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Outside Magazine's 2002 Travel Guide

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Isla Non Grata (Cont.)

TO CALL NAVASSA undiscovered isn't quite accurate. It first entered consciousness in 1504 when Christopher Columbus, shipwrecked on Jamaica, dispatched a crew to Hispaniola to find help. Along the way, the sailors stumbled upon the island, climbed the cliffs, looked for water, found none, and left. For the next 350 years everyone avoided Navassa, except pirates running between Tortuga Island, Haiti, and Port Royal, Jamaica. Supposedly, the waters around the island are littered with wrecks and, theoretically, treasure.

In 1857 the United States seized Navassa from Haiti under the Guano Islands Act. This law gave Americans the right to claim uninhabited guano-splattered islands for the States, allowing its citizens to set up operations to mine the phosphate-rich fertilizer. Conditions on Navassa were horrendous: The white overseers terrorized their black workers, lashing them with ropes and tricking them into indentured servitude. In 1889 the workers rebelled in a bloody attack that resulted in the murders of five bosses. According to legend, the survivors fled and a single boy was left behind. The Haitians believe Navassa is haunted by evil duppies, among which is certainly the spirit of the lone boy. They call it Devil's Island.

Navassa stood virtually abandoned for 100 years until 1996, when Bill Warren, a scuba diver from San Diego, filed a claim under the Guano Islands Act. Warren wanted to build a salvage operation on Navassa to search for pirate wrecks. But when he learned that guano is still fetching up to $600 per ton, he drew up plans to revive the mining operation. Warren secured title to the island from the heirs of the original mining-company owners, but then the Department of the Interior, under Bruce Babbitt, stepped in and declared Navassa a wildlife refuge. The refuge status makes all nonpermitted visits to the island illegal (including mine), and has stymied Warren's ambitions. He hopes that a sympathetic George W. Bush will revoke Babbitt's declaration. When I asked about the environment, Warren assured me his plans are "environment-friendly." "We'll make the mining operation green," he said. "But the scorpions are one of the deadliest species on the planet. We'll have to eradicate them entirely."

Fittingly, Babbitt mentioned scorpion protection in interviews shortly after he declared the island a refuge.

IT'S 3 P.M. by the time I towel off, drop into our dinghy, and row over to the ladder. When I grab the inverted staircase it swings and utters a gut-wrenching moan. The dinghy bucks in the swells beneath me. I'm rising and falling with each swell, and it occurs to me that one rogue wave could run this steel right through my chest like a Haitian voodoo pin. So I jump and, luckily, latch on.

I climb to the top and wander amidst guano boulders and hardpan scrub until I find shade under a single palm grove. The place is littered with trash—remnants of old fires, rubber soles, plastic bags and bottles—left by Haitian fishermen who scramble up the cliffs and camp here. Besides garbage, there are crickets and grasshoppers and a whole assortment of creatures that fit into the buzzing, hopping, crunch-when-you-step-on-them taxon. I have in mind to reach the lighthouse, which the Coast Guard erected in 1916, on the other side of a massive ridge. The lighthouse was manned for about a decade; but after the last in a succession of keepers murdered his family, The Shining-style, the thing became automated. But from what I can tell, a steep, eroded cliff surrounds the ridge, below which is an impenetrable screen of poisonwood. I'm beginning to get a sense of why the Haitians have always believed Navassa was a land of evil spirits. The fishermen who camp up here obviously possess bad voodoo.

Since I'm already enmeshed in the evil, I gingerly step around the poisonwood and head up the ridge, a steep mass of stones that roll every time I try to get a handhold. I'm on my hands and knees crawling up the side when the sky finally lets loose. In a minute the rock and mud are coming apart in large, sopping fistfuls. OK, I've seen it. I've discovered Navassa, I say. Good enough. I turn tail and run, skinning my knee on rock-hard guano before hurling myself down the rusty ladder and into the dinghy. As I push off from the accursed island the rain, eerily, stops.

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