Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - U.S. Minor Outlying Islands

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why the United States Minor Outlying Islands are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

10 seconds of thank you before we start. We just did our episode at the London Podcast Festival when this drops. Thank you to absolutely everybody who came. I'll say more thank yous on Discord and on social media. Thank you. United States minor outlying islands. Known for really not being known. It's not Puerto Rico and Guam and those other territories.

Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why U.S. minor outlying islands are secretly incredibly fascinating. -♪ -♪ -♪ -♪ -♪ -♪

-♪ Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode of Podcast All About Why Being Alive is More Interesting Than People Think It Is. My name's Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie. Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of United States minor outlying islands? You know, I was just thinking about this the other day. You know, I have very strong opinions on US minor outlying islands. I think about it all the time. I think they should get the vote.

I don't know. I have a feeling that like, probably we did something bad here. Because when you're like, we've got all these US minor outlying islands, I'm like, that sounds bad. That sounds like we did something bad and stinky in our past. And so I just want to say, I apologize on behalf of America. And yes. Yeah.

This, so I love this topic because I think it's within the range of stuff that's stiff because everybody's heard of the United States. And nobody knows this is part of the United States. Because I want to shout out James Amaz on the Discord. Because not only did he have an awesome topic idea, but he let me tinker with it a little bit, because he suggested US territories. And that's vast. And also Puerto Rico's probably like two or three whole episodes, and then several other

inhabited territories would be their own episode. US minor outlying islands are broadly considered uninhabited. And we will list what they are. But this is pretty much a case where they're not underrepresented in our government because people don't live there. Okay, that's good. When you say they're uninhabited, is that because we did bomb them with the nuclear bomb or? Oh, also pretty much no. Okay, good. Yeah, this is also pretty much

outside of the context of native people. Like some of these have been like waypoints for especially Polynesian people because they've been amazing sailors and navigators, but these are so small and also usually lack freshwater in a way where there pretty much hasn't been human habitation of them. Okay. So Alex, who do I apologize to then? And this is like, I think it is fundamentally just interesting. Yeah. Okay, cool. So- It's within processes that are of course difficult and also

some good processes we'll talk about too. It's purely sift to me. It is so weird and specific that this land is part of the United States of America. Are there like snakes on these islands that I should apologize to? Like are there snakes that we like, did we put any monkeys on these island and be like eat the snakes? Did we put some cane toads there? Did we? One of these had an invasive rat problem at one point. Okay. But again, they're so small, like that's not such an ecosystem thing even. So then the rats should apologize?

Let's forget apologies. Let's just live should apologize? Let's forget apologies. Let's just live. Okay. Let's do it. All right. Okay. That's what my therapist keeps telling me, but I won't listen. Little islands.

And my relationship to these is I've heard of them because occasionally when filling in internet forms, the little drop down for what country you're from, not all forms, like you won't see this on everything, but sometimes directly below United States and the options for countries, it will list US minor outlying islands as a designation. Now, hang on, Alex. You said that these are mostly uninhabited. Right. So it's confusing. It's confusing that they're under such a special and weird jurisdiction that we'll talk about. It's truly one of the weirdest things in world politics and geography and everything.

Okay. Let's talk about it, Alex. People don't know what they are exactly. And we'll get into that into our statistics and numbers this week. That is in a segment called, diggity ah I count stats and I am well and on sif pod we think math is swell. Wow this brings me back to when I was in high school and that's that's all that I'll say about that topic. You sat on the flagpole of your high school, didn't you?

Didn't you? It's a song called Flagpole Sitta. Oh, yeah. I did that. I was very cool in high school. Let's move on. So we're talking about stats and numbers. Right.

Back to uninhabited islands. Back to uninhabited islands. Great. And that was suggested by Neilio on the Discord. Thank you, Neilio. We have a new name for this every week. Please make a Missilian way I can as best as possible. Send it through Discord or to sifpod at gmail.com.

The first number is nine because nine islands in the world are officially designated as US minor outlying islands. Okay. So by- Nine islands US minor outlying islands. Okay. So by... Nine islands. There are nine islands. Are they all sort of in the general same area or are they sort of splattered about? Both. There is one in the Caribbean, but the other eight are in the Pacific Ocean. Oh, okay.

And all eight Pacific Ocean islands are coral atolls that are spread everywhere, but in the Pacific Ocean in kind of similar ways. Is it atoll? I've always said atoll. Am I dumb? Let's look it up so I don't drive people wild all episode. I've never checked. Yeah.

I mean, there could be multiple ways. I could also be dumb. Okay. So Google thinks the British pronunciation is atoll. It thinks the American pronunciation is atol, which is kind of what neither of us were saying. Neither of us said that. We're from some kind of third country. Or you are. I'm British and you're from a third country.

I'm going to start saying atoll. Yeah, maybe I'll just avoid that word the rest of the episode. But it's a type of island made of coral and it can have a lagoon in the middle. That's what this coral island is. It's often a ring shape. Sometimes it's kind of broken up by the water level. Okay. And it often has coral reefs around it.

I've always called them corral. Oh no. Coral reefs are really cool. And it often has coral reefs around it. I've always called them corral. Oh, no. Well, coral reefs are really cool. You called these uninhabited, but coral reefs are like the cities of the fish world. That's right. Yeah, they're highly inhabited by seabirds and marine life, and then not really inhabited by humans. Okay. Well, hey, that's something. I think we should give colony zooids the vote. That's true.

