From the day you had your first history lessons in school, you’ve probably heard stories of the American Revolution and the greatness of our nation’s founders. Even if the reasons have become a bit fuzzy, places like Lexington, Concord, Valley Forge, and Yorktown remain landmarks in our collective memory. I’ll bet, however, that your high school textbooks and teachers forgot about one of the most important Founding Fathers, named Anopheles quadrimaculatus.
Anopheles quadrimaculatus isn’t a person. It is, in fact, a species of mosquito. A mosquito harboring a debilitating disease named malaria within its body. Even today, with our knowledge of medicine, malaria yearly afflicts millions of people worldwide. The disease causes debilitating fevers, and, in the worst cases, death. In the 1770s, there was no reliable treatment for this scourge.
Most of the early battles of the American Revolution were in the northern colonies. However, unable to achieve victory there, especially after John Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga, by 1780 the British had shifted their attention to the South, where they fancied (mistakenly, for the most part) that Loyalists were just waiting to embrace them. (Actuality, most people in the southern colonies were rather indecisive about participating in the Revolution. Feeling oppressed by politically powerful plantation owners, they saw little point in replacing British overlords with American ones. See, for instance, the Regulator Movement in North Carolina for more regarding this situation.) While Southern Loyalists remained lukewarm in their attachment to the British, Southern mosquitoes did not. Hordes of Anopheles quadrimaculatus, carrying the strain of malaria known as Plasmodium falciparum, swarmed the Redcoats.
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The British soldiers, many of whom were Scottish, had never had this type of malaria; the British Isles are too cold for it to prosper there. So, malaria plagued them continually. While the British commander in the South, Lord Cornwallis, marched his men north from South Carolina to their rendezvous with destiny at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781, the only members of his army able to soldier effectively were those from the southern colonies who had experienced Plasmodium falciparum and were therefore immune to it. Yorktown itself was surrounded by, according to Cornwallis, “some acres of an unhealthy swamp” abounding with the stagnant water that is Nirvana for Anopheles quadrimaculatus.
We know the end of the story. Cornwallis surrendered to General Washington after a feeble attempt to escape encirclement, and this was the last important battle of the American Revolution. Why was the attempt to break out so feeble, though? Because about half of Cornwallis’s men were incapacitated with malaria. No weapon available to Washington, no military strategy that he might have employed, could have eliminated half the British army. For that, we must thank the lowly mosquito. So, don’t forget to salute out nation’s tiny, winged heroes when you raise your glasses next year on Independence Day.
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