The story begins millions of years ago
when bats and sea birds came to nest in the naturally formed caves. Over centuries, the level of guano, or bat or
bird droppings, in the bottoms of these caves built up to a great height,
nearly filling the cavities. Then, as
the Caribbean tectonic plate was dragged down under sea-level with the sinking
Atlantic plate upon which it rested, the guano would be drowned in sea
water. Over a period of millions of
years, this happened repeatedly.
Anguilla and Sombrero were sometimes above sea level for millions of
years, and then it is estimated up to 10,000 feet under water for millions more
years. This process converted the fresh
guano into a crystalline form which chemists call phosphate.
In 1814 and again in 1825, British geologists
surveyed Sombrero and found that it abounded in guano. In the 1840s, guano came to be prized in the
industrial world as a source of saltpetre for gunpowder as well as an
agricultural fertilizer. The US began
importing it in 1843. By the 1850s the
UK was importing over 200,000 tons a year while US imports totalled about
750,000 tons.
The international competition for guano
resulted in the ‘guano mania’ of the 1850s, and increasing prices for the
product. In 1856 the US Congress enacted
the ‘Guano Islands Act’. This Act enabled US citizens to take possession
of unclaimed islands containing guano in the name of the United States, and
empowered the president to send in armed military to intervene in the case of
any dispute. This encouraged US
entrepreneurs to search for and exploit newly found deposits on tiny islands
and reefs in the Caribbean and elsewhere.
This industry reached Anguilla and Sombrero
in the 1850s and became important throughout the 1860s and 1870s.[1] At an unknown date, probably in the early
1850s, a US mining enterprise, Messrs Copeland and Gowen, occupied Sombrero and
in a short time quarried as they claimed over 100,000 thousand tons of guano.
The ships unloaded their Anguillian cargo in Baton
Rouge at the mouth of the Mississippi River, from where it was placed in sacks
and barged up-river. The sacks of
Anguilla and Sombrero guano were then loaded onto wagons and distributed to
corn farmers through the mid-western United States. We can justifiably say that the American
prairies were, in the years before the American Civil War of 1861-1865, opened
up to corn or maize agriculture fertilized with the guano of Anguilla.[2]
In the year 1856, after the passage of the Guano
Islands Act permitted them to do so, Messrs Copeland and Gowen filed a
claim to Sombrero Island on behalf of the United States with the State
Department. They alleged that they had
employed a Captain Meltiah Jordan Jr to go on a voyage of discovery and that he
had on one of those trips discovered guano deposits on Sombrero and had brought
back a sample. They had dispatched a
second vessel commanded by Captain John Jordan, with instructions to take and
retain possession of the island, which was done. However, due to technicalities with the filed
affidavits, the claim was not considered sufficient to warrant recognition of
Gowen and Copeland’s claim.
The following year 1857, the mining firm of
Wood and Grant acquired the interests of Copeland and Gowen. In spite of their claim not being recognised,
they occupied the island and removed guano.
As the US Civil War broke out, one of the previous owners, a Mr AC Elliott
of Maryland, threatened to take possession of Sombrero by force, and make use
of it for the Confederacy, or possibly for the slave trade. By this time Wood and Grant had 45 labourers
on the island, and they asked for protection against expeditions by the
Confederates. As a result, the Secretary
of State wrote to the Secretary of the Navy remarking on the vital importance
during the Civil War of the guano island of Sombrero belonging to the United
States and the necessity of its protection by the Navy. Mr Elliott does not seem to have proceeded
with his claim, and Wood and Grant remained in possession of Sombrero.
In 1859, Mr Sawkins, the government geologist
in Jamaica, was sent to Anguilla and Sombrero where he identified large
deposits of phosphate.[3] This would not have been difficult to do,
since the Americans had been mining the mineral there for some years. The supply of fresh guano having been
exhausted, the American miners were now blasting the phosphate with dynamite
from quarries. The resulting chunks of
the mineral were ground up by a steam-powered mill, and the resulting rubble
slid down a chute to the holds of waiting ships tied up below the cliff. So, the presence of phosphates would have
been obvious to Mr Sawkins.
The following year, in August 1860, the West
Indian workers on Sombrero revolted against the “slavery proclivities” of Mr
Snow, a white US Superintendent, who did not know how to behave in the presence
of free wage-earning men. Four of the two
hundred workers fatally injured Superintendent Snow and took over the island
and the company’s money and stores.
