Baker's Island
Language: English
Part of speech: name
Senses: examples: text: On the 18th of January, 1856, Commodore Mervine sailed from San Francisco, by order of Mr. Secretary Dobbin, conveyed to him by Mr. G. W. Benson, agent of the American Guano Company, to take possession of Baker and Jarvis Islands, in the name of the United States. He was also to survey the islands, and bring home specimens of the guano. Commodore Mervine, believing this matter one of the first importance, instead of sending a sloop of war, went himself in the Independence, his own ship. His route ought to have been first to Jarvis Island; but he passed by that, and sailed directly to Baker’s Island. Having reached this island, he sailed around what he sneeringly calls “the El Dorado of mercantile and agricultural interests of our country.” “The delusion was transitory,” he writes the Secretary of the Navy, “for, on applying his eye to his telescope,” he made the most marvellous discovery of modern times, viz: that “the island was covered with birdlime in a state of decomposition.”
ref: 1857 May 7, “THE AMERICAN GUANO ISLANDS IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN.”, in The National Era, volume XI, number 540, Washington, D. C., page 74, column 7:
text: Mr. BENSON estimated the amount of guano on Jarvis' Island at 5,000,000 tons, and on Baker's Island at no less. He instanced experiments to show that it was in no way inferior to the best Peruvian article. Another company had lately been formed to bring guano from still other islands lately discovered.
ref: 1858 December 8, “Meeting of the Farmers' Club.”, in The New-York Times, volume VIII, number 2252, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 3, column 1; republished as Transactions of the American Institute, of the City of New York, for the Year 1858., Albany: C. Van Benthuysen, 1859, page 179:
text: The Boston Commercial Bulletin says that Capt. M. Baker, of South Dartmouth, Mass., who died Dec. 31, will long be remembered by the commercial and agricultural world as the discoverer of guano on "New Nantucket," now called Baker's Island. The discovery was in this wise. On board of the ship commanded by Capt. Baker in the years 1841, there was an orphan named Warren Wilbur. This young man was fatally injured by falling from the look-out aloft, and his dying request of Capt. B., who watched over and cared for him as if he had been his own son, was to bury him on land. Capt. B. promised to do so if possible, and being in the vicinity of Baker’s Island, interred him there. In digging the grave, he discovered what he then thought to be a most remarkable kind of soil, the dust of which so enveloped and choked the men, that they were compelled to abandon the place first attempted, and chose another nearer the shore where it was not so dry. Thus while engaged in performing an act of kindness, which always characterized his life, he gave origin to a business for thousands of ships, and the basis of food for millions.
ref: 1861 February 2, “Captain Michael Baker.”, in The Scientific American, volume IV, number 5, page 70, column 3:
text: Further west, about the Phoenix group, the equatorial current as described by Mr. Hague (loc. cit. p. 237), has “a general direction of west-south-west and a velocity sometimes exceeding two miles per hour.” At times it changes suddenly and flows as rapidly to the eastward. The drifting of the sands about Baker’s Island (in latitude 0° 13’ N., longitude 176° 22' E.) has much interest in connection with this subject of current-action, and the facts are here cited from Mr. Hague’s paper. The west side of the little island (1 x 2/3. in area) trends north-east, and the southern east-by-north, and at the junction a spit of sand extends out.
ref: 1885 September, James D. Dana, “Origin of Coral Reefs and Islands”, in The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, volume XX, number CXXIV, page 286:
glosses: Alternative form of Baker Island.