I’ve done a lot of reading about guano. Bird poop. It was discovered to be a great, cheap alternative fertilizer for European crops, and during the nineteenth century its harvest and sale became a booming industry. I blogged here about how the guano may have been the source of the plant fungus that decimated the potato crops in the 1840s and led to the Great Hunger.
Charles C. Mann’s fascinating book 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, gives a thorough (and grim) explanation of the way the guano trade worked.
Fertilizer ships from Europe sailed to the Chincha islands, thirteen miles off the coast of Peru, where huge piles of sea bird poop were stacked as high as a twelve-story building. According to Mann, the islands gave off a stench that could be smelled long before a ship reached them. And nothing grew on the islands; the only living things were “bats, scorpions, spiders, ticks, and biting flies.” There was no drinkable water, and not a single plant on the barren, smelly, dry landscape.
Mining the guano was wretched work. Miners had to hack away at the guano, enveloping themselves in corrosive dust clouds. The poop was dumped through a long tube, where it dropped directly into the ships’ holds below, exploding into toxic dust that enveloped the ship. No one wanted to work in those miserable conditions. They tried convicts and African slaves, but the convicts killed themselves (and one another) and the black slaves were too valuable to “waste” in the mines, as life tended to be brutish and short for those forced to perform this awful work. The solution? Enslaved Chinese workers.
As many as a quarter million Chinese indentured workers were shipped there, to live in virtual slavery, in a horrific alternate Middle passage you don’t hear much about.
And it gets worse, if that’s possible. After awhile, guano traders didn’t bother to draw up contracts and dupe workers into thinking they were going somewhere else to work. They just began slave raids.
Easter Island in Polynesia, famous for its mysterious carved statues, was wiped out by guano slave raids. In 1862, a third of the population (1000 men) was kidnapped in a slave raid and shipped to the Chincha Islands, where they were forced to work in the guano quarries. As many as 900 died there, and after a few countries protested, the remaining 100 were repatriated to the island, carrying disease with them. The rest of the population was then wiped out by disease.