The tropics proved to be a charnel house for the English, especially for newcomers and especially in new settlements. In 1660, three years after the East India Company (EIC) gained control of Fort Cormantine in West Africa, the agents and factors sent to the EIC directors a long “List of Men” who had died at the fort, complaining about the “Violent Sicknesse and great mortallyty” there.Footnote ¹ Likewise, a flourishing new English sugar colony in Surinam was nearly wiped out in the mid-1660s, fifteen years after it was settled, by “a raging Contagion & wasting sickness.”Footnote ² Alexander Hamilton, a ship captain who sailed through in the East Indies from 1688 to 1723, described the notoriously unhealthy conditions in early Bombay after the English had gained control in the 1660s: “as fast as Recruits came from Britain, they died in Bombay, which got the island a bad Name.”Footnote ³ By the 1680s, physicians such as Thomas Tryon were lamenting the “short Lives of our English that travel into hot Countries.”Footnote ⁴ “Fevers” and “agues” played an important role in shaping both English perceptions of the torrid zone and the nature of their ventures in that zone. As the overseas empire grew, rumors about tropical fevers spread by sailors and travelers in port towns, taverns, and coffee shops likely amplified the growing fear of the torrid zone.

The English had reason to fear the torrid zones because people born in tropical disease environments survived better in the tropics than European newcomers. People from the tropics had developed both inherited and acquired resistance to pathogens and parasites that were endemic in their environments.Footnote ⁵ Although people from the tropics suffered through many debilitating illnesses and endured a very short life span while enslaved, they generally had more acquired resistance and immunity than European newcomers to two particularly deadly and feverish diseases that flourished in the tropics: yellow fever in the Atlantic Ocean, and malaria in both the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Many, but certainly not all, groups of people from the tropics suffered less from mortality and morbidity from yellow fever and malaria, making them capable of greater overall labor productivity in places in which malaria and yellow fever became endemic.Footnote ⁶ People born in West Africa demonstrated particularly strong resistance to the effects of both yellow fever and malaria. As this became increasingly clear, it bolstered emerging English convictions about the innate suitability of non-European bodies and particularly African bodies for tropical labor. The high death rates for European newcomers ultimately discouraged English migration to the English tropics. The globalization of trade and forced labor markets facilitated the more rapid spread of pathogens and parasites. Malaria − particularly falciparum malaria − became more common in many areas of the global tropics, while yellow fever epidemics became more prevalent in the Americas, particularly in the Caribbean. Malaria and yellow fever shaped forced and free migration through the tropics. People from the British Isles could choose to avoid migrating to areas with reputations for deadly fevers. The enslaved had no choice.

An earlier generation of scholars made overly deterministic claims about disease and the spread of racial slavery.Footnote ⁷ This chapter will avoid that kind of biological determinism and instead show the interplay between a complex and evolving set of epidemiological factors on the one hand and on the other hand the day-to-day choices made by English planters and merchants on the ground in the tropics. This chapter will show that English newcomers proved especially susceptible to malaria and yellow fever. Dengue, which eventually spread through the Atlantic and Indian oceans, almost certainly played a role in this feverish mosquito-borne disease cocktail in the tropics. This chapter, however, will focus on yellow fever and malaria, which are much more lethal if left untreated than dengue. The English became fearful of the effects of the lethal fevers they observed in hot climates. English efforts to rationalize organic processes that they failed to understand along with the choice that many migrants from the British Isles made to avoid the tropics led to a more widespread adoption of slavery. The chapter will also highlight the ways in which disease made English sites in the tropics more precarious, and it will explore how the English responded to that fragility.

This chapter will begin with a case study of the first yellow fever epidemic in Barbados from 1647 to 1652, an epidemic that proved to be a catalyst in the rise of racial slavery in the Caribbean. Then it will proceed to case studies of the effects of feverish epidemics at English colonial ventures from the mid-1680s through the end of the 1690s in the Caribbean sugar islands and at the same time in English factories on the Gold Coast and in Sumatra. These case studies will show how disease could substantially weaken English power in the tropics and force the English to rely more on others to build their tropical empire. As other chapters in this book demonstrate, the 1680s and 1690s were a period in which the English fear of slave insurrection and foreign invasion intensified. This was the point at which the English made a deeper commitment across the empire to one particularly inflexible and brutal variant of racial slavery.

Mosquitos and Fevers

The mosquito was the grim reaper for many newcomers to the tropics. Aedes aegypti, a species with African origins that feeds on people, was the vector for yellow fever.Footnote ⁸ This species of mosquito breeds in stagnant water in small reservoirs – either natural or man-made – and flourishes at temperatures between 27°C and 31°C. They have a limited flight range from their water source for feeding, meaning that yellow fever will usually only spread near dense populations of people.Footnote ⁹ Malaria was transmitted by mosquitos of the Anopheles genus. Anopheles flourish near low-lying swamps and marshes, their breeding grounds. They are most dangerous to people at temperatures between 18°C and 32°C.Footnote ¹⁰ Europeans knew that swamps and marshes were deadly places but blamed the swamps‘ miasmas – what they understood to be noxious or poisonous fumes – rather than the swamps’ mosquitos.Footnote ¹¹ The threat posed by both Anopheles and Aedes mosquitos was highest during and immediately after the rainy season.

Yellow fever (a virus) and malaria (six different kinds of a parasite) had strikingly different effects on their hosts. Young adults are most susceptible to yellow fever’s deleterious physical effects.Footnote ¹² In most settings, yellow fever spares children while malaria targets them. This pattern is particularly the case when the adult population has already had significant exposure to malaria. While survivors of yellow fever develop complete immunity, survivors of malaria do not. They develop resistance to future infection but are still vulnerable to new strains. Antibodies to the yellow fever virus remain in the body for a lifetime but some malarial parasites can lie dormant and cause relapses. Survivors of untreated malaria can suffer from poor health and bouts of sickness for months or even years after the initial onset when the dormant parasite reactivates, weakening the capacity of human hosts for hard labor. Repeated exposure to malaria, however, confers some immunological resistance against future attacks.Footnote ¹³

Both malaria and yellow fever originated in tropical sub-Saharan Africa and spread outward with trade and the globalization of forced labor markets.Footnote ¹⁴ By the eighteenth century, yellow fever had spread to urban centers in the northern hemisphere as far north as Quebec City, while malarial strains moved throughout the early modern era through the warmer regions of the Americas and through Africa and South Asia and as far north into Europe as Scandinavia.Footnote ¹⁵ There is no evidence that yellow fever was exported to Asia until the twenty-first century, perhaps because acquired immunity to dengue fever − a member of the same disease family as yellow fever and more prevalent in Asia − conferred protection from yellow fever.Footnote ¹⁶ In contrast, dengue, which existed through much of tropical Asia, does not appear to have become widespread in the Caribbean until the late eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁷ Malaria remained the most deadly mosquito-borne fever in tropical Asia in the early modern era.

