Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy. Strother E. Roberts
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England in the seventeenth century. The very counties which contributed the majority of emigrants to the first wave of Puritan settlement in New England also experienced some of the highest rates of malarial fever.107 Malaria was also widespread in the Netherlands, where many leaders of the Pilgrim and Puritan migrations lived in exile prior to their departure for America. For example, Thomas Hooker, Hartford’s first minister, contracted the “ague” in 1633 (or earlier) while living in Rotterdam.108 After recovering from his initial illness, Hooker, along with many of his coreligionists, carried dormant Plasmodium protozoa in their bloodstreams when they crossed the Atlantic. Any recurrence of symptoms turned infected migrants into transmitters of the disease, as native mosquitoes spread malaria from the initial host to his or her neighbors.
Malarial fevers plagued New Englanders from at least the 1640s forward, and recurred region-wide throughout the remaining decades of the seventeenth century.109 One scholar has suggested that an outbreak of malaria helps explain symptoms ascribed to some of the supposed victims of the Connecticut witchcraft craze of 1647–1653.110 John Winthrop Jr., Royal Society member and governor of Connecticut, recorded numerous new cases in the colony from 1657 forward—including one especially virulent outbreak he witnessed firsthand during a visit to Hartford in the summer of 1672.111 Indeed, in the 1680s and early 1690s, the towns of the Connecticut Valley gained a reputation as particularly bedeviled by the scourge of malaria.112
Then, after approximately 1700, malaria almost completely disappeared from both the Connecticut Valley and New England more generally.113 New England’s climate is usually credited for malaria’s eighteenth-century disappearance.114 Unlike the warmer southern colonies, the greater length of northern winters limited the annual number of days during which mosquitoes were active at the same time that greater severity of cold reduced the survival rate of adults and larvae. However, a climactic explanation fails to account for malaria’s persistence in the first decades after English settlement or for the disease’s decline just as average temperatures began to rise from the seventeenth-century low point reached during the depths of the Little Ice Age. Nor can it explain the persistence of malaria in areas like New York City, which shares, roughly, the wintery conditions of southern New England. Even more puzzling is the case of Deerfield, the one exception to the general disappearance of malaria from the eighteenth-century Connecticut Valley. In the neighborhood immediately around Deerfield, new cases of malaria continued to appear throughout the 1700s. Locals blamed these persistent outbreaks, so exceptional in New England as a whole, on a group of undrained marshes and stagnant pools that persisted on the unimproved lands east of Deerfield, on the far side of the Connecticut River.115
In this, the inhabitants of Deerfield offer a clue both to the persistence of malaria as a health concern in their own locality and the disease’s disappearance from the larger region after 1700. Since the pool of human hosts continued to increase as the population of the valley grew during the eighteenth century, and the Plasmodium microbe remained in the region, at least, in Deerfield, then a decline in the number of available disease vectors, of Anopheles mosquitoes, must explain malaria’s disappearance. As water tables throughout the valley slowly fell, no longer maintained by the presence of beaver dams, related ponds and wetlands dried up and mosquito-breeding habitat disappeared. Euro-American settlers, intent on draining lands and improving them for agriculture, contributed to the process. Only in the lands east of Deerfield—in an area that had, at the time of first settlement, been a lake bed—did sufficient standing waters persist to provide adequate breeding grounds for a mosquito population capable of maintaining malaria as a local health threat. Deerfield’s own population, likely supplemented by migrants passing through town, some of whom likely had experience in the West Indies trade, provided a reservoir from which the Plasmodium could spread, via mosquito intermediaries, to new hosts.
That the drainage of lands following the decimation of beaver ponds lay behind malaria’s post-1700 retreat from New England is further evidenced by the conditions that eventuated the disease’s return at the end of the eighteenth century. The millponds associated with the saw- and gristmills of the colonial era provided insufficient breeding habitat to reestablish mosquito populations capable of maintaining malaria outbreaks. The much grander engineering projects of the last decade of the eighteenth century, and of the nineteenth century, were another matter. Malaria returned to the valley (outside of Deerfield) in 1792, striking at the towns of Northampton and nearby Hadley. Local residents had little doubt as to the cause of the new outbreak. They pointed to the waters backed up behind a recently constructed dam—a part of the lock system for the new South Hadley Canal then being erected by a construction crew of migrant laborers, “the most of them Hollanders.”116
Contemporaries blamed the miasmas produced by these new standing waters as the source of their illness. Interpreting the outbreak from the perspective of twenty-first-century epidemiology, it seems that these new waters provided new breeding habitat for mosquitoes at the same time that the presence of Dutch skilled laborers offered a new reservoir of Plasmodium microbes. Malaria’s prevalence in the valley only increased over the following decades as new engineering projects sequestered waters for lock operation, to power industrial water mills, and to provide urban drinking water. As malaria outbreaks proliferated, contemporaries continued to identify new construction projects, and the miasmic waters they produced, as the source of their malarial woes.117 By the end of the nineteenth century, the towns lying on either side of the Connecticut Valley had once again gained a notorious reputation as regional hotspots for malarial infection within New England.118 If the postdiluvian landscape yielded by the fur trade spared eighteenth-century valley residents from the scourge of malaria, the reflooding of the watershed’s nineteenth-century industrial landscape placed their descendants once more at risk.
New Markets, New Landscape
Native Americans did not merely act within European commercial networks, they engaged with Europeans to actively construct the commercial networks and economic system that dominated and defined the seventeenth-century New England landscape. The economy that defined New England’s ecology up through the late seventeenth century was neither European nor Native American, but a hybrid system coconstructed by cultures with roots on both sides of the Atlantic. In many ways, and for most of the century, this economy was more Indian than European. The most significant changes to the Connecticut Valley land- and waterscape between 1600 and 1700 were the result of a Native American market revolution and the political and diplomatic transformations that accompanied it.
When Wahginnacut first urged the English to settle in the Connecticut Valley in 1631, he was inviting them to build their homes amid a landscape experiencing substantial ecological and hydrological changes. As English settlers pushed up the Connecticut Valley in the seventeenth century, they continually encountered lands that Indian communities had depleted of beaver and then traded away for as great a profit as possible. The ecosystems that greeted these new homesteaders were, in terms of biodiversity, far simpler than they had been mere decades before. And they were still in the process of becoming simpler yet. In many ways the “natural” environment that English settlers found in the Connecticut Valley in the mid- and late seventeenth century was actually a recent invention. Human actors, driven by the incentives of the fur trade, had destroyed the former ecological and hydrological systems that beaver had engineered over the course of millennia. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Connecticut Valley was a postdiluvian landscape diminished in its biodiversity, but “providentially” well-suited to the demands of English agriculture.
CHAPTER 2
Raising Crops
Feeding the Market
The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English appropriation of Indian lands—a process sped along by the declining fortunes of the fur trade—radically transformed the ecology and economies of the Connecticut Valley. Native communities, who had formerly traded their agricultural surplus to feed ill-prepared English colonists, gradually found themselves displaced by aggressive (and often violent) English traders and settlers.