Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-nptnm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-20T04:37:35.287Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Climate, Health and Black Labor in the English Americas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Gary Puckrein
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

“ Son George,” Sir Henry Colt wrote his progeny in the summer of 1631, “ I have taken pains day and night to collect this journal … because if you will prove a seaman and undertake voyages [to the New World] you may learn how to employ your time at sea, and who to thank for your conservation.” Appended to the diary were “ some rules for diet and health … the way being dangerous because of the change in climates, especially about the tropics.” Among other things, Sir Henry cautioned the younger Colt that he would find the “ torrid zone or middle region temperate enough,” but the most dangerous place would be the “ tropics under which you must pass for pestilent fevers … which have killed many in the hot season of year.” To reduce the possibility of sickness which was likely to occur as a result of travel into warm climates, Colt prescribed some precautionary measures.

Sir Henry Colt lived in an age when such modern terms and concepts as anopheles mosquito, malaria, yellow fever, and immunization zones had little or no meaning. In his day, physicians had not established a connection between anopheles mosquito and malaria, or aedes mosquito and yellow fever. When counseling his son on how to remain healthy in the Americas, Colt had no reason to warn him that anopheles and aedes mosquitoes often served as hosts for parasites which were deadly to human beings, and hence the bites of these insects could be dangerous.

Colt and his contemporaries did, however, hold coherent medical views about disease and its origins which informed their behavior in the New World.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , August 1979 , pp. 179 - 193
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Quoted in Harlow, Vincent, ed., Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana (London: Hakluyt Society, 1925), pp. 98–99Google Scholar.

2 See for example: Eggleston, Edward, The Transit of Civilization (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1914), pp. 48–95Google Scholar; Blanton, Wyndam, Medicine in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (Richmond, The William Byrd Press, 1930), pp. 3–118Google Scholar; Shryock, Richard, Medicine and Society in America (New York: New York University Press, 1960), passimGoogle Scholar; Cassedy, James, “Meteorology and Medicine in Colonial America: Beginnings of the Experimental Approach,” Journal of the History of Medicine, 24 (1969), 193–204Google ScholarPubMed; Ashburn, P. M., The Ranks of Death (New York: Coward-McCann Inc., 1967), passimGoogle Scholar; Curtin, Philip, “Epidemiology and the African Slave Trade,” Political Science Quarterly, 93 (1968), 194–95Google Scholar; Dunn, Richard, Sugar and Slaves (North Carolina: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1972), pp. 308–11Google Scholar; Wood, Peter, Blacky Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), pp. 63–91Google Scholar; Darrel, and Rutman, Antia, “Of Agues and Fevers: Malaria in the Early Chesapeake,” William and Mary Quarterly, 33 (1976), 31–32Google Scholar.

3 A noteworthy exception is James Cassedy's excellent study Demography in Early America: Beginnings of the Statistical Mind, 1660–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969)Google Scholar. A recent call for greater use of medical sources by social historians has been made by Grob, Gerald, “ The Social History of Medicine and Disease in America: Problems and Possibilities,” Journal of Social History, 10 (1977), 391–409CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

4 Historians have long been aware that the colonists believed that there was a relationship between climate and health. Some have attributed early American climatic thought to humoralism, but there has not been a detailed study of the subject. See: Eggleston, pp. 50–51; Gray, Lewis, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1933), 1, 361–71Google Scholar; Curtin, pp. 194–95; Cassedy, , Demography in Early America, pp. 174–304Google Scholar; Jones, Michael, “Climate and Disease: the Traveler Describes America,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 41 (1967), 254–66Google ScholarPubMed.

5 It does not appear that the tropics were uniformly unhealthy for Europeans. Feinberg has found that the Dutch on the Gold Coast of Africa were not subject to a high mortality rate. See Feinberg, H. M., “New Data on European Mortality in West Africa: the Dutch on the Gold Coast, 1719–1760,” Journal of African History, 15 (1974), 357–71CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

6 Curtin, pp. 197–216. See also: Guerra, F., “The Influence of Disease on Race, Logistics, and Colonization in Antilles,” Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 69 (1966), 23–35Google Scholar; Rutmans, pp. 31–60; Davies, K. G., “The Living and the Dead: White Mortality in West Africa, 1684–1732,” in Engerman, Stanley and Genovese, Eugene, eds., Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (New Jersey, Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 83–98Google Scholar; McNeill, William, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976), pp. 56–62, 199–234Google Scholar.

7 Hakluyt, Richard, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, 12 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1904), 6, 459–60Google Scholar.

8 Purchas, Samuel, Hakluytus Posthumum, or Purchas His Polgrimes, 20 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1906), 16, 314Google Scholar.

9 British Public Record Office (hereafter cited as PRO) C.O. 1/5/83.

10 “A Letter from Mr John Clayton Rector of Crofton at Wakefield in Yorkshire to the Royal Society, May 12, 1688,” reprinted in Force, Peter, ed., Tracts and Other Papers, 4 vols. (1844; rept. Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1963), 3, No. xii, p. 6Google Scholar.

