The Alchemy of Air (Book)

Because every barrel of gunpowder required three-quarters of a barrel of saltpeter, access to saltpeter became a matter of national survival.
In 1626 England’s King Charles I commanded his subjects to “carefully and constantly keep and preserve in some convenient vessels or receptacles fit for the purpose, all the urine of man during the whole year, and all the stale of beasts which they can save” to be donated to the saltpeter plantations
The mother lode of saltpeter, however, the only natural deposits in the world large enough to feed the gunpowder needs of an entire nation, was discovered in the mud flats of the Ganges in India (where it was believed that a combination of the river water, the hot climate, and the dung of holy cows combined to create a sort of huge natural saltpeter plantation). The British East India Company started shipping it to England by the ton in the mid-seventeenth century—it was one of the company’s most important cargoes—and this vital natural resource made India an especially important target for European colonial expansion. Saltpeter was a significant factor in favor of the British takeover of India.

They survived only because their village perched on the edge of one of the world’s richest fishing grounds. The great Humboldt Current, a giant river in the sea, rolled from Antarctica up along the west coast of South America, bringing with it a wealth of plankton, shrimp, and

fish that fed local seals, natives, and millions of sea birds. The land here was dead. But the sea was teeming.

These were the Chinchas Islands, a sprinkling of rocks six miles off the coast of Pisco, Peru, which constituted, in 1850, acre for acre, the most valuable real estate on earth. The value came from the

ground the workers and the birds walked on: ten stories of guano, the world’s best fertilizer.

Annual shipments grew to hundreds of thousands of tons per year in the United States and as much in Great Britain. Its availability became a matter of national policy. In 1850 President Millard Fillmore, in his first State of the Union address, noted that “Peruvian guano has become so desirable an article to the agricultural interests in the United States that it is the duty of Government to employ all the means properly in its power for the purpose of causing that article to be imported into the country at a reasonable price.”
About a third of the sale price of every ton of guano went into the treasury of Peru, a flow of income that by 1859 accounted for three-quarters of the nation’s national budget.
As long as the money lasted it looked as if Peru, as one enthusiastic observer wrote in 1857, was destined to become “at once the richest and happiest nation on earth.”
The need was so great that in 1856 the U.S. Congress passed the Guano Islands Act, which allowed any U.S. citizen to lay claim to any deserted guano island anywhere in the world and make it U.S. territory.
The Guano Islands Act is still in effect.
In most places around the world, too much rain washed out the nitrogen content and lowered quality. Chinchas-level guano was found on only a very few rocks with the right mix of abundant seabirds and an arid climate. Nothing else came close.
The end of guano also meant an end to Peru’s easy income. By the 1870s the nation was for all practical purposes bankrupt.

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