THE WORLD WENT GAGA FOR GUANO IN THE 1800'S

Gaga for Guano! The Oddest Boom of the 1800s. In the 19th century a frenzy for better fertilizer sent global demand for guano soaring, sparking colonial wars, American expansion, envious fortunes, and cruel exploitation.

When the first shipment of Peruvian guano arrived at the docks of Southampton, England, in 1840, the stench reportedly left the townspeople reeling. Few recognized it at the time, but this noxious cargo was poised to become the hottest, if not the smelliest, commodity of the mid-19th century. Across both Europe and the United States, population growth was straining the limits of agriculture, but guano (a polite term for dried bird excrement) had exactly the right fertilizing properties to revive depleted soil. Guano’s near-miraculous properties caused demand to skyrocket, triggering a financial boom that would shape diplomacy and trigger wars. For some, the craze brought fabulous riches; for all too many, however, it brought misery and financial ruin.

Highs and Lows

Guano contains nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, essential nutrients for healthy soil. In 1803, during his journey around South America, the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt had noted that even in the desert coastal areas of Peru, plants fertilized with guano grew exuberantly. Its use in Peru was the outgrowth of centuries of agricultural practice, its properties recognized by the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Moche and the Inca. The name guano comes from huanu, which in the Inca language, Quechua, means “dung.”

The guano shipped to Southampton in 1840 originated on the Chincha Islands, some 14 miles off the Peruvian coast and the nesting grounds for millions of seabirds.Vast flocks of seagulls, pelicans, cormorants,gannets,and others gather there to feast on the schools of fish that teem in the waters cooled by the Peru Current. Formerly named for that same scientist who noted the properties of guano, the Peru Current flows north along the west coast of South America, creating favorable conditions for marine life,which in turn provides a cornucopia for hungry birds.

Generations of them had left excrement layers over a hundred feet deep on undisturbed islands. The arid conditions of these places kept the fertilizing properties intact (too much rain would wash away the nutrients and lower their concentration). Thanks to its desert conditions, the Chincha Islands contained what many considered to be the source of the finest guano on the planet.

Winners and Losers

Experiments carried out in 1840 demonstrated that Peruvian guano was far superior to the slurry traditionally used to fertilize British crops.Alert to the potential, the Peruvian government allowed British and French companies, as well as local ones, to collect and trade this valuable commodity in return for a cut of the profits, which were considerable: Merchants who bought guano at 12 pounds sterling per ton could sell it for double that amount. A single guano shipment could bring in 100,000 pounds profit for merchants.

The British entrepreneur William Gibbs had business interests in Peru that enabled him to enter the guano game very early. He became the principal exporter to Britain and grew fabulously wealthy as a result.Between 1842 and his death in the 1870s, William Gibbs’s firm reaped profits of 80,000 to 100,000 pounds sterling a year.

For a while,guano was the linch pin of the Peruvian economy.In the late 1840s it accounted for some 5 percent of tax revenues; between 1869 and 1875 it had risen to around 80 percent. Peru was living off bird excrement:From 1840 to 1870,Peru exported 12 million tons of it. Yet,many others were dying from it.

Removing solidified bird feces was an arduous task, and not only because of the stink and the searing heat. When the workers, using picks and shovels, opened up breaches in the guano in order to extract it, they inhaled noxious dust containing pathogens that caused respiratory illnesses such as histoplasmosis, as well as severe dysentery caused by the deadly Shigella bacteria.

Nobody in Peru wanted to work on the guano islands, and no body could be forced to do so as the country had abolished slavery in 1854. In fact, some of the income from guano was being used to pay off the former slave owners. In the absence of a local workforce to harvest theguano, Chinese indentured servants were brought in. But the conditions proved unendurable even for these hardy workers. As replacements, laborers were sought from Pacific islands such as Easter Island. Often recruited using underhand tactics, many islanders effectively became prisoners of the guano press-gangs.

Reaping the Results

The boom sparked a frenetic search for new guano reserves. In 1843, for example, British traders started to exploit a 25-foot-deep layer covering the island of Ichaboe, off the coast of West Africa. By 1845 up to 450 boats and thousands of men fought over whatever was left. The next spring, when the last sack of guano had been loaded, the island was abandoned.

The United States also wanted more access to cheaper guano but was frustrated by established British interests in Peru. As farmers formed an influential sector of his electorate, U.S. president Millard Fillmore included references to guano in his State of the Union address in 1850, indicating he would do all he could for the “purpose of causing that article to be imported into the country at a reasonable price.”

The U.S. government took more formal action in August 1856 when the U.S. Congress passed the Guano Islands Act, which authorized American citizens to take possession of any island containing deposits of guano, provided it was not inhabited or under the jurisdiction of another state. The imperial expansion was, in part, prompted by guano fever and motivated the United States to take over its first territories in the Pacific and Caribbean, such as the atolls of Midway and Johnston in the Pacific, and Navassa Island in the Caribbean. To this day, the latter is still the subject of an ownership dispute between the United States and Haiti.

The island also evidenced the darker side of the guano trade. Revolting against barbaric working conditions, in 1889 black guano workers on Navassa Island rose up and killed five of their supervisors. Three of the ringleaders were condemned to death. But in one of the first demonstrations of political mobilization by the U.S. African-American community—spearheaded by the fraternal societies such as the Order of Galilean Fishermen —their appeal reached the American president himself, Benjamin Harrison, who commuted the men’s death sentences to life imprisonment.

In the end, however, dwindling reserves took the air out of the guano bubble. Even though Spain occupied the Chincha Islands in 1864 to recoup the debt it claimed Peru owed them, the guano boom was winding down. When Norway began the production of artificial nitrogen fertilizer in 1905, the guano era was over.

The influence of the boom, however, is not. The 1856 legislation that granted U.S. control over guano-bearing islands has been applied as recently as 2014 — but this time it was for preservation, not profit. The United States relied on the 1856 act to expand the size of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, now the world’s largest marine reserve. About 490,000 square miles are protected now, largely thanks to the 19th-century craze for guano.

Written by Enrique Meseguer  in "National Geographic History", USA, May/June 2017, vol.3 n.2, excerpts pp.10-13. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.