Juan Trippe's Island Empire

CLXXII

Trippe’s examination of the far side of the globe had uncovered a handful of tiny specks in the midst of the Pacific. Along with Kingman Reef, none of them seemed to be owned by anyone. They had names like Johnston, Jarvis, Palmyra, Howland and Baker.

The island empire imagined by Juan Trippe in 1934

A bit more research uncovered the fact that each one of these uninhabited islands did indeed have histories, all of which were similar. In the Nineteenth Century, American whaleships routinely dropped anchor nearby, raised the Stars and Stripes ashore, and sailed off. Returning the next year, they invariably discovered that a British Union Jack brought by competing British whalers flew in its place. And so, dutifully, the American sailors would replace the British flag, only to have it replaced in turn. This contest of unenforced claims lasted for decades. As years passed, first Japan and then the Kingdom of Hawaii joined in, but they were largely ignored by the Anglo-Americans to whom it was all something of a game.

The Baker Island day beacon with the ruins of Meyertown

 

Juan Trippe didn’t care who owned the islands. Sight unseen he wanted them as possible Clipper landing sites. And Trippe being Trippe, he was going to enjoy cruelly jabbing his thumb into the eye of the uncooperative British lion by enlarging the territory of the United States. He ordered his legal department to find out how he could extend American suzerainty to these barely-charted desert isles.

The airfield on Baker Island was intentionally ruined in 1943 to forestall its use by Japanese warplanes.

An investigation by Pan American’s lawyers uncovered the details of that same obscure piece of Congressional legislation under which Trippe had “discovered” Wake for the United States. Called the Guano Islands Act, and dating from 1856, it allowed any American to claim any uninhabited land for the purpose of guano mining. Statutorily, all the claimant had to do was indicate intent to begin mining operations within a fixed period by setting up a corporation on paper. Juan hadn’t bothered to jump through all those hoops with Wake, but armed now with this information, Trippe suddenly decided to he needed to diversify his business holdings in the Pacific Basin. His personal lawyers swung into action, founding the Oceanic Nitrates Corporation.

In the days before laboratory fertilizers, guano (bird droppings) was the richest fertilizer available, and there had been a thriving business in guano mining.

Howland and its famous day beacon, the landmark Amelia Earhart sought in vain.

Among the best sources for guano are tiny, uninhabited coral rock desert islands where seabirds have been nesting undisturbed for hundreds of thousands of years. The guano on these "guano islands" is often many yards deep.   

By employing the Guano Islands Act, the United States, along with other world powers, was able to claim inaccessible, otherwise useless specks of land in remote corners of the world simply to assure the nation's farmers of a steady supply of guano.

Guano was a hot property until the post-World War II “Green Revolution” with its synthetic fertilizing compounds. Today, with the rise of organic farming and the backlash against GMOs, guano is again coming into demand.

For Juan Trippe, guano represented a convenient excuse to develop new Pan Am facilities, not a business goal, but if he could profit off shoveling bird shit, Juan Trippe had no compunctions about doing so. And he couldn’t imagine any American Administration subverting a good healthy profit motive. Trippe was so certain that he would be able to secure the islands under the same terms as Midway and Wake --- a nominal Navy presence with civilian development for a mere hundred dollars per year --- that he had set everything in motion on that assumption.

Birds on Jarvis

 

Thus, Trippe was shocked when the Roosevelt Administration rejected the application of Oceanic Nitrates Corporation to begin guano mining operations. 

The islands of Johnston, Kingman Reef, and Palmyra were placed under the control of the U.S. Navy as Wake and Midway had been. However, Howland, Baker, and Jarvis were given over to the Department of The Interior. Instead of leasing Howland, Baker, and Jarvis out for mining, the Interior Department decided to colonize them beginning in 1934.

Birds atop a literal mountain of guano.

The decision to place the latter three islands under civilian control and to seed an American presence there was strictly geopolitical and based on the islands’ proximity to Japanese territory. 

Since there was no FAM Route planned through the region, Pan Am’s development plans (unannounced but well-known in Washington circles) were ignored. 

By 1935, Guam, near the Japanese Marianas, was already a flashpoint due to Pan Am overflights (officially these were put down to navigation errors, but they were often covert surveillances). The Roosevelt Administration did not want another such flashpoint near the Marshall Islands, especially one involving Pan Am (although it did want a token American presence in the area).

A British map highlighting the proximity of Japanese and American territorial dependencies.

In the event, colonization turned out to be something of a pipe dream, even though folk of hardy pioneer stock as well as Polynesians from Hawaii were recruited for the plan. 

Howland, Baker and Jarvis are coral islands of a square mile or two with no natural water sources (cisterns were carved out of the rock and potable water brought ashore from supply ships). Each of the three islands is covered with scrub, described as "a flat bulldozed plain of coral sand, without a single tree." The tropical sun is intense. The bird populations number in the hundreds of millions.  The islands’ elevation is less than ten feet. The vista of the lonely sea is everywhere. The isolation is enough to drive anyone mad.

  

Communities were established --- Millersville on Jarvis, Meyertown on Baker, and Itascaville on Howland. They were stocked with canned food and a warehouse full of cigarettes each. The colonies were doomed to failure for the simple reason that seabirds en masse were attracted to any trees or sown crops on the islands. As a result, none of the colonies could be self-sustaining. There was little to occupy the settlers' time except smoking, drinking and watching time pass. 

The government built an airfield on Howland along with a lighthouse, and a corresponding airfield and Adcock Array on Baker. Both airfields were built for landplanes not flying boats.  

Although Millersville, Meyertown and Itascaville survived for the better part of a decade, the three villages were evacuated by the U.S. Navy in 1943 in the face of an imminent Japanese offensive. 

As for Juan Trippe and Pan American Airways neither had a hand in the development or maintenance of the colonies, though Juan Trippe later liked to say he’d “discovered” Howland, Baker and Jarvis just as he had Wake. The airline’s only connection to the later history of the islands is coincidental --- but still remembered.  

 

Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan. Earhart had lured Noonan away from Pan Am, where he was unjustly notorious for his drinking, with the promise of fame after an around-the-world flight.