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19th Century to World War I |
World War I |
The Inter-War Years |
World War II |
Post World War II Disarmament and proliferation | The Terrorists |
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The ancients practiced a variant of
biological warfare - the use of living
creatures significantly larger than
bacteria - not common today, an example
of which is Hannibal's use of pots
filled with snakes in a battle in 184
B.C. with the Navy of King Eumenes of
Pergamon. The pots were hurled onto the
decks of the ships, where they broke,
forcing the Pergamene to fight against
both the snakes and Hannibal's forces.
(Hannibal won.) The Romans used bees and hornets by catapaulting them at their enemies - to the extent that some historians blame this use for a shortage of hives during the latter years of the Roman Empire. |
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Diseases that are considered major
potential biological weapons in modern
times have been known since antiquity.
Smallpox is probably the oldest - it is
thought to have existed at least since
10,000 B.C., when the first farming
settlements were founded in northeastern
Africa. It was first described in the
West as the Great Plague of Athens in
430 B.C. The Great Plague would help
lead to the downfall of Periclean Athens
and thereby demonstrate the
effectiveness of disease in influencing
human events. Anthrax and the plague have been implicated as the fifth plague of Egypt in the fifteenth century B.C. It is difficult to be certain about the exact identifications as these diseases affect the soft tissues that decay rapidly after death. |
Many early accounts portray outbreaks of disease in invading armies or among conquerers as divine intervention, perhaps an indication of the terrible effects of disease coupled with the lack of understanding of its causes. This confusion between divine and secular causes does make it difficult to distinguish when an outbreak was natural and when it was, so to speak, assisted. The misfortunes of the Philistines after they captured the Ark of the Covenant from the Israelites more than three thousand years ago (told of in I Samuel 4:10 to 6:12) provide an example. The Philistines conveyed the Ark to the city of Ashdod (the home of one of the rulers of the Philistines) and placed it beside the statue of their god, Dagon, in the temple there. In short order, the statue of Dagon fell down (twice) and the population was afflicted with "tumors." The people of Ashdod then decided that the best thing to do was send the Ark, the arrival of which had seemed to precipitate their problems, to Gath (the capital city of a different Philistine ruler). No sooner did the Ark arrive in Gath than "the people of the city, both young and old, [were afflicted] with an outbreak of tumors". The people of Gath quickly decided that the best thing to do was to send the Ark to Ekron (the capital of yet another of the rulers of the Philistines), where we are told that, as the Ark was brought into the town, the people cried out that "They have brought the ark of the god of Israel around to us to kill us..." A plague of tumors also broke out in Ekron, and it is perhaps not surprising at this point that the Philistines decided to send the Ark back (or at least out of Philistine territory), accompanied by an unusual guilt offering (five gold tumors and five gold rats, the apparent association of the disease with the rats causing many modern scholars to suggest that the tumors were the buboes of bubonic plague). The story as related suggests that the disease appeared by intention (albeit it not the intention of men), although the coincidence of the plague breaking out along the Ark's travels may, of course, also be explained by a natural outbreak, possibly carried from city to city by the escort of the Ark.
| Knowledge of the Chinese application of noxious smokes was not hidden from Europe. Formulas for "fire lances" in the Chinese style may be found in Biringucio's 1540 treatise Pirotechnia. |
| ARMIS
BELLA NON VENENIS GERI.
"War is fought with weapons, not with poisons." A declaration of Roman jurists. |
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Wells have been poisoned by various
chemicals or by the simple expedient of
dropping human and animal corpses into
them for millenia.
The Romans, despite the declaration of their Jurists, were not above poisoning wells when it suited them. For instance, when, after defeating Aristonicus in Asia Minor (Caria), the Romans were faced with guerrilla warfare by the remnants of Aristonicus' army, they poisoned the wells that the guerillas and their supporters used. The result was the end of the war leaving Rome in control of the region. Poisoning of wells also occurred in the 19th Century during the American Civil War and in South Africa during the Boer War and continues to this day with the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) of Turkey reported to have poisoned wells in Turkish Kurdistan in mid-1997. |
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The secret of Greek fire, the great
incendiary weapon of the Byzantines, was
held so closely that its composition has
been lost to history. Those knowing the
secret often responded to inquiries by
saying that the formulation had been
revealed by an angel to the
Constantines, and that any attempt to
discover it would provoke the vengeance
of God.
