When you fill out an online form with your postal location information, one of the choices in the “country” dropdown menu is “United States Outlying Islands.” Ever wonder about those? Today, August 21, is the anniversary of the naming of one of them in 1821.
Jarvis Island is a tiny coral island that’s really, totally, I’m not kidding, in the middle of nowhere, halfway between Hawaii and the Cook Islands. The Cook Islands themselves are pretty remote — go to Brisbane, on the east coast of Australia, and head east into the ocean for about 2600 miles and start looking; they’re somewhere around there.
The British ship Eliza Francis discovered Jarvis Island, but thought a deserted spot of sand two miles long and one mile wide wasn’t even worth claiming. Whaling ships visited occasionally, probably to hunt birds — there isn’t any appreciable water supply, and nothing really grows there but some grass and vines. You can’t even use it for a good lookout; the highest hill is only 23 feet high.
It’s a US “outlying island” because Congress passed the Guano Islands Act in 1856. It enables US citizens to claim islands containing guano deposits in the name of the United States, as long as they’re unoccupied and not claimed by anybody else. At the time, guano was used for making gunpowder and fertilizer, and the US imported three quarters of a million tons of it per year.
The result of the Guano Act was a sort of slow, maritime gold rush; Americans started searching the Caribbean and Pacific for overlooked little islands that might have deposits. Jarvis Island did, and for a while it was inhabited while a mining operation was set up.
It’s pretty unlikely that the US Minor Outlying Islands option would be chosen on a web form by a Jarvis Islander now, though — the place is once again uninhabited. But it’s only one of the “minor outlying islands.” Thanks to the Guano Act of 1856, there are 65 others around the world. They’re all tiny, and except for a couple of small science stations and military outposts, they’re all uninhabited. And remote, as well as very unlikely to have broadband. So it might be an interesting exercise to try to find out how many times US Minor Outlying Islands has been selected on any web form ever.
Back in 1935 there was an effort to establish a permanent settlement on Jarvis Island. It was a formal program set up by the US Department of Commerce called the American Equatorial Islands Colonization Project. They built some houses on Jarvis, Howland, and Baker islands, and recruited 130 settlers, mostly from Hawaii.
The stated goals of the project were to start to create an infrastructure so some or all of the islands could house weather stations and landing fields, which would enable airplane service between the US and Australia. The secret goal of the project, which the settlers weren’t told, was military. The US was worried about the Empire of Japan expanding southward and eastward into the Pacific, and having US residents on the islands would provide observation posts, and, if necessary, sites for military bases.
A closer look at the “colonization project” might have revealed that it wasn’t really what was claimed — all the “settlers” were young men. You know, about the age when they could be drafted into the military. And if you’d gotten to see any of the classified memos about the effort, you would have noticed that the Navy, right from the start, pointed out that the islands were “worthless to commercial aviation.”
They really did build a base on Baker Island shortly after the US entered World War II, but Jarvis Island was simply evacuated in early 1942. There was real danger; Howland Island had been bombed on December 8, 1941. Jarvis Island has been left to its own devices ever since, although it was designated a National Wildlife Refuge in 1974. It was probably tacked on as something of an afterthought; some Congressional aide could probably have been heard saying “there are how many of these island territories??”
By 1974, of course, it was a lot easier to total up all the minor outlying islands. This is partly down to William Burroughs, who patented the first working adding machine on August 21, 1888. His grandson, William S. Burroughs II, went into the arts instead of business machines; he’s the author of Naked Lunch and was one of the best known writers of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. The Beat movement was primarily literary, although surrealism was pretty closely related, and included visual arts too — Max Ernst, René Magritte, and Salvador Dali were probably the best known artists of the movement, which in Europe was centered in France.
France has been the place to go for visual arts for a long, long time. The Louvre’s art collection provides all the inspiration an artist might need. It provides inspiration to other professions too, like on August 21, 1911, when Vincenzo Peruggia stole the Mona Lisa. Peruggia was a janitor in the Louvre, and his caper was surprisingly easy. He came to work early, like all the other workers, and when there was nobody else in the gallery, just took the painting down, removed the frame, wrapped it up in a white cloth, and calmly walked out with it under his arm. As far as anybody knew, the painting had just disappeared. You can imagine how the Louvre officials felt.
Exactly 72 years later, NASA officials knew exactly how those Louvre folks had felt. On this day in 1993, they lost the Mars Observer space probe when it was scheduled to enter Mars orbit. The probe disappeared as completely as if eclipsed. Which, by the way, resonates with August 21 in another way; if you think back to 2017, this was the day of a big solar eclipse across the US.
The solar eclipse was over by the end of the day, but remember the Mona Lisa? That stayed eclipsed for two years. Peruggia kept it hidden for that long before revealing (in Italy, to great fanfare) that he had it. He claimed his motive was to repatriate it, since it had been originally painted in Italy. He was hailed as a national hero! Well, by some people. The authorities threw him in jail, although because he claimed his motive was patriotic, he was sentenced to only seven months.
People sometimes do some unusual things for patriotic reasons, from stealing a painting to traveling to Manila (arriving on August 21, 1901) on a US Troop ship in order to teach. 600 people did that — they were the Thomasites, named after the ship they arrived on. They went on to reform education in the Philippines, which at the time was a US territory too. In fact, if you can have complete opposites in a territory, the Philippines and Jarvis Island probably qualify.
Throughout the history of August 21, island is a common theme, as well as somebody coming ashore and self-importantly declaring a “claim.” That’s what James Cook, namesake of the Cook Islands, did on August 21, 1770, claiming eastern Australia (which he called New South Wales) for England. He reportedly thought it was an island.