Although yellow fever and malaria spread at times into the more temperate zones of the northern hemisphere, these diseases were most prevalent and most lethal in tropical zones. Aedes aegypti, the vector for yellow fever, will not feed below 17°C, and the species hibernates if the weather stays cold.Footnote ¹⁸ Likewise, outbreaks of malaria in temperate zones were normally caused by the vivax malaria parasite, and they were nowhere near as disastrous to human health as they were in the tropics.Footnote ¹⁹ Vivax plagued the Chesapeake in the first half of the seventeenth century, likely brought there by European migrants.Footnote ²⁰ Falciparum malaria, the most lethal of the malaria parasites, was found only in the tropical and subtropical zones. Falciparum stops spreading below 19°C.Footnote ²¹ Whereas untreated vivax has a mortality rate of less than 5 percent, the mortality rate in untreated falciparum infections usually exceeds 20 percent.Footnote ²² Falciparum malaria may have been responsible for as much as 90 percent of all malarial infections in West Africa in the seventeenth century.Footnote ²³

Outside of Africa, the balance of falciparum and vivax parasites in the tropics is in rough equilibrium in the twenty-first century, but there may be more falciparum now then there was before a rapid rise in forced migration from Africa in the seventeenth century.Footnote ²⁴ The growth of the African slave trade in the Atlantic drove the spread of falciparum parasites and yellow fever through much of the Caribbean in the 1650s. The colder months in most of the southern colonies of North America limited the transmission and impact of falciparum, but it became prevalent in South Carolina after the 1680s, arriving again with an increase in African captives.Footnote ²⁵ Falciparum had spread through the Indian Ocean as early as 1000 CE, but it became most prevalent in the early modern era in places that received the most enslaved Africans in the slave trade.Footnote ²⁶ The extensive Dutch involvement in human trafficking in Indonesia in the seventeenth century likely helped to facilitate the spread of malaria through the region. It appears to have spread through Dutch Batavia by the early eighteenth century, and, as this chapter will show, it likely took hold by the end of the seventeenth century in Sumatra.Footnote ²⁷ Contemporaries observed that “many hundreds [of] Dutch dyed at their Settlement at Padang” in Sumatra in the 1680s. Falciparum malaria may well have been the culprit.Footnote ²⁸ The Dutch brought many slaves from Madagascar to work in the gold mines in West Sumatra from 1670 through 1696, a higher proportion than they took to other sites.Footnote ²⁹ Malaria had not yet penetrated the highlands of Madagascar, but it was endemic enough along the coastal lowlands.Footnote ³⁰

Disease environments are generally most dangerous for people who have been raised and whose ancestors had been raised without any need to adapt to those environments. People from sub-Saharan Africa, where yellow fever and malaria were holoendemic, were least likely to succumb to diseases that abounded in the tropics. They had developed resistance to malaria and immunity to yellow fever. They had also developed their own medicinal strategies for preventing and treating malaria.Footnote ³¹ Some of the protection against malaria was inherited, extending to people of African descent born outside of Africa. There may also have been some inherited protection against yellow fever, but the evidence suggests that this is much less likely.Footnote ³² Europeans migrants to the tropics were particularly vulnerable until their immune systems had become conditioned to yellow fever and malaria. Parasitic infections such as hookworm and schistosomasis also plagued people living in the tropics, and smallpox − although it claimed the lives of people in all climates − added to the death toll in the tropics.Footnote ³³ Across the global tropics, from the sugar islands to the spice islands, between 35 and 80 percent of European newcomers died in their first year. The death rates were highest in West Africa.Footnote ³⁴

Because both yellow fever and falciparum malaria were holendemic in sub-Saharan West Africa, the English factories on the coast became a graveyard for white men; it was the worst place for the English to travel in the tropics, but Southeast Asia and the Caribbean were still much deadlier for the English than staying at home.Footnote ³⁵ The quantitative evidence for the seventeenth and early eighteenth century is too sparse for precise quantitative analysis of mortality rates, but more comprehensive evidence survives for European soldiers who traveled through the early nineteenth-century tropics. Rates in the late seventeenth century may have been higher because there was less immunological resistance among Europeans to the disease environment.Footnote ³⁶ In the early nineteenth-century British Isles, the annual death rate for soldiers was only fifteen per thousand. That rose substantially throughout the tropical empire.Footnote ³⁷ Along the Gold Coast, British Soldiers at Cape Coast in 1823 and 1826 died at the startling rate of 668 per thousand.Footnote ³⁸ The environment in Sierra Leone was only slightly more conducive to survival. Soldiers there died at a rate of 483 per thousand. Myanmar was the healthiest place for the British in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia, and solders there still died at two to three times the rate that they did at home (forty-five per thousand compared to fifteen per thousand).Footnote ³⁹ The disease environment in the spice islands appears to have been much deadlier for Europeans than elsewhere in Southeast Asia. At the Dutch outposts in the early-nineteenth-century Indonesian islands – principally in Java, Sumatra, and the Moluccas at that point – soldiers died at a rate of 170 per thousand each year. This was 2.4 times greater than the death rates of British soldiers in Sri Lanka, the deadliest environment for the British in India.Footnote ⁴⁰ None of the European sites in the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean approached the level of mortality among Dutch factories in Indonesia. The death rates in the Caribbean were greater than in Southeast Asia as a whole, particularly in the Greater Antilles. British soldiers in Jamaica died at an annual rate of 130 per thousand, nearly approaching the death rates of Europeans in the Indonesian archipelago. Barbados and the rest of the Lesser Antilles islands were healthy by Caribbean standards, likely because there were no Anopheles mosquitos in Barbados, so malaria was never endemic there.Footnote ⁴¹ Soldiers in these smaller English Caribbean islands died at an annual rate of eighty-five per thousand in the nineteenth century – still almost six times the rate they did at home.Footnote ⁴² Barbados appears to have been an even healthier place before the arrival of yellow fever in 1647.

The “Barbados Distemper,” 1647–1652

Richard Ligon arrived in Barbados in 1647 at the beginning of the first yellow fever epidemic in the Americas. Falling sick himself, he called it a “plague, (or as killing a disease).”Footnote ⁴³ The “power and Tyranny” of this “Fever” spread through his own body, leaving him on death’s door “without any appearance of life.” His “relapses [were] so frequent” that they left him weak in mind and body. When he was well enough, he found a ship returning home to escape the toxic atmosphere of the torrid zone, risking imprisonment in the middle of England’s political turmoil.Footnote ⁴⁴ Ligon survived his ordeal, but many more European migrants were less fortunate. Disease consumed the island until 1652 so that the “living were hardly able to bury the dead.”Footnote ⁴⁵ There were 30,000 to 45,000 whites in Barbados in 1647, significantly outnumbering the 10,000 to 12,000 enslaved blacks.Footnote ⁴⁶ Between 6,000 and 10,000 whites died during the five-year epidemic. There are no estimates of death among the enslaved black population, but the disease appears to have had far less impact among blacks than it did among whites.Footnote ⁴⁷ Yellow fever epidemics spread through the British and French islands of the Lesser Antilles and then into Spanish territories in Cuba and the Yucatán, causing what anxious English colonists labeled a “great depopulation.”Footnote ⁴⁸ What Ligon could not have appreciated is that what he experienced on a personal level was part of a crucial period of economic and social transition. The arrival of yellow fever in Barbados in 1647 was a hinge point in the development of racial slavery in England’s overseas empire.

The yellow fever epidemic of 1647–1652, coming on the heels of the initial transition to sugar economies in the Lesser Antilles, marked an “Africanization” of the Caribbean disease environment.Footnote ⁴⁹ In 1658, after the epidemic subsided, César de Rochefort, who wrote a natural history of the Caribbean, observed that “the plague heretofore was not known” in the Caribbean “no more than it was in China, and some other places of the East. But some years since most of these Islands were much troubled with Malignant fevers, which the Physicians held to be contagious.” Where had this plague come from? The “corruption of the Air” in these islands, he guessed, had started with “some Ships which came from the Coast of Africk.”Footnote ⁵⁰ He was correct about the origin, although he did not understand how this disease was transmitted. Parasites and viruses that were endemic in sub-Saharan Africa were transferred to the Caribbean, becoming endemic in much of the Caribbean as well. These diseases were unwittingly carried to the Americas with their vectors aboard slaving vessels from West Africa. This change in the disease environment of the American tropics shaped forced and free migration to the region.

