Canada/Denmark call truce (agree to disagree over Hans Island)

POOP DREAMS

It's a guano-covered rock in the sea. So why do so many people want a piece of Navassa Island?
Article by Brennen Jensen
From Baltimore City Paper, Feb. 21, 2001

This is a story about bird shit.

Or rather, to be more precise, guano, the fetid, often petrified feces of the avian world.

A humble substance, but one that once had the power to move men's souls. In ancient times, spices, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, were the coveted commodity that drove Western explorers. Gold, the eternal prize, led the Spanish to conquer the Incas and Aztecs and sent thousands of novice prospectors scrambling into the Californian mountains. Today, oil builds fortunes, causes wars, and elects presidents.

And then there's guano. Prized as a fertilizer, it was what sent men down to the sea in ships in the 19th century. And Baltimore, with its booming port and proximity to nutrient-starved farmlands, was in the thick of this "guano rush." One hundred and forty years ago, the mayor-proclaimed "Greatest City in America" might have claimed a less peppy (but more easily provable) motto: Guano Capital of the Nation.

So yes, in a way, this is a story about bird shit. But it's principally the tale of a teardrop-shaped hunk of forbidding limestone and coral lying in the Windward Passage some 40 miles west of Haiti. This two-square-mile chunk of land has no inhabitants and no fresh water. What it does have is tons of petrified guano. Baltimoreans killed and died on it. African-Americans were virtually enslaved on it, decades after the Civil War. It caused the world's most powerful nation to battle one of the world's poorest. And this obscure rock led an erstwhile California gospel singer to sue President Clinton and the U.S. government. Such is the saga of Navassa Island.

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http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/misctopic/navassa/poop.htm