[WVDXA] Navassa Island

[Clark L. Stewart]

DX'ers,

      Here is an article from the NY Times.com that has some historical 
information about Navassa Island.  The article can be seen online here:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/30/opinion/30widmer.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin>

      But, I have just copied and pasted the text below in case it 
disappears from the NY Times web site.


Clark, W8TN

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June 30, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Little America
By TED WIDMER

Providence, R.I.

IF you sail due south from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, you will eventually come 
to a tiny tear-shaped island with no beaches, no water and no human beings. 
Navassa, its enormous limestone cliffs rising straight out of the sea, is 
the oldest continuous overseas possession of the United States, older than 
Guantánamo, the Virgin Islands, Hawaii, and Alaska. Older than all of them, 
Navassa contains American history in microcosm.

Although it came into American possession only 150 years ago, Navassa was 
first sighted, according to legend, during the second voyage of Columbus in 
1493. Thirty miles west of Hispaniola, it was close enough to be noticed 
but far enough away that its existence was always a bit in doubt. From the 
beginning it appeared indistinct on maps, a tiny smudge not much bigger 
than a ladybug on a windshield, in the windward passage between Haiti and 
Jamaica.

But still, it was there on the first maps when so much of what we now know 
was not. Around 1507, the year “America” became a word applied to the New 
World, maps began to show a small island in that spot. And so the 
cartographers — the first of a long chain of courtiers and empire-builders 
who, by naming places, pretended to own them — claimed Navassa.

After bursting onto the page of history, Navassa sat quietly for a very 
long time. During all the wars fought along the Spanish Main, it remained 
uninhabited except for the occasional pirate crew. After coming into sight, 
Navassa seems to have become invisible all over again. No one knew or cared 
where it was until 1857, 364 years after its fabled discovery.

On July 1 that year, an American sea captain happened upon the island and 
claimed it on the ground that it contained a valuable mineral, known as 
“white gold.” For millennia, boobies and other seabirds had landed on 
Navassa, knowing that its sheer cliffs and lack of fresh water made it 
inhospitable to humans, and therefore pleasant. Navassa became one of the 
world’s most ample sources of guano — bird excrement — a substance prized 
for phosphate and its regenerative effects on tired crops.

The island is more or less made of guano. Navassa is a spectacular monument 
to avian achievement.

The United States Congress quickly placed the island under American 
jurisdiction based on the Guano Islands Act of 1856. The act, one of 
history’s more accurately named pieces of legislation, gave permission to 
the United States, from the United States, to claim any island in the world 
rich in bird droppings. Consequently, Navassa became an American 
“appurtenance” — not quite a territory but still indisputably American.

Except the declaration was disputed by the island’s nearest neighbor, 
Haiti, which has claimed Navassa since its independence in 1804. Haiti 
bases its rights on Columbus and on early treaties between France and 
Spain. But few paid attention, in part because Haiti itself was not 
recognized by the United States at the time since it was governed by people 
of African descent.

After the Civil War, American business began to cultivate Navassa’s rich 
bounty. Like most treasure, guano demanded a high price for its extraction. 
African-American laborers were sent there to dig, under oppressive 
conditions. Punishments verged on torture, like the policy of “tricing” — 
hanging laborers by their arms, their feet just touching the ground. In 
1889, the workers rebelled, killing five whites.

In 1898, as the United States busily acquired new possessions elsewhere, it 
lost interest in Navassa. The last Americans were removed from the island 
in 1901, and it was claimed by the same residents that live there today: 
rats, birds, scorpions, wild goats and feral dogs.

Humans come back to Navassa now and then. In 1917, a 162-foot lighthouse 
was built there, in part to light the approach to Panama and the new canal. 
A lighthouse keeper lived there until 1929, when an automatic beacon was 
installed. During World War II, an observation post was erected by the 
Navy. No Nazis were ever sighted.

Responsibility for Navassa has shifted from one government agency to 
another, each uncertain of who should be in charge of our giant guano lump. 
For a while Navassa was considered part of the Guantánamo naval base. Then 
it was part of the Coast Guard. Since 1976, it has been lodged in the 
Department of the Interior, an unlikely destination for an island that 
could not be less internal.

There the story would appear to end, the forlorn tale of the little island 
that couldn’t. But just as Navassa survived war, piracy and the rise and 
fall of empires, so it appears perfectly able to survive bureaucracy. Now 
new explorers are visiting. The National Aeronautics and Space 
Administration has undertaken a “remote sensing experiment” to create a 
detailed topographical map of Navassa that will help monitor the island’s 
reaction to climate change, hurricanes and the rise of water levels around 
the world. This seems a fitting result for a place that was never all that 
comfortably on the map in the first place.

This island, so inhospitable to humans, is in its own way a natural 
paradise. Navassa may offer the most pristine Caribbean environment left, 
and in 1999 it was declared a National Wildlife Refuge. A huge number of 
plant and animal species can be found within its three square miles. Recent 
investigations have shown the number of known species, once thought to be 
150, is closer to 650. Many of these species — lizards, insects and trees — 
exist nowhere else. One solitary palm, thought to have disappeared in 1928, 
appears to be the last of its kind. A lonely predicament; but like Navassa, 
it survives.

These efforts to learn more about Navassa’s environment are not universally 
appreciated. Many Haitians, resentful of the American interest in Navassa, 
believe that the science is simply a cover for the same old greed. A lively 
topic of conversation in Haiti is that the United States has discovered 
gold on Navassa, or perhaps uranium, or even the gateway to Atlantis, the 
legendary lost civilization. In 1989, some Haitians occupied Navassa, 
albeit very briefly. After a couple of hours, they left it to the lizards.

What lies ahead for this remote outpost of American sovereignty? On the 
150th anniversary of the year Navassa came into American possession, it 
feels a bit unseemly to see the world’s richest nation entangled in a 
dispute with the poorest nation in our hemisphere over a remote rock that 
no one can live on.

All that Navassa holds for us is the right — or more specifically, the 
power — of its possession. Perhaps we should celebrate the sesquicentennial 
by just giving it back — to Haiti, or an international trust or the state 
of nature itself. It would be a sublime gesture on behalf of freedom in its 
simplest state.

Would it not confound our critics to witness an American act of pure 
altruism? Would it not confound them even more if our oldest possession, 
the birthplace of American imperialism, became the birthplace of a better 
way of thinking about the way nations interact?

To admit that Navassa does not belong to us, or to anyone, would recognize 
an earlier condition, more pristine, before the rise of nations and the 
conflicts that define them. In so doing, we would take a small step toward 
an ancient and very American aspiration: to make the world new again.

Ted Widmer, the director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown 
University, is the author of the forthcoming “Ark of the Liberties: America 
and the World.”

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