Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World

by Gregory Rosenthal

  Bodies, both human and avian, were important mediums that connected disparate natures and wove guano islands into the larger Hawaiian Pacific World. In writing home, Hawaiian migrant workers evinced their concerns, as well as those of the larger community, of the pono (well-being) of their kino (bodies). In the harsh working environment, Hawaiian men struggled to keep their bodies pono by eating right, maintaining ample rest and sleep, and inventing novel ways to recreate and exercise their bodies in what was an unaccustomed environment. Seabird bodies were also significant. They were vehicles for incorporating—literally digesting—the larger transoceanic ecology of fish, squid, winds, and waves, and transforming it all into feces that later became guano. It was seabirds’ bodies that built the “land” of these islands and largely constituted the environment that Hawaiian migrant workers lived in and worked in as guano miners.

  GLOBAL GUANO

  The 1850s and 1860s were a period of global economic and ecological changes known as the “great guano rush” or “guano island mania.” At this time, Euro-American farmers in the United States desired bird guano to fertilize overworked, nutrient-exhausted fields. In the 1840s and 1850s, most Americans purchased guano that was imported from the Chincha Islands off of Peru. But U.S. farmers and business leaders were unhappy with the high prices that Peruvian authorities charged for this nutrient-rich fertilizer. They united in calling upon the U.S. government to find untapped sources of guano at more reasonable prices. The U.S. Congress therefore passed the Guano Islands Act in 1856, an act that gave private entrepreneurs the power to annex and exploit remote equatorial islands in the Pacific Ocean and in the Caribbean under the protection of the U.S. flag. Shrewd business leaders, many already in the business of whaling and trans-Pacific trade, immediately sent ships to traverse the ocean in quest of uninhabited islands—that is, uninhabited by humans, but hopefully inhabited by millions of seabirds and their accumulated droppings. Sticking an American flag in the coral sand and burying a glass bottle with a declaration of annexation inside was the only act necessary for the U.S. government to recognize sovereignty over these islands. Baker, Jarvis, and Howland Islands were three of the first such “guano islands” gobbled up by transnational American companies. These islands became part of a continually expanding U.S. empire. These islands were also where the most extensive guano extraction took place in the Central Pacific.4

  To make these islands profitable, American businesses relied almost exclusively on Hawaiian migrant labor, shipping in hundreds of men from roughly two thousand miles away. The employment of kanaka labor on U.S. guano islands in the 1850s and 1860s was a continuation of trends already reflected in American whaling: indeed, many Hawaiian guano workers had previously served on whaling ships, and vice versa. Capital flowed into both industries, frequently from the same sources.

  This guano boom, however, was short lived. The U.S. Civil War (1861–1865) significantly disrupted the global fertilizer industry. During the war, Northern military forces curtailed and blockaded international trade with ports in the U.S. South, which was the largest market in the world for Pacific Island guano. Plantation-scale cotton production in the South required significant inputs of nutrient replacement. The Boston firm Glidden & Williams remarked on this situation in 1862 when they, in a letter to D.C. Waterman and Company, a Honolulu firm contracting Hawaiian labor for the islands, recommended “to take only a small force [of laborers to Howland Island].” Earlier in the year they had cautiously expressed hope that the war would soon end, “& then the South would be opened for Guano.” But during much of the early 1860s, the market was constricting and the need for labor diminishing.5

  Fear of the collapse of the industry, less than one decade after it had begun in 1856, prompted another business partner, P.W. Penhallow, to write to D.C. Waterman in 1864 with his “hope [that] this Guano business is just beginning to be developed,” so that “both yourself & the writer may get something out of it before it is done.” The industry did not immediately collapse due to the U.S. Civil War, but rather the war combined with the discovery of new, less expensive, more locally produced sources of phosphorus and other nutrients made the extraction of seabird guano half a world away seem a ludicrous investment. Consequently, just as opportunities for Hawaiian employment in whaling and other international industries were fast disappearing, the Hawaiian role in guano extraction declined as rapidly as it had first appeared.6

