The Island of Navassa Illustrated from Sketches by Eugene Gaussoin.
[Baltimore]: [lithographed by E. Sachse & Co.], [1866]. Tinted lithographic title; one typeset leaf of text (Navassa; Explanation of the Plates); six colored lithographic plates (Topographical Map; Low Beach; The Harbor; Lulutown and Old Diggings; Lulu Bay; Diggings). First edition. In the publisher’s brown half cloth, embossed title on both boards, gilt on the front cover. [1] leaf tinted lithographic title, [2] pp., [6] leaves of colored lithographic plates. Folio (44 × 54 cm). Spine reinforced with a blue cloth strip, with shelfmark vignettes. Old library stamp on the title leaf. Paper lightly toned with sporadic light foxing; plates clean. Overall a very good copy.
Rare illustrated album documenting the exploitation of Navassa Island under the Guano Islands Act, with detailed visual evidence of nineteenth-century phosphate extraction, U.S. agricultural and imperial expansion, and the Black labor force on which it depended.
Large-format illustrated album, a technical–promotional publication produced in support of guano and phosphate extraction on Navassa Island, a small Caribbean island located some thirty miles southwest of the Haitian coast. Comprising a geological and topographical text with a suite of six tinted lithographic plates executed by E. Sachse & Co., Baltimore, the work presents the island explicitly as the property of the Navassa Phosphate Company of New York. It combines the functions of scientific report and corporate prospectus, documenting the island’s geological value, demonstrating the feasibility and efficiency of phosphate extraction, reassuring investors and managers at a distance, and legitimizing its commercial occupation under U.S. auspices.
By the mid-nineteenth century, guano had become a valued fertilizer in the United States, as agricultural expansion and soil exhaustion drove demand for concentrated nutrients. Rising prices and fears of depletion led to the Guano Islands Act of 1856, which enabled U.S. citizens to claim unoccupied guano- and phosphate-bearing islands for the United States. As one of numerous small islands brought under U.S. administration through this framework, Navassa was claimed in 1857.
Operating under this legal framework, the Navassa Phosphate Company undertook the exploitation of the island, accompanied by a series of publications intended to inform and attract investors. The present lavishly produced album is the most extensive and visually elaborate of these efforts. Its short text combines geographical description, geological explanation, and operational commentary, emphasizing both the quality of Navassa’s guano in comparison with the widely used Peruvian guano and the exceptional scale of the deposits, while stressing favorable working conditions, a healthy climate with minimal sickness, and secure anchorage and shipping, presenting the island as well suited to sustained industrial activity.
The lithographic plates, based on Gaussoin’s sketches, form an integral part of the album’s argument. A detailed topographical map and sectional profile present the island as a measured and manageable space, intended to facilitate the efficient control of distant operations. Coastal and harbor views depict calm seas and orderly anchorage, highlighting a well-developed industrial infrastructure—rail tracks, wharves, hoisting devices, workshops, storage buildings, and temporary shelters. Black workers are shown at different stages of extraction and shipment, digging phosphatic material—under the supervision of white guards—moving it on railway carts, and loading boats. Taken together, the images present Navassa as a fully organized working site, offering direct visual evidence of the conditions under which production was carried out.
Alongside its industrial focus, the album also records elements of the island’s natural environment. Vegetation appears selectively, with palms and scrub framing the worked landscape, while iguanas in the foreground of the digging scenes and seabirds in flight or along the cliffs recur across the plates. These animals directly reflect the text’s explanation of the deposits as formed from the accumulated dung and bones of seabirds and large lizards over long periods.
The album was produced by Eugene Gaussoin (1812–1881) of Baltimore, a Belgian-born U.S. mining engineer and metallurgist closely associated with the Navassa Phosphate Company. In the same year, he issued Memoir on the Island of Navassa (West Indies) (Baltimore, 1866), addressed to the company’s management and intended to justify further investment and operational expansion. Beyond his engineering role, Gaussoin also acted as a scientific observer and collector, gathering zoological specimens later used in scientific description. His writings identify seabirds and large lizards as central agents in the formation of the phosphate deposits; several species later recognized as endemic were first collected at this time, while others were subsequently exterminated during sustained human occupation.
Despite the album’s consistently favorable presentation of the island, emphasizing health, order, and operational efficiency, conditions on Navassa were in reality harsh, shaped by extreme terrain, isolation, and a coercive labor regime. The workforce, numbering approximately 150–180 Black men, largely recruited in Maryland on fifteen-month contracts, was paid low wages subject to deferred payment, deductions for sickness, fines, and compulsory purchases from a company store, often leaving laborers with little or no pay at the end of their term. Housing was rudimentary, discipline severe, and complaints ineffective. Tensions culminated in a violent labor uprising in September 1889, during which several white supervisors were killed, bringing national attention to the conditions under which the island had been worked and effectively ending large-scale operations. The Navassa Phosphate Company continued nominal operations until the disruption of the Spanish-American War, after which it went bankrupt and abandoned its claim to the island around 1901. Navassa’s legal status has remained contested, with Haiti continuing to assert sovereignty, underscoring the distance between the album’s promotional narrative and the island’s longer, more complex history.
Extremely rare. WorldCat records institutional holdings at only four libraries (Yale, AMNH, University of Delaware, University of Chicago). Apart from the present copy, only one other market appearance within the past fifty years is known to us, a copy offered by Quaritch in 1976.
Sabin 26768; unknown to Whitman Bennett.
References: Blocher, J., & Gulati, M. (2022). Navassa: Property, sovereignty, and the law of the territories. Yale Law Journal, 131, 2390–2448.; Gaussoin, E. (1866). Memoir on the island of Navassa (West Indies). Baltimore, MD: J. B. Rose & Co.; Hyles, J. (2017). Inter-American relations: Past, present, and future trends. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.; James, J. C. (2012). “Buried in guano”: Race, labor, and sustainability. American Literary History, 24(1), 115–142.; Lesher, P. (2004). A load of guano: Baltimore and the fertilizer trade. Maryland Historical Magazine, 99(4), 480–490.; Turner, R. D. (1960). Land shells of Navassa Island, West Indies. Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard College, 122(5), 233–242.
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Price: €22,000.00