The animal state, we should do it. Yeah, yeah. Put it together. A vote for every polyp, I say. I guess eventually my occasional nickname, Schmitty the Clam, starts to be their leader. I don't know how this happens, but we'll get there I don't know. I do think it's funny that your name is your nickname is Schmidty the clam when more or less you are terrified of sea life Yep, and I'm always talking so doesn't fit at all

But yeah these islands there is one Caribbean islands that is much rockier. It also is limestone and coral It's called Navassa Island. And then folks don't need to hold these in their head, but the eight Pacific islands are Baker Island, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, the Midway Islands, Palmyra Atoll, and Wake Island. These all sound like they were named after dudes. Pretty much, yeah. And in some cases, whalers, like whalers who visited in the 1800s.

I mean, that seems unfair to name like a marine island that marine life lives at after someone who goes around murdering whales. Right, the large friend of the polyps. Yeah. Yeah, like this is the Ted Bundy hospital. Like, what? Yeah, and all those names, again, Baker, Howland, Jarvis, Johnston, Kingman Reef, Midway Islands, Palmyra Atoll,

Wake Islands. I feel like their significance is most people don't know any of them. And if you're a World War II buff, you might know Midway Island or Wake Island, but otherwise they're kind of unknown. Well, I'm neither buff nor know all that much about military history. So what is the significance of Wake Island? Yeah. And we'll run down each of their significance as quick. Wake Island is well west of the Hawaiian Islands. The Midway Islands are the furthest west point of the Hawaiian Islands.

There are also some uninhabited islands that are part of the state of Hawaii. The Midway Islands and Wake Island both had air bases and got bombed along with Pearl Harbor in World War II. And they were both the locations of major carrier battles. That's just the nearby atoll when carriers shot planes at each other. I see. Okay. So we just use these islands full of precious sea life and then shot at each other. That's cool. Yeah. And Johnston Hathol is more central in the Pacific. We used it in the Cold War for testing rockets. Oh, okay. Both rockets for the nuclear arsenal and for NASA. Oh.

I know. A lot of mood swings with this episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Rock rockets. Tell me more for nukes. Oh for NASA. Oh for space nukes. Oh for space nukes that go to Mars. Get out of here Elon. Elmo. Get out of here. We can't hug aliens with nuclear arms, but so all right. So we've used some of these locations for strategic military purposes for testing rockets, et cetera. Is that just because it is far away from human beings and so you can blow up stuff and not worry about it? Yeah. And Johnston Atoll is kind of the only one that is still US territory. There's other

places like Bikini Atoll that are not. But yeah, we did a lot of that stuff at those kind of remote islands as alternatives to the Western desert of the 48 states. Yeah, stuff can go wrong if you test too close to where people live. SpaceX rocket where just it blew up and then blasted. Which city was it? It was on the coast of- Texas somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. They didn't love it.

No, it's not great. Yeah. Places like St. George, Utah have experienced nuclear fallout that people only kind of figured out later. It's tough. So they used at-holes later. And then the other islands, there's Jarvis Island, Howland Island, Baker Island. Those three were also US facilities in the early 1900s. Howland Island was what Amelia Earhart was trying to find when she disappeared in 1937. Oh yeah. And what was the island they eventually thought that she may have winded up at? Do you remember? It has kind of a long name.

Different name, yeah. Nekomororo. Yeah. Yeah, she wanted to be on Howland Island, which had one US airstrip in the 1930s. And she ended up on Nekomororo where she was eaten by crabs. Maybe. Well, we don't know that 100% I said, maybe way afterward, way afterward. I said, maybe. So I'm off the hook. We don't even know if she landed there. There's a theory she landed there and that she died and then that her corpse was eaten by coconut crabs.

Not that she was- We're getting a bunch of emails about how great I am. This is cool. Wow. Everyone says, Alex described that really well. That's cool. Wow. Geez.

Yeah. But yeah, because they use something like dead wreck. There used to be the old style of navigation where you are just, it's very scary how easily disoriented you could get. And so you can wind up way off base. So yeah, that is scary. But why was she trying to go to the other island that, what did you, you said the Howard islands? Howland, Howland Island. Yeah. Howland, Howland. In the 1930s, the US said, hey, we have these islands and we can build, like we built a

weather station on Jarvis Island. We built an airstrip on Howland Island. It was a time when we had very good airplanes, but not the gigantic jets we have now that can just fly from San Francisco to Japan. No problem. Like we wanted waypoints to stop a plane and refuel or feed the pilot or whatever. Feed the pilot.

Sandwiches, basically. Gas and sandwiches. That was the plan. I don't know. That was the biggest problem. I think the refueling, just like, man, I could make it across the Atlantic, but I need a sandwich. Yeah. Yeah. And then the other couple I haven't described are almost more like just straight up coral reefs. One of these is named Kingman Reef. They're all coral islands, but we call it Kingman Reef because its highest elevation above sea level is five feet.

That's the fun number there. So it's like barely not just a coral reef and we have declared it an outlying island of the United States. And Palmyra Atoll is six feet above. They're both just sort of habitats for animals. Right, right. I mean, do people go there to look at the reefs? Is research done there? What is even the significant, like why even call that research done there? What is even the significant, like why even call that a part of, you know, a landmass? Yeah, it is a legacy of something else we use them for that we'll talk about in a little bit. You can't, you can't leave me hanging like that. I'm like, what do you mean? Did we do crab experiments on those? There's a lot of setup. We're about to get to it.

Oh boy. Oh boy. Quick other geographical numbers. The next number is 13.2 square miles, which is about 34 square kilometers. 13.2 square miles is the combined land area of the nine US minor outlying islands. That's pretty little. Very small. They're smaller than microstates's pretty little. Very small. They're smaller than microstates. They're small, small. Right.

