Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy. Strother E. Roberts
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territory in the Connecticut basin.
The Benefits of Extermination
For the English settlers who dispossessed the Native peoples of the Connecticut Valley in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the disappearance of beaver, with their dams and ponds, from the landscape did bring certain benefits. To a degree, the successful establishment of English agriculture in New England depended upon the prior removal of the beaver, a fact that Joseph Peirce first grasped in the 1790s. Had Indian hunters not removed beaver through the fur trade, the English farmers who settled the seventeenth-century valley would have had to exterminate them. This would have only added to the time and effort that colonists were already expending to drain and improve the marshes and swamps of the region, a task that environmental historian Brian Donahue has likened to “the labors of Hercules.”97
Throughout the seventeenth century, English efforts to “improve” lands by draining them reinforced the general drying out of wetlands due to the annihilation of the beaver. As the waters impounded behind beaver dams drained, the formerly high groundwater tables that they had helped to maintain began to gradually fall. As the water table fell, wetlands dried out and many small streams disappeared. English settlers, meanwhile, worked hard throughout the seventeenth century, and later the eighteenth century, to drain what swamps and marshes remained. In the process, they destroyed the few refuges left to wetland dwelling wildlife, including the beaver.
Some of the earliest town regulations in the Connecticut Valley centered on ditching and draining the commons. Springfield boasts the earliest extant record of town-mandated efforts at swamp draining. In 1639 the town passed a law requiring all landholders to dig a ditch along the side of the highway as it passed through their lands, each inhabitant linking his ditch to his neighbor’s. Landowners were enjoined to keep this ditch clear to help ensure “the ready passadge of ye water yt it may not be pent up to flowe the meddowe.”98 A year later, Hartford ordered landholders in its Little Meadow to dig a three-foot wide “dreyne” along the border of their lands to facilitate the draining off of seasonal standing waters into the nearby Little River.99 The town records of Wethersfield for 1640 mention the arms of a “three-way lete” converging in that town’s centrally located common meadow. (The early modern English word “leat” refers to an open drainage ditch.) Such efforts continued for decades. In 1667, Springfield parceled out extensive new tracts of “swampy meadow” from its commons on the condition that the new owners would “improve” (presumably meaning drain) the land.100 Numerous other drainage efforts, especially those undertaken on private lands, went unrecorded.
Changing nomenclature can help illustrate the combined impact of the mutually reinforcing processes of agricultural improvement and declining water tables. In Hartford, for example, much of the vast swamps recorded in the earliest land divisions had transformed into dry land within just a few short decades. The large parcels of swampland originally granted to town founders Nathaniel Ward and John Haynes, and referred to locally as Ward’s Swamp and Haynes’ Swamp, came over the seventeenth century to be known as Ward’s Meadow and Haynes’ Meadow, respectively. Hayne’s Swamp may have begun the process of drying out in the 1640s when Haynes sold five and a half acres described in the records as “sometime swamp, now mowing land.” The drying out of swamps occurred elsewhere as well. One two-and-a-quarter-acre parcel recorded simply as “swamp” by George Wyllys in 1639 had become “dry swamp” by the time it was resold to James Ensign later in the 1640s. A parcel of land registered as “meadow & swamp” by William Parker in 1639 became merely “meadow” by the time it was sold to Edward Stebbing in the 1660s.101 All of this points to the gradual draining and drying out of the former wetlands that had bordered the Connecticut River and its tributaries.
While the expansion of arable land, pastures and meadow benefitted the English husbandmen of the watershed, the disappearance of wetlands was not without its economic downside. The increased propensity to flooding that accompanied the large-scale loss of beaver ponds in the landscape would have only been exacerbated by the efforts of husbandmen to drain the other wetlands of the valley. Without these wetlands to act as a catchment for seasonal and other unexpected storms, colonial streams and rivers often overflowed their normal banks. The disastrous flooding that the lower Connecticut Valley endured in the early 1680s was likely an early portend of inundations that in later decades would come to be taken as unavoidable acts of nature.102 Usually this meant floodwaters overflowing the same lands that had formerly been swamp, marsh, or pond. The eighteenth-century residents of Hartford accepted with resignation that the northern half of Main Street, built along the course of a swampy stream that was redirected in the seventeenth century, would turn to a mass of mud and standing water following any heavy rain.103 The Great Meadow in Springfield continually reverted to its former marshy state, drawing repeated calls from the town assembly for landowners to keep their ditches “well scowred.”104 English landowners in the valley learned time and again that water had to go somewhere, and, especially during the spring freshets, it could not always be contained. The persistence of waters to find their own way to the waiting banks of the Connecticut and its tributaries, and then downriver to Long Island Sound, would continue to frustrate its human inhabitants throughout the colonial period and, indeed, can still cause problems today.
Even as the valley’s eighteenth-century inhabitants continued to wrestle with the increased hazards of periodic flooding, they benefitted from the absence of an even greater scourge to their health and well-being. The disappearance of large areas of standing water reduced the breeding habitat for, and thus the numbers of, mosquitoes in the region.105 This in turn spared the valley’s human residents both the annoyance of being bitten and the very real dangers associated with mosquito-borne illnesses. Malaria, for example, was a common affliction throughout the early modern Atlantic World. The disease’s near-complete absence in the eighteenth-century valley suggests the wide-ranging ecological impacts of beaver extermination in the Connecticut Valley, and New England more generally.
Plasmodium vivax, the species of malarial microbe that made up the vast majority of cases in New England, seldom proved fatal in itself. This species is less deadly than Plasmodium falciparum, which can lead to organ failure and which came to predominate in the American south. But the symptoms of P. vivax could still be quite debilitating for sufferers, and could expose their hard-pressed immune systems to other diseases that might result in death. Malaria afflicts sufferers with recurring fevers interspersed with severe cases of the chills. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers commonly referred to malaria as the “ague” (a general term for fevers, although it was especially associated with malarial symptoms), “remittent” or “intermittent fever” (a reference to the chills that interspersed spiking malarial fevers), or as “tertian” or “quatrain fever” (depending on whether the periods between fevers averaged three or four days). Although early modern theorists commonly blamed malarial outbreaks on the presence of “miasmas” (“bad airs” usually associated with marshes and other areas of stagnant water) the exact nature of the disease and its transmission remained a mystery. This was at least partially because malaria is a recrudescent disease—one in which the invading microbes can lay dormant for a period of years between the outbreak of symptoms. Malaria sufferers who seemed to have been cured of their fevers could quite suddenly fall ill again many miles, or even an entire ocean, away from the areas of “bad air” where they first contracted the disease.106
Three factors are required for malaria to persist as an endemic disease within a region: the presence of the protozoa which causes the disease, a sufficiently large human host population to maintain the microbe and allow it to multiply, and a sufficiently large Anopheles mosquito population to transmit the microbes to new hosts. Prior to 1600, the lands that would become New England housed a large number of populous human communities as well as a substantial Anopheles mosquito population—the latter a source of considerable complaint for early European explorers in the region. However, like so many of the deadliest and most debilitating diseases to afflict humanity, malaria had evolved in the eastern hemisphere. To gain a foothold in New England, malaria plasmodium first needed to hitch a ride across the Atlantic. Beginning in the 1620s, thousands of English emigrants unwittingly volunteered as carriers.
Malaria