After much consideration of existence, I have come to the conclusion that the most resilient or fundamental form of happiness is the knowledge that things could always be way, WAY worse. This realization has kept a smile on my face for a decade despite my squandered potential, constant solitude, and lack of any clear direction. Having lucked into a middle class, 21st century American life, there is not much in my past that would garner any sympathy from an observer. Regardless of how much tribulation I or anyone has faced, I believe that the logic to this outlook holds true even when your life resembles that of the way, way worse. Whether you are dead broke and living on the streets, left alone and isolated, your dreams lie in tatters, or you find yourself paralyzed in some manner you should be able to take solace in the fact that some other poor soul has had a life full of unimaginable stress and torment. This strain of logic doesn’t work on everyone. In fact, it barely consoles anyone to whom I’ve explained it. Though their problems pale in comparison to that of billions of their fellow man living today, this epiphany fails to take. In familiarizing yourself with the truly horrifying fates that your fellow man have endured, you can give insert a mental check against despair.
This notion regarding fundamental happiness came from my early obsession with the news. As a younger man I was continuously trying to understand why my life is so stress free and the majority of everyone else’s so full of hardship. Though I think the outlook for humanity is bright, the world is still an inherently fucked up place littered with countless atrocities and disconcerting statistics. My young Christian heart would shed tears at what the devil had worked in humanity. Now, I still shed a tear or two, but accept the horrors of existence as just a byproduct of evolution by natural selection. My obsession with the daily catalog of horrific events inspired a love for nonfiction. Since what else is nonfiction other than a tale of some historical turbulence? I became, and am still, obsessed with adding to my understanding of the history of humanity and the Universe. In this pursuit, I have stumbled upon some truly terrifying tales of human existence. Tales that left an imprint on my brain to the point where in times of personal stress, I found myself saying; “Well at least I am not…”
In that spirit, it is my aim with the Weekly Worst Existence to make you feel a little bit better about whatever condition your condition is in. Life is hard, but a little perspective, to me, can make even the most difficult parts of life pale in comparison to the worst that history has dished out.
As this is the first in a series, I wanted to delve into one that has stuck with me ever since I came across it. A wretched life many were tricked or forced into: a slave in the Peruvian Guano Trade. (a little foreshadowing, many of these involve being a slave of some kind) Most of what follows comes from Charles Mann’s incredible book 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.
Guano, as you may of course know, is bat or bird shit. Being shit, it contains the essential nutrients for plant growth: nitrogen, potassium, and phosphates. Guano’s potential as a fertilizer was known by the inhabitants of western South America as early as 800 BCE. Much later on, the Inca empire recognized its value going as far as restricting access to the islands where it was found and punishing the poaching of any guano producing seabird with death. In the decades following the arrival of Pizzaro and his band of savory characters in the 1530’s, the local population was decimated by disease, famine, war, and slavery. It is not lost on me that we are just glossing over another horrible time and place to be human but I want to stay on topic. This decrease in population meant that the land of the former empire could feed the population without importing essential nutrients from elsewhere. Guano as a commodity was forgotten until 1802.
In that year a German explorer and a French botanist rediscovered the properties of guano and even had their samples analyzed by the immortal Humphry Davy. Even after its rediscovery it was not until the population explosion of the mid 1800’s in Europe that created the market for the newly dubbed “white gold.” As a consequence of this drastic increase in population, yields of crops in Europe began declining. It was only a matter of time before the secret was out. Given that we were in an era of peak Imperialism, some poor souls were bound to be exploited.
There are many groups of islands off the Western coast of South America. The movement of the currents and wind that surround them is what makes this chain of islands of special interest. Local to these islands off the Peruvian coast are the Guanay Cormorant and the Peruvian Booby. Each bird can deposit 20 grams of guano per day, 11,000 tons per year. The most sought after pieces of real estate in these chains were the Chincha Islands. The cold Humboldt current and warm sea air sweeping by results in very little rainfall. Without regular precipitation, the seabirds reveling in the excellent fishing deposited mountains of guano over thousands of years. Peru gained its independence from Spain in 1821 but for the first twenty years it struggled to pay its debts and develop its economy. This was until 1841 when two Lima businessman sent a sample of the guano from these islands to a merchant in the English port city of Liverpool. Implementation of these samples on local farms yielded the most bountiful harvest ever recorded. Word traveled quickly across Europe. All that was needed was labor.
Guano deposits are hard to extract on the Chincha Islands. Three hundred foot cliffs and deposits twelve stories thick made traversing these islands perilous. The only tools of procurement were picks and shovels. Only wheelbarrows to transport the guano from the cliffs to awaiting trade ships. Initially, enterprising guano traders forced local natives and prisoners to mine the hot new commodity. This quickly proved inadequate as the demand was too high and many of the labor force resorted to suicide. Justifiably as we will soon understand. A horrifying aside is that slaves imported from Africa were considered “too valuable” due to their resistance to malaria and the propensity of workers in the guano mines to end their own lives.