Are they smaller than Micronesia? They are. Yeah, Micronesia is substantially larger and more populated. Yeah. Are they smaller than micro? Which is fun. Are they smaller than micro machines? Oh, no.

They got them beat. Okay. So take that, Toys. And the other number is more than 2,600 miles or more than 4,200 kilometers. More than 2,600 miles is the distance between Jarvis Island and Wake Island, which are two of these in the Pacific. So they're very far flung and kind of remote from each other in addition to just the rest of land.

Right. So, that's part of why they're uninhabited. That's part of why they're available for a country to claim them. Yeah. It doesn't seem that it could fit much. Maybe one, we could put one Chuck E. Cheese on one island and then maybe a Cracker Barrel on another one, but then you'd have to go so far to get from the Chuck E. Cheese to the cracker barrel.

Right. Which is not the America I want to live in. Exactly. I want to live in, I guess most of the rest of America has those close together. So yeah, there we are. To bring it back to the topic, could you put a barrel on one of these islands? Could you fit a barrel on them? How many barrels? They're in that weird middle ground where they are just slightly too small and dry to support life or human life, but they're plenty big enough to put a building or an air strip

in most cases. Other than Kingman Reef, which is truly a reef poking out of the ocean, most of the rest of them can kind of support some little facility if you have amazing 1900s vehicles to get to and from. Got it. Yeah. The last number here gets us into how we got them. The number is three years. how we got them. The number is three years. Three years is the amount of time that the borders of the United States have matched the shape of the 48 states and Washington DC. That's the entire amount of time in all of history that that's been the shape of the United States. Three years. That's sort of like rhombus with a wiener shape.

That sort of like rhombus with a wiener shape. Yes. I've always thought of it as two wieners out east there. But yeah, pretty much. Congratulations Maine. Congratulations. I'm a race in Canada when I say that. It's like a rhombus with a wiener and then a phalange. Yeah, like that shape is a very, very important concept to the United States' conception of

itself in modern times. And one key source this week is an amazing book. It's called How to Hide an Empire. And that's by Daniel Immervar. He's an associate professor of history at Northwestern University. And he talks about the concept that that 48 states plus DC, he calls it a term of the logo map. Logo map. Like sort of like how if you imagine the logo of McDonald's or the logo of Nike,

there's one clear shape. Right. And that's sort of the logo of the United States is we're that shape. It's too bad that our country isn't in the shape of a bunny rabbit. You know what I mean? Because what's cool is that Italy's shape is a boot. And you're like, hey, that's like a boot. Which part of the boot are you in? Yeah, Italy might have the world's most famous logo map.

It does at least have the most, I guess, discernible shape. Although, I always thought Croatia looks like a bird head. And I've been told China looks like a chicken. I never saw or knew that. The Northeast is the head. Yeah, it's a chicken. Cool. So there's that fun stuff.

I'm just looking at the world like it's clouds. That one looks like a chicken. That one looks like a foot. Why don't we go through all the clouds we've seen recently and what shape they are and then lose the rest of our listeners? I like that we have already done a clouds episode. Moving on. Forget it.

Yeah, and so the logo map of the U.S. is that shape. You know, and your classroom map probably had separate inserts for Hawaii and Alaska. They often leave off Puerto Rico. They almost always leave off other large inhabited territories of the United States because more than 300,000 Americans, American citizens and everything, they live in Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Those are all U.S. territories with many people in them. They're not these uninhabited rocks that we're talking about. It's very strange to me that it is something that just does not really get brought up much. At least for me, it never did when I was in elementary school, even in middle school and high school. I don't know that we covered it that extensively. I mean, I know that they are not

states. Pretty peculiar that we're like, well, you're not states, but we still have power over you. And no, you can't vote like in presidential elections. Or some of them can. But wait, which ones? Only DC. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. DC isn't in Congress and then Puerto Rico and those other territories don't have any representation in the federal government. Interesting. They often get like an observer who hangs out, but they don't vote. So yeah, doesn't seem good. Yeah. And that's never really seemed good to most American mentalities, but we acquired those places long after that window of just being the logo map. The window was just 1854 to 1857.

Those are the only three years the U was shaped in the Logo Map way. We almost got there in 1848 because we both completed conquering a lot of Mexico and set a Northwest border with British Canada. But then 1854, we did a deal called the Gadsden Purchase to buy what's now Southern Arizona, Southern New Mexico. On that date, it became the shape of the 48 states in DC. Not all of it was states yet, but that's when it started. Just three years later, the US began annexing what are now the US minor outlying islands. Our first territory beyond that was not Hawaii, not Puerto Rico, not Alaska, any of that. It was these tiny assholes with no people on them.

That's an interesting sort of, I guess, priority to have. Why were we so interested in just claiming like, I can see a reef peeking out from the water. That's the US also. That's us also planting like tiny American flags on each little rock that like pokes its head out of the water. Yeah, and we did it for one weird reason, which is takeaway number one. The US has minor outlying islands today because of bird guano and almost fighting a war with Peru. Well, I knew that. Duh. Right. Bird. Of course, it was bird guano.

Like, you know, the guano famous. That was the main reason. Guano economy. Guano economy. That's Guano comics. They call it, you know, there's Reaganomics and there's Guano comics. Guano comics. They call it, you know, there's Reaganomics and there's guano comics. Guano economics. Yeah, your husband, Brad, he studies guanomic-o-guanos. I already, Alex, you saw me fall into that pitfall, that bad joke, and you went right in there. I lemminged in. I'm a lemming. Here I go. I know they don't do that for real. I admire your bravery. You see me fall flat on my face and you're like, I'd like some

of that please. We're a team, buddy. We're doing it. So yeah, that's interesting. So what were we eating this delicious bird guano? Indirectly, yeah. it was fertilizer. Yeah. Oh, that makes actually sense. Yeah. And yeah, this is it's a very biological episode this week because bird guano is rich in nitrogen and plants eat nitrogen if we give it to them. And so it was a very effective fertilizer.

