Own Your Own Island! On Second Thought, Don't!

Last night in bed, my wife and I got to talking on a subject that I'm sure every couple has had a deep heart-to-heart on. I am, of course, talking about bird poop. Specifically, petrified bird droppings.

She's in the middle of a novel and mentioned it takes place on an island that used to be part of Haiti, but the U.S. took it over. I asked if it was covered in doo, and she applied in the affirmative. I confirmed for her that one of the side details in the book was, in fact, based in reality: the U.S. has a bird poo island annexation law.

Passed in 1856, the "Guano Islands Act," reads:

Whenever any citizen of the United States discovers a deposit of guano on any island, rock, key, not within the lawful jurisdiction of any other government, and not occupied by the citizens of any other government, and takes peaceable possession thereof, and occupies the same, such island, rock, or key may, at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.

The best part about it is that this law is still on the books. So, if you're sailing around the South Pacific and find an uncharted island covered in dung, you can claim it for America. Uhhh... yay.

Why would we have such a bizarre law? Well, it's because people wanted the guano. Bird droppings are naturally high in phosphates, which make amazingly good fertilizer -- unchallenged until chemical fertilizers in the mid-20th century. The problem is, in non-equatorial climates, they all degrade, but if you have the right kind of weather, hoo boy, you get the creme de la crap. Of course, it's hard to collect except in places where a lot of birds congregate in a smallish area most of the time -- like a small island. And in the 1840s and 1850s, the only known islands with the really good stuff were off the coast of (and owned by) Peru.

The Peruvians were making a lot of money off this fetid resource -- they limited its supply to the rest of the world, and charged a lot for it. One of the reasons was it was a nasty job to get the stuff. Fresh shite is obviously no picnic, and after it dries to a desireable amount, it more or less petrifies, and you need to basically mine it like stone -- including using dynamite.

None of the Peruvians really wanted the job, so they resorted to the solutions men had turned to for millenia -- get immigrants to do it! Whether they want to or not! Peru shipped in chinese coolies, sometimes in chains, and freelance slavers depopulated the Easter Islands to sell the islanders to work the mines. You know those big heads that nobody knows what they're for? That's because everyone who could read the inscriptions died mining fecal matter.

Anyway, in 1855, we wanted bird BMs, Peru had them, and we weren't happy. But an American discovered that Baker Island in the South Pacific had a lot of this precious commodity, so congress lept into action as quickly as possible, and a year later we had the Guano Islands Act.

Two guano islands stand out, one as a military landmark (I'll let you guess which one, and reveal it at the end) and one for actual Guano harvesting. The latter is an island called Navassa, in the Caribbean, still at least nominally claimed by Haiti. In 1857, an American entrepreneur took control of the island under the Act, and set up a mining company there. While not quite as harsh as the Peruvian conditions, the mining situation on Navassa was so bad for the (almost all black) workers that they eventually revolted, killing several overseers. The rioters were brought back to the U.S. and sentenced, some to death with the company denying the claims of severe abuse.

However, after operations restarted, one of the miners actually managed to slip a letter through the island's company censors to President Benjamin Harrison, and the letter actually made it to the President himself. He dispatched a Navy destroyer to investigate the matter, and the allegations of the miner and those on trial were confirmed. Public opinion turned against the company, and the death sentences were commuted.

The Spanish-American War of 1898 forced the island to be evacuated, and by that point, significant phosphate deposits in the U.S. south had been found, and it was not profitable to restart the operation. The mining operation shut down. Nevassa hosted a Coast Guard lighthouse until 1996, and is now run by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife department, who have closed it to the public.

Oh, and some guy in California tried to invoke the Guano Islands Act to take posession of Nevassa, then sued the government for $50 million over the whole thing when they turned him down. He lost, because the claiming was ruled to be a one-time event, you can't claim an Island of Doodie that someone else claimed in the past. So keep a list of what's been taken when you go to stake your claim.

Oh, and the other famous guano island? It's known to Americans as Midway.