There is a rich, if old, literature on the impact of tropical diseases on European colonization in the Americas. In the last four decades of the twentieth century, Philip D. Curtin and Kenneth F. Kiple stressed the differential impact of disease on European-born and African-born populations and the determinative role that epidemiology played in the creation of the African slave trade and slave societies in the Americas.Footnote ⁵¹ In 1992, Kiple and Brian T. Higgins argued that the introduction of yellow fever in 1647 explained the shift toward predominantly black populations in the Caribbean.Footnote ⁵² Yet this broad interpretive vein has had minimal impact on the specialist literature addressing the rise of slavery in the early English Caribbean. In 1972, Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh saw the 1647–1652 epidemic as a catalyst in the rise of slavery in the early Caribbean, arguing that it “stimulated the importing of more blacks from Africa,” but they had no idea what the disease was or that it was connected to a changing tropical disease environment.Footnote ⁵³ Richard Dunn, whose Sugar and Slaves was also published in 1972, knew that the epidemic was a yellow fever epidemic, but he did not highlight the differential impact of the disease on European and African laborers or argue that the yellow fever epidemic was a factor in the transition to African slavery.Footnote ⁵⁴ In 1989, Hilary McD. Beckles speculated in passing that the death of so many white servants in the 1647–1652 epidemic “must have signalled to masters the impossibility of basing their long-term plantation economy upon the use of white labor.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Most specialists of the transition to slavery in the English Caribbean, however, continue to overlook epidemiology as a determinative factor in their analyses. Instead, the standard narrative stresses economic factors such as the labor demands of sugar production, the limited supply of European servant labor, and the increasing cost of servant labor relative to slave labor or cultural factors such as prejudice toward Africans or the Irish.Footnote ⁵⁶ Simon P. Newman, for example, argued in 2013 that the transition to a majority African labor force in Barbados was driven by “the increasing affordability of slaves, planters’ dislike of the numerous Irish servants … and the need to cut labor costs to a minimum.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Epidemiological shifts help to explain more fully both the decline of white servants and the marked preference that planters displayed for enslaved African laborers after 1647.

A perfect storm of conditions aligned in midcentury Barbados for the yellow fever epidemic of 1647–1652. The initial growth of the African slave trade to Barbados introduced yellow fever to an island filled with nonimmune newcomers. They had been pushed to Barbados by political and social turmoil in the British Isles and pulled there by economic opportunity. From 1641 through the end of 1646, nearly 20,000 Africans disembarked from transatlantic slavers in Barbados.Footnote ⁵⁸ From 1640 to 1650, the number of Europeans in Barbados more than doubled, while the overall population tripled from slightly more than 14,000 to nearly 43,000.Footnote ⁵⁹ By the end of the 1640s, the small island of Barbados was by far the most densely settled colony in England’s overseas empire.Footnote ⁶⁰ Barbadians began growing sugar in the mid-1640s, increasing labor demands.Footnote ⁶¹ Sugar agriculture in Barbados transformed the environment, creating ideal breeding conditions for Aedes aegypti. Sugar cultivation brought rapid deforestation.Footnote ⁶² As the trees disappeared, so did the birds that ate mosquitos.Footnote ⁶³ The sugar economy was a boon for Aedes aegypti. These mosquitos are drawn to both blood and sweet liquid and can survive on either, although they need a blood meal to reproduce.Footnote ⁶⁴ They also breed well in human-made water receptacles. They would have flourished in the clay pots planters used to refine sugar. Thousands of broken and discarded pots were strewn across these plantations.Footnote ⁶⁵

The transition to a majority African labor force and an integrated plantation complex in Barbados came quickly on the heels of the 1647–1652 epidemic. The yellow fever epidemic was not the sole cause of that transition, but it shaped the speed and character of that transition with lasting effects. By 1660, at the latest, there were more blacks than whites.Footnote ⁶⁶ The transition to racial slavery might have come even sooner had not the First Anglo–Dutch War and the turmoil in the British Isles curbed the traffic of slaving vessels from Africa from 1648 through 1654. The trade began to increase again in 1654.Footnote ⁶⁷ The deaths of so many whites from yellow fever put the holdings of small landowners onto the market, enabling an elite class of survivors with capital to monopolize landholdings.Footnote ⁶⁸ The consolidation of property spurred the creation of the integrated plantation system in the 1650s, a new innovation in Atlantic sugar cultivation, which led to greater profit maximization.Footnote ⁶⁹ The booming profits from new economies of scale allowed planters to buy more African slaves.

Gang labor, which would become a signature aspect of sugar plantation slavery, followed quickly on the heels of the transition to an enslaved African majority. This system of labor organization evolved over the course of the seventeenth century, but it was in a nascent state within a decade of the first yellow fever epidemic.Footnote ⁷⁰ It was one of the keys to the productivity of Barbados’ sugar industry.Footnote ⁷¹ Gang labor was a militaristic form of labor organization in which slaves worked in lockstep with a rhythmic cadence and uniform pace under the eyes of a whip-wielding driver or overseer. It was never used effectively with free laborers because it was so physically and psychologically draining, and it required remarkably high levels of control and close supervision.Footnote ⁷² The gang system spread beyond Barbados through the British Caribbean sugar islands.Footnote ⁷³

Several factors contributed to the development of the gang system in the 1660s. Cultural prohibitions among the English kept them from using as much coercive violence with white servants as they did with African slaves. The transition to an African labor force was thus critical for the development of ganging.Footnote ⁷⁴ The large number of white migrants in midcentury Barbados with a military background in seventeenth-century European warfare had experience with the kind of violence and discipline and with the synchronized movements necessary to oversee the gangs.Footnote ⁷⁵ Soil erosion in seventeenth-century Barbados led the planters to adopt checkerboard grids of deep holes in the cane fields that facilitated the development of a more synchronized and uniform pace of labor.Footnote ⁷⁶

The newly Africanized disease environment played an ancillary role in the development of gang labor. The productivity of the gang system was driven both by the willingness of Europeans to use violence to impel gang labor and by the capacity of the laborers to perform that work at the uniform and accelerated pace that the gang system demanded. The differential effects on servants and slaves of the increasingly Africanized disease environment made it possible for planters to force African slaves – through brutal measures – to work harder and more productively than European servants.Footnote ⁷⁷ Significant differences between laborers in speed, strength or output would have made it more difficult to impose the uniform pace of the gang system. As European servants in field gangs declined through a combination of mortality, limited white migration and an increasing planter preference for Africans, the door opened for planters to fully develop gang labor.

