historical change.”

T

here’s a long tradition of history

books that profess to explain the

world through singular factors: salt or

cod or the color blue. “The Mosquito”

suffers from the necessary myopia of the

genre (in addition to some florid writ­

ing, repetition, and digressions through

blockbuster movies and the Western Civ