  In this time, perhaps as many as one thousand Hawaiian men traveled to the guano islands and experienced life and labor among the birds. The importance of guano in the Hawaiian psyche during this decade cannot be overstated. Guano was on everyone’s minds, even that of the young kamaʻāina (Hawaiʻi-born) George Dole, son of a Euro-American Christian missionary. In 1859, Dole wrote a school essay on the topic of the newly found, newly famous feces. “The Peruvian government have, for a number of years past, exported large quantities of guano from the Chincha Islands, which are situated about 150 miles west of Lima,” he wrote. But now, “guano islands have lately been discovered in the Pacific Ocean near the equator, and large companies have been formed in the United States for the purpose of working them and taking the guano to North America or Europe.” Despite never having visited these islands, Dole attempted to describe the mysterious seabird world of Jarvis Island, over one thousand miles east of Baker and Howland. “Jarves Island is low and almost entirely destitute of verdure. No wild animals abound except a few goats which came originaly from Honolulu.” As for the work, “the guano lies in beds of different sizes, depth, and value, in various parts of the island. These beds are worked by laborers imported chiefly from the Hawaiian Islands.”7

  Dole’s data was likely compiled from the frequent reports published in Hawaiian newspapers discussing conditions on these remote islands. It is not clear if Dole read the Hawaiian-language newspapers in addition to Honolulu’s many English-language ones. Workers’ stories, in their own voices, were almost exclusively confined to the Hawaiian-language press. In his school essay, Dole concluded that “it is thought by some that the guano trade will in a few years take the place of the whaling business, which is already declining, and which will perhaps in half a century, entirely disappear.” His premonitions were incorrect, but the importance he placed on the industry at the time was appropriate. In the 1850s and 1860s, guano simultaneously captured the imaginations of capitalists just as it captured the labor (and sometimes the lives) of Hawaiian migrant workers who experienced firsthand what haole schoolboys could only imagine.8

  BIRDLAND

  The red-tailed tropicbird takes wing again. The equatorial Pacific where so many seabirds nest is not as biologically productive as other parts of the ocean, meaning that these animals must travel thousands of miles away, for days if not weeks at a time, to find the fish and squid that they need to feed themselves and their young. There is great ichthyological diversity within Howland, Jarvis, and Baker Islands’ reef flats. Within the coral reef ecosystem live many hundreds of species of reef fish, but these are not the preferred food of the seabirds. Immediately beyond the reef’s edge, the equatorial ocean is barren of biology: it is an oceanic desert. Thus the tropicbird takes wing for a while, seeking productive ocean waters well beyond the equator. Seabirds know where these places are, although they are incredibly small. Comprising only approximately 0.1 percent of the entire ocean’s surface, seabirds’ feeding grounds are places where fish and squid arise and provide them with food for life. Underneath the surface of these unmarked sites are oceanic processes unnoticeable to humans, yet recognized by seabirds.9

  Below seabird feeding grounds sit giant sentinels of rock called seamounts, the ruins of former volcanic mountains. Millions of years ago these mountains soared above the sea and provided a place for seabirds to nest; now submerged, they provide seabirds with a place to feed. Below the surface, underwater ocean currents propel deep, cold ocean water up the seamount’s steep slopes. As the cold water rises, so do cold-water fishes and squids
. When these species arrive at the surface of the ocean, seabirds like the red-tailed tropicbird are there, waiting for their meal. This oceanic process, termed upwelling, occurs elsewhere throughout the Pacific Ocean. The famous Humboldt Current forces the upwelling of cold water as far north along the South American Pacific shelf as the Galapagos Islands where, remarkably, even penguins live. Upwelling also occurs in remote areas of the ocean where two underwater currents converge, pushing cold water to the surface along with fish and squid. Seabirds live in an oceanic world where land, air, and water converge, act upon each other, and make up separate yet combined components of oceanic space. If we were to draw a map of this space, we would have to include the underwater topography of seamounts, as well as the seamounts’ resident cephalopod and ichthyological mountain climbers.10

  FIGURE 10. Charles Livingston Bull, Tropic-Bird Fishing, 1902. Reproduced from James D. Hague, “Our Equatorial Islands; with an Account of Some Personal Experiences,” Century 64, no. 5 (1902): 669.

