Outbreak! Plagues That Changed History Read Online Free PDF

The New World seemed an inexhaustible supply of wealth: land for the taking, gold and silver from its mines, food from its farms, hides, feathers, pelts, wood, and dyes from its forests. Most importantly, the New World was an astonishingly fertile place to plant a valuable Old World crop: sugar. Sugar plantations needed a source of plentiful, cheap workers—preferably slaves. Europe itself wouldn’t do; the continent was still underpopulated from the Black Death. With demand for labor exceeding supply, peasants had power: wages were going up. Nor was the New World a potential slave-labor pool, for European depredation and disease had nearly wiped out the Native American population.
    The obvious alternative was Africa, a continent European explorers and colonists were just beginning to exploit. Africa already had a bustling slave trade to satisfy local and Muslim demand. The Europeans simply redirected the flow across the Atlantic and opened the spigot full blast. The deadly irony of this choice would become apparent too late. Along with the estimated twenty million Africans enslaved and shipped to America for European greed came yellow fever, an African disease to which most slaves were immune but slave owners were not. The illness would prove to be slavery’s undoing, first in the Caribbean, then in North and South America. Later, the disease would also play an important role in the United States’ efforts to project its power throughout the region.

Welcome home
    Human beings have lived in Africa longer than on any other continent. Pathogens that live there too have become exquisitely adapted to exploiting us. Malaria, yellow fever, river blindness, and elephantiasis are just a few of the diseases that coevolved with people, fine-tuning their life cycles to our own. Thousands of years ago, when many of our ancestors left Africa to populate temperate regions, they managed to leave many of these parasites behind. But when Europeans returned to conquer Africa, the microbes were waiting. In West Africa, tropical diseases killed so many Europeans the region was nicknamed “the white man’s grave.” Within a year of arrival, most would-be conquerors weren’t running plantations or sipping gin on the veranda, they were composting inthe soil. The image of the European explorer or missionary dying in his tent from some tropical illness was so common it became a literary cliché. “Beware, beware the Bight of Benin,” warned one British rhyme about West Africa. “One comes out where fifty went in.”
    Yellow fever proved an exceptionally portable African disease. On ships leaving Africa for the New World, the fever would usually strike a week or so into the voyage. Mild cases would feel like the flu: the symptoms would pass and the host would recover. In severe cases, however, the illness would progress from fever, blinding headaches, chills, and intense muscle pain to bleeding from the nose and mouth. Blood would collect in the stomach, coagulate and darken, and exit as yellow fever’s unmistakable black vomit. Eventually the liver would fail, turning the skin a jaundiced yellow. Death would follow.

Super slaves
    Yellow fever scythed through ship after ship sailing from Africa to the New World. Sometimes entire crews perished from yellow fever. On average, one-fifth were done in. When a fever-struck ship arrived in port, it was often quarantined and forced to fly a yellow flag or “jack.” Yellow jack became the English maritime name for the disease. As with other mysterious illnesses, Europeans tried fervent prayer and the usual Galenic cures: bleeding, purgatives, enemas, cold-water baths, or aromatic talismans to ward off the miasmas thought to cause the disease. As usual, nothing worked.

     
    Yellow fever would often break out on slave ships at sea, sickening and killing the European crew. Adult Africans who had survived the disease as children were immune, a black invulnerability whites found