It may even have been lost to the Byzantines - when Constantinople fell into the hands of the Crusaders in 1204 A.D., Greek fire was nowhere to be found. |
As a result, the use of chemical agents in conflicts in Europe was fairly limited through the end of the Renaissance. There was, however, considerable attention paid to poisons. The Roman Emperors, in particular the Julio-Claudian emperors, would gain a attention for poisoning members of their families and others that displeased them. Nor was the practice limited to the Emperors - Juvenal would write of it in his Satires in a way that suggested that it had become a sort of status symbol among the upper classes.
A woman named Locusta would become particularly infamous as a poisoner in Rome; she would also be one of the first to systematically investigate the use of poisons with state (or, at least, Imperial) sponsorship. Convicted for a multiplicity of crimes under Claudius, she was sentenced to death, but the sentence had not been carried out when Claudius died (the delay in the execution of her sentence is said to have been arranged by Agippina, the wife of Claudius and mother of Nero, so that Locusta might prepare a poison for Agrippina to use on Claudius). Subsequently, the new Emperor Nero is supposed to have asked Locusta to prepare a potion for use on Nero's half-brother, Britannicus. Once Brittanicus died, Nero suspended the death penalty and made Locusta his advisor on poisons. In due course, he organized a school of poisoning where she could tutor others and conduct experiments aimed at determining how to poison and how to defend the person of the Emperor against poison. Surviving accounts indicate that many tests were performed on animals and that at least some tests were performed on convicted criminals. (Nero's preferred poison is said to have been cherry laurel water, which contains cyanide.)
Poisoning would decline in popularity after the Second Century, but it would never disappear, and would occasionally enjoy a renewed popularity. For instance, the poisoning of individuals, usually with extracts of plants such as aconite or Belladonna, would be an accepted part of statecraft in the Renaissance, especially in Italy. The meticulous records of the Council of Ten of Venice, for instance, contain considerable information on how victims were selected, poisoners contracted, prices set, and payment made for the completion of the task (indicated by the notation factum in the records). And in France, the use of "inheritance powders" would be widespread until the Poison Affair brought scandal to the court of King Louis XIV and the formation of the burning court (chambre ardente) forced, if not an elimination of poisoning, at least a greater degree of circumspection in its practice.
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The Roman commanders should have studied their classics more closely - Xenophon, in his Anabasis, tells of what happened when his troops consumed some of the local honeycomb in the same area in 401 B.C. - although he was luckier than Pompey, as the Persians who were pursuing him did not attack during the four days his army took to recover. |
In 187 B.C., the inhabitants of the town of Ambracia in Epirus dealt a setback to Roman soldiers seeking to tunnel under their walls:
| Filling a huge jar with feathers, they put fire in it and attached a bronze cover perforated with numerous holes. After carrying the jar into the mine and turning its mouth toward the enemy, they inserted a bellows in the bottom, and by pumping the bellows vigorously they caused a tremendous amount of disagreeable smoke, such as feathers would naturally create, to pour forth, so that none of the Romans could endure it. As a result the Romans, despairing of success, made a truce and raised the siege. |
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| - Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book XIX |
Roman commanders were not always on the receiving end, however. And they could be quite inventive.
Plutarch, in his Life of Sertorius, tells us of how that worthy soldier dealt with the Characitanes, who had a redoubt formed from a series of caves that seemed impregnable. Noticing that the prevailing winds blew from the North, and that the openings of most of the caves faced the North, Sertonius had his soldiers pile up a mound of earth in front of the redoubt. As the breeze began to blow, he had his soldiers turn the earth over, and his calvary ride over it, raising a cloud of somewhat caustic dust - what might be called a particulate aerosol today - that blew into the caves, blinding and choking the Characitanes. After two days of this treatment, they surrendered, "adding, by their defeat, not so much to the power of Sertorius, as to his renown, in proving that he was able to conquer places by art, which were impregnable by the force of arms".
The Romans also practiced anticrop chemical warfare, most famously after the defeat of Carthage, when the fields were sown with salt to help prevent resettlement.
The biggest use of chemicals in war in ancient times was in the area of flame weapons. The first use of fire in war probably followed shortly after the discovery of how to make it appear on command. By the Fourth Century B.C., a number of recipes existed for producing incendiary compositions, such as that provided by Aineias in his On the Defense of Fortified Positions, which comprised pitch, sulfur, tow, granulated frankincense, and pine sawdust in sacks which were set alight. Aineias cites as the virtue of this mixture the difficulty of extinguishing it; while the sulfur, at least, would also have produced toxic fumes, this does not seem to have be given any particular import. Indeed, although a variety of mixtures were used containing an astonishing number of additives, the major interest in additives seems to have been related to their perceived value in producing a hotter flame (for instance, salt appears to have been added commonly because it produced a visible orange flame), rather than for the production of choking or irritating smoke.