  On a whole, seabirds spend most of their lives in the airspace just above the ocean, not on land. Some seabirds spend weeks, even years, soaring along the winds without ever alighting on a hard surface. The red-tailed tropicbird, like many seabirds, depends on equatorial Pacific islands for breeding only—as safe places for mating, laying eggs, rearing young. Some seabirds even sleep on the wing, riding the winds and somehow never crashing into the ocean. They soar at work and at play, returning to land only when their inner timepieces tell them it is time to breed. When they do return to land, they encounter a world that really could not be any more different than the one they have known at sea.

  After months of flying solo, many seabirds come to rest on Baker, Jarvis, and Howland Islands among millions of other birds all sharing the same space. Although frequently documented by nineteenth-century human admirers due to their attractive red tail feathers, tropicbirds were only a fraction of the seabird species utilizing these islands. King of all were the sooty terns, black and white squawkers that together formed visible “clouds” of bodies when circling in the air. When they weren’t blackening the sky, these sooties lived in a very un-Christian fashion, or so said humans who disparaged the birds for their lackluster efforts at domesticity; female sooties frequently released multiple eggs onto bare coral rock without constructing any sort of nest, much to the shock of nineteenth-century human observers.11

  Through the cloud of sooties also flocked the frigatebirds. With their sharp V-shaped tails, taunting calls, and aerial maneuvers, frigatebirds threatened the other birds on the islands as they preyed on their chicks. Frigatebirds also waited on the aerial outskirts of islands for seabirds returning home with fish and squid. These frigatebirds surrounded and accosted the returning birds until forcing them to cough up their food, which the frigatebirds then fought over mid-air in a remarkable performance of aerial acrobatics. Because frigatebirds sometimes made a living this way—as “pirates” rather than as decent laborers—they, just like the sooty terns, received the scorn of many a nineteenth-century human. Various terns, boobies, petrels, noddies, shearwaters, and even the occasional albatross, also nested on these islands. Crammed within an area only one mile long by one mile wide, these seabirds coexisted most of the time in a remarkable state of peace. Their various nesting behaviors had evolved so sharply into differentiated ecological niches that each species’ nests varied both spatially and temporally from all others. But overall, life on land for seabirds was hot, flat, and crowded, and not anything like life on the wing.12

  FIGURE 11. Charles Livingston Bull, Frigate Bird, or Man-O’-War Hawk, 1902. Reproduced from James D. Hague, “Our Equatorial Islands; with an Account of Some Personal Experiences,” Century 64, no. 5 (1902): 656.

  Still, life in a seabird colony fostered bonds between members of the same species, and sometimes even across species. Human visitors frequently commented on just how talkative the birds were. One visitor recounted an awful night spent on Baker Island: “It seemed at times as if the house were besieged by innumerable tom-cats; then the tumult resembled the suppressed bleating in goats, and I heard noises as of bats grinding their teeth in rage; again it was the querulous cooing of doves, and soon the chorus was strengthened by unearthly screams, as of ghouls and demons in mortal agony.” This symphony of sounds, heightened during the nesting season, attested to vibrant conversations between partners, families, enemies, and even the occasional overly inquisitive neighbor. There were also definite seasons and defined rituals of courtship within each seabird community. Albatross males and females frequently developed and maintained life-long pairings, usually initiated when the male albatross clucked and clapped his long beak against his lover’s as he gently nibbled her in a prelude to courtship, and perhaps concluding in a performance of synchronized imitative dancing. Frigatebird males showed off their distinctive bright red air pouches underneath their beaks to any and all passing females. They inflated these pouches until they looked like big red balloons.

