Son of Fortune (43 page)

May 29, 2013

I was working as a Divemaster on an expedition cruise ship in the South Pacific when I first learned about guano. Each day we visited small islands and atolls where we ferried the passengers off to explore with a staff of naturalists. As my job was to take the passengers snorkeling or scuba diving, I was mostly focused on the underwater world, but one can't be near any island and not be aware of birds. The sky was always full of them, screeching and diving. Any cliffside was dotted with resting birds and “painted” with long white splotches of bird droppings. And there were ground-nesting colonies, where the birds sat as close together as buns in a baker's pan.

Every evening, the expedition leader gave a brief talk about the history of the islands, and after a few days, we jokingly started referring to this as the “guano talk,” for every single island had indeed been drastically influenced by the guano trade.

The word “guano” comes from an Andean Quechua Indian word,
wanu,
which most likely came from an Incan word,
huanu,
meaning “dung.” This guano—bird poop—was once the most valuable commodity in the world. Men sailed across the globe to obtain it. They fought for it, grew rich from it and enslaved other men to dig it out for them. Half the world would have starved to death without it.

Picture your grocery store with half of the shelves empty. Picture all the food your family eats in a week cut in half. That is what our world would be like today if not for manufactured chemical fertilizers.

As early as the mid-1700s, the world was experiencing food shortages. After even a few years of intensive farming, with the best practices of the day, soil was quickly exhausted and crop yields began to dwindle. By the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, as populations grew and more and more people moved to cities, farming was at a crisis point.

The Incas had known for a thousand years that guano made great fertilizer, but Europeans were slow to realize its value. Early adventurers were more interested in gold and silver. It wasn't until around 1840 that farmers in Europe and the U.S. really began to understand what guano could do for their depleted farmland. It was estimated to be thirty-five times more effective than any other type of fertilizer (mostly manure) that was commonly used at the time. It truly was a magic powder, and the scramble to get it quickly grew intense.

Seabird droppings were harvested from every island and scrap of rock in the South Pacific, but the richest deposits of all were found on the three rocky islands known as the Chinchas, off the southwest coast of Peru. All of the details about guano mining in
Son of Fortune,
including the brutal treatment of Chinese laborers, are true. I have drawn them from the books listed in the “further reading” section, as well as shipping records, newspaper stories and many sailors' personal accounts from the time, found in archives primarily in San Francisco and Baltimore.

Estimates vary widely about how many Chinese men were brought to work on the Chincha Islands during the height of the guano trade, from 1849 to 1875. More than 100,000 were brought to Peru to work on cotton and sugar plantations, railroads and guano mining. (Another 10,000 died on the four-to-five-month ocean voyage, where they were packed in holds like cargo.) Some of these men signed contracts thinking they were going to work in gold mines or railroads. Some were prisoners or debtors “sold” to agents. Some were kidnapped outright. The guano mines on the Chincha Islands needed between four hundred and six hundred men working all the time. Many died within two years of arrival; few ever left.

In addition to the horrific practice of Chinese slave labor on the Chinchas, many of the guano operations on those beautiful islands I was visiting also depended on kidnapped and enslaved people taken from Pacific islands. “Blackbirders” would invite local islanders aboard their ships to trade or feast, then imprison them and set sail. In 1862, Peruvian blackbirders kidnapped over 1,500 people, probably half the population of Rapa Nui (Easter Island). The government finally intervened and forced the slavers to release those still alive, but only fifteen were returned. They brought with them an epidemic of smallpox, which destroyed most of the remaining population.

The guano trade was in decline by the 1870s, but only because most of the islands had been stripped bare. Guano is still collected on the Chincha Islands. You can buy a bag of it in your local gardening store. But today those who labor there do so voluntarily.

In 1909, two scientists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, finally invented a way to make chemical fertilizer, and the world changed once again.

I am grateful to all the librarians and archivists, primarily at the California Historical Society, the San Francisco Public Library, the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park and the Maryland Historical Society, who helped me discover dozens of old newspaper and magazine articles, agricultural bulletins, shipping reports, letters and pamphlets.

For Further Reading

The Alchemy of Air
by Thomas Hager; published 2008 by Harmony Books (Random House, Inc.)

The Great Guano Rush: Entrepreneurs and American Overseas Expansion
by Jimmy M. Skagg; published 1994 by Palgrave Macmillan

More Precious than Gold: The Story of the Peruvian Guano Trade
by David Hollett; published 2008 by Associated University Presses