Ghosts of Navassa: Race and Violence at the Heart of America's Guano Empire

Brian Medley

Advisor: Rosemarie Zagarri, PhD, Department of History and Art History

Committee Members: Michael O'Malley, Yevette Richards

Horizon Hall, #3225
November 17, 2025, 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM

Abstract:

Navassa Island was America’s first extraterritorial possession and a key component of the country’s mineral frontier. After passage of the Guano Islands Act of 1856, the approximately two square mile Caribbean landmass forty miles west of Haiti came to play an outsized, yet little understood, role in United States history. A Baltimore entrepreneur, and then the Navassa Phosphate Company, managed the island. It was a “guano” island in name only; it had none of the seabird feces planters coveted as fertilizer. It did, however, have a lot of phosphate. Expanded conceptions of guano came to include that mineral, which was also vital to nourishing America’s farms. This was especially true in the nutrient-starved cotton fields of the South. Navassa would also become a place of suffering and torture for the mostly African American labor force employed there.

This dissertation has two broad goals. One is to restore the events and people who toiled on Navassa Island to United States history and its historiography. The stories of those who worked there are mostly untold and unknown. The other goal seeks to analyze why conditions there deteriorated so dramatically, leading to a series of revolts, repeated interventions by the United States Navy, a Supreme Court decision that affected future American imperial actions, and a presidential decision saving three Navassa workers from being hanged.

Absent the conditions mangers imposed, Navassa Island would have been a difficult place to work. At least three factors conspired to make that already bad situation worse. One was its physical and regulatory isolation. The government essentially outsourced governance to the company. That meant the remote island existed in a cloud of legal ambiguity and regulatory neglect. Second, few people who worked on Navassa Island—workers or managers—had adequate prior experience to help them make sense of their situations, leading to role improvisation. For managers, that could mean tyrannical despotism, using threats and violence to extract as much work as they could from the captive labor force. For workers, it sometimes induced a sense of acceptance and self-preservation—other times it led to resistance. Third, the lack of oversight, the island’s physical remoteness, and the harsh labor regime permitted the company to employ a bounded statelessness on its workforce. Navassa’s statelessness, though limited by impermanence, eventually led to a horrific labor uprising in 1889 that resulted in the deaths of five white managers, the incarceration of numerous Black workers, and increased public scrutiny of activities on the island that contributed to the company’s eventual downfall.
This dissertation analyzes the intersection of empire, commerce, and race relations on Navassa Island between 1857 and 1898. Company officers there comprised the island’s governing class. Its laborers were the imported imperial subjects. That quasi-imperial structure alone makes the island a revealing case study. However, Navassa was also a commercial enterprise that created a place of abuse and suffering. Despite the company’s many advantages, it was seldom able to turn a profit and learned no lessons from its repeated crises. The Navassa Phosphate Company abandoned this outpost of America’s guano empire only when the United States entered the Spanish-American War, which inaugurated a whole new era of extraterritorial imperial expansion.