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While they didn't have Greek fire, the
Moslems were adept with other oil-based
incendiaries. In a siege of Mecca in
683 A.D. the Umayyads used catapaults
to hurl naphtha-based incendiary
projectiles against the defenders,
accidentally setting the cloth covering
of the Ka'bah on fire. In 813 A.D.,
Baghdad would be essentially destroyed
by naphtha barrels thrown into the city,
and in 1167 A.D. Cairo was destroyed by
naphtha pots and bombs to deny it to the
Crusaders.
Distillation of petroleum, to produce fractions ("white water naphtha") suited for incendiaries, was also known. A workshop for producing incendiary grenades, complete with a distilling furnace and a gasoline storage container, dating from the first half of the thirteenth century has been found in Hama, in Syria. The Book of Horsemanship and the Art of War, written by Najm al-Din Ahda in 1285, even tells how to build rockets with fire bomb warheads. The Moslems seem to have avoided the intentional use of toxic additives in their flame weapons, perhaps because of injunctions in the Koran against poisoning the air and water. |
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Even without intention, disease traveled
with war, both because of the poor
sanitation that results and because war
meant travel. The Crusades and the Arab
expansion are both considered to have
contributed greatly to the spread of
smallpox.
Even nominally peaceful travel was a boon to the spread of disease. As Europe began to explore and colonize Africa and the New World, new diseases ravaged explorers, settlers, and natives. Venereal disease, apparently reimported from the New World and Yellow fever from Africa killed many. It was the mosquito-ridden swamps of the coastal regions of West Africa that gave rise to the term "The White Man's Grave." On the other hand, smallpox introduced by a single victim in the Cortez expedition killed 90% of the Aztecs of Mexico and in the far north the Eskimos were ravaged by epidemics of measles. |
While it may be argued that the intent of casting decomposing carcasses was simply to harass (which it certainly did) or perhaps to have something to throw during a brief shortage of the more usual stones, it seems almost certain that the aims included at least a hope on the part of the attackers that the defenders would be stricken with disease. After all, one of the prevailing theories of disease transmission of the period was that disease were caused by "bad air".
Legend has it, probably not completely correctly, that the Black Death that killed a quarter of Europe's population in the 14th Century was spread by refugees from the siege of the Genoese settlement of Kaffa in the Crimea when the Tartars used the bodies of plague victims as ammunition during the siege. Whatever the truth of this allegation, there is no question that the plague had a dramatic effect on both sides. Plague was already raging through the ranks of the Tartars when they started casting the bodies over the walls. Plague then also broke out among the defenders, leaving them too weakened and demoralized to take advantage of the situation (according to one chronicle, only one in several thousand retained health enough to flee).
Although there was no widespread
interest in chemical warfare in the
Renaissance, as with so many other
things, the indefatigable Leonardo da
Vinci seems to have done some thinking
on it. He offered a proposal to
He also considered the issue of
protection. In his notes we find a
description of a protective mask which
would serve to shield the eyes, nose,
and mouth (and lungs) of the user from
dust and smoke - a more effective
protection against the use of his toxic
powders than the damp cloth originally
proposed to protect their users from
retaliation in kind.
As the Middle Ages gave way to the
Renaissance, gunpowder and firearms and
artillery began to play a role in
warfare and they came to dominate the
battlefield. They eventually reduced
the utility of castle walls to the point
where even the most advanced
fortifications could be reduced and
broken by a choreographed set of
maneuvers (provided that the defenders
were unable to interrupt the dance).
The rise of gunpowder weapons also
produced an interest in chemistry, or at
least in compounding mixtures for use in
war.
Gunpowder-like mixtures - mixtures
containing charcoal, sulfur, and
saltpeter - were known in China by 1044
A.D., primarily as incendiaries, since
the proportions were not right nor were
they confined for a bang to occur. By
1232, the Chinese had developed rockets
and a weapon called "Heaven-shaking
Thunder", an iron bomb attached to
a chain which could be lowered from the
walls of a city to explode among
attackers. By 1280 A.D., at least the
knowledge that adding saltpeter to
incendiary compositions made them work
better was widespread, as a book on war
engines written by a Syrian, one
al-Hasan ar-Rammah, appeared which
included instructions for its use and
purification. At about the same time, a
number of compositions which would
explode, at least weakly, are described
in such tomes as the Liber Ignium (Book
of Fire) of Marchus Graecus. Very soon
after this time the use of these
materials to throw projectiles from what
came to be known as guns began.
