Hi I'm the History Guy I have a degree in history, I love history, if you love
history too this is the channel for you. In the 1840s new deposits of gold were found
off the coast of Peru, and it spurred the largest gold rush in the history of the world as nations
scrambled, not just to dominate the new supplies in Peru, but to scour the world searching for
their own supplies. Economies turned on it, wars were fought over it, but I'm not talking about the
yellow rock, I'm talking about a brand new kind of gold that was called “White Gold”, and it's so
impacted the world that it changed the geography of the world, and redefined our understanding of
a Nation-state, and that is why today we are going to talk about the “Great Guano Craze”.
Yeah, I said guano, and it is what you think it is, bird poo. Mounds of the stuff millions of tons
of bird poo, and understand how bird poo, and more specifically Peruvian bird poo changed the world,
we have to understand a little bit about the interworking of agriculture, economics,
and chemistry. You see the story goes like this, countries need people, people need food. Food is
grown from the ground as plants, plants require nutrients and so to a large extent a country's
wealth depends upon the fertility of its soil, the ability of the soil to provide the nutrients to
provide the plants to feed the people, but the trick is you can improve the fertility of your
soil with fertilizer, and thus make your country wealthier. Fertilizer is made up of three key
ingredients, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, and as luck would have it, Peruvian seabird guano
is very rich in all three. It all has to do with this thing called the Humboldt Current,
named after Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, the Humboldt Current is a cold water
current that comes from Antarctica up the coast of Peru, and it's an up swelling, which means it
brings nutrient-rich water from the bottom of the ocean up into the warmer depths which are usually
nutrient depleted. This creates the world's most prolific large marine ecosystem, with huge schools
of fish like sardines and anchovies and mackerel, those fish are then eaten by Peruvian seabirds
like Pelicans and Cormorants and Boobies, and because of the Humboldt Current, the islands off
the coast of Peru tend to be windswept, which means that they are tall dry volcanic islands
perfect for taking the birds guano and drying it in conveniently mineable form, sometimes more than
a hundred feet deep. There are signs that Peruvian tribes might have been using guano as fertilizers
early as 100 A.D. and there's archaeology on the Cinque islands, the most prolific of the Guano
Islands, saying that it might have been mined there in the first millennia A.D. but we know by
the 14th century that the Incas so valued guano, that it was a capital offense to kill a guano
producing bird, that is to say, the Incas had laws to preserve seabird ecology 700 years ago. But
after the Spanish conquest of the Incas there was so much depopulation and loss of culture,
that the collection of guano as fertilizer was forgotten, and the guano was allowed to
accumulate unmolested clear until the 1840s. By the middle of the 19th century, traditional
methods of fertilization were insufficient to keep up with population growth in Europe
and soil was becoming depleted, but the study of organic chemistry was just catching up with
the organic chemistry of bird guano. In 1840, famous German chemist Justus von Liebig was
applying the study of organic chemistry to plant nutrition. In his book, Organic Chemistry and its
Application to Agriculture and Physiology, he noted the potential of guano as a fertilizer,
and then in 1841, Scottish chemist James Johnston published the gripping essay,
“On Guano” in the British Journal of the Royal Society of Agriculture. He noted experiments where
guano could increase turnip yields by as much as two or threefold. The demand was clear, in 1841
the first guano ship from Peru bound for Europe left with 2,000 tons of Peruvian guano bound for
Liverpool and “The Great Guano Craze” had begun. By the 1850s, Britain was importing 300,000 tons
of guano a year, at America another 175,000 tons. A British officer visiting the Chincha Islands
noted seeing over 100 ships, representing 11 different countries loading guano. Ships
could wait as long as eight months before getting a load. An enterprising Irishman
named Russell Grace had the idea to build a store servicing those ships, and made such a fortune,
that he moved to the United States and became mayor of New York City. In 1860,
433 ships left Peru carrying 350,000 tons of guano worth fifteen million dollars. Guano provided most
Peruvian income between 1840 and 1880, exporting some 2 million tons, worth 2 billion dollars. And
while all that money was certainly a boon for the Peruvian economy it actually kept them from
instituting economic reforms and made them far too dependent upon one industry, that really showed
in 1864 during the Chincha Islands War. Spain, trying to reassert authority over her old colony
and make claims and old debts, militarily occupied the Chincha Islands. At the time
Peru was so dependent upon guano money that the Chincha Islands represented 60% of the governance
revenue, and by denying him that revenue, Spain was able to extort from Peru an agreement so
unfavorable, that it led to a popular uprising and a coup against the government. By the 1870s
the guano was running out and Peru was nearly bankrupt. In the United States, guano was so
important that the importation of affordable guano made Millard Fillmore's 1850 State of the Union
address, and spurred Congress in 1856 to pass the Guano Islands Act. The Act allows any American,
to go to any island not already claimed by another nation, and claim that island for the purpose of
mining guano, and the US military will defend that claim. Now this changed our understanding
of the nation, previously the United States had only ever claimed territory, that at some point,
might become a state. This is the first time that we claimed unoccupied, and unoccupiable territory,
merely for the purpose of economic exploitation, and that redefined our understanding of a
nation-state and created the concept of insular areas. Eventually companies like the American
Guano Company claimed more than a hundred islands under the Guano Islands Act, and while the claims
on most of those reverted when the guano was exhausted, the U.S. hung on to some of them,
and some of them became important military bases during the Second World War notably Midway
Island. We increased the size of some of those islands, sometimes two and three hundred percent,
through coral dredging in order to get them to accommodate an airbase and therefore the
Guano Islands literally changed the world map. We still claim about a dozen of those islands,
and as territorial claims go 200 miles out into the ocean, that means the U.S. claims large swaths
of the Pacific and much of that now is part of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument,
the largest protected area on earth three times the size of California all
because of islands claimed, because of bird poo. In the end guano was a victim of its own success,
by 1880 it was getting scarce and expensive. In 1880 guano cost seventy six dollars a pound,
that's a quarter the price of real gold, and because of that expense and that scarcity, it
drove the development of synthetic alternatives, which are mostly used today, but guano is making a
comeback as there's more popularity for organic farming and using better conservation measures
Peru is again back in the business of mining in exporting guano. And while the guano craze
certainly impacted the world, caused Wars, changed the map, created the world's largest
preserved area, the biggest thing that it did was feed the world. From 1840 to 1880 it was the most
popular fertilizer that allowed us to increase the production of food to match the increase in
production of population and that alone is reason for you to appreciate the value of the white gold.
I'm the history I hope you enjoyed this edition of my channel five minutes of
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