The yellow fever epidemic had a significant impact on the age and sex ratios of white society, which in turn shaped property laws and ownership patterns in this budding slave economy. Children fared better than adults during yellow fever outbreaks and, at least in the 1647–1652 epidemic, women may have had greater survival rates than their male counterparts. According to Ligon, when yellow fever ravaged Barbados, “for one woman that dyed, there were tenne men.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Other witnesses agreed, observing that the fever “most fell upon the men.”Footnote ⁷⁹ There was almost certainly some exaggeration and confirmation bias in Ligon’s numbers. Ligon and the other settlers would have expected men to suffer more from disease because of what they believed was men’s greater tendency to debauchery and intemperance.Footnote ⁸⁰ Yet, death rates were clearly greater on the whole for men than for women in the seventeenth-century English Caribbean, and these eyewitness accounts suggest that yellow fever, when it struck, at least intensified that discrepancy.Footnote ⁸¹ If it is true that the survival rates were greater for women, there may have been gendered conventions in dress that exposed men more than women to Aedes aegypti, which tend to bite exposed extremities, particularly bare feet, lower legs, and ankles. Divisions of labor might have also led men to be more exposed than women to bites from Aedes aegypti; they tend to feed outdoors at midday.Footnote ⁸²

Because children and, possibly, adult women fared better in the 1647–1652 epidemic than men, Barbadians faced new sets of problems relating to the intestate inheritance of plantations and the management of orphans’ estates, including their slaves.Footnote ⁸³ By 1655, Governor Daniel Searle and his council had received so “many and sundry complaints” of the “greate abuse [of] Orphants” by embezzling or inept estate managers that they decided to intervene. The governor declared that three men would be appointed in each parish to periodically monitor both the orphans and their estates and report abuses.Footnote ⁸⁴ High death rates among white settlers in Barbados led the Barbadian Assembly to continue experimenting with new legislation to resolve intestate disputes, briefly reclassifying the “Slaves of this Island to be Real Estate” in cases of intestate inheritance. The law specifically noted that this clarification was necessary to ensure that “the Heir and Widow, who claims Dower, may not have bare Land without Negroes to manure the same.”Footnote ⁸⁵ This legal maneuvering to protect estates inherited by widows and orphans helped to ensure the continuity of the emerging integrated plantation system in colonies with high mortality.Footnote ⁸⁶

The yellow fever epidemic in Barbados was a marker of the “Africanization” of the Caribbean disease environment. From 1650 through 1700, 153,500 Europeans migrated to the English Caribbean but the combined white population declined from a high of 44,000 in 1650 to 33,000 in 1700.Footnote ⁸⁷ After the introduction of African diseases, European mortality rates were on par with the enslaved in the Caribbean, even though the enslaved lived under much more brutal conditions.Footnote ⁸⁸ In malaria-ridden Jamaica, mortality rates for whites were higher than among the enslaved blacks.Footnote ⁸⁹ As Robert A. McGuire and Philip R. P. Coelho argue, the captive Africans that Europeans began to prefer as laborers in tropical and subtropical climates “had immune systems that had been selectively culled by the environment for the greatest resistance to tropical pathogens.”Footnote ⁹⁰

Malaria and yellow fever became endemic or epidemic through much of the Caribbean in the last half of the seventeenth century. It was falciparum, the most lethal of the malaria parasites, that took hold in the region as the slave trade expanded. Feverish epidemics often followed quickly on the heels of large numbers of captives arriving from West Africa or large numbers of nonimmune servants or soldiers arriving from Europe. Africans fared better in the new Caribbean disease environment, but it still had a deleterious effect on both populations. One key difference was that Europeans could choose to avoid such a disease environment whereas African migration was involuntary. The threat of tropical fevers began to inhibit European migration to the Caribbean in the 1660s, while the differential impact of yellow fever and malaria on African and European populations gave planters another reason to prefer enslaved African labor in the sugar fields. After the yellow fever epidemic of 1647–1652, the British Caribbean became an increasingly nightmarish collection of demographically failed societies in which a handful of whites relied on sadistic punishments to control blacks.Footnote ⁹¹

The Return of Yellow Fever: The Caribbean Epidemic of the 1690s

A devastating yellow fever epidemic returned to the Caribbean again in the 1690s, driven by the nonimmune soldiers and sailors waging the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697).Footnote ⁹² England and the Dutch had allied against the French. Jamaica was invaded by the French in 1694, and the English were driven out of St. Kitts. The English countered with attacks on St. Domingue and Guadeloupe.Footnote ⁹³ Mosquito-borne diseases shaped imperial destinies in this decade, both during and immediately after the war. Spanish counterattacks, poor planning, and what was likely a mix of yellow fever and malaria ensured that Scotland’s one major attempt at empire in the mosquito-infested swamps of the Darien Peninsula in 1698 failed.Footnote ⁹⁴ The failure at Darien would bankrupt the Scots and lead to the Anglo-Scottish Act of Union in 1707, transforming the English empire into the British empire.

The effects of the second major Caribbean yellow fever epidemic were felt most keenly in Barbados with its dense population, particularly in Bridgetown, which was settled on low swampy ground. Waves of yellow fever rocked Barbados repeatedly through the 1690s until enough of the population had developed immunity to yellow fever. As Richard Dunn argued, “Thousands of Barbadians died” again, but the exact number is difficult to determine.Footnote ⁹⁵ By 1693, Governor James Kendall said he had lived “almost three years” in Barbados and insisted that during that time “one half of the Inhabitants” and “two thirds of all those that have Arriv’d” had died.Footnote ⁹⁶ By Kendall’s rough estimate, approximately 8,950 of the 17,900 whites living in Barbados in 1690 had died in just three years from yellow fever, and perhaps 1,600 of 2,450 new arrivals had died.Footnote ⁹⁷ If Kendall’s estimate was right, then the death toll of nearly 10,550 among the white population by 1693 was already higher than it had been during the first Barbadian yellow fever epidemic, but it is possible that Kendall exaggerated the death toll in order to gain military support from the metropole during the war. In 1693, Kendall hoped, prematurely, that they were finally free from the “Contagious Sickness” with which the island had been “Severely afflicted.” He announced the end of the epidemic.Footnote ⁹⁸ The island was “now in a perfect State of Health.”Footnote ⁹⁹ He even declared “a publique day of Thanksgiving.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The epidemic was not over; it grew worse.

Yellow fever returned to Barbados again in 1694, arriving with the rains as the mosquitos flourished. The height of the epidemic came in 1694, and more people died in Bridgetown that year than at any point in the seventeenth century.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Governor Francis Russell, who took over from Kendall in 1694, petitioned the Lords of Trade and Plantations for military support. He worried that the white population in Barbados was now so small that the enslaved would certainly rise again.Footnote ¹⁰² The epidemic continued until 1700, but some eyewitnesses in Barbados insisted that the death rates began to abate after 1694.Footnote ¹⁰³ Nevertheless, in 1700 “Sickness so Raged in the Towne” and the mortality rates were high enough that people refused to travel to Bridgetown to attend the Court of Chancery. Most of the lawyers were sick. Many of the inhabitants had shut up their houses in town.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The English had learned to avoid the places in Barbados that seemed most sickly. Bridgetown became a ghost town. Overall, the yellow fever epidemic of the 1690s probably claimed more lives in Barbados than the first epidemic of 1647–1652. Ships and migrants avoided the island as word spread through port towns and taverns. Kendall observed that the return of yellow fever had “frightened all Mankind from Coming near us.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The specter of disease could clearly shape both trade and migration.