Initially, the projectiles were
simply stones, but as time went by, a
variety of new projectiles were
developed.
It was quickly observed that firing
carcasses at an enemy could provide, at
the least, considerable distraction as a
result of the action of the fumes even
when the primary goal of starting fires
was not achieved. While never losing
their primary function as starters of
fires, a variety of fills were developed
for carcasses that were intended to
maximize the effects of the smoke. It
is said that the gunners of the Imperial
Artillery were particularly prone to the
use of toxic fills during the Thirty
Years War. The experience with noxious
smokes would lead to speculation and
some experimentation in the years to
come.
While the spread of gunpowder weapons
had begun to get people thinking about
the use of chemical technology in
warfare, there was still little or no
systematic thinking about, or use of,
biological weapons. The possible impact
of biological weapons had always been
obvious to commanders who usually found
disease to kill more men in the course
of a campaign than did enemy fire. But
the existing theories of how disease was
transmitted, coupled with the lack of
knowledge about how to direct a disease
only against an enemy, made the use of
disease as a weapon seem little more
than a fantasy.
In 1714 an article in the
Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society would lay the groundwork
for a change in how biological warfare
was viewed. The article contained a
description of a technique used by a
physician, one Giacomo Pylarini of
Smyrna, to confer some protection
against
smallpox.
The technique, variolation, entailed
taking some of the liquid from the
pustules of a victim of a mild case of
smallpox and rubbing it into a small
scratch made on the person to be
protected. Usually, the individual
variolated would suffer a mild case of
the disease and then be, on recovery,
immune to further infection. There were
two disadvantages - usually the case was
mild, but not always and the variolated
patient could spread the infection
during the course of the (hopefully)
mild case. However, the risk of death
from variolation was felt to be
acceptable when held against the
problems that could result from
uncontrolled infection (some estimates
set mortality at 2-3%, which was still
less than a tenth of the mortality rates
seen without variolation), and
conscientious quarantine would prevent
problems with variolated patients
spreading disease.
The practice of variolation was
introduced by Circassian traders to the
Ottoman Empire, where it was practiced
beginning no later than 1670.
Variolation would become especially
popular in England, although not as a
result of the 1714 article in the
Philosophical Transactions (nor,
for that matter, as a result of a second
article that appeared in 1716). Its
popularity is attributed to the actions
of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who had
had been afflicted by smallpox and who
had lost her brother to it. Lady
Montague was married to Lord Edward
Wortley Montague, who was the ambassador
to the Sublime Porte of the Ottomans in
Istanbul. There, Lady Montague observed
the practice of variolation as practiced
by the Turks and, determined not to have
her family suffer as she had, directed
the surgeon of the Embassy to learn the
technique and, in March, 1718, to
variolate her five year old son. After
her return to England, she determined to
promote the technique, and had Maitland
variolate her four year old daughter in
the presence of several physicians,
including the king's physician. The
royal interest was aroused, and Charles
Maitland was given leave to perform what
came to be known as the Royal
Experiment, in which he variolated six
condemned prisoners (who had been
promised full pardons if they
survived). When the prisoners survived
(and were pardoned), further experiments
were done on charity children. The
safety of the procedure being
established by these experiments, two of
the king's grandchildren, the daughters
of the Princess of Wales, were treated
on April 17, 1722. After this the
practice of variolation spread like
wildfire, reaching even the rural areas
of England by the 1740s.
Across the sea, in England's
American colonies, the practice was
accepted even earlier than in England.
In 1721, the Reverend Cotton Mather had
prevailed on Dr. Boyston to variolate
some 244 people in an effort to halt a
smallpox epidemic in Boston. When the
deaths were tallied (six of the
variolated against 844 of 5980 infected
who had not been variolated) it was
clear that variolation was the way to
protect against the smallpox. By the
1750's, no less a personage than
Benjamin Franklin was promoting the
technique.
The goals of the practitioners of
variolation, were, of course, benign.
Smallpox was a terrible disease, killing
from 20% to 60% of those afflicted (with
a disproportionate effect on those
younger than 5 years old - in one
outbreak in Berlin, 98% of the children
who caught the disease died). A
significant number of the survivors of
the disease were left blind as a result
of corneal infection. At the least, a
survivor would bear the scars of the
disease.
