Lands of Red and Gold #25: The Gates of Tartarus
Warning: This post deals with the spread of Aururian diseases to the rest of the globe. It therefore involves some rather unpleasant subject matter.
* * *
“And I looked, and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth...”
- Revelation 6:8
* * *
Infectious diseases are the greatest killers of humanity throughout history. In war and in peace, diverse infestations of diseases have ravaged the world’s population time and again. Effective treatments have been rare until the last couple of centuries of human history, and even today many diseases can only be prevented, not cured.
Yet, as is well-known, while epidemic diseases can kill humans wherever on the globe they may live, the diseases themselves did not originate from all parts of the world. The Old World had more than a dozen major killers which were transported along with Old Worlders to the other continents and islands, but the rest of the world did not have any major killers awaiting Old Worlders when they arrived [1].
So, as Europeans reached other parts of the world, they brought a host of diseases with them. Smallpox, measles, typhus and influenza are usually considered the deadliest killers, but malaria, yellow fever, tuberculosis, whooping cough, diphtheria, plague, mumps, typhoid, chickenpox, rubella, gonorrhoea and other diseases were also major scourges.
Look into the depths of allohistory, however, and this exchange of diseases was not always one-way. In the continent which history calls Australia, and allohistory calls Aururia, the inhabitants have long suffered from a variety of diseases. Many of these are minor, non-fatal, or otherwise constrained by geographical and biological factors to the continent itself. Still, the Aururian continent holds three diseases with the potential to become worldwide killers: blue-sleep, swamp rash, and Marnitja.
Blue-sleep is a form of avian influenza, which originated from migrating birds that travel between Aururia and parts of Asia and Europe. Like all forms of influenza, it is airborne, highly contagious, and mutates rapidly, making long-term immunity impossible, although people who have survived a previous infection are unlikely to die from a re-infection. Infected victims quickly experience fatigue and have their faces and lips turn blue, but in other respects the disease is similar to common influenza.
Being derived from avian influenza, blue-sleep has extreme potential to turn into a pandemic. The worst influenza pandemics in both history and allohistory originated from avian derived forms of influenza, and blue-sleep is no exception. The historical Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 is estimated to have killed about 5% of the global population, and blue-sleep has a similarly lethal potential.
Blue-sleep is infectious and common enough that it afflicted Dutch visitors as early as de Houtman’s second expedition to Aururia. Fortunately for the rest of the world, blue-sleep spread very rapidly amongst ship crews, and the main Dutch trading post at Fort Nassau was a considerable sailing time from the next port of call at Batavia. This meant that while Dutch sailors regularly caught blue-sleep, transmission of the virus across the oceans was much more difficult.
Swamp rash is a mosquito-borne virus which evolved from the historical Barmah Forest virus. It produces chills, fever, fatigue, swollen joints, and a blistery rash which spreads over most of the body. While most of the victims recover, in some cases the infection enters the lymphatic system, leading to painfully swollen lymph nodes and eventual death.
Swamp rash is not a continent-wide disease. The virus is mostly confined to the artificial wetlands in the Nyalananga [Murray] basin, although it has recently spread to the wetlands in the western regions of the Yadji lands [south-western Victoria]. For it to spread further, however, is unlikely. The mosquitoes which carry swamp rash are short-lived species, and the birds which are its other natural hosts do not migrate beyond the continent. While it would not be impossible for the virus to spread overseas, it would be unlikely.
The mortality rate of swamp rash varies. The Gunnagal who live along the Nyalananga itself have evolved some natural resistance to the virus, and so their mortality rate is only about 5% for children and less for adults. For visitors from elsewhere in the continent, or overseas, the mortality rate is about 10% for adults, and worse for children.
Of all of the afflictions found on the Aururian continent, however, none is deadlier than what the locals call the Waiting Death: Marnitja, in the Gunnagal language. Marnitja is an allohistorical henipavirus, related to the historical Hendra and Nipah viruses, and more distantly to measles and mumps. Marnitja originated as a bat-borne virus which spread via domesticated dingos and ultimately evolved into an exclusively human epidemic.