By this time, the US occupation and
exploitation of Sombrero’s mineral resources was attracting the attention of
the British colonial authorities. In
1863, Sombrero was the subject of diplomatic correspondence. Wood, who was still occupying Sombrero, wrote
the US Secretary of State complaining that the British Frigate PHAETON,
Commanded by Captain Latham, had visited Sombrero on March 18, 1863 and forced
the Americans on the island to haul down the American flag. Captain Latham subsequently permitted the
American occupants to put the flag up again, at the same time claiming they had
no right to do so. Wood & Sons
claimed to have been in continuous, peaceful possession since December 1,
1856. They admitted that they had not
secured a proclamation of American sovereignty over the island under the Guano
Islands Act, but several hundred tons of 75-80% pure phosphate still
remained to be exploited. They explained
that since the blockade of the Southern Confederate Ports in 1861, they had
shipped Sombrero’s phosphates almost entirely to England. They were not interested in making any claim
to the island, only to being allowed to remove and sell the phosphate. Charles Francis Adams, the US Ambassador to
the UK, negotiated with Lord Russell of the British Foreign office, as a result
of which the Americans were offered a five year lease for the removal of phosphate,
with a proviso that any United States claim to sovereignty over Sombrero was
not prejudiced. The US Secretary of
State agreed to this arrangement, but the US never subsequently claimed any
right to sovereignty over Sombrero.
At the height of mining activities on the
island, a steam-powered engine pulled the waggons from the quarries or pits to
the derrick which lowered their contents of phosphate to the boats waiting
below. The engine may also have been
used to grind up the lumps of phosphate that were stored alongside the engine
house awaiting the arrival of ships to take it away. The rusting remains of the boiler can still
be seen near the ruins of the engine house at the landing place on Sombrero.
1.
Sombrero, circa 1864, crowded with phosphate ships
British interest in Sombrero was stirred by
the need for a lighthouse to mark the Anegada Passage, the safest point of
entry to the Caribbean Sea from the north.
The island lay directly in the route of shipping from England to South
and Central America in an area with many shipping hazards. From as early as 1848 the Admiralty was asked
by shipping interests to install a light on it.
With the wreck in 1859 on Horseshoe Reef on Anegada of the Royal Mail
Steam Packet Company’s ship PARAMATTA on her maiden voyage, requests to the
Admiralty mounted. The lighthouse was
then built and it first showed its light on the evening of 1 January 1868.
From the early 1870s until 1885, a Cornish
mining engineer, Thomas Corfield, was Superintendent of Sombrero. His duties included organising the conveying
of the phosphate to a spot which was convenient for loading the lighters to
take the mineral to the ships lying off the island. He supervised the construction of derricks and
engine houses, and arranged the laying of the tram lines for the railway wagons
which were loaded at the quarries. The
phosphate was piled in dumps near the engine houses and derricks.
2.
Superintendent Corfield’s cottage on Sombrero, ca 1880
Workers were recruited mainly from St Maarten
and Anguilla. They lived in wooden huts
during their term of service. The
Superintendent’s house was a wooden bungalow near the middle of the island, and
the quarters of the technicians, store keepers and lighthouse keepers and other
wooden buildings were grouped around it.
Stores and various supplies were obtained as needed from a Mr Nesbit, a
Philipsburg merchant. The company’s
schooner LOGOS brought supplies from St Maarten and also took the labourers to
and from their homes.
In 1871 the lease of the island was sold for £55,000 to a French banker in London, Baron Erlanger, and
then sold again by him to the New Sombrero Phosphate Company for £110,000. This transaction gave rise to ground breaking
litigation in the famous case of Baron Erlanger v New Sombrero Phosphate Co
(1878) App Cas 1218. Erlanger,
a French banker, purchased the balance of the lease of Sombrero Island which
had been mined for many years previously for its phosphates by Mr Wood &
Co. He then floated the New Sombrero Company
in the City of London, and issued a prospectus inviting purchasers to invest in
it. A large number of shares were
sold. Erlanger did not disclose in the
prospectus that he was about to make a huge profit by selling the lease he had
purchased to the company. After three
years of hearing nothing, the investors sent a detective to Anguilla and
Sombrero to investigate. He reported
back that Sombrero was abandoned except for the lighthouse and that all the
phosphate ore had been mined by the Americans.
The investors tracked down Erlanger and sued him.
It was held by the House of Lords, Britain’s
final court of appeal at that time, that the promoters of a company are in a
fiduciary relationship with investors.
They are obliged to put in the company prospectus the full details of
any contract they have with the company they are promoting. Erlanger, who had concealed the 100% profit
he was going to make from the sale of the lease to the company, was found to
have defrauded the investors. The court
ordered rescission of the contracts to purchase the shares, meaning that the
contracts were set aside and the purchase price ordered to be repaid to the
investors. This case is the foundation
of the company law doctrine that when promoters start up a company, if any one
of them has any contract with the company, full disclosure must be made in the
prospectus, or the investors will be able to have the prospectus declared by a
court to be a fraud, and they can get their money back with damages. This is a leading case in Caribbean, British,
Canadian, and even United States company law.
