To Boldly Go Where Only Bot Flies Have Gone Before

At day's end most of the men had been marked. Trekking in and out of rivers was causing fungal infections and circulatory problems in their feet. The white bottoms were bloodless, wrinkled, and tender, a condition later described as "warm-water-immersion foot." Walking was so agonizing, some had tried to march on the edges of their feet, seeking out scraps of foot tread that wouldn’t make them wince each time their shoes, or what was left of them, struck the ground. Itchy brown and reddish patches of fungus appeared where their haversacks rubbed against their backs, or high on the leg extending from the crotch. Others reported a strange worm of sorts embedded under the surface of the skin, and covered over like a blind boil. "As to the manner in which it was deposited no information could ever be obtained,'' an officer wrote, "but it appeared to grow rapidly, in some subsequent cases attaining the length of one inch, and was extremely painful, especially when in motion.''


Evening hours were spent prying the bot flies and more numerous ticks from their bodies, and the open fires burned dusk till dawn—not to keep off the insects, which couldn’t be kept off, but to discourage what the party believed were the jaguars howling on the camp periphery. In the morning when the men awoke, some found themselves weak and disoriented, their night clothing saturated with blood. The culprit, a vampire bat, excised such a tiny piece of flesh, and bit so surgically, a sleeping man almost never stirred. An anticoagulant in the bat’s saliva produced a steady trickle of blood that flowed freely all night long...
Read more excerpts