People infected with Marnitja show a distinctive two-stage set of symptoms. The first stage is a haemorrhagic infection of the lungs called the “pink cough,” where the fevered victims experience severe coughing and other breathing difficulties. They also suffer from fatigue, fever, and sometimes blood loss and renal failure. Some survivors of the pink cough have life-long breathing problems.
Survivors of the pink cough, however, are not yet free of Marnitja. While they are no longer infectious, they may still be afflicted with the second stage of the virus. This is a form of encephalitis, an infection of their central nervous system which leads to fever, seizures, delirium and almost inevitable death. Survivors of the pink cough have to endure an interminable wait to find out whether they will succumb to the delirium; the usual period is two to three months, but on rare occasions it can take as long as three years [2]. This lingering period of uncertainty is what led the survivors to christen the disease the Waiting Death.
The fatality rate of Marnitja varies considerably, depending on a population’s previous exposure to this virus or to infectious diseases in general. Amongst the Aururian peoples, each epidemic usually kills less than 5% of the population. For Eurasian peoples, the virus would kill anywhere between 10-15% of the population, depending on their nutritional levels and general health. For peoples with insufficient exposure to epidemic diseases – which in the early seventeenth century means most of the New World – the fatality rate is likely to be in excess of 20% of the population.
Given the shipping times between Aururia and the East Indies, Marnitja is also unlikely to be transmitted by direct infection. However, one of the distinctive features of Marnitja is that it produces a relatively high proportion (up to 0.5%) of asymptomatic carriers. Anyone who becomes an asymptomatic carrier will be infectious for life, and it will only take one such person to travel from Aururia to the rest of the world for Marnitja to become a global problem.
* * *
The first European exposure to Marnitja was in April 1625, when a Dutch trading fleet arrived in Fort Nassau [Perth] after sailing from the Netherlands. The Waiting Death burned through the ships Dordrecht and Sardam as they sailed to Batavia, but the pink cough had run its course before the ships reached the East Indies. While some of the sailors would later die in a fevered delirium, by this stage they were no longer infectious. One of their Yaora mistresses recognised the Waiting Death and described it to the Dutch, but they did not pay it much heed. They treated this malady as simply one more in a long list of tropical diseases which often struck Europeans who visited the Spice Islands.
They would soon learn the gravity of their mistake.
Centuries later, a collaboration of three authors – an epidemiologist, a linguist, and a historian – would trace the path of the first Marnitja epidemic as it burned across the globe. Their efforts were dedicated, their report exhaustive, and it would eventually be published in three languages on as many continents.
This report marked the authors as the first to accomplish many things. They were the first to trace the oldest references to the virus. They were the first to recommend the application of what would become the near-universal name for the disease (Marnitja), replacing the host of appellations which the disease had carried before that: the Dutch curse, the dying cough, the sweating sleep, the unholy death, and many more.
What these authors were not the first to do was discover the name of the first Dutch asymptomatic carrier who carried the disease to the world. History would never record that name. Yet these authors gave this carrier a name anyway: Patient Zero.
The authors discovered that Patient Zero was a sailor aboard the Dutch merchant ship Vliegende Hollander, which landed at Fort Nassau on 15 October 1626. Several sailors caught Marnitja on this visit, and many of them died from it. As before, the Dutch assumed that this was another tropical malady, and after conducting normal trade, set sail for Batavia. The Vliegende Hollander was one of four ships in this trading fleet, but after its arrival, it was the only one to be reloaded with gold and spices for a quick return to the Netherlands, along with five other ships making the voyage home.
The authors presumed that Patient Zero stayed on the Vliegende Hollander for most of the unloading and reloading, for there is no record that Marnitja spread from him to anyone in Batavia. The Vliegende Hollander and its fellow ships sailed west with the November monsoons. While crossing the Indian Ocean, the Vliegende Hollander became damaged in a storm, and had to put ashore on the eastern coast of Madagascar for repairs. Relations with the locals were peaceable enough after the captain provided a few gifts, and the repairs were effected over the next few weeks. The Vliegende Hollander departed the island for Amsterdam, some time behind its fellow ships. However, it left a legacy behind.
Madagascar became the first region of the Old World to know the scourge of Marnitja. In 1627, the affliction burned its way across the island, earning it the name of “burning lungs.” It left behind a legacy of fevered, coughing victims, survivors with breathing difficulties, and other survivors who did not yet know the doom which awaited them.