Plants are freaks. They're like, that's some yummy, yummy doodoo all the time. nitrogen if we give it to them. And so it was a very effective fertilizer. Plants are freaks. They're like, that's some yummy doo doo all the time. They're like, yeah, give me that delicious bird doo doo. So I assume that we then there just weren't other good sources of nitrogen such that going all the way out there to these little teeny islands full of seabirds and what, scraping their poop? Like how did we collect it? Did we just hire a bunch of poor poop scrapers? Yes, that's exactly what we did.

Huh. An interesting job. It was apparently comparable to coal mining in terms of the unpleasantness and also the damage to respiration. Oh my God, did people get the white lung from bird poop? Yeah, they did. Yeah. Damn. That's so bad. No, I hate that. I hate that so like, hurt your lungs from inhaling too much bird doo-doo. Yeah, these islands, like, they really changed my concept of a desert island. Like, pop culture told us that a desert island is a little bit of sand with one palm tree and a lot of coconuts,

you know? Right. And like a message in a bottle, maybe resort to some light cannibalism. They never said anything about poo poo miners. Yeah, in real life, a desert island, an actual meaning of desert is a lack of rain. And these islands being so tiny, the land doesn't really cause the weather patterns for consistent rain. And so it's basically an incredibly dry rock that seabirds love to nest on and hang out on because you can rest on land and otherwise a bunch of sea. They love the sea.

Right. And so the tininess of these islands led them to be uninhabited by people, and then caked in increasing amounts of dried out, not washed away, seabird guano, like calcified massive heaps of it. Did these form actual... You said it was similar to coal mining. Did they form actual huge chunks of it, or was it just a little bit of bird poop you'd scrape here and there? Big chunks and carving blocks of it.

And so it was pretty gross and a lot of lifting and digging and heavy work. Yeah. Oh, also, if you're wondering, it's like, okay, so humans can't really live there because there's not enough rainwater, there's not enough fresh water, what the heck are seabirds doing there? They can get some hydration from seawater and excrete excess salt out of special glands. So that is the birds are doing just fine there, living their lives, pooping a lot, probably really confused why people are collecting their doo-doo. Right.

And like they're not bothered by their own doo-doo, but we just kept clearing it for them. And they're like, okay, I guess this is fine. And people like hunted some of them too. I mean, no joke, it was probably disruptive to their nesting habitat. I can't imagine it was like, it's not like, oh great, now there's this doo-doo and we're happier for it. It was probably not good for the seabirds,

although it sounds the worst for the actual miners. I cannot express how much I can't get over how crappy that is. Well, the pun slightly intended, but also just, it upsets me so much that you could get a lung disease from having to be a minor for bird poop. That's just, I feel so bad. If there's a plus side, it's that these people thought they were saving the world from starvation. Oh, okay.

The situation of the, especially late 1800s is that the world is industrializing and a lot of European and colonized American farmers are doing industrial over farming. They're planting the maximum amount of the same crop on the same land every year. And then they said, hey, I'm experiencing soil exhaustion. My soil seems to be out of nutrients or something. And then at the same time, populations are growing massively. So this era gives you people like Thomas Malthus, who was a scientist who theorized that we'd run out of food and the world would starve and there'd be massive resource wars and it'd be horrible.

Right. Like that was like Malthusian economics. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He comes from this era and the main solution was in 1909, scientists figured out how to synthesize ammonia and make fertilizer in a factory. And so we said, great, in 1909, we'll just start doing that. But before that, people said, what is everything else we can do?

And around the 1840s, people realized, hey, there are guano heaps on these tiny spec islands in the world. If we dig that up and ship it to farmers, we can sell it for a massive profit and feed people that way. Okay. Yeah. I mean, sounds like, I guess, a reasonable idea. It's like coal mining in the way where it also powered cities and gave people some things,

you know? Yeah. I mean, coal is just dead organic matter that's been compressed over many, many millions of years. So, you know, attracts. Yeah. Yeah. And the first people to exploit this guano this way were the British, but they did it in partnership with the new country of Peru. I really want to make a joke about this, but I think, wait, is this episode before or after we've been in London? It comes out like a couple hours after our London show is complete. So fire away, baby. Take that.

Kim Charles is weird. Yeah. Right. I'm going to go and get my some poo poo voices from these islands. Okay, that's it. That's my joke. Good. Yeah.

Yeah, that covers it. And there was a island chain called the Chincha Islands that's very close to the coast of Peru. So that's kind of the first place people tried this. It wasn't so remote. And British companies in partnership with the new Peruvian government made a bunch of money off that. And the United States got really jealous.

We were like, we wish we had money on fertilizer. That'd be great. Yeah. I mean, I feel like a lot of stuff, a lot of advancements or economic developments are like, hey, that other country just did this thing. We want our own burdooky economy. Yeah. That was the opinion of President Millard Fillmore, a crummy president who never got elected. He replaced the guy who died.

You know what's funny is that there was that really bad political cartoon, the stupid duck cartoon, political cartoon that forgot to make jokes all the time called Mallard Fillmore. And we're also talking about bird poop. So what about that? Yeah, it's very on theme Of course Mallard Fillmore was interested. He knows right he's like yes bird poop very important quack Yeah, and we're used to modern presidents doing a state of the union and in earlier history That would often just be a written message to Congress. It wasn't the media event it is, but in his 1850 version of that, Millard Fillmore said it is a national priority to acquire guano. We must get guano for the United States.

