The Deadliest Ally | America in Pursuit

Forget guns and generals — the real victor of the Revolution had wings. This week on America in Pursuit the story of how a deadly swarm of mosquitoes shaped the American Revolution and changed the course of history. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:19Speaker 01

  This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from Throughline and NPR. I'm Ramtin Arablouei. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in America that began 250 years ago this year, when those rights, inalienable rights, were laid out in the Declaration of Independence. But Americans had to fight for them, beginning, of course, with an all-out revolutionary war that lasted years. So for our first episode, we're going to go back into the archives to bring you a story from that revolutionary fight, which you probably know the basics of. People were mad about taxes and were tired of answering to a king.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  The Boston Tea Party broke out. George Washington and his crew took up arms and defeated the Imperial British Army with unconventional tactics. But there's a big, or should I say, small, part of this story that's rarely mentioned: mosquitoes.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  It's still the animal that kills more human beings on the planet than any other animal to this day, and that's including other humans.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  That's Dr. Tim Weingard.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  I'm a history professor at Colorado Mesa University, also the head coach of the hockey team, being Canadian. And I wrote the book, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  The specific mosquito we're talking about today is known as the Anopheles, a species of mosquito that thrives in marshes and swamps and is known for spreading malaria, a deadly disease that has changed the course of history in all kinds of ways.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  We like to think we get to make our own history, that we did this as human beings. And that's not necessarily the case.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  We head to the battlefield with the Anopheles mosquito when we come back.

• 2:10Speaker 00

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• 3:42Speaker 01

  It's 1778, three years into the American Revolutionary War. The first half of the war was fought almost entirely in the North. George Washington and the Continental Army were having mixed success and spent a lot of energy running from the British Army, trying to buy more time.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  The British are very upset that General Washington won't essentially commit to a decisive battle to end the war. And Washington knows he can't do this because he doesn't have anything. If he commits to a decisive battle and loses, the revolution's over. But as long as he can keep an army, however ill-supplied and under-equipped in the field, the British have to defeat and chase this army.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  All the while, he's desperately waiting for help to come.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  He waits for his political lords, essentially, in the Continental Congress, to get some supplies, get some allies, get some weapons, and hopefully get France on board. This is essentially playing cat and mouse, and it frustrates the British.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  So, they change their strategy.

• 4:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  The British concentrated their forces in the southern colonies of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. Second in command of this campaign was General Charles Cornwallis, who landed in Charleston with 9,000 British soldiers.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  And these soldiers come primarily from northern England and Scotland, these British soldiers. So, there was malaria in England, but these soldiers specifically are recruited from northern England and Scotland, away from the malarial fenlands of England. So, they're not what is called seasoned. What seasoning is, essentially, the more you suffer, the less you suffer. Now, I don't suggest this as an inoculation strategy, but generally speaking, the more you contract malaria, the less severe the symptoms are, and the less likelihood of dying. So, the American soldiers have been seasoned to their colonial malaria. They've had malaria, they've been seasoned to it.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  Where these British soldiers come over, they haven't been seasoned to their own English malaria, let alone colonial stew of malaria.

• 6:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  And this new set of circumstances in the South forced Cornwallis to adopt some unusual tactics.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  If you look at his campaign in the South in 1780, 1781, he is zigzagging all over the place. It is one of the strangest marches you've ever seen on a map.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  And so, why is Cornwallis doing this? Is he running away from the Americans? Is he chasing the Americans? No, he's trying to find a healthy spot for his troops.

• 6:36Speaker 05

  With a third of my army sick and wounded, which I was obliged to carry in wagons or on horseback, the remainder without shoes and worn down with fatigue, I thought it was time to look for some place of rest and refitment.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  And he says this repeatedly in his correspondence. He says that malaria is ruining my army. And he's asking British loyalists in the southern colonies where there's a healthy spot. And because they're seasoned, they say, oh, just go that way. And then he gets there and his troops are cut to pieces by malaria again.

• 7:10Speaker 05

  I am now employed in disposing of the sick and wounded and in procuring supplies of all kinds to put the troops into a proper state to take the field. I am likewise impatiently looking out for the expected reinforcement from Europe to enable me either to act offensively or even to maintain myself in the upper parts of the country, where alone I can hope to reserve the troops from the fatal sickness which so nearly ruined the army last autumn. April 10, 1781.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  As Cornwallis was running around looking for a safe mosquito-free spot for his troops, he got an order from his superiors to retreat and fortify at the port of Yorktown in Virginia.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Yorktown is a little hamlet situated in the tidewater estuaries between the James and York rivers. Essentially, it's rice paddies. It's marshland. So he holes up in Yorktown. French Navy comes. They're eventually joined by General Washington and the Americans, and they ensnare the British in Yorktown. This is in August, which is prime mosquito time in prime mosquito country in these marshlands surrounding Yorktown.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  His army was decimated. And in October, General Cornwallis surrendered.

• 8:38Speaker 05

  I have the mortification to inform your excellency that I have been forced to give up the post. And to surrender the troops under my command. The troops being much weakened by sickness as well as by the fire of the besiegers.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  In his correspondences, Cornwallis lays some of the blame for his surrender on malaria.

• 9:03Speaker 05

  Our numbers had been diminished by the enemy's fire, but particularly by sickness.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  He's like, I don't have anybody who can even stand up to fight. He only has 35% of his troops roughly who are able to even stand up.

• 9:20Speaker 05

  Our force diminished daily by sickness to little more than 3,200 rank and file fit for duty.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  The rest are either sick, dead, or dying of malaria.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  The Siege of Yorktown was the final battle in the war between the colonies and Great Britain, opening the path for the formation of the United States.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  So in a way, Dionofli's mosquito, the founding mother of the United States, and she deserves to have her nice proboscis face tucked in between Washington and Jefferson on Mount Rushmore.

• 10:01Rund Abdelfatah?

  Our founding mother, the mosquito, looms large over the history of humanity. And as Tim told us, her reign is not limited to our past. She may completely transform our future.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Human beings are crisscrossing the planet for trade, travel, business at record rates to record numbers of destinations in record numbers everywhere. Disease is a constant baggage to human migration. Whether that be war, trade, travel, it doesn't matter.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  It's a universal creature and has been for forever, essentially. Her reach and her historical impact and influence kind of cross both time and space. Time is kind of irrelevant to her reach because at every stage, the mosquito and these pathogens have essentially been able to circumvent our frontline weapons to continue what they're prewired to do, and that's simply reproduce. So we are constantly trying new and innovative techniques to break this eternal stalemate that we've had with our deadliest enemy and deadliest predator.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  That's it for this week's episode of America in Pursuit, a special series from Throughline and NPR. If you want to learn more about the role mosquitoes have played in shaping history, check out Throughline's full-length episode called Buzzkill. And make sure to join us next Tuesday when the American revolutionaries try to figure out how to build a new nation and a new government, relying a lot on something you probably wouldn't expect: the post office.

• 11:50Speaker 06

  It was the nervous system of the republic.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  That's next time. Don't miss it.

• 12:06Speaker 03

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