By 1890 the phosphate works on Sombrero were completely abandoned, and
no further effort was ever made to mine the island again.
Everyone in Anguilla has heard of the Gavannah
Cave, sometimes pronounced Cavannah. It
lies on Rev John A Gumbs’ land in the Katouche Valley. It is not a cave at all. It is a mine.
A cave is a natural cavity in the land.
A mine is a man-made cavity, dug to remove minerals from below the ground. The Gavannah Cave was dug by American miners
during the 1870s when Anguilla’s mining industry was at its height. It is not a very deep mine. The main shaft is no more than 100 feet long,
and lies just below the surface.
3.
Gavannah Cave, after DA McFarlane and RDE MacPhee
There
is a chimney or opening halfway down the tunnel. Outside of the chimney there are mounds of
large boulders and rubble, which indicates that there must have been a large
winch above the opening which permitted the miners to remove the results of
their dynamiting that way.
There is a short branch tunnel to the left after
you enter the main tunnel, with a short shaft about 10 feet deep at the end of
the branch tunnel. There is 20 ft deep
shaft at the end of the main tunnel. When
you climb down this shaft you find yourself in a sort of hub of two or three short
tunnels, no more than 10 feet long, going off in different directions like the
spokes of a bicycle wheel. They appear
to be exploratory tunnels that the miners dug in an effort to find more
phosphate, as the mine came to the end of its productive life. In those early days, miners did not know that
phosphate was fossilised bat or seabird guano.
They may have thought that, like mining for gold or tin, if they struck
out underground from a successful vein of mineral they might find more veins
waiting to be discovered. It was only
many years later, when geologists discovered the great age of the earth and the
many changes that it had gone through in the millennia of the past, that
chemists were able to explain how phosphate came to be made.
We do not know at present who owned the land
in the 1870s on which the Gavannah Mine was dug. There are no leases or legal documents in the
Anguilla Archives to give us this information.[4] We can only hope that, whoever the Anguillian
owners were, they made their fortune after decades of grinding poverty trying
to make the poor soil of the Katouche Valley produce beef and goat-meat.
The Anguillian owners would not have been
able to authorise the mining of phosphate on their land. In the Leeward Islands the mineral rights in
private land has long been vested in or owned by the Crown or government. Only the Crown could grant a licence to dig
for minerals in privately owned land. The
landowner could at most lease the bare land for the purpose of working it as a
mine. Was the Cavannah a legal mine,
where the government of St Kitts received royalties from the mining while the
Anguillian landowner received rents for the lease? We do not know. Very likely, it was an illegal mine, privately
arranged between the Anguillian landowner and the American miners.[5]
We know that in his 1768 Will Governor Gumbs
left the Katouche Bay Estate to his two daughters, Anne Warner and Katherine
Payne. It was then spelled Cadeaux Bay
Estate. To one he left the south bank of
the valley and to the other he left the north.
Cadeaux is the French word for “gifts”, as in the plural of gift. They shared the small sugar factory on the
south slope half way between the Estate Well and the beach. The ruins of the Boiling house can still be
seen if you know where to look. All sign
of the Curing House and the Animal Round where the canes were crushed have
disappeared in the intervening years.
The name Katouche has evolved from the original name Cadeaux. The Anguillian English speakers did not know
the correct way to pronounce the French word.
The pronounced it phonetically as “cadeuse”. It began to be spelled in the deeds “Cuttous”
or “Catouche” with a “C”. Eventually the
“C” was replaced with a “K” and we get the present spelling.
The Gavannah Cave was not the only phosphate
mine in Anguilla. Also bearing evidence
of extensive phosphate mining is the Little Bay Phosphate Cave which can be
seen on the eastern flank of Little Bay.
But, we know nothing of the working of the Little Bay Phosphate
Cave. Like the Gavannah Cave, it must
have been informally leased and mined.
Palaeontology
work began in the north-eastern area of the Caribbean in the mid-nineteenth
century, when phosphate mining boomed in the region and fossils were
coincidentally found in associated strata. In the year 1868, Henry Waters & Brothers,
manufacturers of phosphate fertilisers in the City of Philadelphia, received a
shipment of cave earth from Anguilla.
The shipment was sent for the purpose of having the Philadelphia Academy
of Sciences estimate the potential industrial value of the phosphate specimens
included in the earth. Henry Waters
noticed the presence of fossil bones in his shipment, and promptly brought them
to the attention of Edward Drinker Cope, an eminent palaeontologist. Cope was at the time the Secretary of the
Academy. Cope recognised the fossil
bones as coming from a rodent of phenomenal size. He named the extinct animal that produced the
fossils, Amblyrhiza inundata.[6] The generic or first part of the name roughly
translates as “strange root” reflecting Cope’s inability to conceive where such
a strange beast could have come from.