But the popularization of variolation
was a two-edged sword. Those living in
the countries where variolation was
popular could be presumed to know:
In 1763, during the Pontiac Rebellion,
Captain Simon Ecuyer, the commanding
officer of Fort Pitt, found himself in a
difficult situation. The indians were
pressing hard - three forts in the Ohio
River watershed had been lost, and many
settlers had come to Fort Pitt seeking
safety. The Fort was crowded and
uncomfortable, and smallpox had appeared
among the refugees. On June the
twenty-third, two Delaware indians
appeared at the fort, asking for a
parley with Alexander McKee, the
Assistant Deputy Superintendent of
Induan Affairs for the Crown. On the
twenty-fourth, Captain Ecuyer, along
with a delegation including Mr. McKee
and also William Trent (who was the
commander of a local civilian militia)
met with the indians, who professed a
desire to avoid conflict and called for
the evacuation of Fort Pitt, indicating
that, if this were done quickly, it
could be done peacefully. Captain
Ecuyer declined to evacuate the fort,
claiming that three large armies were
coming to his aid. The indians
indicated that for their part they hoped
for friendship (a hope that the British,
at least, were doubtless suspicious of,
since the history of wars with the
American indians had been full of
spurious offers of safe conduct), and at
this point, as Mr. Trent records in his
journal [2],
"Out of our regard for them, we
gave them two Blankets and a
Handkerchief out of the Small Pox
Hospital. I hope it will have the
desired effect" In the event, the
Delaware were to suffer severely from an
epidemic of smallpox, although the
infected materials may have been only
one of several sources of infection.
Fort Pitt was not the only time that
informed attempts at biological warfare
were made in the New World in the second
half of the 1700s, simply the best
documented one. Among the most
significant would be those by the
British during the American Revolution,
not for their effect, but for the
response they provoked.
The idea of spreading
smallpox to the rebels was discussed
openly. Robert Donkin's 1777 book,
"Military Collections and
Remarks", published in New York,
contains a footnot e picturesquely
suggesting that the rebellious Americans
would disband in fear if the British
should " Dip arrows in matter of
smallpox and twang them at the American
rebels, in order to inoculate
them."
Washington had himself been a victim of
smallpox, and in 1776 saw his attack on
Quebec fail in large part because many
soldiers were affected by an outbreak of
smallpox (which many believed, albeit
with small evidence, to have been the
work of the British, judging by the
testimony given to a Congressional
hearing on the attack). He knew what
the disease could do, and had come to
regard it as "the greatest enemy of
the Continental Army". But he also
knew what to do - variolate. On January
6, 1777 he issued to Dr. William
Shippen, Jr., Director General of the
Hospitals and Physician in Chief to the
Army, an order to inoculate all the
Continental troops and the new recruits,
also advising him to keep "the
matter as secret as possible".
danger was past.
For the first time in history, measures
had been taken to secure an army
against, not only the very real risk of
natural infection, but also against the
risk of a deliberate biological attack.
And they worked - after 1777 the
Continental Army was never hampered by
smallpox in its operations again.
2. This is sometimes incorrectly
attributed to Captain Ecuyer's report.
In fact, he makes no mention of the gift
in the official report of the incident.
The documentation of Captain Ecuyers
involvement resides in the ledgers of
the Fort.
Some information about how the use of
smallpox was viewed by the command
structure of the time, including access
to images of some of the documents, may
be found at a site (not part of
CBWInfo.com) developed by Peter
d'Errico:
Selected Historical References and Resources
Copyright© 1999, 2001, 2005 CBWInfo.com
throw poison in the form of
powder upon galleys. Chalk, fine
sulfide of arsenic, and powdered
verdegris may be thrown among enemy
ships by means of small mangonels, and
all those who, as they breathe, inhale
the powder into their lungs will become
asphyxiated.
Explosive shells, with a
powder charge ignited by a fuse lit just
before firing it against the enemy
appeared. And so did an incendiary
shell that was called, in the proper
terminology of artillery, the carcass,
also called, by those that were not
artillerymen (and some few who were),
the stink pot. The carcass was a hollow
metal shell with perforations for the
emission of flame and flaming material,
and, if one wonders why that would give
rise to the sobriquet of stink pot,
consider that the usual fill of a
carcass included sulfur, tallow, rosin,
turpentine, saltpeter, and antimony.