  FIGURE 12. Seabird Demography of the Equatorial Pacific Ocean, by Group and by Species, including Shorebirds, 1854–1877. Sources: Llewellyn Howland, ed., “Howland Island, Its Birds and Rats, as Observed by a Certain Mr. Stetson in 1854,” Pacific Science 9, no. 2 (1955): 95–106; Albert Francis Judd’s diary [1858], reprinted in A. F. Judd II, ed., The Guano Islands (Honolulu: Family Records, House of Judd, 1935); J. Kuhaloa, “He palapala mai ka mokupuni o Jarvis mai [A letter from the island of Jarvis],” Ka Hae Hawaii, November 17, 1858; Observations of J. M. Brooke [1859], reprinted in A. Binion Amerson, Jr. and Philip C. Shelton, The Natural History of Johnston Atoll, Central Pacific Ocean. Atoll Research Bulletin no. 192 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1975), 165–66, 190, 207, 244, 346, 473; G. P. Judd’s journal [1859], reprinted in Judd, Guano Islands; Daily Evening Standard, February 13, 1860, reprinted in R. Gerard Ward, ed., American Activities in the Central Pacific, 1790–1870, 8 vols. (Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1966–67), 4:94–96; Mabel H. Closson’s observations, seemingly inspired by Elizabeth Kinau Wilder’s recollections [c. 1859–60], in “Under the Southern Cross,” Overland Monthly 21 (1893): 205–16; J. D. Hague, “On the Phosphatic Guano Islands of the Pacific Ocean,” American Journal of Science and Arts 34, no. 101 (1862): 2–21; J. D. Hague, “Our Equatorial Islands; with an Account of Some Personal Experiences,” Century 64, no. 5 (1902): 653–70; “Life on a Guano Island,” New York Times, April 21, 1869; Richard Branscombe Chave, Adventures of a Guano Digger in the Eastern Pacific (unpublished manuscript, 1871; available on microfilm from Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, Australian National University); and observations of Dr. Thomas H. Streets [1877] in Ward, American Activities, 5:473–82. Compiled by the author.

  Along with the security of pair bonding, seabirds also experienced predation in their colonies. We cannot know with certainty what emotions the birds experienced when threatened by predators, but contemporary human observers were less hesitant to speak of avian emotions in response to danger. Rat infestations were one source of predation. These rats were the result of perhaps unintended ecological imperialism by previous human visitors. Rats attacked baby birds and also excelled at stealing eggs from nests. Seabird parents and neighbors banded together to shriek at, flap wings at, and do their best to scare away rats, but they were rarely successful. The piratical frigatebirds sometimes actually helped by gobbling up any rats they could get their beaks on. Newborn chicks faced great odds against survival on a crowded island. Frigatebird and rat attacks, as well as sudden climatic events and even parental abandonment, meant that hundreds of thousands of seabirds each year never lived to see the world beyond their islands. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands did take flight. They would sculpt a life for themselves out of many decades exploring the wonders of this oceanic world.13

  When millions of seabirds nested each year on tiny coral islands sheltered by the dry winds of the equator, vast quantities of feces accumulated. Hundreds if not thousands of miles away, Pacific Ocean seabirds consumed prodigious
amounts of fish and squid, some for their hatchlings and some for their own caloric intake. During periods of feeding, seabirds expelled their feces over the ocean, “wasted,” as an entrepreneurially minded guano businessman might have put it. On land, however, feces accumulated. But it did not just sit there; it seeped into the interstices of coral rock, chemically altering the content of the land itself. To be sure, there was never any land or rock here to begin with, at least not within the past few million years. Baker, Jarvis, and Howland Islands, as seen above the ocean’s surface, consist entirely of calcareous sand and coral rock. The actual mountaintops of Baker Mountain and Jarvis Mountain rest far below sea level. These islands would be completely submerged if not for the dynamic coral growth that maintains a visible presence above the sea.