The second or specific part of the name reflects Cope’s belief that the
animal must have lived on an area of land that was now under the sea. In that he is right, since Anguilla was in
pre-historic times, when the sea level was hundreds of feet lower than it now
is, part of a giant island named by geologists “Anguillea” and incorporating
Anguilla, St Martin and St Barths. Sea
levels having risen 35 meters the higher parts of Anguillea are now separate
islands surrounded by the sea.
They were dug
from an unknown phosphate mine on Anguilla, probably the Gavannah Cave. Fossil
remains of Amblyrhiza have also been identified in St Maarten, and it is now
defined as an extinct species of giant marsupial that is estimated to have
weighed between 50 and 200 kg. The
extinct animal now also goes by the name the Blunt Toothed Giant Hutia.
4. Amblyrhiza inundata (reconstruction)
The fossils that were shipped to Professor
Cope were accompanied by an Amerindian carved conch chisel. The sciences of geology and biology were not
as advanced in Professor Cope's time as they are now. He thought it possible that the Amblyrhiza remains were associated with
that of early man. It is now known that
the Giant Hutia pre-date the entry of man into Anguilla by many thousands of
years. The Amblyrhiza remains have been carbon dated to 125,000 years, while the
earliest humans are not thought likely to have entered the Americas more than
30,000 years ago, showing that Amblyrhiza
lived long before humans entered the American Continent from Asia.
We can hope that, one day in the future,
some enterprising Anguillian student in a doctoral programme, perhaps preparing
a thesis on the phosphate industry of Anguilla, will locate Anguilla’s archives
in St Kitts, hopefully containing copies of the leases, if any, made to the
American prospectors who worked the phosphates of Anguilla. The mining company records may still be
preserved in Philadelphia, and study of them may reveal details of the social
life of the Anguillians of the 1850s to 1890s, as well, perhaps, as the
engineering plans and designs for the works on Sombrero. In London, among the Colonial Office records
at Kew Gardens and elsewhere, will be found the correspondence and agreements
relating to the licences granted to the original Sombrero Phosphate Company and
the New Sombrero Phosphate Company.
These records will all prove useful in telling us something about the
life and social conditions of the Anguillians of the mid- to late-nineteenth
century.
[1] As
an aside, when speaking or writing about Sombrero, it is worth remembering that
until as recently as 1951 Sombrero was attached to the British Virgin Islands,
and was not a part of Anguilla as it is now.
In 1951 it was detached from Tortola and added to the colony of St Kitts
and Nevis. This was principally because
the lighthouse on Sombrero had for many years been provisioned by the Schooner
Warspite of Anguilla, which sourced the needed fuel for the lighthouse and
provisions for the lighthouse men in the commercial outlets of Basseterre. The lighthouse men came mainly from Anguilla,
then a possession of St Kitts. It must
have seemed more convenient to the colonial authorities to have the island of
Sombrero placed under the control of the government and legislature of St
Kitts, which had more of an administrative connection with Sombrero than the
government in Tortola. In the 1982
Anguilla Constitution, as a result of negotiations between the British, St
Kitts-Nevis, and Anguilla governments, Sombrero was for the first time detached
from St Kitts and formally added to the territory of Anguilla. As a result, we are entitled to treat the
history of Sombrero as a part of the history of Anguilla.
[2] The
soil of the prairies needs fertilizer to be able to grow any crops since it
consists of millions of acres of ancient sand dunes that formed from the bottom
of the ancient sea that once occupied all of the central plains of the US. Sand is notoriously lacking in nutrients and
is only fertile when fertilizer is added to it.
[3] CO
239/104 - No 122. Dispatch of Governor Hamilton of 8 October 1860 to Secretary
of State Newcastle concerning his detention in St Kitts of Mr Sawkins to do a
survey of St Kitts, he having completed his survey of the probable value of
phosphate of lime in Anguilla. I have
searched for a copy of the survey in the colonial records at Kew Gardens, but
have not been able to locate one.
[4] There
may be some in the St Kitts Archives of Anguilla, which will in due course shed
light on the commercial dealings that surrounded this excavation.
[5] We
will only know the truth when we get to see the Anguilla Archives for the 1860s
and 1870, presently being held for us in the St Kitts Archives in
Basseterre. The St Kitts authorities
have generously agreed to hold our Archives for us until such time as we
construct a suitable building to hold the fragile and crumbling documents. To bring them to Anguilla, and store them in
an un-air-conditioned and insect-riddled room would be stupid of us.
[6] Professor
Cope's report may be accessed online: https://books.google.com.ai/books?id=nJA4rYDQT-4C&pg=PA183&lpg=PA183&dq=&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false