The use of toxic projectiles was not
viewed with total equanamity. German
gunners were reported in 1650 to have
pledged to "not construct any
poisoned globes" and to "never
employ them for the ruin and destruction
of men, because the first inventors of
our art thought such actions as unjust
among themselves as unworthy of a man of
heart and a real soldier."
In 1672, during his siege of the city of
Groningen, Christoph Bernhard van Galen,
the Bishop of Münster, acquired a
nickname, "Bommen Berend"
(Bomber Berend), for his profligate use
of artillery. Among the explosive and
incendiary devices he used were some
which had a fill including belladonna,
intended to produce toxic fumes. The
weapons failed to prove decisive,
however, at least in part because they
were used without taking wind direction
into account. In the end, the Bishop
had to withdraw, lifting the siege on
the 28th of August, an event still
celebrated in the city.
The use of chemical weapons did not proceed unchecked.
On the 27th of August, 1675, the French and the Germans concluded the
Strasbourg Agreement, which included an article banning the use of "perfidious and odious" toxic
devices (poisoned bullets).
The Chinese produced immunity to
smallpox using a technique in which a
dried powder of the material from a
pustule was blown into a persons nose
beginning in the Eleventh century.
In other words, if you had an army that
was made up mostly of individuals who
had already been exposed to smallpox,
either naturally or through variolation,
you would stand to gain if smallpox were
to be introduced to an opposing army
which was not similarly protected. And,
if you had access to smallpox cases,
then you could acquire materials that
would allow you to be sure that you
could expose an actual or potential
enemy to the disease.
To Sundries
got to Replace in kind those which were
taken from people in the Hospital to
Convey the Smallpox to the
Indians
- line item in the ledger for Ft. Pitt, June, 1763
The documentation that survives,
including the ledgers (which had to be
approved by British authorities up to
the level of General Gage, the
Commander-in-Chief of British forces in
America), makes it clear that this
action was not seen as something
extraordinary, or an action taken under
unusual circumstances by a local
commander. In fact, letters survive
from a correspondence in July of 1763
between General Sir Jeffery Amherst
(then the British Commander-in-Chief)
and Colonel Henry Bouquet, who was
leading a relief force to Ft. Pitt,
that the use of smallpox as a weapon
against the indians was receiving
general consideration. In a letter
which seems to have been written shortly
after he learned that smallpox had
broken out at the fort, Genral Amherst
suggests asks Colonel Bouqet "Could
it not be contrived to send the Small
Pox among those disaffected tribes of
Indians?" On the thirteenth of
July, Colonel Bouqet, on his way to Ft.
Pitt, replies "I will try to
inoculate the...with some blankets that
may fall in their hands, and take care
not to get the disease myself."
This independent mirroring of the use of
the smallpox, down to the method of
delivering the infectious particles,
makes it seem likely that the use of
smallpox had received some attention in
military circles prior to the event.
Indeed, there is some evidence, although
none is conclusive, that this was not
the first time smallpox was employed
against the indians. Certainly the
inclusion of the line item noted above
in his accounts makes it clear that
Captain Ecuyer was not concerned that
there would be any censure for his
actions.
The natives of the New World also used
chemical and biological weapons. In
South America, the smoke from burning
chili peppers was used boh in local
conflicts and against the Portuguese as
a sort of tear gas, while in the North,
there are several incidents that suggest
that the Indians may also have tried to
initiate smallpox outbreaks among the
European soldiers and settlers.
In April of 1775, the British in Boston
found themselves facing both the
Continental Army and a smallpox
epidemic. Reasonably enough, they began
to variolate their troops. Less
reasonably, they began to variolate
civilians fleeing the city. While there
is no documentation surviving that
demonstrates the British intention in
this instance, it was well known that
those variolated became infectious.
General Washington, the commander of the
Continental Army, wrote that he believed
that "...the enemy intended
spreading the Small pox amongst
us". He had been encouraged in
this belief by the stories of British
deserters, about which he was skeptical
until an outbreak of the disease among
the evacuees convinced him. He delayed
his attack, regarding the smallpox in
Boston as "a weapon of
Defence" being used by the
British. When it was finally evacuated
by the British, Washington advanced with
great care, fearing the exposure of his
troops to the disease.
Surviving letters indicate at least the
hope of causing infection among the
Rebels on several other occasions. One
of the most significant is that of
General Alexander Leslie, who notes in a
missive directed to General Cornwallis
dated July 13, 1781 that more than "700
Negroes are come down the river in the
Small Pox." and that he intends to
"distribute them about the Rebell
plantations."
http://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/amherst/lord_jeff.html
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