🏳 Navassa Island

Stranded on Jamaica during Columbus's fourth voyage, crew members sent by canoe to Hispaniola for help came ashore on the island and found it had no water. They named it Navaza, from the Spanish for plain or field, and mariners largely avoided the island for the next 350 years.

The treaty transferred recognition of the western portion of Hispaniola and specifically named nearby islands from Spain to France. Haiti's later claim to Navassa traces its legal roots to this settlement, making the treaty the foundation of the enduring sovereignty dispute with the United States.

The 1801 constitution enumerated several nearby islands by name and also claimed unspecified "other adjacent islands". Haiti maintains that Navassa fell within this residual clause and that it has been continuously Haitian since 1801, while the United States asserts the island was not included.

The American sea captain claimed the island on 19 September 1857 under the 1856 Guano Islands Act, citing the rich guano deposits and the absence of lawful jurisdiction by any other government. This act founded the enduring United States claim to Navassa as an appurtenance.

After Haiti protested the annexation, Buchanan's order of 7 July 1858 supported the United States claim and called for military action to enforce it. Navassa has since been maintained by the United States as an unincorporated territory.

Following an interruption for the American Civil War, the Navassa Phosphate Company of Baltimore began industrial guano mining in 1865, building barrack housing for 140 black contract labourers from Maryland, supervisors' houses, a blacksmith shop, warehouses and a church. Guano was dug by dynamite and pick-axe and railed to Lulu Bay for shipment, making the island a working extractive outpost of American agriculture. Mining continued until 1898, the island's only period of significant habitation.

Successive Haitian constitutions from 1801 to 1867 had claimed adjacent islands only generally; the 1874 constitution named Navassa for the first time. The claim has been carried forward, with the 1987 constitution treating the island as part of the department of Grand'Anse.

The storm swept over the island, wrecking the rail line and workers' homes. Damage was estimated at $25,000, a serious setback to the guano operation.

Harsh conditions and gruelling manual haulage in tropical heat provoked a riot in which five white supervisors died. A U.S. warship returned 18 workers to Baltimore for three murder trials, funded in defence by the black fraternal Order of Galilean Fishermen.

Deciding on 24 November 1890 in cases arising from the 1889 rebellion, the court upheld the constitutionality of the Guano Islands Act and held that Navassa must be considered as appertaining to the United States. This created a legal history for the island under U.S. law unlike most other guano-act claims.

A grass-roots petition from black churches, also signed by white jurors from the trials, reached the president before the scheduled spring executions. Harrison cited evidence of bad treatment and the men's lack of access to any officer or tribunal for redress in his 1891 State of the Union Address.

After repeated refusals following the refuge's creation, permission was granted in October 2014 for a two-week operation. The K1N expedition made 138,409 contacts from the territory, which the American Radio Relay League accords separate entity status with the prefix KP1.

The refuge covers 1,344 acres of land and marine habitat within a 12-nautical-mile radius, protecting coral reefs, seabird colonies including over 5,000 nesting red-footed boobies, and four endemic lizard species. Later that year full administrative responsibility passed from the Office of Insular Affairs to the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the refuge was closed to the general public.

A scientific expedition led from Washington, D.C. surveyed the island's land and offshore ecosystems. It concluded that, aside from a few extinctions, they had largely survived the 20th century intact, underpinning the case for refuge status.

An American salvager had claimed the island via the State Department under the Guano Islands Act. On 27 March 1997 Interior ruled that the Act applies only to islands not already appertaining to the United States, holding Navassa a U.S. possession "unavailable to be claimed".

The Coast Guard, which had administered the island since 1917, dismantled the light and ended its interest. Interior placed Navassa under its Office of Insular Affairs, and the island was thereafter grouped statistically with the United States Minor Outlying Islands.

The island was excluded from equidistant boundary calculations in the Cuba–Haiti Maritime Boundary Agreement. Its omission reflected the unresolved sovereignty dispute over Navassa.

After the Coast Guard absorbed the Lighthouse Service in 1939 and serviced the light twice yearly, the Navy manned an observation post for the duration of the Second World War. The island has been uninhabited since then, with only Haitian fishing activity in surrounding waters.

The U.S. Lighthouse Service built the Navassa Island Light and a wireless telegraphy station in 1917 to aid shipping through the Windward Passage. Congress had appropriated $125,000 in 1913 after the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 increased traffic past the hazardous island. The 162-foot tower stood 395 feet above sea level and was staffed by a keeper and two assistants until an automatic beacon was installed in 1929; the light operated until 1996.

The company's collapse followed the loss of its Navassa assets and the end of mining. A dispute over the sale blocked any restart and left four contract workers virtually abandoned on the island from December 1900 to May 1901.

With the Phosphate Company forced to abandon operations because of the island's proximity to Spanish Cuba and Puerto Rico, a group of Haitians took the island, abrogating an agreement with Admiral Hammerton Killick permitting withdrawal of equipment. Unable to operate the machinery, they ended mining; some 1 million pounds of phosphate had been removed between 1857 and 1898.