The Chincha Islands

No other 19^th century job was as horrifying, demeaning, or dangerous as shovelling feces on the guano islands off the coast of Peru. The Chincha Islands were the most dreadful of them all.

In the arid, desiccating air of these desolate islands, bird droppings accumulated until, by 1803, the guano was 100 feet deep. The Incas ranked it alongside gold as “gifts of the gods,” and used it on the stair-terraced slopes of their mountainous farms.

In the 1800’s, a Peruvian businessman exported 22 shiploads to  Southampton, England. When the shipment arrived, the stench was so foul that the entire town took to the hills; yet farmers soon found that the guano was a fertilizer more potent than barnyard manure. Mining of guano began in earnest.

It had to be hand-dug. Slaves, coolies, convicts and army deserters laboured deep in trenches, shovelling the greasy manure into wheelbarrows which were trundled to the cliffsides and slid down canvas chutes into cargo holds.

Injury and death were omnipresent. Trenches caved in, burying workers alive. Men contracted respiratory problems, gastrointestinal complaints caused by ingested feces, swollen limbs, scurvy. Overseers whipped workers with cat’o’nine tails. Half-starved dogs roamed the island, scavenging in the cemeteries which were filled with the rotting corpses of workers buried in too-shallow graves. The barren earth was scattered with human bones.

Chapter 7, "Yellow Dust"