The Evolution of Diseases in the Caribbean (Christian Darrin)

The establishment of sugar plantations in the Caribbean opened what Richard Sheridan called a “Pandora’s box of debilitating and lethal pathogens” into the new world (Senior 2018).  While this is not far from the truth, the reality of the matter is that although the establishment of plantations allowed these diseases to flourish, they had been introduced to the Caribbean world much before sugar took hold across the island region.  As early as 1492, Columbus and other Europeans brought with them a host of new diseases that had never before been transferred to people of the new world and nearly destroyed the native population.  The time from 1492-1650 became known as the “Columbian Syndemic,” and it was so deadly that many historians hypothesize that biologically speaking, after the year 1600 there were most likely no fully Taino people left. Many were substantially Taino, but nearly all of those who remained had some sort of European or African ancestry (Morgan 2022).  With the population decimated, many of these diseases began to slowly die off with time.  However, this would change in 1650, with the start of what became known as the “Second Syndemic”.

The emergence of sugar as a cash crop and the shift to a plantation economy brought in hundreds more people as the population ballooned.  The growing cities became the perfect spots for crowd diseases like Cholera and typhus to run rampant, and with no sanitation plans and lack of medicine the death toll continued to rise (Morgan 2022).  Outside the cities, diseases like malaria and yellow fever thrived on plantations.  Many diseases, which had already run their course through the islands by 1650, began to wreak havoc once again on the newly dense populations of both cities and plantations.  The revival of these diseases especially effected the Africans who had been enslaved and forced to work on plantations.  Nearly all plantation slaves in the Caribbean were malnourished, and many would constantly have open wounds and cuts that were never properly treated (Hutson 2005).  Mosquitoes and other insects and parasites began to take advantage of these, and the death toll among the enslaved people in the Caribbean continued to rise.  An average of three percent would die upon arrival in the islands before they would even reach the market (Morgan 2022).  From there, it continued to get worse.  Through their first twelve months in the region, nearly one third of all enslaved Africans would die from diseases contracted after their arrival.  They would face an onslaught of crowd diseases, such as smallpox, measles, mumps, influenza, and rubella, as well as diseases from parasites or local fauna, like yaws, leprosy, filiariasis (guinea worm), and tetanus (Lammie 2008).  Those that survived the first year would gain immunities to many different sicknesses, but conditions were still harsh and workers certainly would not develop immunity to all diseases.  But those who did gain immunities would begin to pass them on to their children, making them slightly more likely to survive the dangerous disease regime that surrounded them (Hutson 2005).

These terrible and dangerous realities of the Caribbean disease environment should have led to a steady population decline.  Birth rates were low all across the island region, and death rates had skyrocketed since 1650.  In fact, on the island of Jamaica in the early 1800s, slave populations had a crude birth rate of 23/1000 and a crude death rate of 35/1000 (Morgan 2022).  This should have led to a population decline by as much as 1.2 percent.  The numbers were similar to Jamaica across the board, and the region naturally would have declined as people perished in massive amounts.  But instead, the population numbers continued to rise.  In 1600, the total population of the island Caribbean totaled below 100,000 people.  By 1750, it reached around 1 million people, and about seventy percent of the people in the region were enslaved (Senior 2018).  As more Europeans traveled to the Caribbean looking for work or wealth, and more enslaved Africans were brought to the Caribbean to replace workers who had died, they each brought sicknesses with them that were new to the island region.  Some were hosts for the diseases themselves, while others may have brought livestock or unclean water.  The new diseases would grab hold on the islands, taking many lives and creating space for newcomers to arrive at the islands with their own goals of wealth, fame, and freedom, therefore starting the process over again.

Works Cited:

Hutson, J. Edward. On the Treatment and Management of the More Common West-India Diseases 1750-1802. University of the West Indies Press. 2005.

Lammie, Patrick J. The Neglected Tropical Diseases of Latin America and the Caribbean: A Review of Disease Burden and Distribution and a Roadmap for Control and Elimination. National Library of Medicine. 2008

Morgan, Phillip J. Sea and Land: An Environmental History of the Caribbean. Oxford University Press. 2022

Senior, Emily. The Caribbean and the Medical Imagination. Cambridge University Press. 2018.