The Guano Islands Act
How Bird Shit Changed U.S. Foreign Policy

There was a time when America desperately needed bird poo. Tropical bird poo, known as guano, to be specific.

Guano — just like other natural resources such as coal, oil or gold  — played a role in significantly changing U.S. foreign policy.

Guano covers whole islands in the tropical oceans around the world. It is sometimes hundreds of feet thick. There used to be a lot more guano until capitalism woke up one day in the 19th century and realized bird shit smelled like money.

August 18, 1856, 167 years ago, the United States Congress enacted The Guano Islands Act.

The Guano Islands Act is a federal law allowing citizens of the United States to take possession of unclaimed islands containing guano deposits in the name of the United States. And not only that, the islands can be located anywhere. The only real restriction is islands cannot by occupied by citizens of another country and not be within the jurisdiction of another government. Sounds simple. The hard part is locating poo-covered islands not claimed by another nation and/or people are living there.

But wait — there’s more. If you find and claim an appropriate island you have the full faith and power of the U.S. military and federal law to help out, if necessary.

The Guano Islands Act also empowers the president of the United States to use the military to protect our nation’s bird poo interests and extends criminal jurisdiction of the United States in these territories.

Guano’s two valuable uses are making gun powder and explosives and making fertilizer. Guano is mostly used for fertilizer.

What is now called the Guano Age – 1802-1884 – began with Peru, the same country that gave the world potatoes. Peru has a string of islands off its coast that are, or were, covered sea bird poo. The use of sea bird guano, which has more nitrogen that other animal excrement, stretches back at least to the Inca Empire. Beginning in the 1840s, mining and exporting Peruvian guano went into high gear.

There was guano mania in the mid 1800s as the economic potential of bird poo became obvious. Soil on agricultural lands in Europe became depleted from centuries of constant plowing, planting and degradation from near constant warfare. Other types of fertilizer just weren’t working out. Thanks to slave labor mining the guano and shipping it from Peru to Europe was economically viable.

Chinese laborers stand on a partially extracted guano deposit in the Chincha Islands, Peru, in 1865. Public Domain

The guano trade and Peru’s history is a fascinating tale of corruption, slaving and environmental devastation. Here are a few sources you want to learn more about Peru’s bird poo trade:

The Great Peruvian Guano Bonanza: Rise, Fall, and Legacy
https://coha.org/the-great-peruvian-guano-bonanza-rise-fall-and-legacy/

A History of the Peruvian Guano Industry
https://yaffle53.wordpress.com/2014/05/22/a-history-of-the-peruvian-guano-industry/

When The Western World Ran on Guano
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/when-the-western-world-ran-on-guano

On YouTube:
How Peru Accidentally Became a Superpower
https://youtu.be/qzzqdIkWHh4?si=_LB5xF9BpBtKvH3o

European scientists tested the first samples of guano from Peru and found it was far more effective than anything seen before. The rush exploit the powerful poop was on.

The word “guano” comes from Quechua, an Andean indigenous language. It refers to any type of dung used as fertilizer. Andean people collected seabird guano from small islands off the desert coast of Peru for use as a soil amendment for well over 1,500 years and perhaps as long as 5,000 years ago, archaeological evidence suggests.

The Guano Age ended with the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), when Chilean marines invaded coastal Bolivia to claim its guano and saltpeter resources. Victorious, Chile annexed resource-rich territory from Peru and Bolivia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific

Guano mining on islands off Peru’s coats continues to this day, with working conditions as hideous as you might imagine.
https://www.audubon.org/news/holy-crap-trip-worlds-largest-guano-producing-islands

The United States began importing guano in 1843. By the 1850s the United Kingdom was importing about 200,000 tons and the U.S. 760,000 tons of bird poo per year.

The bird shit market quickly became oligopolistic with Peru forming a guano export cartel with England. Prices soared, governments attempted to regulate prices and there were fears that sea birds weren’t relieving themselves fast enough and in sufficient quantities to prevent exhaustion of this resource.

The United States needed to get its own bird shit together.

That’s when the Guano Islands Act was hatched.

The Guano Islands bill was introduced in the Senate on 26 May 1856 as S339 by Sen. William H. Seward (R–NY). If the name William Seward sounds familiar that’s because he was Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state. He negotiated the Alaska Purchase in 1867, derisively known as “Seward’s Folly”. Seward got the last laugh on that one.

Seward’s Guano Act became law at something akin to legislative light speed, less than 90 days. The Act passed the Senate on 24 July 1856; passed the House on 16 August 1856, and was signed into law by President Franklin Pierce, one of America’s worst presidents, on 18 August 1856.

The act freed American entrepreneurs to search for and commercially mine guano deposits on numerous tiny islands and reefs mostly in the Caribbean and in the Pacific Ocean.

The Guano Islands Act was one of America’s first official means of expanding the nation’s imperial power far beyond mainland North America, significantly changing how territories were dealt with legally.

The Guano Islands Act initiated the concept of insular areas in U.S. territories. Before the Act became law, any territory acquired by the U.S. become an integral part of the country unless that was changed by treaty. Territories would eventually have the opportunity to become a state of the Union. Insular areas can be held by the federal government without the possibility of ever becoming a state.

Through the Guano Islands Act, the US gained control of about 94 islands by 1903, 66 of these islands were recognized U.S. territories.

Whenever any citizen of the United States discovers a deposit of guano on any island, rock, or 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.
— Section 1 of the Guano Islands Act

Section 6 of the Guano Islands Act states that criminal acts on or adjacent to these territories “shall be deemed committed on the high seas, on board a merchant ship or vessel belonging to the United States; and shall be punished according to the laws of the United States relating to such ships or vessels and offenses on the high seas”.