Simultaneous to the European population explosion in the first half of the 19th century, was a steep rise in the birth rate in China. Invested interests in Peru and Europe saw an opportunity for exploitation as the excess Chinese population was accompanied by poverty and food shortage. Chinese migrants were susceptible to an offer of good paying jobs across the ocean that could bring them stable income and personal riches. As you could expect, the ships that arrived on the shores of China taking these new laborers across the globe to mine bird poop had no intention of sharing the wealth. A new word entered the English lexicon: Blackbirding. It derived from a Western derogatory epithet for the people of East Asia. This was the practice of promising fair paid work on phony contracts, most of which suggested that you would be working the gold mines of California, only to be virtually enslaved upon arrival in Peru. (The coordination of nefarious people and nation state interests resulted in the abduction of over 250,000 Chinese migrants over the course of the Guano Boom into a Pacific Ocean version of the Middle Passage)
As misfortune had you placed on one of these ships across the Pacific, you would have been very wary of what was to come. Aboard the ship under false pretenses, you were packed like a sardine in the hull of the ship with meager rations. Sadly, surviving the journey was the least of your worries. One of the few instances where death may have been advantageous given what was to come. A migrant slave on one of these vessels would have been able to smell the noxious fumes before you ever seeing the islands. Scorched by the hot equatorial Sun, the smell of roasting bird excrement radiated for miles.
If you were one of these unfortunate laborers, you would disembark on the shore of a makeshift village and would see nothing but desolation. You may as well stepped onto a different planet. The Chincha Islands contain almost no vegetation, no beaches to safely land on, and nothing but steep, rocky cliffs. You would find shelter in ragged tents and your only bedding would be old sacks infested with fleas. Your only water source were giant concrete cisterns resupplied by ship as needed. You awoke in the morning to the thought of a 17 hour day of swinging pick and shovel for 1 Peruvian Real and a little bit of rice per day.
Now onto the actual picking and shoveling. Once aerosolized by your brute force, the guano would cause severe medical conditions. Your lips and nose would bleed. Your lungs would fill with particulate matter. Death from bronchitis was common. Your diet of dried meat and infested rice was not adequate for the amount of energy you exerted. Many of your friends, tricked into the same nightmare, would die from malnutrition or scurvy. In your weakened state, you were susceptible to tick borne illnesses and the constant threat of malaria. In a day you probably wheelbarrowed upwards of 5 tonnes of bird shit in treks that could be as far as a half mile. The fertilizer, destined to be spread across farms all over the Western world, was tipped over into shoots by hand, filling barges below the vertical faces. No shade to be found and no amount of sunscreen would have helped. The sores that developed would have made sleeping unthinkable if it weren’t for the inevitable exhaustion from such an undertaking.
To boot, the merchants brought in Black British slaves to whip the miners into submission. Insubordination could result in you being tied to a buoy out at sea as a message to the rest of the inhabitants. To subdue their unwilling workforce, the British imported opium. If you could no longer tolerate your cruel fate, overdosing was the most common way out. Some just took the simpler route and leaped over the edge of the high cliffs. Your will to survive severely weakened. Your friends sick, dying, or dead. This was no way to exist. We have all seen some period piece on high society in Imperial Europe. There is always some scene with a lavish feast. Those feasts would not have been possible without the unspeakable horrors that those who worked the guano mines endured. Everyday, lungs filled with toxic fumes, skin blistered from the Sun, body aching from malnutrition, and hands cracked from the dry sea air. Friends and strangers dying and decrepit. Fleas, ticks, malaria, and influenza as a way of life. The astonishing thing is that a majority survived with a five year mortality rate of 35-40%. A world away from what most of us can even imagine.
Eventually, the word got back to those seeking better fortunes abroad in China and the flow of bamboozled workers slowed. Yet the demand remained and if you could not dupe people into slavery why not just straight up force them into it, not without a dash more of treachery of course. Invested interests in the guano trade took advantage of another humanitarian crisis to exploit human beings for their personal gain. Famines in the Polynesian Islands of Tonga led to another population susceptible to offers of work overseas. By this point the slavers simply invited natives onto their boat under the pretense of trade. Then just locked the doors with over half the population inside. Little did they know what awaited them.
Another side effect of the guano trade was the annihilation of the native population of Easter Island. Already forcing other Polynesian people into mining guano for nothing, slave raids became common. Famous for its carved statues and the disappearance of its people, Easter Island is far off the Western Coast of South America on the same latitude as the Chincha Islands. Slavers raided the island and enslaved a third of the population in one go. A thousand people were sent to this unforgivable place and only 100 survived. They were spared because of an international outcry and sent back home to be with what was left of their families. Of course this tale could only get worse as they also brought back with them the diseases they contracted. The immune systems of the Easter Island inhabitants were not prepared and the rest of the population perished. Most of my life I was under the impression that the demise of the native people of Easter Island was a mystery. Only to find what I should have expected; another sacrifice to the gods of greed and money.
Putting myself in the shoes, or really just feet because I doubt they gave them shoes, of a man forced by circumstance to take a chance at a better life, only to find himself a fool toiling away in toxic dust with nothing but the vast ocean in every direction leaves me with a deep sense of how insanely lucky I am. Largely because to me all there is Gene’s x Circumstance = Luck. If I may find myself alone and homeless or besought with some family crisis, at least I never had to break up and transport tonnes of bird shit until I contemplated suicide or died of malnutrition or malaria. At least I have that. One can take great solace in knowing that being a slave in the guano trade is hardly comparable to whatever one typically experiences as a modern American. I know this does not resonate with everyone, but it is the axiomatic foundation of my happiness. Whether you have lost your job, have a terminal illness, or have become destitute, remember things could always be way, way worse.
The Westerlund Project 