MOMENTS IN TIME: Parliament’s poached penguin eggs and the Great Guano War

, owned by Good Faith Shipping, is holed by who knows what and sinks between Dassen and Robben islands off Cape Town.

It’s all rather depressing and takes some of the lustre out of our rescue operation. But what catches my attention is the Guano War. Did grown men really kill each other over bird shit? The African connection has to do with a rakish New York captain named Benjamin Morrell who has a penchant for wandering the oceans. In 1828, he sails up the coast from the Cape to Angola, hunting seals. He eventually writes a book with the windy title:

Before you can yell “hoist the mainsail” the next guano hunter is sailing southwards – then another, then another. The steward is obviously doing good, unprincipled business.under Captain Wade. He leaves a record: “On first landing in November 1843 on the island which enjoyed for a time so odorous a celebrity, the place was literally alive with one mass of penguins and gannet. They were so tame that they would not move without compulsion.

All hell breaks loose, aided by some smuggled liquor. No master or mate is allowed on the island; any officer attempting to land is pelted with dead penguins and threatened at knifepoint.. Its master negotiates a deal with Ryan – provisions for guano – and its crew begins digging. The British are hopping mad. War is declared against the new republic.

By May 1845, it’s all over. About 300,000 tons of guano have been shipped to Britain at around £7 a ton and most of the penguin islands round the southern African coast have been scraped clean. Without guano in which to bury them, where are the corpses? There is no record of them. A hundred years earlier it had been oil. A report in 1790 states that “the Government sends every year a detachment into the Isle of Roben to shoot mors and manchots, which are called at the Cape, penguins, from which they extract great quantities of oil”.

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