The Pests That Plagued Colonial America

In the spring of 1634, the pilgrims at Plymouth were startled by an ear-splitting drone. Colonial governor William Bradford would later recall the woods ringing with “a constant yelling noise” that threatened to “deaf the hearers.” According to Bradford, the culprit was “a quantity of a great sort of flies” that emerged from the ground and congregated on trees.

Bradford and the other pilgrims had experienced the emergence of periodical cicadas. Different broods of these red-eyed, glassy-winged insects emerge by the trillions every 17 years across much of the eastern and midwestern United States. The same cicada brood (XIV) that Bradford noted nearly 400 years ago, emerged in 2025.

While Bradford penned the earliest known written account of periodical cicadas, the insects were already well known to local Indigenous communities. For example, Iroquois communities dug up cicada nymphs and barbecued the bugs over a fire.

The now-ubiquitous American cockroach is actually native to Africa and was introduced to the American colonies by trade in the 1600s.

It did not take long for colonists to regard these creatures with contempt. Colonial governor John Smith, who helped establish the Jamestown settlement in Virginia, complained of an insect Spanish settlers called “cucaracha” that would “eat and defile with their ill-scented dung." English doctor Thomas Mouffet also despised the critters, which he erroneously called moths, writing in 1658 that they were "nasty, cruel, rough, [and] theeving.”

European colonists brought a menagerie of creatures to North America, including cattle, pigs and chickens. They also brought rats, who scurried aboard ships bound for the New World.

To determine when the first rats reached North America, a team of scientists studied a trove of rodent remains from several colonial settlements and shipwrecks that date as far back as 1559. Their findings, published in 2024, reveal that these pests had become entrenched in the colonies during the 1600s.

The arrival of rats ended up helping colonists at Jamestown survive the "Starving Time," a period in 1609 when food was scarce and the settlement’s population plummeted. According to Magen Hodapp, a zooarchaeologist at Jamestown Rediscovery, one site in the settlement’s James Fort reveals what colonists resorted to eating during this harrowing time. Among the site’s roughly 30,000 animal bones, Hodapp and her colleagues uncovered several hundred black rat bones (Rattus rattus). These remains “date to the Starving Time, indicating they’re likely food remains,” she says. In addition to rats, the colonists also resorted to eating horses, snakes and potentially iguana.

Rodents were not the only stowaways to cross the Atlantic. When archaeologists excavated a well in Jamestown between 2005 and 2006, they unearthed the remains of several European beetles that likely reached the continent by infesting wood and food stores aboard ships.

In just three soil samples from the well—which had been converted to a dump after its water turned salty—scientists were able to identify 24 different species of insects. These well-traveled beetles included Trox scaber beetles, which likely fed on discarded table scraps, and spiny-legged rove beetles, likely drawn to moldy wood.

Archaeologists also found the remains of saw-toothed grain beetles in the trash heap. These insects are attracted to spoiled grain and posed a consistent problem in Jamestown’s earliest days. John Smith noted multiple times that bugs had infested the colony’s supplies. In 1607, he wrote that the stores “contained as many wormes as grains.” A year later, he complained of grain so rotten with insects that “the hogs would scarcely eat it.”

Traveling between Europe and North America during the 1700s was no easy feat. Passengers spent the weeks-long journey in cramped quarters and at the mercy of bad weather. It also meant dealing with lice. In 1750, a traveler aboard a ship from Germany to Pennsylvania complained that “the lice abound so frightfully, especially on sick people, that they can be scraped off the body."

The scourge of these blood-sucking parasites did not end when the ships arrived in harbor. “Personal hygiene was not a focus, but we’ve found lots of lice combs, which tells us it’s a significant issue,” Leah Stricker, senior curator for Jamestown Rediscovery, said in an email. Excavations at Jamestown have yielded several fine-toothed combs fashioned out of bone that colonists used to remove lice and fleas from their hair and beards. Many of these combs were double-sided with different sized teeth to pick out both adult lice and their small eggs, called nits.

Early colonists encountered another blood-sucker: mosquitoes. In 1749, Swedish naturalist Pehr Kalm documented the “troublesome” insects during his journey through North America. “When the people have gone to bed they begin their disagreeable humming, approach nearer and nearer to the bed, and at last suck up as much blood that they can hardly fly away,” Kalm wrote. “In the greatest heat of summer, they are so numerous in some places that the air seems to be full of them.”

Kalm mentioned that the mosquitoes’ bite left behind painful “red spots and blisters.” However, the connection between mosquitoes and devastating diseases like yellow fever and malaria would't be discovered until the 1800s. Many of the mosquito species that carry these diseases are native to western Africa and reached North America via the transatlantic slave trade in the 1640s. These insects wreaked havoc throughout the American colonies, causing malaria outbreaks in Jamestown and other settlements.

However, by the time the Revolutionary War began, these disease-carrying insects had become an unlikely colonial alley. American colonists had been exposed to mosquitoes for over a century. This gave them an edge on the battlefield against their British adversaries, who had no resistance to the local insect-borne diseases. In the summer of 1780, a malaria epidemic ravaged the British Army in the mosquito-infested South Carolina Lowcountry.

The following year, another malaria epidemic broke out among British troops stationed at Yorktown, a settlement along Virginia’s coast that was under siege by American and French forces. More than half of the British soldiers were too sick to stand duty, forcing them to surrender and effectively end the war.