11 Ibid., p. 6.

12 “Calvert papers,” reprinted in Maryland Historical Society, Fund Publication (hereafter cited as MHSFP), 28 (1889), 202Google Scholar.

13 Ligon, Richard, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 2nd edn. (1673; rept. London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1970), p. 27Google Scholar.

14 Ibid., p. 45.

15 Curtin, pp. 211–12; Rutmans, pp. 33–43.

16 Devries, D. P., “Voyage From Holland to America, A.D. 1632 to 1644,” translated by Murphy, Henry C., reprinted in New York Historical Collections, second series, 3, 37Google Scholar.

17 Kingbury, Susan M., ed., The Records of the Virginia Company of London, 4 vols. (United States: Government Printing Office, 1935), 3, 301Google Scholar.

18 Ibid., pp. 298–99.

19 Devries, p. 75; Dankers, Jaspar and Sluyter, Peter, “Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour in Several of the American Colonies in 1679–80,” translated by Murphy, Henry C., Long Island Historical Society Memoirs, 1 (1867), 239Google Scholar.

20 Ligon, p. 102.

21 Harlow, , Colonising Expeditions, 99Google Scholar.

22 Tryon, Thomas, Friendly Advice to the Gentleman Planters of the East and West Indies (London: 1684), p. 52Google Scholar.

23 Ibid., p. 63.

24 “Calvert Papers,” MHSFP, 28, 202Google Scholar.

25 “The Relation of Colonel Doyley upon his Return from Jamaica Directed to the Lord Chancellor,” Additional MSS. (British Museum) 11,410, ff. 10–12.

26 PRO, CO. 1/27/52.

27 Curtin, “Epidemiology and the Slave Trade,” pp. 211–16; Wood, , Blacky Majority, pp. 85–91Google Scholar.

28 Shick, Tom, “A Quantitative Analysis of Liberian Colonization from 1820 to 1843 with Special Reference to Mortality,” Journal of African History, 12 (1971), 45–59CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

29 There is a growing historiography that minimizes the importance of race in the American colonies before the eighteenth century. Further study of colonial medical thought will probably necessitate some modification in this view.

30 Benson, Adolph, ed., Peter Kalm's Travels in North America, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publication, Inc., 1966), 1, 207Google Scholar.

31 Additional MSS. (British Museum), 11,410, ff. 10–12.

32 PRO, CO. 124/2/68–70.

33 In the 1620s it was charged that the Earl of Warwick intended to secure large tracts of land in Virginia and people it with workers from Guinea. His choice of Africans was a consequence of his skepticism about the health of Europeans in the heat of a Virginia summer. It is perhaps significant that he was later a member of the Providence Island Company and presumably participated in the discussions to bring Negroes to Association. See: Brown, Alexander, The First Republic in America (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1898), pp. 288–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Quoted in Scarborough, Ruth, The Opposition to Slavery in Georgia Prior to 1860 (Georgia: Stein Printing Company), p. 8Google Scholar.

35 Tilfer, Pat, Anderson, Hugh, DrDouglas, , and others, “A True and Historical Narrative of the Colony of Georgia in America,” reprinted in Georgia Historical Society Collection, 2 (1842), 199–200Google Scholar.

36 For a full account of the rise of slavery in Georgia see: Scarborough, 1–75; Flanders, Ralph, Plantation Slavery in Georgia (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1933) pp. 3–22Google Scholar.

37 Chandler, Allen et al. , eds., The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, 22 vols. (Atlanta: Franklin Printing and Publishing Company, 1905), 3, 429–30Google Scholar.

38 Wax, Darold, “The Negro Slave Trade in Colonial Pennsylvania,” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Washington, 1962), p. 106Google Scholar. For further discussion of the health problems that blacks faced in the northern colonies and its impact on their employment see: Greene, Lorenzo, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620–1776 (New York: Kennikat Press, Inc., 1942), pp. 101–02Google Scholar; McManus, Edgar, Black Bondage in the North (Syracuse Univ. Press, 1973), p. 52Google Scholar; Wax, Darold, “Quaker Merchants and the Slave Trade in Colonial Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 86 (1962), 153–54Google Scholar; “Demand for Slave Labor in Colonial Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History, 34 (1967), 344Google Scholar.

39 My remarks on the Pennsylvania slave trade rest mainly on the insightful research of Darold Wax. Besides the works of his that have already been cited in this paper see also his “Negro Imports into Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History, 32 (1965), 254–87Google Scholar.

40 Wax, “Quaker Merchants and the Slave Trade,” pp. 151–53.

41 Ibid., pp. 154–55.

42 Wax, “The Negro Slave Trade,” p. 131.

43 Ibid., p. 107.

44 Quoted in Scarborough, p. 71.

45 Labaree, Leonard W., et al. , The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 20 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), 8, 111Google Scholar.

46 Dr. Hewit, “An Historical Account of the Rise and progress of the Colonies of South Carolina and Georgia,” reprinted in Carrol, B. R., Historical Collections of South Carolina, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1836), 1, 109–10Google Scholar.

47 Michael Jones has recently found evidence of climatic thinking in the United States in the beginning decades of the nineteenth century. See Michael Jones, “Climate and Disease,” pp. 254–66.