Guano Trade

The mid-nineteenth-century export of seabird-dropping fertilizer, chiefly from the Chincha Islands off Peru, prized for its high nitrate and phosphate content. Peru held a state monopoly from the 1840s; ships waited months at the Chinchas to load under brutal conditions, much of the digging done by indentured Chinese labor. The deposits were the country’s main revenue source until exhaustion and Chilean nitrates displaced them. Control of the islands triggered the Chincha Islands War between Spain and Peru, 1864 to 1866.