It sounds like we are segueing into our war with Peru. Yes. So we say, okay, the Chincha Islands, the British and the Peruvians have that. We don't want to mess with the British. But in 1852, Millard's secretary of state, Daniel Webster, he makes an announcement that is completely wild. He says, any American business can go to another set of Peruvian islands called the Lobos Islands, where there is also guano. You should go and mine this guano on Peruvian land, and we will send the United States Navy's combat ships

to escort you and help you do this. I'm assuming Peru didn't know about this and say, okay. So they heard about it before Americans got there. And what Peru did is they threatened to declare war. They threatened to seize the property of the few Americans in Peru, and they threatened to execute those Americans. And the US backed down. Hands off our bird poop or we'll kill people.

Yeah. And so the classic United States-Peru rivalry we all know begins, you know? Right. It's a famous diplomatic relationship that people think about. Yeah. You know, those calming Peruvian flutes, that is just to lull us into a false sense of security. And then finally it'll be payback for our aggressive attempt to steal the guano. Right. The last words you hear are, this is for the guano, and then they push you off

of Machu Picchu. You fall so far. How many semi-offensive stereotypes can we get in about Peru? About Peru? We'll keep going. Yeah. Finally, I can apologize to Peru. I'm sorry, Peru. You have a lovely country. Been looking for an apology to do all episode. Yeah.

Yeah. And I actually do like the flute music. It's beautiful. Peru's great. And yeah. And so US speculators and the government said, we definitely still want fertilizer. And what about the entire rest of the earth? What if there are other tiny desert islands with a lot of seabirds? We'll look beyond the coast of Peru.

So question, maybe this is dumb, but there's birds on the mainland in the US. And chickens, we have a load of chickens that we eat the chickens and we eat their eggs. Why didn't we just collect the chicken doo-doo and use that? Why don't we use bird poop from the US? Is it that the sea bird poop is especially good in terms of being rich in nitrogen or something? Yeah, it's that and other stuff. The still pretty good poop of other birds, we basically can't box train them or convince them to poop in one place. And these tiny islands just lured bird after bird after bird after bird to poop in the same place. I see. And Daniel Amarvar's book, he talks about our other big idea being human

feces. All of our crops are going to the cities. What if we take the poop from the cities back to the farms? And it turns out there's biological issues with that, but also they decided it wasn't cost effective or a good way to do it. And you kind of need a different systems connected to toilets and so on. Like all of that just didn't make economic sense. I see. Like if we didn't have like someone go around with a cart going like bring out your poop and have people donate their their doo-doos. Yeah, yeah. We've always just kind of not wanted to think about sewage and for all these interlocking reasons people said this perfect giant mountain of bird poop on this tiny island. Let's just do that even though it's not great.

this tiny island. Let's just do that, even though it's not great. And the speculators quickly tried to do their own boat trips to look at other islands further from the American mainland. And then in 1856, just four years after we almost went to war with Peru, in 1856, speculators approached new president Franklin Pierce. And they said, hey, can you send a Navy ship to Howland Island and Jarvis Island to scout for Guano? He said, I'm going to do much more than that. And Pierce told Congress to draft and pass a law that he signed. It's called the Guano Islands Act. And it changed all of American history.

Was this another poop coup? Did we try to coup the poo again. Was this another poop coup? Did we try to coup the poo again? Like a Peru coup or was this, were these islands not claimed by any other nation? Yeah, they were usually not claimed. A few of them were either claimed by the British or claimed by the independent kingdom of Hawaii in particular. I see. But those claims were not particularly active. They weren't sending people there. They weren't mining guano yet.

The Guano Islands Act was very far reaching. It said that whenever a US citizen discovered guano on an unclaimed, uninhabited island, that island would, quote, at the discretion of the president, be considered as appertaining to the United States. And the keyword there is appertaining. Yeah. What does that mean? It meant that this definitely belongs to the United States, but we don't owe them anything. We don't need to do anything with them. It's like very unspecific and vague as a word. That's what appertaining mean?

In this legal use, yeah. What's the dictionary definition of appertaining? This dictionary looking at is relate to or concern. Okay, so like pertaining. Right. It's sort of fancy pertaining. Fancy pertaining. And so it was a way of pretty clearly saying the US gets this and we kind of haven't invented

the sense of overseas territories yet. Because until 1856, the US would create territories, but it was always on a model of this is next to or near existing US land, it will probably achieve statehood at some point. And they also had a mental picture of it being uninhabited, even though it was full of native people. I see. Like that was kind of the process. Or we conquered or purchased it from a power like France and Britain and Mexico. I see. And so this was new. And one of the sponsors was Senator William Seward, who later purchased Alaska, later was in Lincoln's cabinet. He told Congress, quote, the bill is framed so as to embrace only these more ragged rocks,

which are fit for no dominion, end quote. And so the entire legal basis was we just want the bird poop. And that's why this gets to be outside of normal ideas of United States liberty and democracy and making a place part of the US. Right. I see. So it's like birds don't get the vote. Yes.

