Unfamiliar Fishes

The same features that made the islands attractive rookeries for seabirds made them, decades later, desirable sites for airfields. The pointillist empire that the United States built after the Second World War would rely in part on those nineteenth-century guano claims.

Not only did Wilson do nothing to liberate Puerto Rico, he took the war as an occasion to expand the U.S. Empire. In 1917 his government purchased the Danish West Indies, a small cluster of Caribbean islands next to Puerto Rico that offered a population of some twenty-six thousand and, more important, promising naval bases. This colony, the U.S. Vi

Guano entrepreneurs hastily formed the American Guano Company, with a capitalization of $10 million (a number that grows more impressive once you realize that all federal expenditures in 1850 totaled less than $45 million). They begged President Franklin Pierce to send the navy to Howland and Jarvis to protect their diggings from foreign interloper

Wenzell Brown wasn’t the only one to recognize Puerto Rico’s incendiary potential. The celebrated journalist John Gunther gasped when he saw the island’s crowded slums. The sight offered a “paralyzing jolt to anyone who believes in American standards of progress and civilization,” he wrote. Life magazine ran an exposé of the “cesspool of Puerto Ric