The Mozambique Channel presented no barrier to an epidemic of the Waiting Death. Madagascar had long been a hub of traders coming to and from East Africa; the Portuguese who had begun to establish colonies along the coast were only seeking to break into a much longer-established market. From Madagascar, trading vessels carried the new affliction near-simultaneously to the Portuguese outposts at the Island of Mozambique and Zanzibar.
Once established on the African mainland, Marnitja spread rapidly both north and south. It left a deadly passage as far south as the Cape, devastating the Bantu and Khoisan peoples of southern Africa. To the north, it spread more slowly, reaching Ethiopia in 1628 and then Egypt in 1629. Seaborne trade carried it to the Persian Gulf in 1628, striking first at Muscat, then spreading along both shores of the Gulf and into Persian lands.
Marnitja reached Mecca in time for the annual hajj in 1629. Among the victims were a few pilgrims who believed that they had been spared from the visitation of this new malady, when in fact they would be bearing the disease home with them. From Egypt, Mecca and Persia, the disease was poised to spread over the rest of the House of Islam. However, it did not spread much into Christian Europe, for by this time the Waiting Death had already reached that continent by another route.
From Ethiopia, Marnitja did not just spread north; it also burned its way west across the Sahel. In time, it devastated all of the West African peoples, including kingdoms such as Allada, Oyo and Kaabu. As well as the suffering inflicted on these regions by the disease itself, the first wave of Marnitja also struck the European slave-trading outposts in West Africa.
Unfortunately, this was not enough to destroy the slave trade entirely, not with sugar planters in Brazil and the Caribbean with a seemingly endless demand for more labour. In 1630, among the unfortunate slaves crammed into European trading vessels were three asymptomatic carriers, two bound for Brazil, the other for Hispaniola. From here, the disease spread rapidly throughout the Caribbean and Portuguese Brazil, and more slowly into Mesoamerica, through Central America, and down into Peru. All of the heavily-settled parts of New Spain were also struck by the virus. The main wave of infection burned out in the northern deserts of New Spain and did not penetrate into most of North America. However, over the next few years, secondary waves of infection struck the European colonies on the eastern seaboard, and spread to the neighbouring Amerindian peoples.
Europe itself first felt the Waiting Death thanks to Patient Zero. On 21 August 1627, the Vliegende Hollander sailed into Amsterdam, where its crew disembarked. One week later, the first Dutch men and women developed fevers and chills, followed quickly by a hacking cough which grew ever worse.
Two days later, Marnitja caused its first deaths on the European mainland. The first of uncountably many. Many prominent Dutchmen died, including Frederik de Houtman, the discoverer of the South-Land, who succumbed to the pink cough on 1 October 1627 [3]. Still, Frederick Henry, the Prince of Orange, survived the disease without any apparent ill effects.
At this time, Europe was nine years into a war which another history would call the Thirty Years War. The Dutch Republic was not involved in the main part of this struggle, although it had been at war with Spain-Portugal since 1625. Its neighbours were at the forefront of the fighting, though; the Holy Roman Empire was the key battleground, and Christian IV of Denmark had led his kingdom into the war two years earlier.
In 1628, Marnitja spread rapidly through war-ravaged Germany, killing both sides indiscriminately. Recognising where it had come from, if not the cause of the disease, the Germans referred to the epidemic as the Dutch curse. It was a curse which would kill many of their people in the days to come, including several of the leading political and military figures of the day.
Like so many of his subjects, Ferdinand II, the Holy Roman Emperor, was afflicted by a severe bout of the pink cough. While he survived, he was gravely weakened, with breathing difficulties which would persist for the remainder of his truncated life. Left move vulnerable to other infections, he would succumb to pneumonia in 1631 [4].
The Catholic forces had two leading generals at this time. One, Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly, died in a fevered delirium in February 1628. The other, Albrecht von Wallenstein, also caught the Dutch curse but escaped with only mild symptoms. However, the deaths and disruption caused by the disease meant that he had to abandon his plans for a siege of Straslund, the last holdout Protestant port on the southern Baltic coast.