Even though we're using your poop for our economy. Yeah. And Seward also promised that there would not be an establishment of colonies. They even explicitly said, we won't put people here to make a community. We'll just send miners to take the guano and leave. And so Congress said, that's not imperial. Did people in Congress have a problem with being an empire or was it more to reassure sort of countries who were closer to these little islands? All of the above, but mainly his fellow Americans. Yeah. There was a mainstream belief in America

really up to the world wars, but we violated it too. But there was a mainstream belief that we were isolationists and that we were not the style of colonialists that the Europeans were. I see. isolationists and that we were not the style of colonialists that the Europeans were. We did colonialist stuff to an entire continent, but the idea was that we would not create like a British India, for example. The US doesn't have land outside the US and also we're expanding, but we don't have it outside the US was the weird mental gymnastics we were doing. Just like an attempted Peru coup coup, but not anything too serious,

even though we did do like a ton of coups in South America. In Central and South America, yeah. Like our whole deal is coups, but we were like, not that kind. We love a coup, we're like pigeons. Our national bird should be a pigeon because we love coups. And so this law passed in 1856 and within a year we'd annexed several islands, including most of what's now the US minor outlying islands because they had guano or something else that's fertilizer. Within seven years, there were 59 guano islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

When we made our last claim in 1902, the total reached 92 islands. We only really stopped because of the invention of industrial factory-made fertilizer. This was a huge business until we found an alternative. Are we ever in danger of running out of guano supply? Was it pretty finite or was it being replenished mostly by the bird poop? Because I would assume those big chunks of calcified bird poop takes a while to build up. Yes. Yeah, we disrupted the supply and made up for it by adding more and more islands. That's the reason the US has treated any of these islands as US territory at all. And then the other reason we still do is that we started to do European

colonialism late in the Guano Islands period. Especially in the 1890s, an American Admiral named Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote a book arguing that the key thing for world power was navies and lots of Navy bases worldwide. And then also American businessmen overthrew the Queen of Hawaii. And the American military took over Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific. So then in the 1910s, we said, we don't need guano anymore. Also are these tiny islands useful for stitching together our European style empire now? And so then we kept having them from there.

I see. I see. So we thought maybe we could use them as like a launching base for some kind of naval empire. Yeah. And like 1909 is also right along the lines of when airplanes start happening too. So then we're like, oh, boats and planes, like these would be perfect. That's great. I see.

So yeah, I mean, but did we, did, were they actually useful? I guess is the question. Did we actually get other than, I mean, obviously for the bird poop mining that did seem to be disgustingly useful but was, were these actually strategic for say, I don't know, building, not, I'm not talking about like later on in World War II, but for our fantasy of building an American empire. The answer is pretty much World War II because we only stopped really needing them in the our fantasy of building an American empire? The answer is pretty much World War II, because we only stopped really needing them in the 1910s. And by the 1930s, we were worried about Japan in particular. And the other thing is

nobody tried to take them from us in between the 1910s and the 1930s. So then we started building air bases and air strips and they were somewhat useful. Yeah. Okay. All right. But aircraft carriers also kind of replaced them in that way too. That makes sense. You can fit more planes, I guess, on an aircraft carrier than you can on a poop island.

Yeah. And then it can move around. It's like if Howland Island could move around and wasn't covered in poop, you know, it's amazing. Right. Yeah. It's astonishing. But now imagine an island that can move around and is also covered in poop.

That's exciting. Everything you could want. And folks, that's a humongous takeaway on many, many numbers and places. And we're going to take a quick break then, return with the two most surprising global impacts of modern US minor outlying islands. You know, Katie, one in five Americans have the phrase, learn a new language on their bucket list.

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And we are back. We have two more takeaways. The last one is pretty thrilling and about the Pacific Ocean, Minor Outlying Islands. And the next one is the opposite. Because it's not thrilling and it's about the Atlantic. Just a heavier subject. Okay. Because takeaway number two, one labor dispute on Navassa Island led to the global second class status of U.S. territories. Okay. So this is why we still don't give, say, Puerto Rico full representation?

Yeah. The population of Puerto Rico would be the 30th most populous U.S. state, if it were. It has no electoral votes or members of Congress. And the legal origin of that is the one US minor outlying island in the Atlantic. It's called Navassa Island. Navassa. All right. And sources are Daniel Amarvar's book, also a piece for the Baltimore City Paper by Brandon Jensen and justia.com records about Supreme Court cases. Because the history of guano mining usually doesn't involve US citizens. The British used laborers from China,

and the Pacific US businesses used folks from the independent kingdom of Hawaii, mainly, like Polynesian people and other people. And so if something went wrong, it didn't go to US courts. It was just this international business thing. Navassa Island exploited a very specific group of US citizens. The business there was also not mining guano. It was taking phosphate from the coral reefs. Navassa Island's just different a little bit than the rest. But they formed a company where they scammed black American men in Baltimore into signing exploitative labor contracts and then getting shipped to Navassa Island to mine coral.

I knew this was going to have some stinkiness in it this episode. I knew. I knew it. Yeah. This is the stinkiest part. Yeah. That we were going to talk about some of the shenanigans. Well, that sounds pretty awful. Tell me more, Alex. We'll describe it simply and as it is. This is the 1880s, especially. It's when a lot of white American business owners were trying to maintain elements of human slavery, just not in that way. And a later investigation compared the Navassa mining camp to a prison camp, but not as comfortable and not as clean as a prison. So how did they sort of coerce people into this situation?

They mainly targeted men who did not know how to read. Oh my God. And talk them into signing a contract that they couldn't read. Oh for God sakes. I describe how horrible it is to explain what some of the workers did. In 1889, some of the black workers attacked and killed white supervisors on the island. Because they were, it's horrible. That's why they did that.

