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.”
Source: wiktionary