On the Protestant side, the most prominent casualty of the Dutch curse was John George I, Elector of Saxony. Christian IV of Denmark survived, although he lost several of his children, including the crown prince, Frederick. Most other major Protestant rulers survived, although Georg Wilhelm of Brandenburg-Prussia was permanently invalided by breathing problems caused by the pink cough. The effective governance of his state passed to his Catholic chancellor, Adam, Count of Schwarzenberg.
The Dutch curse could not, of course, be confined to the combatants in what would now not be called the Thirty Years War. It crossed the Rhine and swept into France around the same time as it was ravaging Germany. Here, Cardinal Richelieu had taken personal command of the royal armies besieging the Huguenots in La Rochelle. In April 1628 he died coughing up blood, and the Dutch curse took so many soldiers with him that the government forces abandoned the siege. The epidemic spread from here into Spain, where it took a heavy toll of the population, including several prominent nobles, although Felipe IV survived.
The Dutch curse spread eastward and southward from the Holy Roman Empire. In 1629, Victor Amadeus I, Duke of Savoy, became one of the rarest of survivors, one who suffered but survived the delirium of the Waiting Death. Unfortunately, it left him with severe paralysis and impaired speech. His Francophile wife Christine Marie, the Duchess consort, was then pregnant with the future Louise Christine, and became the de facto regent of Savoy. Further south in Rome, Pope Urban VIII survived the curse, although several of his most prominent cardinals did not.
In its eastward spread, the Dutch curse cut a deadly path through Poland-Lithuania and on into Muscovy, as well as passing south into the Ottoman-ruled Balkans. Sultan Murad IV survived without apparently even catching the disease, although it struck his court. The most prominent casualty in the Sublime Porte was the Grand Vizier, Gazi Ekrem Hüsrev Pasha. From here, it combined with the other wave of infection coming through Persia and Arabia, and burned its way across the length and breadth of Asia.
One final tendril of infection went north from Lithuania into Swedish-ruled Estonia, and thence into peninsular Sweden in 1630. This was a secondary wave of infection, since the disease had already entered Sweden from Denmark in 1628. However, among those who had not caught Marnitja during the first wave was the Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus. He caught the pink cough in May 1630, and survived. By this time, though, word from the Netherlands (via several Aururian mistresses) meant that the Swedish monarch knew that he still needed to wait to see whether the delirium would take him. He might succumb in any time up to three years.
Gustavus Adolphus decided that if he did die, he would leave a legacy worth remembering.
* * *
Blue-sleep took longer to expand its deadly reach out of Aururia. Confined by sailing times from their trading posts, no early Dutch ship would bring the disease back to the Indies.
However, the Dutch were not the only early explorers of Aururia.
Portugal and England knew of the Dutch discovery of a new land near the Indies; word had not taken long to spread. However, the VOC had been assiduous in restricting knowledge of charts and other important navigational details, so other nations were not sure exactly where this new land could be found, or how to navigate it safely. England soon found other concerns besides the distant rumour of gold, but Portugal had a greater presence in the Indies. And, due to a combination of religious concerns and an ongoing war with the Dutch, a greater motivation to explore these new lands.
Father António de Andrade was a distinguished Portuguese Jesuit who had spent two and a half decades as the Society of Jesus’ chief missionary in the Indies. He had been recalled to Goa in 1624, but he retained an interest in affairs in the Indies. With ever-growing rumours of the new land which the Dutch had discovered, he decided to return there and explore this new land to see whether he could spread the Word of God to the new peoples.
De Andrade returned to Flores in the Indies in 1629 along with his brother, Manuel Marques, and arranged for a ship to be sent to explore these new lands. Under de Andrade’s guidance, the ship sailed to the south-east and explored part of the South-Land. They called this region Costa Problematica [Troublesome Coast], for what they found was a barren, forbidding land, with the natives being very reluctant to approach. De Andrade persisted, and had some brief encounters with some of the natives, but was unable to induce any of the natives to return to Flores on board the Portuguese ship.
De Andrade’s visit marked the first Portuguese exploration of Aururia. It failed in terms of direct conversion, but he had always known that was unlikely on a first visit. The expedition did develop some useful charts of parts of the new land. Unfortunately, the sailing times were quick enough that it also brought back something else with it: blue-sleep. A sailor had caught the disease during one of the meetings with the Aururians, and it spread amongst the crew on the voyage back to Flores. Several of the sailors were still infectious when it reached the Portuguese colony.