Yeah, if you're trick, I'm sorry, but if you're, like, if someone tricks you into slavery and keeps you in a slave labor camp. I'm not going to be fussy about you attacking your captors. Right. And that's how they felt when they were hauled back to Baltimore, Maryland to be tried for murder. And the workers say, great, just like tell them how horrible it is on the islands. But the workers' lawyers said, that probably won't work due to racism. And it's just hard to get off a murder charge if you definitely did it, even if it's justified. And so the lawyers get creative. They say, we will argue that the United States lacked jurisdiction on Navassa Island. There's no US government officials.

There's no institutions. It doesn't really have the status that states and territories have. And they specifically criticize the language of the Guano Islands Act, especially that word appertain. They said like appertain doesn't mean you actually have judicial power or can like try crimes that happen there. Hmm. Okay. It's also a dumb word that seems like you could just say pertain instead of appertain. Yeah, it's like privy or vow or something like cut it out. Stop it. I mean, privy I do like because that, you know, I toss it inithee if I really want a snack and I'm like, Prithee, pass me the Pringles.

I think it does add a little bit of juice to kind of the amount of desire I have for the snack. But yeah, I don't know. Hang on. I'm ordering you Pringles. Hang on. One sec. I heard Prithee.

I can't stop. Oh, jeez. The urgency. I need those Pringles. Paprika, add to cart. Okay. Okay. Great. Those are good. Those are actually good. Yeah. And so specifically because this one island used US workers, it becomes a case and goes all the way to the Supreme Court. Every court still says the men are guilty of murder and sentenced to death, including

the Supreme Court of the United States. Oh, for God's sakes. The one follow-up bit of good news is that the president disagreed. Oh, good. Please tell me these men were not executed. Yeah. President Benjamin Harrison, the source says he commuted the death sentences. So I think they were still jailed, but they were not executed. Okay. And in his next written letter that is like the State of the Union in 1890,

President Harrison said, "'We need to resolve the Guano Islands status. Like this is weird. It's this legal limbo and bad thing that we need to fix.'" And he also like sent people to investigate Navas Island. He wasn't imperialist in a lot of ways, but he did normal things with this situation. Okay. Well, I'm actually, I don't want to say pleasantly surprised because the whole situation is messed up, but I am at least glad that there was a smidgen of justice there.

Not really, because like it should have been the basically slave owners that were put in prison. So it's not really justice, but you know. Yeah. And this situation plus the Guano Islands leads to US territories being a thing the way they are today. Several years later, 1898, the US goes to war with Spain, conquers not just Guam and Puerto Rico that we're more familiar with, but also the entire Philippines and takes

a huge business and military interest in Cuba. We still have Guantanamo Bay today. And that leads to further Supreme Court cases. By the same horrible court that said the guys are guilty of murder, they did a series of decisions that we now call the insular cases that created the situation where the US can rule territories without granting them democratic representation. It's so good that we keep those kinds of laws on the books to this day. Yeah. In 2022, the Supreme Court declined a case called Fittus Emanu v. United States

that could have reversed the precedent of these turn of the century territory cases. So it's still on the books. It's still the precedent if we have any of those. And the framework for them deciding that was previous decisions like this case about a couple of murders on Navassa Island. That's the germ of it. Yeah. Well, you know, America doing poo-coos and not really fixing our mistakes. Yeah. And knowing this stuff hopefully helps there be a framework for changing it

someday. Yeah. What a ridiculous reason for any of this. It's even weirder than what I think most people think where they either don't think about Puerto Rico or think, well, it's just different. No, it comes out of this extremely weird turn of the century Supreme Court. Yeah, where people were mining bird poop and getting tricked into slavery. Not even just like, I wouldn't even say tricked, right? Because that just like coerced into slavery. And then, yeah.

Yeah, they were unemployed in Baltimore, Maryland. And then suddenly they've been like pressured into signing a bad deal and they're on a random island somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. But, and then I said our other takeaway is more upbeat and I think it is. Great. Because this is about all of those Pacific minor outlying islands.

And takeaway number three, the U.S. minor outlying islands are the backbone of the largest nature area in human history.S. Minor Outlying Islands are the backbone of the largest nature area in human history. Hey! Yeah, a humongous amount of the Pacific Ocean is now a pair of marine national monuments run by the United States. And that started in our lifetimes recently. Well, you know, that's pretty good. So do the birds get to keep their poop now?

Yeah, like specifically, birds are protected by by this and we stopped mining guano a long time ago, but now we're like really not messing with the birds. And there's US fish and wildlife people and other like staff making sure. That's great. You got name some of those birds, Alex. What birds we got out there? The most fun one might be albatrosses around the Midway Islands. Ah, Heck yeah.

Those guys are huge. And red-footed boobies on some of these and some terns and stuff. All the cool sea birds. Yeah. That's fantastic. The other thing I was surprised by with this is national monuments. It turns out that is a legal designation for US places that we can apply to them. Based on the name, it sounds like what it

is in most cases where like a house is historic or like a little thing is historic, but it can also be used to basically create a national park. The only difference is Congress creates national parks and a president can executive order a US national monument. Okay. Some of these national monuments are one house and some of these are half the Pacific Ocean. Some guys log cabin and then the ocean. It's amazing. Yeah, it's, we should really sort that out. Honestly, it's not like a great way of doing things, but, but it's something. Yeah. What is the significance though of something being a national monument? Does it allow for more funding for upkeep? Does it allow it to be protected more?

Both, yes. And then it also is often like a step toward Congress or some other group in the government protecting it in a different way, like the Bureau of Land Management coming in or the National Park Service or something else. Yeah. Okay. So when did we create, when did we turn these into national monuments? Yeah. And the first one came from a very surprising place in time. The year is 2006.

