- There are a bunch of islands that the United States owns
at the very edge of this map, deep into the Pacific
like out here.
And they all say like a little U.S. next to them.
They're teeny tiny island where no one lives
and they're just in the middle of the Pacific
so far away from the actual United States.
Why do we own all these weird islands?
What happened?
Well, it has to do with farming and bird poop.
(upbeat hiphop music)
Back in the old days, farming looked like this.
(cows mooing)
Basically just small groups of people usually a few families
that would grow food for their community
and that was about it.
But soon the world started to change
and started to look a lot less like this
and a lot more like this.
People started moving into the city
and working in factories,
mass producing commodities and items
that would be shipped all around the world.
And suddenly farmers had an incentive
and a duty to make more food
to ship it to these non-farm workers
who are now living in cities.
Farms started specializing in one crop like corn or wheat
and they were able to sell their crops
not only to their local markets
but to markets all around the world.
But there's a problem here,
when you're a farmer and you're producing the same crop
year after year, your soil starts to lose its nutrients.
It doesn't have time to regenerate
and it eventually becomes completely exhausted
making it impossible for you to produce in abundance.
And if you can't make food in abundance
then you can't feed these ever-growing cities
of people who are working in factories.
And then the global economy starts to break down
and the whole thing stops.
For a moment there in the 1800's
it was looking like earth
would not be able to sustain a population over like
two and a half billion people
because there wasn't enough nutrients in the soil
to keep up with the demand for food.
But luckily there was a solution
to this soil nutrients problem.
And that solution looked like this.
(upbeat music)
- One oh!
- Animal waste from any animal
is packed with the nutrients that the soil needs
to rejuvenate itself to grow more crops year after year.
Another term for this is fertilizer.
And so now we're talking about farms
and industrialization and fertilizer
and you're probably thinking this is a boring story
but these simple facts led the United States
to expand well beyond
the borders that we think of the United States today,
to colonize far flung islands
in the Pacific and the Caribbean
all in search of one special commodity, bird shit.
(upbeat music)
So it's the mid 1800's and like I said,
these farmers are growing a ton of a single crop
sending it mainly to cities to be consumed.
Now, before all of this urbanization
when people would eat this food,
the waste that they would produce
would be captured and brought back onto the field
which would help rejuvenate the nutrients in the field
and allow them to continue to grow
in this sort of sustainable cycle.
But now all of that human waste
was being piped into sewage systems
and then sent out to rivers and to the ocean
completely lost.
One estimate said that
every year $50 million worth of valuable fertilizer
was just wasted away through the sewer system.
And this is where the bird shit comes in.
(birds chirping) (upbeat music)
If you go down to Peru and look right off the coast
you're gonna see a few islands.
These are a little more than just some rocks
in the middle of the ocean that were totally uninhabited.
Well, I guess they were inhabited
just not by humans but by birds.
These birds spend their day eating fish
from the ocean around the rocks,
inevitably dropping their waste,
pair this with the fact that
these rocks don't get a lot of rain.
So instead this bird dung just sits there
day after day, year after year baking in the sun
and eventually it becomes like rock hard.
You can imagine that after thousands of years
of this process you start to get some pretty thick layers
of bird shit.
These deposits would get up to 60 meters.
That's like the size of this random building
in Argentina that I found on the internet.
The building's not important, the height is.
This calcified bird poop is called guano
and it contains exactly
what the farmers in the United States needed
to continue with the demand for more and more food
in the cities.
Because again, bird and animal waste is full of
chemical properties like nitrogen
that are vital for regenerating soil,
meaning they're good fertilizer.
Once this guano was discovered,
there was a race for everyone around the world
to get their hands on it.
Soon in the United States,
guano became this like mythical magical substance.
There's all these tall tales that pop up
where like this dad leaves his kid in the shed
where the guano is contained
and he opens the shed an hour later
and the kid is now a full grown man with facial hair
or the farmer who sprinkles guano on his cucumbers
and the vines of the cucumbers pop up
and start to like attack the man.
I mean, it's just crazy.
It's obviously not fact-based or true
but it gave a sense that there was this craze
that guano was going to be the savior
of all of the farmers issues in the United States.
So inevitably an economy and a trade around guano emerged.
And as always at this time, the British got there first.
So there was a British firm
that had a monopoly over all the guano trade
from these islands in Peru,
which was sort of the best known place
for guano at the time.
So with this one British firm controlling
the whole guano trade and demand surging,
the prices skyrocketed
making it way more expensive for American farmers
to get their hands on this amazing stuff.
So who steps in to solve this issue?
The president of the United States.
In his first state of the union address,
President Fillmore gets up and talks about guano.
He says that,
"Peruvian guano has become so desirable an article"
that he felt that "the duty of the government
to secure it at a good price for American farmers."
This is crazy to me.
Can you imagine the president of the United States
getting up to address the nation
and making it a national priority
to go to some far flung place
to secure some natural resource that
is really important for economic growth
- On my orders,
coalition forces have began striking selected targets
of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability
to wage war.
- Yeah, I mean it's not that weird I guess.
So yeah this is becoming a geopolitical issue
the president is involved, they want all the guano.
President Fillmore says, "nothing will be omitted on my part
in the effort to secure this magical life giving bird shit."
Okay actually he didn't say that last part
the quotation should have ended, like up here.
I just sort of paraphrased the rest.
The point is President Fillmore
was serious about this issue.
He was gonna get his guano at any cost.
So he did what you do when you're a rising superpower
and he promised to send in warships
to these Peruvian Islands if he had to
in order to secure guano at a good price,
even though Peru rightfully had sovereignty
over these islands
and yet here's a president sending in warships
in order to secure the resource
again, kind of sounds familiar.
