An Isle Rich in Guano and Discord

The American scientists were awe-struck when they finally penetrated the sheer cliffs and swept away the scorpions of Navassa Island, one of a handful of remote and anachronistic outposts claimed by the United States.

What they found in July were riches far beyond Navassa’s million tons of bird dung--a resource once so valued that it accounted for a rebellion by African American workers, complete with ax murders, leading to a landmark Supreme Court decision on U.S. sovereignty there.

Rather, say the scientists, the tiny island is a rare find: a universe of biodiversity, with more than 200 species found nowhere else on Earth, virtually untouched by human hands for nearly 100 years.

Team leader Michael L. Smith proclaimed it “a marvel of biological treasures.” And marine scientist Nina Young said it “represents one of the true gems of the marine environment, with some of the most spectacular diving, enchanting underwater vistas and pristine coral reefs in the United States.”

Just one problem. Is this speck of limestone 40 miles off Haiti and nearly 600 miles southeast of the Florida Keys really “in the United States,” or even U.S. government property?

No, says Haiti, as it has for more than 140 years. A treasure hunter and would-be bird-dung miner from Alpine, Calif., agrees and is suing the U.S. government to assert his own claim to the isle.

The story behind the battle over just who owns the 2-square-mile rock that rises like an old straw hat from the Caribbean Sea is a tale as rich and diverse as the island’s natural resources.

According to more than 1,000 pages of government documents, the United States’ claim on Navassa is the story of U.S. foreign policy past and present, of slavery and sovereignty, and of a unique yet flawed law that paved the way for a modern-day conflict pitting science against nationalist pride against personal profit.

And at the heart of it all is guano--the Peruvian word for bird manure, which the Incas used to fertilize their fields for nearly a millennium. It was a commodity that became almost as sought-after as Incan gold when British and U.S. farmers in the mid-19th century discovered guano’s magical effect on crop yields.

So valuable was guano in the farmed-out fields of the American Northeast, in fact, that Congress passed legislation in 1856 laying the foundation for the bizarre legacy of Navassa and 78 other tiny pieces of real estate scattered throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean.

Passed and signed into law after little more than a few hours of Senate debate, the Guano Islands Act declares: “When any citizen or citizens of the United States may have discovered . . . 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 . . . said island, rock or key may . . . be considered as appertaining to the United States.”

In effect, “the Congress of the United States deputized each and every American citizen to claim territory for the commonwealth, an act that has no parallel in history,” wrote Wichita State University economics professor Jimmy Skaggs in his 1994 book, “The Great Guano Rush.”

Skaggs, whose years of research on the act made him a rare expert on the subject before his death in 1996, added: “For a decade following passage of the Guano Islands Act, American entrepreneurs seemingly laid claim to every island, rock or key around the globe that might possibly possess fertilizing agents.”

Navassa Island was among the first--and now among the last--in that remarkable inventory.

Today only eight other guano islands--all in the Pacific--are claimed by the United States. One is now part of Hawaii, another of American Samoa; the rest are strewn across the vast ocean between the two. Others once claimed by the United States were ceded over time by a succession of presidents--most recently by Jimmy Carter--to everyone from Britain and France to the Pacific republic of Kiribati.

One of the islands still claimed is Johnston atoll, now the site of chemical weapons incinerators and previously used for nuclear tests. Turned over to Honduras in 1972 was Great Swan Island in the Caribbean, which had been a CIA base for radio propaganda against Cuba’s Communist regime--and was still used by the U.S. years later as a staging ground for Contras seeking to overthrow Nicaragua’s socialist government in the 1980s.

Navassa is the only guano island now in dispute. Sixteen Haitian constitutions through the past century and a half all lay claim to the island. Although Haitian President Rene Preval has yet to publicly renew his nation’s protest over Navassa, his government directed its Miami-based legal advisor, Ira Kurzban, to build Haiti’s legal case.

“I think that Haiti has a very, very good claim,” Kurzban said. “I base that on the history of Navassa Island, the flawed implementation of the Guano Islands Act and the clear claim by the Haitian government at the time it [the island] was occupied by the Americans that it was a part of Haiti.”

In fact, the year after the Baltimore-based Navassa Phosphate Co. occupied and started mining the island in 1857--using dozens of recently freed American slaves--Haiti’s Emperor Faustin I sent two warships to chase the Americans off what he declared to be sovereign Haitian soil. The U.S. Navy responded with a bigger warship.

Haiti Lays Out Its Case for a Hand-Over

Haiti again formally protested in 1872, after the United States ceded two guano islands it had occupied to the neighboring Dominican Republic. Haiti insisted that Navassa was an identical case, and it backed the claim with documents showing that the island was part of the territory Spain ceded to France in 1697 and French King Charles X conceded to Haiti when his nation finally recognized its independence in 1825.

Hamilton Fish, the American secretary of State, again rejected Haiti’s claim, saying that it had never occupied the island before the U.S. laid claim and that the Dominican islands were far closer to Dominican shores than Navassa was to Haiti.

Professor Skaggs and other historians suggest that slavery in the United States was at least partly behind Washington’s 19th century resistance to surrendering Navassa. After all, they said, the United States refused until after the Civil War to recognize the sovereignty of Haiti, where the overwhelming majority are descendants of African slaves.

“The Southern representatives and their sympathizers were bitterly opposed to the recognition of Negro republics,” historian Charles F. Howland wrote in 1929, “both because of their belief that this would acknowledge the equality of the black and because, after 1840, they thought to make the Caribbean an outpost of slavery.”

Slavery of a sort was a theme that ran through the 43 years that American guano miners occupied Navassa.