The 1690s epidemic powerfully reinvigorated fears of the American tropics, and the English struggled to understand why, as Governor Kendall asserted in 1693, the Caribbean had become “the Region of Death.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In 1695, Russell had maintained that this “very pestilentiall distemper” had been made worse by “winds” driven to Barbados “from ye Continent [the Guianas] wch is low & swampy land.” He also blamed the heat of the torrid zone. Surrounded by yellow fever, he begged permission from the Lords of Trade and Plantations to go to “a cold climate” if he felt ill. Russell believed that escaping the tropics was the “one cure” for the fevers that plagued the island.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In 1700, in the last year of the epidemic, a report submitted to the Board of Trade on the causes of the epidemic blamed the “Nastiness of the Streets” of Bridgetown. Having so much “filth and slime” around was particularly dangerous “to the health of the Inhabitants” in “so hott a Country.” It led to rot, mold, “stinking noisome smells,” and “infection of the Air.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Notably, the report focused on the combination of the climate and the proliferation of slaves in Bridgetown. The author associated disease with both heat and the slaves themselves, and his solution was to create what he believed would be separate white (healthy) and black (unhealthy) spaces. “The Nastiness of the Negroes in that Town,” the author explained, “laying their Tales in the Nights in the Streets and Lanes, in so hott a Country,” was “one very great Cause of the Sickness there.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ He argued that enslaved people of African descent should be removed from Bridgetown by forcing the inhabitants by law to keep white servants in town instead. Slaves should be reserved for field work on rural plantations. This, he suggested, would also help to mitigate the dangers of rebellion and robbery in the colony.Footnote ¹¹⁰

The return of yellow fever during and immediately after the Nine Years’ War had a major impact on forced and free migration and racial demographics across the English Caribbean. Although 17,000 people from the British Isles – many of them soldiers – migrated to the English Caribbean in the 1690s, the white population in the region fell from 37,000 in 1690 to 33,000 in 1700.Footnote ¹¹¹ Warfare played a role in the population decline of the 1690s, but yellow fever –and malaria on some of the islands – probably played a more significant role. Barbados, the most populated English island in the Caribbean, did not experience an invasion. Yellow fever was the lethal agent in Barbados. Whites may have succumbed to disease even more quickly in Jamaica where endemic malaria combined with yellow fever. According to Trevor Burnard, the white indentured servant population of Jamaica “rapidly declined” in the 1690s.Footnote ¹¹² The yellow fever epidemic struck Jamaica in 1694, and it continued to strike the island in waves through the beginning of the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹¹³ This new storm of yellow fever may have led some of the wealthiest Jamaican planters to turn absentee in the eighteenth century, fleeing the island for safer climes in England and leaving their massive estates in the hands of managers.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Black to white ratios in the English sugar islands increased markedly after the 1690s, driven in part by the epidemic and by the increasing availability of slaves on the Gold Coast but also by renewed English fears of the feverish Caribbean environment. In 1690, blacks outnumbered whites across the English Caribbean by a ratio of 2.7:1. English planters turned quickly to enslaved labor after the war. By 1720, the ratio was 5:1.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Some islands saw exceptionally rapid changes after the 1690s. From 1691 through 1700, nearly 3,000 African captives had arrived in Antigua. In the next decade that number quadrupled.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Disease had once again bolstered English convictions that racial slavery was essential to settlement in the tropics.

Gold Coast in the 1690s

Historians have debated the extent to which disease prevented Europeans from extending the plantation complex to the West African coast.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Most historians would now stress factors other than the epidemiological environment. Yet, the evidence suggests that a complex combination of disease and the military weakness of Europeans relative to local West African polities kept the English and other Europeans from establishing more extensive colonies on the African coast. A case study of the English factories on the Gold Coast in the 1690s shows the extent to which the English factories could be weakened by disease. West African pathogens and parasites forced the English to rely more heavily on the labor of castle slaves and on local labor and military support. The disease environment and African agency in the slave trade need to be seen as interconnected. High mortality rates among European soldiers and servants at Royal African Company (RAC) factories led them to rely more fully on Africans to conduct the trade from the Gold Coast.

To maintain trading footholds on the African Coast and take advantage of the growing slave trade from the Gold Coast at the end of the seventeenth century, the English had to survive what was probably the most lethal epidemiological environment for European newcomers in all of England’s tropical empire.Footnote ¹¹⁸ A mix of falciparum malaria and yellow fever were the deadliest pathogens for Europeans on the Gold Coast. RAC servants and soldiers succumbed rapidly to the “feavers and agues” of these mosquito-borne viruses.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Annual death rates were always highest for English newcomers lacking immunity or resistance to the yellow fever and malaria endemic on the Gold Coast. Before the 1660s, Fort Cormantine was the most significant settlement on the Gold Coast; it was lost to the Dutch in 1665. In 1659, before the RAC monopoly on the African Coast began, the EIC still had possession of Fort Cormantine. James Cognet, the chief at the fort, wrote to London in June that year to insist that the company send new supplies of “Soldiers and workmen” because “one halfe of them you Sent … are dead and the rest Sick.”Footnote ¹²⁰ The men sent to Africa by the RAC continued to suffer the same fate. Between 1695 and 1722, more than six out of every ten RAC employees died within their first year in Africa.Footnote ¹²¹ Death rates for RAC employees were highest in the rainy season between May and August as the rain pooled in empty containers and cisterns, providing a place for mosquitos to lay their eggs.Footnote ¹²² Between 1683 and 1734, 27 percent of all RAC employee deaths on the Gold Coasts occurred in June and July, but this number climbed to 35 percent between 1690 and 1699, suggesting perhaps that the mosquito-borne illnesses accompanying the rainy season were responsible for an even higher share of the death toll in the 1690s.Footnote ¹²³

The death rates for the RAC’s white merchants and soldiers on the Gold Coast were particularly high in the 1690s. RAC agents at most of the English sites along the Gold Coast complained about sickness and the loss of men throughout the decade. In August of 1692, Joshua Platt, chief at Cape Coast Castle, wrote to London; “[T]he Year,” he complained, “hath bin fatall to ye men.”Footnote ¹²⁴ The RAC resettled their most western outpost of Dixcove in 1692 with a few men.Footnote ¹²⁵ By November, the chief factor Christopher Clarkson complained that the whole factory had fallen ill. They were all “very bad, noone being better than another.” All five European men had been so stricken with disease that there was no one left strong enough to “fire a gun.”Footnote ¹²⁶ An epidemic in 1694 was the worst of the decade; it killed nearly six out of every ten company employees across the Gold coast.Footnote ¹²⁷ The garrison at Cape Coast fell from 114 men in 1693 to seventy-five just a year later.Footnote ¹²⁸ The rains were exceptionally severe in 1694.Footnote ¹²⁹ John Bloome at James Fort in Accra noted that the rain was especially “violent” in late May and early June; the fort walls, he said, were collapsing. By the end of May, he complained “2 of our new men” were dead and “diverse others are sick.”Footnote ¹³⁰ By the end of June, Bloome himself had fallen ill. He was “very indisposed” with a “weakness in my hands” that left him unable to care for himself.Footnote ¹³¹ At Sekondi, in 1694, the situation was no better; “all the white men” were “sick of a feaver.”Footnote ¹³² The great rains that year were catalysts for disease, encouraging both cholera and breeding mosquitos; the violent tropical rains also destroyed the RAC’s fortifications across the coast to such an extent that the company directors in London complained in 1695 about the unusual cost of repairs.Footnote ¹³³ The English factors and their factories were all falling down.

