In 1857, the United States began annexing small islands throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific. By the end of the century, it would claim almost a hundred of them. The islands had no indigenous populations and, at the time, no strategic value. They tended to be remote, rocky, and rainless but they had the one thing that everyone in the nineteenth century badly wanted. They had “white gold,” - guano - better known as bird shit.
In the nineteenth century, land fertility started suffering because of the lack of nitrogen. Nitrogen makes up nearly four-fifths of the earth’s atmosphere by volume but it is almost exclusively dinitrogen (N2) which is unreactive and thus inaccessible to plants. The bacteria that inhabit the nodules of the roots of some legumes can convert it into a form usable by plants. It took chemists until the nineteenth century to piece all that together.
But farmers, in their own way, had comprehended it for millennia. All agricultural traditions require methods for managing nitrogen flows. Nitrogen-rich manures are spread, crops rotated, forests burned, fields left fallow, or lentils planted. These complex systems faltered, however, in the nineteenth century. Farms that used to grow a rotating variety of crops for local consumption started focusing on the most profitable crops and grew them for distant markets. Single-crop farms yielded diminishing returns due to what was called “Soil exhaustion”.
Farmers used various items for organic material that could be spread on their fields to replenish them like rapeseed cake, linseed cake, malt dust, straw, spoiled hay, oats, putrefied animal remains etc. What did work was guano. That term can refer to any bird or bat feces used as fertilizer, but the guano on everyone’s minds was the nitrogen-rich droppings of cormorants, boobies, and pelicans on the Chincha Islands off the coast of Peru. The guano piled hundreds of feet high and baked in the sun, so that the very rock of the islands was centuries’ worth of calcified bird droppings.
Guano's sharp, ammoniacal smell was notorious, perceptible from miles off. And yet, sprinkled in small quantities over the farms of North America that were nitrogen-starved, the stuff worked miracles. Huge demand drove up the cost. So did the tight control of the supply by British firms that monopolized guano exports from the Chinchas and kept prices high. The “guano question” came up again and again in the US Congress.
Guano entrepreneurs hastily formed the American Guano Company, with a capitalization of $10 million (all federal expenditures in 1850 totaled less than $45 million). The US passed the Guano Islands Act in 1856. Under its terms, whenever a U.S. citizen discovered guano on an unclaimed, uninhabited island, that island would, “at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.” This meant that those islands would, in some way, belong to the country. This Act is the reason why the USA has so many territories in the Pacific today.
Ian Fleming' novel, Doctor No is set on a guano island. When James Bond first arrives in Jamaica, the colonial secretary sits him down for a lecture on guano’s history (“Bond prepared to be bored”) which lasts an entire chapter. The secretary starts with the British-Peruvian monopoly and works his way up to Fritz Haber’s invention of ammonia synthesis. The point, as he comes to it, is that there are small, uninhabited islands scattered around the Caribbean. And one has been purchased by a mysterious international figure, Doctor Julius No.
At the end of the novel, Bond defeats Doctor No by burying him in a guano pit, the villain’s “screaming lungs stuffing with the filthy dust” until he dies. In the 1962 film version, however, there is no trace of guano. Doctor No’s base is powered by a nuclear reactor, and Bond triumphs in the end by triggering a meltdown, drowning Doctor No in the pool containing the overheating reactor and wrecking the island.
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