- 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. I wanna tell you about Squarespace. They sponsored today's video and I'm really grateful for that but I'm also really grateful that they have this really cool
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integration, analytics, everything that is just really useful for running an online
business or portfolio or just having a creative presence online, Squarespace just makes it easy
it's like a one stop shop. I've used Squarespace for many years long before they came to sponsor video. And that's why I'm excited
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really believe in the service. So if you were looking to
either start an online presence or revamp your online presence, I really recommend Squarespace to do this. There's a link in my description that when you click helps
support this channel but it also gives you an offer of 10% off any purchase you make on Squarespace. So you can go get hosting or a domain name or whatever you need
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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)
Great video.
He also has another good video to watch: “How the US stole Hawaii”. Christian missionaries turned into sugar/fruit plantation owners (like Dole). Then the US gov sent in the military to help business interests, staged a coup, and even banned the Hawaiian language!
So much freedom and human rights!
https://youtu.be/XK2MBnw6RlY
Before the guano the US got filthy rich through intermediation trade during the french revolutionary/ Napoleomic wars. As the spanish navy crumbled, the US replaced it in the America - Europe trade. If I remember right that is part of the reason of the 1812 war with Britain.
I think they also used that opportunity to pick up silver and furs through pacific south america and sell it in Guangzhou as well, making a world round trip that earned a lot of money for Massachusset traders.
Stole most of them from Japan.