Although the 1694 epidemic was the worst of that decade, disease continued to ravage the RAC settlements in the last half of the 1690s. In 1695, Edward Searle, the new chief in Accra, warned Cape Coast that the fort in Accra was still in need of repair after the great rains of 1694, but the “bricklayers” that Cape Coast sent had “been sick,” and in 1697 the “people” at Accra were still “so sickly” that Searle was still struggling to conduct business.Footnote ¹³⁴ Likewise, in 1697, the RAC agents at Cape Coast complained that “Mortality doth much weaken them,” and noted that factors were sick across the forts on the coast, and more were needed.Footnote ¹³⁵ As the men continued to fall, the RAC struggled to maintain sufficient soldiers and factors in the main garrison at Cape Coast. By 1697, there were only sixty-seven Europeans at the largest fort on the coast.Footnote ¹³⁶ The RAC suggested in 1698 that Cape Coast needed a total of 150 men to be fully stocked.Footnote ¹³⁷ Yet, by 1702, despite a succession of new arrivals, there were only fifty-five men remaining in the castle.Footnote ¹³⁸ Disease forced the company to operate at the turn of the eighteenth century with little more than a skeleton crew at a point at which the slave trade was accelerating.Footnote ¹³⁹

The intensification of warfare along the coast and the increase in human captives at RAC factories in the 1690s probably made the disease environment more deadly, much like the arrival of larger number of West Africans captives had led to disease epidemics in the Americas. Denser human populations and the migration and movement of people encourage the spread of almost all pathogens and parasites, including yellow fever and malaria. Both Europeans and Africans suffered from this pooling of pathogens and parasites in the 1690s at RAC sites. At Accra, James Fort was becoming very crowded with slaves for shipping. In February of 1694, Bloome wrote to Cape Coast to say that they had managed to buy 112 human captives at Accra, but the slaves were “too much crowded in their lodging.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ By March, many of them were “lately dead,” with “others falling sick dayly” with some sort of “catching disease” that was “amongst them.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ The same contagious disease may have plagued the slaves throughout the English forts on the Gold Coast in the mid-1690s. In 1695, Cape Coast had “Lost many slaves by Mortallity,” while at Accra the slaves were still perishing, falling suddenly sick “one day & dead the next.”Footnote ¹⁴² The Europeans at this fort were spared from this particular disease – likely because they were not forced to endure the crowded conditions of the dungeon – but when the heavy rains came in late May, the Europeans at Accra began to grow ill and die from the feverish diseases that were endemic on the Gold Coast forts in the rainy season.Footnote ¹⁴³ By July of 1695, death had taken its toll to such an extent that the chief factor complained, “I want white[s].”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The fort was falling down and the company’s men were too sick to build it back up.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ At Accra, in 1697, as the numbers of slaves held in the bowels of the castle grew, the company employees began to suffer from serious illness again. The rainy season had started, and the Europeans were “so sickly” and few in number that they had elected to keep a Portuguese employee that they were about to release from their service in order to have enough free whites staffing the fort.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Although the RAC forts on the Gold Coast were ravaged by epidemics in the mid-1690s, the more lethal disease environment had little impact overall on the English trade in human beings in West Africa. As the Company employees took sick and died, the trade continued to escalate, driven by warfare. When disease struck, the Company simply operated with fewer employees, eventually sent more to replace the dead, and relied more on local labor and on their castle slaves to maintain the forts. The commerce in human captives and other goods was as important to the African communities surrounding the English forts as it was to the English.

Sumatra, 1685–1700

After being forced out of the city of Bantam in 1682, the EIC pinned its hopes on Sumatra. In the mid-1680s, the Company began to carve out a new string of factories along the west coast of Sumatra just north of Bantam in Java and far enough from Dutch Batavia that the Company could hope to escape Dutch reprisals. The new factories were supposed to help the Company secure a larger share of the Indonesian pepper trade and counter the creation of a Dutch East India Company (VOC) pepper monopoly. Such a monopoly would be lucrative enough that the court of directors insisted it could change the balance of power in Europe, making the Dutch “Masters of the European as well as of the Indian Seas.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ After careful planning, the EIC directors in London settled on a place called Pryaman.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ But, the Company’s local agents had different plans. In 1685, after listening to local reports about the pepper trade and consulting with local Malay dignitaries, they chose instead to establish the Company’s primary forts in Bencoolen and Indrapura, places that were ravaged by tropical diseases.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The EIC directors were furious at their local agents, particularly for the “fattall & never enough to be repented Error” of settling a factory in Bencoolen.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ It was “too neare [Dutch] Batavia,” and, perhaps more importantly, the Company knew from “long & antient experience” that the part of the Sumatran coast around Bencoolen was “unhealthfull.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ The mortality rates at the English factories in both Indrapura and Bencoolen were catastrophic from the outset, and the Company was left with a puzzle to solve: how would they find enough laborers, soldiers, and settlers to maintain and defend these outposts when the people they sent died so quickly?

In June of 1685, EIC factors arrived with supplies and enough soldiers to begin building York Fort along the Bencoolen river in the country of Sungai Lemau.Footnote ¹⁵² The carnage that ensued in the next two years was breathtaking. They had arrived with a “great Number of people” and settled near the Malay town.Footnote ¹⁵³ “Violent” and “greate raines” fell almost every day from June to October.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ By October, the factors in Bencoolen were describing the toll that a “Sickness” had already taken. “[A]ll our souldiers, I may Say are unfitt for Service,” and “not five English that doe duty,” and “Six” more “portuaguess” laying sick with no “People to tend them.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The disease seemed to spare no one. “[All] or most of ye Cooleys & black workmen are Sick & dead.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Fifteen of these non-European workmen were left, and “ab[ou]t 40” had already died.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Most of these black workmen were probably free Indians brought from Madras.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Food was scarce because the “Cooks are sick,” and there was just one Portuguese man left healthy enough to fetch wood and water.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ For every man who died of disease, another was dying of hunger. There was no one well enough to bury the fallen. “[D]ead corps” were lying all around “towne.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ A ship arrived to load pepper at the end of September but it was sent away before it was full because its men were all growing “Sick … & dayly men falling downe.”Footnote ¹⁶¹ No records of the exact numbers of deaths exist for this first year, but by mid-January only “11 men [were] able to hold a musquett.”Footnote ¹⁶² The few soldiers alive were on the edge of mutiny as the epidemic swept through the English factory in Bencoolen.Footnote ¹⁶³ The Bencoolen council imprisoned some of the mutineers, but by April of 1686 the council decided that “Considering the Mortallity of men” and that “many” were also “Sick,” it was “fit to give yre prisoners theire liberty.” There were simply “not men enough to watch at night.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ They would have to trust the mutineers.

As the epidemic swept through the new arrivals in Bencoolen in 1685, the EIC’s head factor in Sumatra, Ralph Ordonds, left with “20 [English] Souldiers and Severall black Servants” for Indrapura to the north.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Bencoolen was, at first, supposed to be a subordinate factory to Indrapura. As the disease took its toll, the Bencoolen factory turned to Indrapura for help. The chief at Indrapura replied that they had heard of the “Sickly Condition” at the southern factory, but Bencoolen could expect “little help” from Indrapura because they were “little better or Rather worse our Selves.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Most of the “Compa[ny] Servants” were “very Sick.” Again, it was not just the European settlers; “not one of our black people [is] well [with] some dead and many near dying.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Few records survive from the early Company settlement in Indrapura because the bookkeeper took sick and then died, “Leaving no books or accots” other than some “loose papers.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸ In July of 1686, as the deaths mounted and Indrapura was left with just a skeleton crew of factors, Madras decided to reverse the hierarchy on the west coast of Sumatra and make Indrapura subordinate to Bencoolen.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ By August of 1687, there were “but 6 English Souldiers Liveing” from the twenty that Ordonds had led to Indrapura two years before: “[T]hey [were] scarce able to stand to Their arms Through weakness.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ In 1693, the Dutch seized Indrapura while another wave of disease swept through, killing the English “Governor and his Council” and causing a “great mortality.”Footnote ¹⁷¹ The Company put all its hope on Bencoolen.

