Malaria

Bourgmont’s attempt to expand French markets onto the plains by blunting the worst abuses of the captive trade was hobbled by the expansion of slavery in the sugar colonies. The 1725 census for Fort de Chartres indicated the company financing Louisiana owned 22 African slaves, while the nearby lead mines had 20. The community of 126 individuals, 68 soldiers and unenumerated natives and voyageurs held an additional 19 African and 17 Apache or Pawnee slaves. There was one free Black.

The Africans were a recent addition. Tradition says they were brought from Saint-Domingue in 1718.

France had entered the slave trade when the price for sugar began rising. There were few slaves among the 3,100 Europeans living in the Saint-Domingue colony in 1670, when it grew tobacco. The Compagnie de Sénégal was chartered in 1675 to supply labor to the developing sugar plantations. By 1685 when the Compagnie de Guinée was established and Jean l’Archevêque was living in Petit-Goâve, there were 2,939 African slaves and 4,6500 French on the western part of Hispañola. Fifteen years later, there were more slaves than whites: 9,082 to 4,560.

When Louis XIV granted the Spanish asiento for Caribbean trade to the Compagnie de Guinée in 1703, it was instructed to draw its slaves from Angola and Gabon. A decade or so later, in 1716, France eliminated the monopolies, and allowed any ship owner from one of five ports to sell slaves so long as he paid duty in Saint-Domingue. Fort de Chartres’ bondsmen came under the last regime.

The import of Black slaves introduced more virulent forms of malaria to the Caribbean. The disease is caused by a single-celled protozoa of the genus Plasmodium. The species found in Europe and the New World, malariae and vivax, are less dangerous than the falciparum found in sub-Saharan Africa. An individual infected with one develops an immunity to that particular strain, but when such a person is exposed to falciparum the protection transforms into a susceptibility. Infected people carry the parasite for life in their blood.

The map below shows the current distribution of malaria. The different colors represent strains that are resistant to different treatments. No connection was drawn between the resistence patterns and the underlying pathogen. One would guess the dark brown was Plasmodium falciparum, and the other colors other species.

Malaria is spread by mosquitos that transfer the parasite through their bites. They need stagnant water to lay its eggs. The first step in the colonial assimilation of falciparum was its genetic adaption to New World insects. According to Alvaro Molina-Cruz and Carolina Barillas-Mury, mosquitoes have internal mechanisms that protect them from the invaders. Each type is different. The modification made by Plasmodium to disable the barriers didn’t happen just once, but every time the protozoa were taken into a new environment.

The transformations happened quickly. The English seized Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655. They quickly stocked it with slaves, taking whoever was in the market. The first serious cases of malaria were reported in 1655 and 1656.

Notes: The asiento was mentioned in the post for 17 May 2015. The most active slave port was Nantes.

Boucher, Philip P. France and the American Tropics to 1700, 2010.

Brown, Margaret Kimball. History as They Lived It: A Social History of Prairie du Rocher, Illinois, 2010.

Molina-Cruz, Alvaro and Carolina Barillas-Mury. "The Remarkable Journey of Adaptation of the Plasmodium falciparum Malaria Parasite to New World Anopheline Mosquitoes," Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, Memórias 109: 662-667:2014.

Morgan, M. J. Land of Big Rivers: French and Indian Illinois, 1699-1778, 2010. He said many of the company slaves were rented out, and that the mine slaves ended working in the wheat fields.

Renaudiére, Philippe de la. Journal of the Voyage of Monsieur de Bourgmont, translation in Frank Norall, Bourgmont, 1988.

Graphics: Percherie, "Pays Concernés par le Paludisme (Malaria)," uploaded to Wikimedia Commons on 8 October 2006 as "Map of Places Affected by Malaria by Type."