- America is addicted to oil.
- But American lawmakers in Congress
had another answer to this problem
which would allow Americans to get their own Guano Islands.
The proposed law said that any American citizen
not a government official or a military personnel
could go out on their boat anywhere in the ocean
and if they stumble upon one of these rocks
that's covered in calcified bird poop they could claim it
not just for themselves
but for the country of the United States.
No treaties, no negotiations, no official declaration,
no government involvement even
just American citizens out on their boats,
looking for bird poop islands.
Some lawmakers at the time were
understandably uneasy with this law.
Now remember that the U.S.
was expanding a lot at this time.
Remember that video I made about Mexico
and how they're sort taking over Texas and California
and that whole area.
Yeah, that's happening around this time.
But the U.S. hadn't moved beyond this landmass,
this contiguous shape that we think of
when we think of the United States.
Yeah, we had moved West
but we hadn't gone for far-flung colonies
far into the Pacific ocean.
And secondly, the lawmakers are like,
since when do we let just like random American citizens
go out and like help us colonize islands
anywhere in the world.
This would set a precedent that these lawmakers were worried
would have way bigger consequences
than just like letting people go get fertilizer
for their farms.
The sponsor of this bill
was trying to get it through Congress,
came out and said, "listen guys, you're overreacting.
This isn't like legit imperialism.
We're not like going out
and like taking over whole countries
like the British or the French were doing
carving up continents, no, no no.
We're just going to these rocks to get some fertilizer
for our farms it's harmless."
And this was apparently enough to convince the critics
and this law passes.
The Guano Islands Act of 1856
where literally any American
can go help expand the United States
by claiming Guano Islands and mining this stuff
and bringing it back to the United States.
And so now a giant blitz
of guano exploration begins by American citizens.
(upbeat music)
Sort of like the gold rush,
but you know, for bird poop.
Soon this claim start rolling in to the U.S. government
random guy X from Nebraska,
sailed to a random island in the Pacific
planted an American flag
and now it belongs to the United States of America.
All in all by the end there were 94 separate islands
mainly in the Pacific and the Caribbean.
The guano was chipped away, harvested, put on ships,
brought back to the United States
and farmers thrived.
But you know who didn't thrive?
The people who had to mine this stuff.
I mean, you can imagine
being the person who has to go onto these islands
where you have thousands and thousands of years
worth of layers of bird droppings
to drill and cut that away
and to bring it onto a ship
to be shipped back to United States
it's just like excruciating to think about.
This was a pretty horrendous job.
And it came with all sorts of side effects
like lung issues or running out of food
because you're not on an island that grows food
you're on a literal like rock
and so the food would go bad in these ships
and the people would be like stranded at sea.
Unsurprisingly these guano barons would trick people
into coming with them on these expeditions.
In the case of the Pacific
they would often target Hawaiians to recruit for these jobs.
And in the case of the Caribbean
they would often target Black Americans
recently freed from slavery
to come work on these guano ships.
As some members of Congress at the time worried,
the Guano Act had ramifications
well beyond guano and fertilizer.
In fact, guano became totally obsolete a few years later
in the early 1900's when a German chemist invented
perhaps the most important invention of all time,
which was synthetic fertilizer
a way to actually make fertilizer
without having to get it from like animal waste.
This allowed the population to grow to what it is today
and really changed the history of humanity.
But what it did is it made guano obsolete.
And yet this law that allows Americans
to take over random islands
and the islands themselves remained on the books.
But eventually with time,
these claims for random rocks in the Pacific and Caribbean
sort of just withered away and we either withdrew the claims
or people forgot about them
and they were eventually claimed by local countries
like Kiribati or Tonga
and places like Haiti in the Caribbean.
But a few of these Guano Islands
that we originally claimed remain today.
We still own them, they're still a part of our borders
in both the Pacific and the Caribbean
but the U.S. government isn't interested in using them
for guano anymore obviously,
these mostly uninhabited rocks in the ocean
are mainly used by the U.S. military
for landing strips and sea ports.
They also serve to help the U.S. with their ocean borders
because international law says that
if you have a piece of island,
you get a big swath of ocean around it
for your exclusive economic zone.
Meaning the country who owns this island
has exclusive economic rights
in all of this ocean around their islands.
So this greatly enhances the U.S.'s ability
to have sovereignty and control
over certain parts of the ocean
in the Pacific and Caribbean.
But perhaps the most important result from this guano fest
was a psychological one.
Like we talked about before,
the U.S. was expanding but it hadn't expanded
beyond this contiguous land mass in North America
that it was taking over rapidly in the 1800's.
But soon after this laws passed,
suddenly the U.S. had possessions in far away oceans.
And what happens after this is a domino effect.
Suddenly if we can take over islands in the Pacific,
why can't we annex Hawaii?
Or occupy Cuba?
Or Puerto Rico?
Or take over an entire country of the Philippines
from Spain?
This law that allowed Americans
to claim islands all over the world
was the first step towards real big boy empire behavior.
And it all started with the hunt for bird shit.
Thanks for watching my video about bird shit.
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There's a link in my description
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And thank you Squarespace for sponsoring this video.
Thank you all for watching.
I am making a lot of these U.S. expansion videos
because there's so much to cover
and so many parts of the story
and I want to piece it together in this series.
So I'm gonna keep doing it
and eventually we'll have like loads of videos
of how the U.S. grew to the shape that it is today.
So keep an eye out for more of that
and I will talk to you soon.
See you later.
(upbeat music)