Sublime

With a tropical climate and countless animal reservoirs of disease, tropical Africa was home to many fatal and debilitating diseases both for humans and farm animals, including horses. Falciparum malaria, transmitted by the human-biting mosquito Anopheles gambiae, created a disease barrier to European conquest. African trypanosomiasis, otherwise

within thirty years of Columbus’s first American landfall, the conquest of the Aztec Empire by Cortés and his company of adventurers signalled that European intrusion into the Americas held a different significance from the piecemeal colonization of Europe’s oceanic periphery or Portugal’s hijacking of Asian trade.