by DrDebugDU » Mon Sep 19, 2005 8:03 pm
This story is going to drop on this board as well, but somebody mentioned that there was a truce over Hans Island, a conflict between Denmark and Canada about an uninhabited rock, I was suddenly reminded of Navassa and this is for the record.<br><br>Navassa is an island off the coast of Haiti and since 1857 the US and Haiti are in war about that island/rock, but the really funny thing is the island itself:<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>POOP DREAMS</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>It's a guano-covered rock in the sea. So why do so many people want a piece of Navassa Island?<br><br>Article by Brennen Jensen<br>From Baltimore City Paper, Feb. 21, 2001<br><br>This is a story about bird shit.<br><br>Or rather, to be more precise, guano, the fetid, often petrified feces of the avian world.<br><br>A humble substance, but one that once had the power to move men's souls. In ancient times, spices, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, were the coveted commodity that drove Western explorers. Gold, the eternal prize, led the Spanish to conquer the Incas and Aztecs and sent thousands of novice prospectors scrambling into the Californian mountains. Today, oil builds fortunes, causes wars, and elects presidents.<br><br>And then there's guano. Prized as a fertilizer, it was what sent men down to the sea in ships in the 19th century. And Baltimore, with its booming port and proximity to nutrient-starved farmlands, was in the thick of this "guano rush." One hundred and forty years ago, the mayor-proclaimed "Greatest City in America" might have claimed a less peppy (but more easily provable) motto: Guano Capital of the Nation.<br><br>So yes, in a way, this is a story about bird shit. But it's principally the tale of a teardrop-shaped hunk of forbidding limestone and coral lying in the Windward Passage some 40 miles west of Haiti. This two-square-mile chunk of land has no inhabitants and no fresh water. What it does have is tons of petrified guano. Baltimoreans killed and died on it. African-Americans were virtually enslaved on it, decades after the Civil War. It caused the world's most powerful nation to battle one of the world's poorest. And this obscure rock led an erstwhile California gospel singer to sue President Clinton and the U.S. government. Such is the saga of Navassa Island.<br><br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>"Guano, though no saint, works many miracles."</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br>- Peruvian proverb<br><br>It's said that Christopher Columbus was the first Westerner to set eyes on Navassa Island, stumbling upon it in 1493. But the desolate, cliff-encircled rock held little allure for the intrepid mariner, and he sailed on.<br><br>More than three centuries would pass before Navassa captured the world's attention. That occurred in 1857, when Baltimore ship captain Peter Duncan landed on the island, discovered an estimated 1 million tons of petrified guano, and set about claiming it under a newly minted piece of U.S. legislation called the <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Guano Islands Act</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->. <br><br>Passed by Congress the year before, the Guano Islands Act was designed to spur American entrepreneurs to seek out and exploit sources of guano. American agriculture was clamoring for this new and powerful fertilizer, particularly Maryland and Virginia farmers, whose soil had been decimated by decades of rapacious tobacco and cotton production. <br><br>The act authorized the awarding of mining rights to any explorer who discovered guano on an uninhabited and otherwise unclaimed island. Once some procedural paperwork was completed, the island would be considered to be "appertaining" i.e., belonging to" the United States." <br><br>In other words, one could essentially hoist the Stars and Stripes over any desolate island, atoll, key, or reef covered in bird droppings. The act was geared to break guano-rich Peru's perceived stranglehold on the market. A series of arid islands off the South American nation's coast serve as a virtual guano factory: Their fish-filled waters attract vast flocks of seabirds, which roost, and shit, on the islands. <br><br>After tens of thousands of years, the islands were hundreds of feet deep in bird droppings. The ancestors of the Incas had spread guano on their fields at least as far back as 500 a.d. and prized this "white gold" nearly as dearly as their gold gold, but bird poop's value was lost on the conquistadors, who blindly pursued the latter. Guano's value as a fertilizer didn't dawn on the West until the early 19th century (Baltimore's first boatload of bird dung arrived in 1824), but when it did conflict quickly ensued. The Peruvian government tightly controlled delivery of its smelly commodity to the world; U.S. farmers thought they were getting too little and paying too much.<br><br>More ...<br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/misctopic/navassa/poop.htm">www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/misctopic/navassa/poop.htm</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>More about Navassa: <br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/misctopic/navassa/navassa.htm">www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/misctopic/navassa/navassa.htm</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE IMAGE START--><img src="http://xs47.xs.to/pics/05382/navassa.jpg"/><!--EZCODE IMAGE END--> <p></p><i></i>
