for his ship, he clearly was there after the New Englanders, at least. In 1857, Capt. John Paty of the Manuokawai annexed Laysan to the Kingdom of Hawaii. The island held an economic value in guano. In 1859, Capt. Brooks of the ship Gambia traveled to the island, and in his ship log wrote that there was guano there, but "not of sufficient quantity to warrant any attempts to get it." Despite this estimate, in 1890 George D. Freeth and Charles N. Spencer successfully petitioned the Kingdom of Hawaii for permission to mine guano on Laysan and agreed to make royalty payments to the Kingdom. Around were extracted per day. Given that iron-hulled sailing ships towards the end of the guano mining era had a capacity of 5,000 tons, Laysan produced a shipload every two months. The working condition at the guano mine was grueling. In August 1900, Japanese workers mutinied against American management. At first the workers refused to work. That strike action turned to violence because of a language barrier. As a result, there were two deaths and two injuries. This newfound attention to Laysan attracted scientists, and in the next decade, many of Laysan's unique species were scientifically examined for the first time. However, guano digging affected the island's ecosystem dramatically. Professor William Alanson Bryan of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum estimated that there were 10 million seabirds on Laysan in 1903, but eight years later the estimation was at little more than a million. In those eight years, the Pritchardia palms that were unique to Laysan, and the island's sandalwood trees (Santalum ellipticum) both became extinct. 1894 marked the arrival of Laysan's most notorious inhabitant, German immigrant Max Schlemmer. Schlemmer released domestic rabbits, Belgian hares, English hares and guinea pigs on the island, expecting them to multiply, and provide supplies for a future meat-canning business. This proved to be crucial in the decline of Laysan. Period of extinction The rabbits did reproduce rapidly. Soon, the appetite of the rabbits far exceeded the available vegetation on the Laysan island. Complaints about this and about Japanese poachers of the bird population led President Theodore Roosevelt to declare the Northwestern Hawaiian chain a bird sanctuary in 1909. Schlemmer continued to allow the Japanese to export bird wings illegally and so was removed from the island. But without plant cover, much of the soil and sand became loose and blew