For workers, the Navassa Phosphate Company used African Americans from Baltimore. Promising a tropical life of picking fruit and romancing beautiful women, the company induced the often-illiterate workers to sign long contracts and step on board.

Yet once the workers disembarked, they found conditions considerably less idyllic. The scorched, jagged, sea-battered island had neither fruit nor women. Instead, it offered a scurvy-inducing diet of hardtack and salted pork, along with the company of abusive white overseers. Such necessities as shirts, shoes, mattresses, and pillows could be got only from the company store at wildly inflated prices. Workers who fell ill were fined. Those who made trouble were “triced”: tied up for hours in the hot sun with their arms in the air and their feet barely touching the ground.