Once a disease such as blue-sleep was established in the Indies, it inevitably spread. Airborne, easily transmissible and often lethal, blue-sleep followed the trade routes throughout the Indies and onto the Asian mainland. From here, it burned across the length of Asia and on into Africa and Europe.
Blue-sleep ravaged Europe in 1631-2. While the overall toll from this disease was lower than that of Marnitja, the greatest proportion of the deaths was among young adults [5]. This meant that it killed many young men of military age, which had considerable effects on the armies then fighting across much of the continent.
The disease took its toll of prominent members of European society, too. Perhaps the most notable victim was Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland. His death left his infant son Charles II as nominal sovereign and his dominions to be governed by an uncertain regency, with the claimants including George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham [6] and Thomas Wentworth.
The Austrian branch of the House of Habsburg suffered a severe toll due to an unfortunate confluence of timing; the children of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, and many of the other leading members of the House, were at the most vulnerable age. Ferdinand III had only succeeded his father for six weeks when he succumbed to blue-sleep on 18 October 1631. His only brother, Archduke Leopold, had died two weeks before, leaving no direct male heirs. He had only two surviving sisters, and one of them, Cecilia Renata, died in early November.
Worse, there were now no suitably-aged close male relatives amongst the Austrian Habsburgs. The closest male-line relative was the three-year-old Ferdinand Charles, Archduke of Further Austria, and cousin of Ferdinand III. Ferdinand Charles had himself been born posthumously; his mother had been pregnant which his father Leopold, the old Emperor’s last surviving brother [7] had died from the Dutch curse in April 1628.
The only other alternative was to find a husband for the last surviving daughter of Ferdinand II: Archduchess Maria Anna of Austria. She was reportedly intelligent, stern, driven, opinionated – and an extremely attractive political prize. The intrigues started before Ferdinand III’s body had a chance to grow cold...
* * *
The seventeenth century was already a time of global upheaval. The European powers had begun their assault on the globe which would see them establish colonial control over most of the world’s surface in the next few centuries. The deepening climatic effects of the Little Ice Age brought famine and other agricultural problems to much of the planet.
The Americas were in the midst of the greatest population replacement of the modern era. Japan was nearing the time when it would have chosen to close itself of from all but carefully regulated contact with the rest of the world. In China, the worsening climatic conditions brought about social unrest which would have led to the collapse of the native Ming Dynasty and its replacement by the foreign Manchu. In Europe itself, the continent convulsed as old political and religious certainties crumbled.
In these volatile times, the twin waves of Aururian epidemics could only add to the upheaval. Collectively, they killed 19% of the global population - over 100 million people - and their effects did not stop there. Marnitja, in particular, would recur every generation and depress the global population growth rate for centuries. The world which followed would be an emptier place.
More, the deaths and devastation had inevitable effects on the world’s psyche. A new age had dawned, or so some later historians would say, when describing the changing attitudes to religion, to labour, and to social and political institutions.
Of course, some of those historians would argue that, for all of the death and upheaval which Aururian diseases caused, that this was not the greatest effect which the discovery of Aururia would have on the rest of the world.
* * *
[1] Apart from maybe syphilis, but there’s not yet been a definitive answer on whether that disease was from the Old World, the New World, or a fusion of the two.
[2] This waiting period is longer than that described in the earlier post on Aururian diseases (#8). It has been extended to reflect some of the recent real-world discoveries about Hendra virus and Nipah virus; in some cases, those diseases have taken over 4 years for the viral encephalitis to appear.
[3] This did not, in fact, shorten de Houtman’s life by very much; in real history he died only a few weeks later.
[4] In real history, Ferdinand died in 1637.
[5] In this regard, blue-sleep is much like a historical avian-derived influenza virus, the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. That disease, too, was most deadly for young adults.
[6] Historically, Buckingham was assassinated in August 1628 by a disgruntled soldier; here, the dislocation of diseases means that he was not in the vicinity of his would-be assassin, and so survives for the time being.
[7] Yes, another Leopold. Like many European royal families, the Habsburgs had a habit of recycling names.
* * *
Thoughts?
That's gonna have some major political implications...