The most savage killers in these early years in English Sumatra were almost certainly a mix of mosquito-borne pathogens. In 1687, Thomas Lucas, an EIC employee, noted that thick swarms of “Musketoes” preyed on people all along the Sumatran coast.Footnote ¹⁷² Most Europeans associated the tropical fevers in Sumatra with “malignant vapors” rather than mosquitos. William Dampier, who worked in Bencoolen as a gunner during the early settlement, suspected that “the winds coming over the Swamps” brought “a Stink with them,” which made it “an unhealthy Place.”Footnote ¹⁷³ Lucas, however, recognized mosquitos as, at least, the harbingers of death if not the vectors. He claimed that the west coast of Sumatra was “so much annoyed w[i]th Musketoes ye infallable companions of bad aire.” That “boggy moist bad air” filled with mosquitos made it difficult for “Europeans” to “expect to live one yeare”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ He imagined that Bencoolen would be somewhat healthier than elsewhere on the Sumatran coast because he had been “seinge very few” mosquitos during his brief time on shore there.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Unfortunately, for the English, Bencoolen proved an ideal breeding ground for mosquitos. The Malay settlement was “built on posts … for tis a Swamp the Town stands on.” The land around the fort, “especially near the Sea,” was also “swampy, producing nothing but Reeds or Bamboes.”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ A “wett & dry Ditch” surrounded York Fort, often filled with stagnant water.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ In the first two years, disease, as one would expect with a mosquito-borne pathogens or parasites, struck hardest during and immediately after the heavy rain season in September, October, and November.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ As the English tried to clear and tame nearby forested land, brought cattle to tend, encouraged more settlers, and expanded the Sumatran settlements into a colony, they unintentionally encouraged the spread of malaria; deforestation and increases in the density of both humans and livestock are catalysts for malarial epidemics.Footnote ¹⁷⁹

Malaria would not begin to fully ravage VOC employees in nearby Java until the 1730s, but the English settlements in Sumatra were subject to a particularly lethal mix of malarial parasites by the 1680s and 1690s.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Before 1733, approximately 6 percent of Europeans arriving in Dutch Batavia died in the first year, but after 1733 the death toll for European newcomers reached 50 percent or more in the first year, and as many as one-third of all European settlers in Batavia died in some years.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Falciparum malaria, the most lethal malarial parasite, was almost certainly the culprit; untreated, it can kill as many as 50 percent of the infected during epidemics, and the survivors suffer for many years.Footnote ¹⁸² The introduction of the falciparum parasite to the malarial mix would have led to higher mortality rates. Likewise, a combination of vivax and falciparum malaria probably killed most of the early settlers at Bencoolen and Indrapura.Footnote ¹⁸³ Dengue fever, also transmitted by mosquitos after heavy rainfall, may have played a lesser role.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ The soldiers in early Bencoolen and Indrapura were plagued by “feavours and Agues,” and the death rates at the outset appear to have approached or exceeded those in Batavia after the 1730s.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ In 1692, when a company employee died and the surgeon examined him, they found that his “Lungs & Liver were quite decayed,” common effects of untreated malaria in people without any immunity; lung damage is particularly common in falciparum infections.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ The chief factors in the Sumatran settlements were both sick, and they described recurrent bouts of illnesses and persistent weakness after their first attack, characteristic of malaria infections. In October of 1685, Indrapura said that “the Chiefe was but just Recovered when we Came hear and has been very Sick.”Footnote ¹⁸⁷ In 1686, Benjamin Bloome, the governor of the Bencoolen factory, pleaded with Madras to find him a replacement as soon as he had finished his first year because the “the Nauscouness of the climate” had left him “perpetually Sick.”Footnote ¹⁸⁸

From the outset, the EIC’s Sumatran factories became little more than a graveyard for the people sent there. As early as February of 1686, the Bencoolen council wrote to London to insist on more “People to Command I meane slaves.” He also wanted soldiers. They needed “a Superfluous number” of people to command, well beyond what was normally “requisite” to allow for the extreme “Mortallity” and “unhealthfullnesse of the climate.”Footnote ¹⁸⁹ The directors in London had been excited about the prospects of the settlement in Pryaman.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ When they heard instead about the devastation at Bencoolen and Indrapura and the petitions for more slaves, soldiers, and migrants, they were outraged. Trying to counter the exorbitant loss of money and manpower, they complained that the places that local factors had chosen to settle in Sumatra had already “caused ye deaths of above 500 men black & whites” and had cost the company more than £50,000.Footnote ¹⁹¹ The EIC directors refused to send “any more Soldiers … to be deprived of there lives in so short a time.”Footnote ¹⁹² They cautioned the factors still alive in Bencoolen that they needed to see proof that “Englishmen can live better in that place.” Until they got that proof, Bencoolen “must never expect from us workmen … to be sent out of England other than wt. we have already sent you.”Footnote ¹⁹³ Perhaps “the Chineses & others” could be convinced to come settle there and “Cohabbitt with you.”Footnote ¹⁹⁴ But, the Company did decide to send “Negro slaves.”Footnote ¹⁹⁵ The Sumatran outposts needed both free settlers and laborers. Ideally, they would have settled European communities with families there, but the EIC directors knew as early as 1687 that Bencoolen had proven so “exceeding[ly] unhealthfull” for settlers that “few families will adventure to go thither.”Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Madras tried at first to draw migrants and willing laborers for Sumatra from the Coromandel Coast of India, but by February of 1686 no one would go: “they hearing the Sad news of the Mortallity of soe many of [their] Country men, that went over” in the first settlements.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ London wrote to St. Helena to see if there were “young men there … of 16 or 17 years of age” that would be willing to come to Bencoolen. They hoped to convince a few “planters sons” without sufficient land or prospects.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ London also urged the company employees in Bencoolen to plant food and raise more livestock and tend to the “preservations of yo[u]r health” enough to prove the place was desirable for settlers.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ The EIC wanted, most of all, to entice Chinese migrants and traders away from Dutch Batavia. The first five Chinese men arrived to settle in Bencoolen in 1689. To encourage them to stay and bring others, the EIC built them a house and gave them a substantial loan and continued to make sure that all Chinese settlers were “well treated.” They hoped the Chinese would begin carving out sugar plantations in Bencoolen.Footnote ²⁰⁰ Because of the disease environment, the Bencoolen factory soon became a kind of joint Anglo-Chinese endeavor.Footnote ²⁰¹

The Dutch used a massive slave labor force to maintain their settlement and their fortifications in Batavia, and the EIC directors knew that they would need to model that schematic in a disease-ridden Sumatra.Footnote ²⁰² Slavery had proven essential for settlement everywhere in the tropics. The EIC’s directors promised to buy and send another “100 Madagascar Negroes” as soon as possible, but the outbreak of the Nine Years’ War hindered their acquisition.Footnote ²⁰³ The directors in London promised to try to find enough slaves in Madras and Bombay to send to Indonesia, but they also urged the factors in Bencoolen to follow Dutch practice in Batavia and try to acquire slaves locally from “the Island of Balu [Bali] and other Islands to the Eastward of Javay [Java].”Footnote ²⁰⁴ The EIC directors wanted to avoid the high costs of continually resupplying the Sumatran settlements with slaves, so they urged the chief and council at Bencoolen to follow the Dutch method of managing slaves in Batavia in every way but one: “We would have ours,” the EIC insisted, “used with more Lenity and have their bellyes full of such meat as is Proper for them.”Footnote ²⁰⁵ More benign management, they hoped, would not only preserve the slave’s “Lives & healths” but also lead to their natural “Encrease and Multiplication,” diminishing replacement costs for the Company.Footnote ²⁰⁶

