Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. I'm John Bachelor with the author and producer Stephen Moss, his new book,

Ten Birds that Change the World, Peru.

The Comorant, the Comerant's Droppings turn into Guano.

And this story is so strange, I go immediately to Stephen Moss to help me tell it.

The discovery of the guano on these islands, the arid islands 50 meters deep.

I put that all together with who did who had the breakthrough when did they have the breakthrough that

it was fertilizer Stephen well actually the Incas so over a thousand years ago the

Incas civilization in South America knew about

Guana. Guana is very like all sea bird, who basically droppings, it is very rich

in phosphates and nitrates and it's very, very good fertilizer.

But of course that had been forgotten with the end of the Inca civilization.

And then in the 19th century, a British businessman called William Gibbs based near where I live actually in Bristol.

He and his partners went over to Peru and harvested this guano. Now the important thing here is that you

mention the fact that it's very arid islands. Seabas living colonies all around the

world. They live off North America. They live off Europe in colonies, but it rains in those places, and so the guano washes away.

There's some left, but broadly it washes away. That didn't happen. So there were vast amounts of this guano there.

He entered into a contract with the Peruvian government that he would pay them a fee. He would ship this horrible, melodorous, rather dangerous substance back to Britain and then he sold it to farmers and he became the

richest commoner in England the richest non-aristic rat in England he, I compare him to someone like Bill Gates because he

was also a great philanthropist with the money he earned. The only problem was that the money he'd earned was from Guano, which was being

harvested by these poor Chinese indentured laborers, laborers that had been brought over from China

either thinking they were going to California to take part in the gold rush or

they just been fooled and captured and press scanned and brought by

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