Through those decades, hundreds of African Americans, working barefoot, dug out Navassa’s dung deposits in the broiling Caribbean heat, pushed tons of it into rail cars and then onto boats for a salary of $8 a month. Most had to borrow more than they made from a company store, forcing them to work for months to repay their debt. They were fined 50 cents for missing a day’s work, and many were bound, beaten or imprisoned by their white supervisors.

“The discipline maintained on the island seems to be that of a convict establishment, without its comforts and cleanliness,” wrote a U.S. Navy officer dispatched by President Benjamin Harrison in 1891 to investigate.

The conditions sparked an uprising in 1889 that left five white supervisors axed or shot to death, and 18 of the workers were indicted for murder. Three eventually were tried, convicted and sentenced to death. They appealed to the Supreme Court, alleging that U.S. authorities had no right to Navassa--and thus no jurisdiction over their crimes.

Although the Supreme Court upheld their convictions--and the U.S. claim to Navassa--the justices stressed that “who is the sovereign of a territory is not a judicial but a political question.”

The ruling also noted that occupation by the Americans was justified “for such period as [the U.S. government] sees fit over the territory so acquired.” And even after Navassa Phosphate Co. abandoned the island in 1900, U.S. authorities continued to reject Haitian claims to it--in 1917, when the U.S. built a lighthouse on the island; and again in 1932, when Haiti’s foreign minister told U.S. diplomats that “it was time some settlement was made of the question.”

None was. But the Haitian appeal led to an exhaustive, 976-page State Department review of the United States’ guano islands. Published in 1933, the report devoted 31 pages to Navassa alone and backed the U.S. claim--as government lawyers continue to do today--with documentation of sea captain Peter Duncan’s original discovery, the 1890 Supreme Court ruling and several U.S. presidential decrees.

Yet the State Department review also cited interpretations of the Guano Islands Act that tended to favor Haiti’s claim. There was a 1905 State Department letter to a prospective buyer of Navassa: “This government possesses no territorial sovereignty over the island of Navassa.” And a 1907 memo by the department’s solicitor general stated: “It is maintained that the United States has not surrendered jurisdiction over Navassa under the Guano Act, but that it could not say Navassa ‘belongs’ to the United States.”

With that report, the controversy faded--until July.

Coast Guard Abandons Lighthouse

When the U.S. Coast Guard finally abandoned its Navassa lighthouse in January 1997, it turned the island over to the Interior Department, which administers the guano islands in the Pacific. In July, the department commissioned Smith’s Washington-based Center for Marine Conservation to explore its new acquisition.

But when news of the U.S. scientific expedition reached Port-au-Prince, several scientists in the Haitian capital renewed their nation’s protest. They asserted that Navassa was not only Haitian but a potential treasure that could awaken their nation to its own environmental disaster.

“Here we have a rich piece of land that offers us the opportunity to reflect upon the destruction a human being can do to the land--an aesthetic beauty of unspoiled land that we can use as a showpiece to teach our people about the environment,” said Ernst Wilson, a Haitian oceanographer who in August formed the Navassa Island Defense Group.

Wilson’s crusade has filled the Haitian media ever since, making Navassa the centerpiece not only for environmentalism but for nationalism and unity at a time when political infighting has left the nation without a government for more than a year.

Yet, while the two governments prepare for a formal debate in the months ahead, there is also the small matter of William Warren, the businessman from Alpine, who has filed a 126-page lawsuit against the U.S. government for failing to recognize what he asserts is his legitimate claim to Navassa.

Warren, who runs a San Diego County-based company that hunts for shipwrecked treasure, says that he “rediscovered” Navassa Island last year after the Coast Guard pulled out and that he filed an official affidavit with the U.S. government claiming it under the Guano Islands Act. Warren accepts the U.S. sovereignty claim on the island, but he cites the 1907 State Department memo in asserting that the U.S. has no ownership rights.

Asked how he rediscovered the island, Warren replied in a telephone interview: “In the World Almanac.”

Asked if he plans to mine guano if he wins title to the island, Warren said, “Oh yeah. Not on a big scale. We’re not planning on using tractors or anything. But I have orders for it from Maine to Hawaii.”

Mostly, Warren said, he plans to use Navassa as a base of operations to search and recover shipwrecked Spanish galleons. He added: “And I’d like to develop a casino there.”

Attorneys for the Interior, Justice and State departments declined comment on Warren’s pending litigation; the U.S. government has until the end of this month to respond in court. But Haitian and U.S. scientists said they doubted Warren’s claim that guano can be profitable in today’s marketplace. And they flatly opposed any development on what the scientists agreed is an environmental treasure.

“It’s definitely not a place you would even want to go camping,” said Smith, the zoologist who led last summer’s Navassa expedition. “The terrain is so rough, there’s nowhere even to pitch a tent, except on a concrete slab where we were literally sweeping the scorpions away.”

Visits by others are unlikely under current Interior Department guidelines. The six-page application titled “Permit to Enter Navassa Island” lists 21 rules and regulations that include strict medical examinations, official debriefings in Washington and bans on such products as tomatoes.

Even then, one Interior official said, no permits are being granted until sovereignty is resolved.

U.S. government lawyers say privately that they are basing American claims to the island almost entirely on the 1890 Supreme Court decision. At the core of the sovereignty debate, though, is the original intent of the Guano Islands Act, and history suggests that it was not meant to expand U.S. territory.

William H. Seward, the senator who sponsored the act, stressed during Senate debate: “The bill is framed so as to embrace only those more ragged rocks which are covered with this deposit in the ocean, which are fit for no dominion or for anything else except for the guano which is found upon there.

“The bill itself,” he added, “provides that whenever the guano should be exhausted, or cease to be found on the islands, they should revert and relapse out of the jurisdiction of the United States.”