I was going to say that's not that long ago. And then I realized that there are teenagers who were born. Yeah, this is not in every listener's lifetime. But in 2006, there's this guy, Jean-Michel Cousteau. And Jean-Michel Cousteau is the eldest son of Jacques Cousteau. Okay. I was going to ask. I was going to ask.

I was like, a Cousteau, you say. And he's like what you would think. He does similar filmmaking and science communication and loves nature. Where's the same beanie? Plays with the same crabs. He didn't have the beanie in the picture. I was really hoping for a beanie when I looked it up. I want everyone to dress like the Life Aquatic movie.

You know what's funny? My dad is a part of a marine research group and they do wear a lot of beanies because there's wind at the ocean. So wearing a beanie makes a lot of sense. Do they avoid red ones because it's like too gusto or do they lean into it? No, I think that's fine. I don't think any of them really cares about. They enjoy it. And he said they liked the Life Aquatic.

They thought it was funny. It's a really good movie. Yeah. And so in 2006, Jean-Michel Cousteau holds a White House screening of his new documentary about one of the Midway Island atolls. And he shows it to George W. Bush and Laura Bush. And then he inspires George W. Bush to create a massive Marine

national monument called Papahanaumokuakea. And I will link a little video that taught me how to say it. It's great. But it's a set of the northernmost Hawaiian islands that are in the state, but not that inhabited. And then also the Midway Islands. Those are now a giant national monument. Yeah. A couple of weeks before he left office in January 2009, he designated a whole nother Pacific remote islands Marine National Monument, which includes all of the other seven minor outlying islands of the Pacific. The reason we did that at all is that there is US land in that ocean. And so we said, I guess it's our job to environmentally protect it.

The reason we did that at all. Yeah. And so Bush set those up. And then the other key president is Barack Obama, who came after him. In 2014 and 2016, he massively expanded both of those, but Bush marked off a pretty limited amount of ocean. In particular, Obama made the Pacific remote islands monument that's just outlying islands. He made that six times larger than Bush's plan. Just lots, lots more ocean. Did he get to see a movie? Or?

Just increasing Jean-Michel Cousteau visits. Jean-Michel Cousteau is like, And what about this? And what about this? And this is my sequel about the island, but even island two, bigger and better. Is he French? Is he still French? You know, I presume. I didn't actually check if he like grew up here or something.

I thought Jacques Cousteau is definitely French. Yeah, he's from France and everything. Okay. He's from France? The whole, the whole kit and caboodle. He's definitely from France and the whole, the whole deal, the whole thing, the whole baguette and everything. I'm realizing I have a mental misconception that just most celebrities end up moving to the United States. Like I was like, surely the son of a French celebrity is American because like he got a house here.

Right. Right. Like once you're famous. The dream of every French person is to someday make it to America. I'm such a jerk. Wow. Je suis désolée. someday make it to America. I'm such a jerk. Wow. Je suis désolé.

There we go. And so the expansion by Obama means that these two national monuments based on the eight US minor outlying islands cover more than one million square miles of ocean, they would be double the size of Alaska if they were land. Wow. I didn't mean that to sound sarcastic. So this whole confusing and weird and horrible progression led to this awesome thing now. And part of it is that we don't want the guano anymore.

Part of it is that we don't want the guano anymore. Like part of it is that our economics just changed. Right. But that opened the door to that plus realizing there's an environment we started protecting it. Did we like give like a sea bird a medal of honor for all the poop that they did that day? We put like a little medal on this sea bird. And the albatross is trying to fly with

this metal around its neck. It's like, man, this metal around my neck is sure as an albatross around my neck, but me, I'm the albatross. I'm sighing at myself so you guys don't have to. It's a good one. Folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, the U.S. possesses minor outlying islands today because of bird guano and almost going to war with Peru. Takeaway number two, one labor dispute on Navasa Island

in the Atlantic led to the global second class status of of US territories. Takeaway number three, the US minor outlying islands are the backbone of the largest nature preservation area in human history. And then many stats and numbers, in particular that basic number nine, the nine different US minor outlying islands that are part of the country today, the 92 total islands that were Guano Islands at some point. It's an amazing segment of the United States. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximumfund.org.

Members are the reason that this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the bizarre population count history of the U.S. minor outlying islands, because sometimes we have said they're populated, other times not. Visit sifpod.fund for that bonus show, for a library of more than 17 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fund bonus shows. It's special audio, it's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation.

Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximumfun.org. Key sources this week include an amazing book. It's called How to Hide an Empire. That's by Daniel Imrevar of Northwestern University and has so many more stories than what we talked about, especially about the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the entire American project. Quite a bit of US Fish and Wildlife resources about those marine national monuments. Museum resources from the Smithsonian, digital writing from Vox.com and the Baltimore City

Paper and more. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wapinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skatigok people and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here.

Also, it feels worth saying again that these U.S. minor outlying islands have generally not been permanently inhabited that I know of. I'd love if you have resources about any kind of permanent habitation of them. And many Polynesian peoples have used especially the Pacific Islands as waypoints or as sort of helpful locations in navigation. Besides that topic specific note, that acknowledgement feels worth doing on each episode. And please join the free CIF discord where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life.

There is a link in this episode's description to join the discord. We are also talking about this episode on the discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Cause each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 68.

That is about the topic of keyboards, as in computer keyboards. Fun fact there, one of the key innovators in all computer hardware almost created a keyboard with five buttons. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my cohost Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. If you loved the bird talk on this one, there's so much more there. Our theme music is Unbroken, Unshaven by the Boodos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza

for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members and thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Music

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