Peru in the Guano Age / Being a Short Account of a Recent Visit to the Guano Deposits, with Some Reflections on the Money They Have Produced and the Uses to Which It Has Been Applied

by A. J. Duffield

The Pabellon de Pica is in form like a pavilion, or tent, or better still, a sugar-loaf rising a little more than 1000 feet above the sea which washes its base. It is connected by a short saddle with the mountain range, which runs north and south along the whole Peruvian coast, attaining a height here of more than 5000 feet in isolated cones, but maintaining an average altitude of 3000 feet.

When a strong north wind rages on these sandy pampas, the dust, finer than Irish blackguard, obscures the sky, disfigures the earth, and makes mad the unhappy traveller who happens to be caught in its fury. A mind not troubled by the low price of Peruvian bonds, or whether even the next coupon will be paid, might imagine that the gods, in mercy to the idleness of man, were determined to cover up those dunghills from human sight; and hence the floods, and cataracts of sand and dust which have been poured upon them from above.

If it could be conceived that an almighty hand, consisting of nineteen fingers, each finger six hundred feet long, with a generous palm fifteen hundred feet wide, had thrust itself up from below, through this loaf of sugar, or dry dung, to where the dung reaches on the Pabellon, some idea might be formed of the frame in which, and on which the guano rests.

The man who reckoned the Pabellon to contain eight million tons of guano, took no notice of the Cyclopean fingers which hold it together, or the winstone palm in which it rests. There are eighteen large and small gorges formed by the nineteen stone fingers. Each gorge was filled with a motionless torrent of stones and sand, and these had to be removed before the guano could be touched.

So hard and compact had the guano become, that neither the stones nor the sand had mixed with it; when these were put in motion and conducted down into the sea below, the guano was found hard and intact, and it had to be blasted with gunpowder to convey it by the wooden shoots to the ships' launches that were dancing to receive it underneath. The process was as dangerous as mining, and quite as expensive, to the Peruvian Government; for, although the loading of the guano is let out by contract, the contractors—a limited company of native capitalists—will, as a matter of course, claim a considerable sum for removing stones and sand, and equally as a matter of course they will be paid: and they deserve to be paid. No hell has ever been conceived by the Hebrew, the Irish, the Italian, or even the Scotch mind for appeasing the anger and satisfying the vengeance of their awful gods, that can be equalled in the fierceness of its heat, the horror of its stink, and the damnation of those compelled to labour there, to a deposit of Peruvian guano when being shovelled into ships. The Chinese who have gone through it, and had the delightful opportunity of helping themselves to a sufficiency of opium to carry them back to their homes, as some believed, or to heaven, as fondly hoped others, must have had a superior idea of the Almighty, than have any of the money-making nations mentioned above, who still cling to an immortality of fire and brimstone.

Years ago the Pabellon de Pica was resorted to for its guano by a people, whoever they were, who had some fear of God before their eyes. Their little houses built of boulders and mortar, still stand, and so does their little church, built after the same fashion, but better, and raised from the earth on three tiers, each tier set back a foot's length from the other. It is now used as a store for barley and other valuable necessaries for the mules and horses of the loading company.

If the bondholders of Peru, or others, have any desire to know something of public life on this now celebrated dunghill, they may turn to another page of this history, and Mr. Plimsoll, or other shipping reformer, may learn something likewise of the lives of English seamen passed during a period of eight months in the neighbourhood of a Peruvian guano heap. In the meantime we are dealing with the grave subject of measurable quantities of stuff, which fetches £12 or so a ton in the various markets of the cultivated world.

The next deposit—of much greater dimensions, although not so well known—is about eight miles south of the Pabellon, called Punta de Lobos. This also is on the mainland, but juts out to the west considerably, into the sea. I find it mentioned in Dampier—'At Lobos de la Mar,' he says, vol. i. 146, 'we found abundance of penguins, and boobies, and seal in great abundance.' Also in vol. iv. 178 he says, 'from Tucames to Yancque is twelve leagues, from which place they carry clay to lay in the valleys of Arica and Sama. And here live some few Indian people, who are continually digging this clayey ground for the use aforesaid, for the Spaniards reckon that it fattens the ground.' The fishing no doubt was better here than at the Pabellon, which would be the principal attraction to the Indians. The Indians have disappeared with the lobos, the penguins and the boobies.

One million six hundred thousand tons of guano were reported from Lobos last year by the Government engineers. The place is much more easy of access than the Pabellon, and no obstacle was in the way of a thorough measurement, and yet the utmost carelessness has been observed with regard to it. It may safely be taken that there are two millions and a half of tons at this deposit, or series of deposits, ten in number, all overlooking the sea. The guano is good. If the method of shipping it were equally good the Government might save the large amount which they at present lose. I have no hesitation in saying, that for every 900 tons shipped, 200 tons of guano are lost in the sea by bad management, added to the dangers of the heavy surf which rolls in under the shoots. As at the Pabellon de Pica, so here the principal labourers are Chinamen, and Chilenos, the former doing much more work than the latter, and receiving inferior pay. Many of the Chinamen are still apprentices, or 'slaves' as they are in reality called and treated by their owners.

At Punta de Lobos I discovered two small caves built of boulders, and roofed in with rafters of whales' ribs. The effect of the white concentric circles in the sombre light of these alcoves had an oriental expression. The number of whales on this coast must at one time have been very great. They are still to be met with several hundred miles west, in the latitude of Payta. No doubt for the same reason that the lobos and the boobies have gone, no one knows where, so the whales have gone in search of grounds and waters remote from the haunts of man and steamers.