Salt

by Mark Kurlansky

  For clarifying we use nothing but the whites of eggs, of which we take a quarter of a white and put it into a gallon or two of brine, which being beaten with the hand, lathers as if it were soap, a small quantity of which froth put into each vat raises all scum, the white of one egg clarifying 20 bushels of salt, by which means our salt is as white as anything can be: neither has it any ill savour, as that salt has that is clarified with blood. For granulating it we use nothing for the brine is so strong itself, that unless it be often stirred, it will make salt as large grained as bay-salt.—Dr. Thomas Rastel, 1678

  The goal was always to make bay salt, salt that resembled the sea salt of Bourgneuf Bay, because this was the salt of the fisheries. Lowndes mentioned in his treatise that he had received a letter from a Captain Masters, dated June 5, 1745, estimating that the Newfoundland cod fishery used “at least ten thousand tons” of salt annually.

  An eighteenth-century English engraving of codfish being salted and dried in Newfoundland. The Granger Collection

  Between 1713 and 1759, through nearly global warfare with France, England had acquired most of the codfish grounds of North America. The English were excited about their new cod potential. But even a decade before they had achieved their greatest victories, Brownrigg had warned that in order to take advantage of the acquisition of Cape Breton alone, the French end of Nova Scotia, England would have to increase its supply of salt.

  North American cod seemed limitless, and the only impediments to British profits were the number of ships and fishermen, and the supply of salt.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  American Salt Wars

  STUDYING A ROAD map of almost anywhere in North America, noting the whimsical nongeometric pattern of the secondary roads, the local roads, the map reader could reasonably assume that the towns were placed and interconnected haphazardly without any scheme or design. That is because the roads are simply widened footpaths and trails, and these trails were originally cut by animals looking for salt.

  Animals get the salt they need by finding brine springs, brackish water, rock salt, any natural salt available for licking. The licks, found throughout the continent, were often a flat area of several acres of barren, whitish brown or whitish gray earth. Deep holes, almost caves, were formed by the constant licking. The lick at the end of the road, because it had a salt supply, was a suitable place for a settlement. Villages were built at the licks. A salt lick near Lake Erie had a wide road made by buffalo, and the town started there was named Buffalo, New York.

  When Europeans arrived, they found a great deal of salt making in North American villages. In 1541, Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, traveling up the Mississippi, noted: “The salt is made along a river, which, when the water goes down, leaves it upon the sand. As they cannot gather the salt without a large mixture of sand, it is thrown into certain baskets they have made for the purpose, made large at the mouth and small at the bottom. These are set in the air on a ridge pole; and water being thrown on, vessels are placed under them wherein it may fall, then being strained on the fire it is boiled away, leaving salt at the bottom.”

  Hunter groups that did not farm did not make salt. An exception was the Bering Strait Eskimo, who took reindeer, mountain sheep, bear, seal, walrus, and other game and boiled it in seawater to give a salty taste. Many, such as the Penobscot, Menomini, and Chippewa, never used salt before Europeans arrived. Jesuit missionaries in Huron country complained that there was no salt, though one missionary suggested that Hurons had better eyesight than the French and attributed this to abstinence from wine, salt, and “other things capable of drying up the humors of the eye and impairing its tone.”

  The Puget Sound Indians, whose diet was largely salmon, were said to eat no salt. The Mohegan of Connecticut ate great quantities of lobster, clams, shad, lamprey, and also corn, but, according to Cotton Mather, “They had not a grain of salt in the world until we bestowed it on them.”

  But the Delaware salted their cornmeal. The Hopi boiled beans and squash with salt and served jackrabbit that was stewed with chili peppers and wild onions in salted water. The Zuni served boiled salted dumplings in a brine sauce and made kushewe, a salty bread of lime and salted suet. When a Zuni traveled, he always carried a jar or earthen box of salt along with one of red chile, a blend that would remain a classic seasoning of the Southwest.

