[1] They set up a merchant house at the port of Valparaiso in Chile, trading as Myers, Bland and Company.
[1] In the 1830s Bland was speculating on a new agricultural fertilizer, guano, the accumulated droppings of sea birds over many centuries.
[1] In July 1839 through the Myers, Bland and Company he sent thirty bags of guano to Liverpool from Valparaiso on board the ship Heroine.
[15][1] In 1861 Bland commissioned the architect Walter Scott[17] of Liverpool to design a new red and blue brick gabled house with a slate roof on his land at Burghfield Common called Hillfields.
[17] He had a "detached Brick and Slated Building erected for a Museum" according to the 1892 Hillfields house sale catalogue.
It contained a stuffed lion, kangaroo and platypus, marine shells from Australia, Papua and Philippines, pottery from ancient Egypt, Greece and Peru, and weapons and implements from Africa and the Pacific.
[19] Bland died on 31 March 1876, aged 73,[20] and was buried at St Mary’s churchyard, Burghfield.