The U.S. Supreme Court considered this provision in Jones v. United States, 137 U.S. 202, and ruled it constitutional in 1890.

The Act remains a law of the United States. Of the more than 90 islands claimed under the Guano Islands Act, all but 10 claims have been withdrawn.

The most recent Guano Islands Act claim came in 1997 for Navassa Island. Navassa is a small uninhabited island in the Caribbean Sea located northeast of Jamaica, south of Cuba, and 40 nautical miles (74 km; 46 mi) west of Jérémie on the Tiburon Peninsula of Haiti. The claim was denied because an American court ruled the island was already under American jurisdiction.

Haiti disputes U.S. jurisdiction over Navassa, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service administers as of 3 December 1999. The United States claims a 12-nautical-mile (22 km; 14 mi) territorial sea boundary around Navassa Island.

One of the Act’s problems is that it does not specify the status of a territory is after it is abandoned by private U.S. interests and/or the guano is exhausted. This oversight creates neither obligation to nor prohibition of retaining possession. This is may be why the number of guano island claims dwindled from 100 to just eight today.

At least one very creative use of the Guano Islands Act has been attempted.

In 1964, using the Guano Islands Act as part of a claim to sovereignty, Leicester Hemingway, the younger brother of author Ernest Hemingway, attempted to establish a micronation, the Republic of New Atlantis. The Republic of New Atlantis was an 8-by-30-foot (2.4 m × 9.1 m) bamboo raft anchored by an engine block just outside Jamaica’s territorial waters.

The apparent goal was to use the new “country” as the headquarters for Leicester Hemingway’s own International Marine Research Society, to conduct marine research and protect Jamaican fishing.

Both the U.S. and Jamaica rejected his claim. Tragically, a tropical storm in 1966 destroyed the raft and fledgling, mooting the whole question.

Complete reliance on bird shit shipped half way around the world ended around 1913. German chemists developed a means of synthesizing ammonia, which can be used to make nitrogen fertilizer.

List of Guano Island claims

Islands claimed by the United States under the Act as of 2023:

• Baker Island (The first island to become a part of the United States under the Guano Islands Act. Discovered by whalers in 1818, the U.S. took possession of it in 1857. American Guano Company mined here from 1859 to 1878. On 7 December 1886, the American Guano Company sold to the British firm John T. Arundel and Company, which made the island its headquarters for guano digging operations in the Pacific from 1886 to 1891. Britain claimed the island until the United States claimed reclaimed it in 1936. It eventually became part of the Baker Island National Wildlife Refuge and an unincorporated and unorganized territory of the U.S.

• Howland Island (Aviator Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan were to land here to refuel before they mysteriously disappeared 2 July 1937.)

• Jarvis Island (Dry and uninhabited, Jarvis Island once had some of the largest seabird breeding colonies in the tropical ocean. Guano mining and the introduction of rodents destroyed most of the island’s native wildlife.)

• Johnston Atoll (Closed to public entry, for a few good reasons. Controlled by the U.S. military since 1934, it has been a naval refueling depot, an airbase, a nuclear and biological weapons testing site, a secret missile base, and a site for the storage and disposal of chemical weapons and Agent Orange, a toxic defoliant used in the Vietnam War that poisoned numerous veterans.

The U.S. Air Force completed remediation work on the atoll in 2004.  is  by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service co-administers Johnson Atoll. The atoll s part of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument and home to thriving communities of nesting seabirds and significant marine biodiversity.)

• Kingman Reef/Danger Rock (Largely submerged, uninhabited, triangle-shaped reef, in the North Pacific Ocean, about halfway between the Hawaiian Islands and American Samoa. claimed by the US in 1859 under the name “Dangers Rock.” It was briefly a stopover for commercial Pacific flying boat routes going to New Zealand in the 1930s. The Navy administered the island from 1934 to 2000 whe control passed to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The atoll is closed to the public. There is no evidence that guano existed on Kingman Reef.

• Midway Atoll (From 1941 until 1993, the atoll was the home of Naval Air Facility Midway Island, which played a crucial role in the Battle of Midway, June 4–6, 1942. Today, the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, encompasses 590,991.50 acres (239,165.77 ha) of land and water. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service administers the island. The refuge and most of its surrounding area are part of the larger Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.

• Navassa Island (claimed by Haiti; see above. Read more about slavery in Navassa from the Library of Congress: “Freedom for a Slave,” Kansas City Journal (1899) and “The Navassa Riot,” (1889)
Eugene Guassoin’s The Island of Navassa (1866)
Read the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Jones v. United States (1890)

• Bajo Nuevo Bank (Disputed with Colombia. Remains in place as an unincorporated territory. De facto administered by Colombia, also claimed by Jamaica and Nicaragua.
• Serranilla Bank (Disputed with Colombia)

• Swains Island (Part of American Samoa. There is no evidence of guano ming here. Claimed by Tokelau, a dependent territory of New Zealand in the south Pacific, formerly known as the Union Islands. Tokelau has a population of about 1,500 and the world’s smallest national economy. The United States administers Swains Island.)

Sources, further reading:

“Acquisition Process of Insular Areas”. United States Government, Department of the Interior. https://www.doi.gov/oia/islands/acquisitionprocess

“Latest developments: Territorial and Maritime Dispute (Nicaragua v. Colombia) | International Court of Justice”. www.icj-cij.org. https://www.icj-cij.org/case/124

FORMERLY DISPUTED ISLANDS https://web.archive.org/web/20070930014736/http://www.doi.gov/oia/Islandpages/disputedpage.htm

Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler (2008) ISBN 978-0-307-35178-4.

The Ecology of Agroecosystems p149
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Ecology_of_Agroecosystems/AFRQSuQGHiIC?hl=en