The Deadliest Ally | America in Pursuit
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from ThruLine and NPR. I'm Ramtin Arablui. 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, unalienable 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. 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.
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. That's Dr. Tim Weingard.
How did mosquitoes influence the outcome of the American Revolution?
I'm a history professor at Colorado Mason 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.
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.
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.
We head to the battlefield with the Anopheles mosquito when we come back.
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.
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.
All the while, he's desperately waiting for help to come.
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. So, they change their strategy.
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.
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 is the Anopheles mosquito and why does it matter to history?
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. Where these British soldiers come over, they haven't been seasoned to their own English malaria, let alone colonial stew of malaria.
And this new set of circumstances in the South forced Cornwallis to adopt some unusual tactics.
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. And so why is Cornwallis doing this? Is he running away from the Americans?
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:02–1:13
2
How did mosquitoes influence the outcome of the American Revolution?
1:13–3:49
3
What is the Anopheles mosquito and why does it matter to history?
3:49–6:30
4
How did disease shape George Washington’s military strategy?
6:30–8:58
5
Why did British General Cornwallis zigzag across the southern colonies?
8:58–10:19