The disease-ridden Bencoolen settlement and the smaller subsidiary factories developed in Sumatra would rely as much as possible on forced labor, and these Sumatran outposts would become a dumping ground for the Company’s criminals and other undesirables, a common story in the seventeenth-century English tropics. When Dampier was in Bencoolen in 1690, the soldiers of the fort “were sickly and died very fast.”Footnote ²⁰⁷ Little changed over time. According to Dampier, Bencoolen became well-known as “the most unhealthy Place of any that we trade to.”Footnote ²⁰⁸ The struggle to find European or free migrants, soldiers, and laborers in the Sumatran disease environment meant that the EIC continued to rely on non-European soldiers and migrants and, particularly, on slave labor.Footnote ²⁰⁹ The English persisted in trying to make Sumatra into a “famous Colony” by staffing and settling it with non-European forced and free migrants from throughout the tropics.Footnote ²¹⁰

Conclusion

Mosquitos and the diseases they carried helped to create disease environments that shaped the expansion of tropical slavery and the nature of slavery around the globe. In midcentury Barbados, the transition to enslaved labor happened more quickly because of a yellow fever epidemic. The disease claimed the lives of so many white indentured servants, convicts, and prisoners of war during the early sugar boom and weakened so many others that the planters began to turn more readily to African slaves. In the late 1680s and early 1690s, the EIC’s Sumatran factories were so ravaged by malaria that they developed a reputation as the unhealthiest place among all the EIC possessions. The Sumatran factories became an Anglo-Chinese partnership that relied heavily on Indonesian laborers and soldiers to protect its interests from the Dutch while they tried to develop the pepper trade. In the 1690s, the Nine Years’ War unleashed another yellow fever epidemic in the Caribbean, wiping out many of the remaining white settlers and reinvigorating fears of the effects of the tropics on white bodies. As Caribbean governors struggled to find and retain white migrants, sugar planters resorted to relying even more on enslaved African laborers. White to black ratios in the Caribbean rose sharply after the war. A surge in the supply of captives on the Gold Coast helped to facilitate this growth. In the 1690s, the English factories on West Africa’s Gold Coast had to learn to rely more on Anglo-African partnerships with the various fragmented coastal communities in order to maintain their security amid escalating local warfare while still taking advantage of a surging trade in human captives. In all three places, slaves began to match or outnumber the English population, sometimes by large margins.

English efforts to rationalize organic processes they failed to understand fostered increasingly virulent racism that they deployed to justify the enslavement of Africans over the servitude of Europeans in the tropics. The globalization of trade and forced labor markets and the spread of plantation agriculture transformed tropical disease environments, making them increasingly inhospitable to European newcomers. Many English colonial architects had become convinced by the 1660s, after the first Barbadian yellow fever epidemic, that the forced migration and labor of non-Europeans was essential to settlement and profit in the tropical zones because of the different effects of hot climates on white and black bodies. In 1660, the chief agent at Fort Cormantine on the Gold Coast wrote the EIC directors to complain that he could not possibly “meddle” with “Building of Factories to Windwards” without “at least 100 Slaues for the Diginge of stones and other labor which the White men are not able to indure.” In 1663, Edward Doyley, the first governor of Jamaica, reported that the new English royal colony in Jamaica was “very unhealthy” for the English, but it was “wonderfull healthful for Negroes which are the life of Plantations.”Footnote ²¹¹ Enslaved Africans had the same risk of mortality in Jamaica, he thought, “as English in England.” In contrast, he claimed, newly arrived Africans in the more temperate zones of Virginia struggled to survive “the Winter.”Footnote ²¹² The English believed that white bodies were fragile in the tropics while black bodies endured. Perhaps more importantly, blacks could be more easily forced to migrate and forced to labor in those harsh conditions.

English colonizers in the Indian Ocean responded to the death toll from disease by adopting the same racial logic as their Caribbean and West African counterparts. In 1686, the Bencoolen council argued that “Madagascar Blacks” would be important in Bencoolen because they had proven essential to maintaining a Dutch presence in the region, especially at Padang in West Sumatra, where the environment had proven especially deadly for Europeans.Footnote ²¹³ They argued that the Dutch could not possibly do the heavy work of building forts without black slaves.Footnote ²¹⁴ In 1701, an English traveler to Borneo stopped in Bombay where he observed that the combination of heavy tropical rain and the “Sultry heat” were “very pernicious to Europeans.” The resulting corruption of “ye Air” had a “feverish effect” which left most Europeans suffering from “feavors & fluxes.” The environment, he noted, was especially lethal for people “from England.”Footnote ²¹⁵

This racialization of tropical bodies and the idea of homogenous tropical zone led the English to assume, wrongly, in a homogeneity in the resistance of all “black” people to tropical fevers. English perceptions of the hardiness of Malagasy bodies underscore the ways in which the English began to lump together sub-Saharan West Africans with the Malagasy, describing them both as “negroes.”Footnote ²¹⁶ Their assumptions had devastating effects on the enslaved. The English seemed to have hoped that the Malagasy would thrive in the swampy fever-ridden tropical environments around their factories in Sumatra. They labeled the “Madagascar Blacks” the “best” slaves for “Service” in Sumatra.Footnote ²¹⁷ However, Madagascar’s climate, terrain and disease environment was significantly different than West Africa. Overall, the Malagasy people had less exposure to malaria than coastal West Africans. Some of the Malagasy could trace their descent to the Bantu-speaking people of East Africa and they likely had some genetic resistance to malaria. Others, such as the Merina, had descended from the Austronesians and had little or no such inherited resistance.Footnote ²¹⁸ The Merina established communities in the interior highlands of the island to escape the fevers along the coast of Madagascar. Although malaria was endemic in coastal Madagascar in the sixteenth century, it was not endemic in the central highlands of Madagascar until the nineteenth century and many of the enslaved were taken from the highlands.Footnote ²¹⁹ The EIC sent enslaved Malagasy, likely taken from both the highlands and the coastal areas, to Sumatra and the other Indonesian islands where malaria was endemic.Footnote ²²⁰ The Company hoped that the Malagasy would be hardier and more robust than captives taken from the Indonesian islands but the brutality of enslavement and the disease environment ensured that their mortality and morbidity rates were very high. Many enslaved Malagasy succumbed to the same fevers that killed both the English and many of the workers who had been brought from the Indian subcontinent.Footnote ²²¹

The growing English assumption that heavy labor in the tropics had to be done by non-Europeans combined with the increasing supply of slaves from Africa, the profitable economics of slave-based production and a dwindling number of Englishmen willing to migrate drove the expansion of slave-based economies in the tropics. Mosquito-borne diseases combined with scorching suns and torrid rains made the tropics seem to be a dangerous place. Early ideas about race and environmental determinism were shaped by English experiences in the tropics, particularly after the devastating Barbadian epidemic of 1647, a hinge point in the development of slavery in the English empire. Endemic and epidemic diseases – particularly yellow fever and malaria in Africa and the Americas, and malaria in Asia – continued to claim the lives of many Europeans, reinforcing their fear of the hot sun, the heavy rains, and the corrupt air of the tropics. English fears of fevers and tropical heat and the effects of epidemics – such as the ones in the 1680s and 1690s in the Caribbean, on the Gold Coast, and in Sumatra – helped to direct the expansion of the empire and its labor politics. The disease environment forced the English to rely on non-English people to build an empire. Non-European slaves became so closely associated with heavy labor and profits that the model of the English planation complex, forged in Barbados, spread throughout the global tropics.