A HISTORIAN'S 



COAST 



The Guano Gospel 



By David Cecelski 



T 



-Lhe: 



Navassa Guano Co., circa 1905, led Wilmington' s fertilizer industry. 



.he smallest places sometimes 

 have the grandest stories. I thought about 

 this recently when I visited Navassa, a small 

 town a few miles from Wilmington. A rural, 

 mainly African-American community, 

 Navassa is surrounded by cypress swamps 

 and river. It's a remote, quiet place without 

 even a small downtown — just country 

 homes with gardens, an old graveyard, a 

 lumberyard, a volunteer fire and rescue 

 squad, a Masonic lodge, the Mount Calvary 

 AME Church and a couple of abandoned 



fertilizer factories. You wouldn't guess that 

 Navassa's past spans continents and seas — 

 or that it upends much of what we think 

 about our coastal history. 



Navassa's story begins with the guano 

 fertilizer boom that swept America in the 

 19th century. Guano, from the Quechua 

 word huano, meaning dung, originally 

 referred only to the dried excrement of 

 seabirds. When the German explorer and 

 scientist Baron von Humboldt visited Peru 

 early in the 1 800s, he found some of its 



rookery islands with 100-foot-thick layers of 

 bird droppings. Countless generations of 

 albatross, gulls, penguins, cormorants and 

 other seabirds had caked the islands with 

 their nitrogen-rich droppings. 



First introduced to Europe by 

 Humboldt, Peruvian guano was an extraordi- 

 narily rich source of ammonia, phosphate 

 and other nitrogenous compounds, as well as 

 a source of alkaline salts, sulfate of lime and 

 other organic matter that improved plant 

 growth. Demand for guano fertilizer soon 



20 EARLY SUMMER 1998 



