Bird Poop and Sovereignty at Bay: The Strange Fate of Navassa Island
| Author | Bruce Rich |
| Position | Attorney and author who has served as senior counsel to major environmental organizations |
| Pages | 21-21 |
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 | 21
Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, September/October 2021.
Copyright © 2021, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.
The Developing World
IMAGINE a tiny uninhabited islet in
the Caribbean — smaller than Man-
hattan’s Central Park — where over
two decades ago researchers were aston-
ished to identify more than 650 species,
discovering some 500 new insects and
spiders, of which nearly a third are en-
demic. ey found new lizard and sh
species, and large colonies of seabirds.
Navassa Island, 40 miles o the western
coast of Haiti, is the longest continually
claimed U.S. foreign possession.
But has Navassa ever legitimately
belonged to the United States?
Christopher Columbus de scribed
it in his journals, joining Navassa to
the Spanish Empire until 1697, when
Spain conveyed to
France the western
third of Hispaniola
with it s adjac ent is-
lands. By the late 18th
century the French
colony St. Dom inique
exported nearly half
the world’s sugar and coee, produced
by 500,000 slaves under such brutal
conditions that average life expecta ncy
for landed Africans was six years. e
only successful slave revolt in history
ensued, entailing the defeat of 50,000
of Napoleon’s troops in 1804.
e liberated Africans c alled the
new nation Ha iti, honoring the in-
digenous Taino I ndian name mean-
ing “mountainous land.” e Tainos
numbered hund reds of thousands in
1492. ey were totally exterminated
by 1540 and replaced by black slaves.
Every Haitian constitution in history
but one (written under a U.S. Marine
Corps occupation from 1915 to 1934)
claims the adjacent oshore islands.
Starting in 1825, France, Britain, and
several other European countries o-
cially recognized Haiti — but not the
United States until Abraham Lincoln
acted in 1862.
U.S. overseas expansion began with
the seizure of Navassa under the 1856
Guano Islands Act. e law asserted
the United States could occupy unin-
habited, unclaimed islands with g uano
deposits anywhere in the world. Gua-
no, the nitrogen-rich feces of seabirds,
was then a prized ferti lizer commodity.
e act was ambiguous: gua no islands
would “appertain” to the United States,
and claims could terminate when gua-
no minin g ended.
In 1857 an American sea captain ar-
rogated Navassa under the act, working
with a Baltimore company to extract
the gua no. Haitians had shed around
the island for decades, and even built a
small chapel there. e Haitia n govern-
ment sent two small vessels to stop the
American activities, and the company
appealed to President
James Buchanan for
help. Buchanan force-
fully rushed to defend
U.S. rights to bird
excrement, sending a
warship to threaten
the Haitians.
Haiti’s commercial agent in the
United States, a Boston merchant,
wrote to Buchanan’s secretary of state,
arguing the “perfect lega l title” of Hai-
ti’s sovereignty over Navassa, noting
the 1825 French recognition of the new
country and “all of its dependencies.”
e State Department rebued him.
e Baltimore-based Navassa Phos-
phate Company hired former slave
overseers to manage the gua no work-
ers. In 1889 abuse bordering on tor-
ture of 140 African America n contract
laborers led to a revolt and the killing
of ve hated overseers. A U.S. circuit
court condemned three to death, and
57 others to prison. On appeal the Su-
preme Court in Jones vs. U.S. (1890)
ruled against the defense argument
that the United States had no jurisdic-
tion over Navassa. e Court declared
“it is not material to inquire, nor is it
the provinc e of the Court to determine,
whether the executive be right or wrong
[in denying Haitian sovereignty]; it is
enough to know that in the exercise of
Bruce Rich is an attorn ey and
author who has served as senior
counsel to major environmental or-
ganizations. brucemrich@gmail.com.
his constitutional functions he has de-
cided the question.”
e company went bankrupt in
1901. e island’s administration
passed to the U.S. Navy, and later to
the Coast Guard until 1996, when the
Interior Department took over, desig-
nating Navassa in 1999 as a National
Wildlife Refuge. Ha iti’s claim gained
Cuba’s support in 1958, followed later
by Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Ecua-
dor. In 1989 Haitian amateur radio
operators briey occupied the island,
setting up a Radio Free Navassa trans-
mitter, and in 1998 a Haitian oceanog-
rapher esta blished t he Navassa Island
Defense Group.
Interior and the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Admi nistration con-
duct valuable research on Navassa,
and have on occasion invited Haitian
scientists to participate. So is legal
sovereignty a distraction with no real
consequence? It’s not an edifying sight
to behold the world ’s richest cou ntry,
wrote historian Ted Widmer in 2007
on the sesquicentennial of the United
States’ Navassa claim, disputing with
the Western Hemisphere’s poorest na-
tion ownership of an uninhabitable
rock covered with bird droppings. An
international trust for research a nd
conservation administered a s a condo-
minium by the United States and Hai-
ti might be a solution. In practice, not
much would change, but in a world
rift by authoritarian rulers aggressively
asserting c ontested territorial clai ms it
would be an important gesture of soft
power for the United States.
The guano islet is
claimed by Haiti but
administered by the
United States
Bird Poop and Sovereignty at Bay:
he Strange Fate of Navassa Island
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