Chego Trouble: Mark Catesby and the Frictions of Representation in Colonial Entomology

Abstract: Tunga penetrans —most frequently referred to as a “chego” in the archive—was a source of anxiety for eighteenth-century colonizers. Difficult to see without a microscope, this tiny arthropod burrowed into unprotected feet to lay its eggs. Its infection caused pain, lameness, and even death among its sufferers, usually enslaved workers. Plantation owners agonized over pest eradication methods, trying to mitigate this threat to their labor force, and natural historians attempted to circumscribe the flea through both metropolitan and colonial knowledge production. Both groups, however, had little success. Placing Mark Catesby’s Natural History (1729–47) alongside the works of Hans Sloane, Richard Ligon, and other Caribbean writers, I explore how the chego subverted various methods of management from empiricist observation to plantation organization. First, this paper traces proposed and failed attempts to make the chego legible to the British imperial eye. I track how the tools used to make the chego visible—the microscope, paper, and the skin itself—were meant to confine this parasite within various and often conflicting visual epistemologies, which ultimately destabilized the chego’s form and emphasized its illegibility. The paper then analyzes the importance of enslaved Indigenous and African workers to the production of knowledge about the chego. White writers surveyed and cataloged Indigenous medical treatments and Black enslaved workers’ embodied experiences. In their attempts to reconstitute these knowledges as their own, enslavers and naturalists denied the material realities of the chego flea through fictions of racial hygiene. In reasserting these African and Indigenous sources of knowledge about the chego, this paper elucidates how colonial entomology was challenged and reformulated in the Caribbean.