  IN THE SEVENTH month of their year, the Aztecs observed ceremonies for Vixtociatl, who was banished to the saltwaters by her brothers the rain gods, and thus she was the discoverer of salt, the inventor of salt making. The sixteenth century Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagun described her appearance: ears of gold, yellow clothes, an iridescent green plumage, and a fishnet skirt. She carried a shield trimmed with eagle, parrot, and quetzal feathers, and she beat time with a cane topped by incense-filled paper flowers. The girl chosen to represent Vixtociatl danced for ten days with women who had made salt. Finally, on the festival day, two slaves were killed, and then the girl too was sacrificed.

  Many indigenous North American cultures have a salt deity, almost always female. For the Navajo, it is an elderly woman. Among agricultural people of the U.S. Southwest and Mexico, expeditions to gather salt were often initiated with great ceremonies. Among the Hopi, this included copulation with a woman designated “the salt woman.” Among many southwestern groups, salt gathering was organized by religious leaders. Usually, participants had to be initiated into a cult of salt gatherers. Often only members of a privileged clan, such as the Laguna’s parrot clan, could go on salt expedition. In most cultures only men were allowed to gather salt, but the Navajo allowed women also. The Zuni, according to legend, originally allowed both, but their frivolity on the mission offended the salt goddess and the salt supply started to vanish. So they changed the custom to men only. The entire Zuni population prayed for the safe return of the salt expedition. When the men returned, the paternal aunt of each salt gatherer would wash his head and body with yucca suds.

  THE HISTORY OF the Americas is one of constant warfare over salt. Whoever controlled salt was in power. This was true before Europeans arrived, and it continued to be the reality until after the American Civil War.

  As on the Italian peninsula, all the great centers of civilization on the American continents were founded in places with access to salt. The Incas were salt producers, with salt wells just outside Cuzco. In Colombia, nomadic tribesmen probably first built permanent settlements because they needed salt and learned how to make it. Their society was organized around natural brine springs. The Chibcha, a highland tribe living in the area that was to become the modern capital of Bogotá, became a dominant group because they were the best salt makers. In yet another example of the association between sex and salt for twentieth-century psychologists to ponder, the Chibcha salt lords honored the gods two times a year by abstaining from sex and salt.

  As in Africa, the Chibchas made salt by evaporating brine into cone shapes. Befitting a multiclass society, various grades of salt were produced, from the whitest for the rich to a black, unpleasant-tasting salt for the poor. All the natural brine springs of the Chibcha were owned by the monarch, the zipa, who ruled by virtue of his ability to distribute salt. When the Spanish came, having an understanding of the power of kings, they took over the brine springs and declared them property of their king, thus destroying the authority of the zipas.

  According to Bernal Díaz, the chronicler of Hernán Cortés’s conquest, the Aztecs made salt from evaporating urine. A tribe in Honduras plunged hot sticks into the ocean and scraped off the salt, just as the Romans had observed the Britons doing. More commonly, brine from natural springs was evaporated, or desert salt beds were scraped like the sebkhas of the Sahara, or sea salt was raked from the ocean’s edges.

  The Aztecs controlled the salt routes by military power and were able to deny their enemies, such as Tlxalacaltecas, access to salt. William Prescott’s 1819 classic, History of the Conquest of Mexico, described the Aztecs receiving tribute from
their subjects: “2000 loaves of very white salt, refined in the shape of a mold, for the consumption only of the lords of Mexico.”

  The Spanish took power by taking over the saltworks of the indigenous people they conquered. Cortés, who came from southern Spain, not far from both Spanish and Portuguese saltworks, understood the power and politics of salt. He observed with admiration how the Tlatoque had maintained their independence and avoided the oppression of the Aztecs by abstaining from salt. “They ate no salt because there was none in their land,” he wrote, and like the British, they feared salt dependency.

  THE EARLIEST EVIDENCE that has been found of Mayan salt production is dated at about 1000 B.C., but remains of earlier salt-works have been found in non-Mayan Mexico such as Oaxaca. It may be an exaggeration to claim that the great Mayan civilization rose and fell over salt. However, it rose by controlling salt production and prospered on the ability to trade salt, flourishing in spite of constant warfare over control of salt sources. By the time Europeans arrived, the civilization was in a state of decline, and one of the prime indicators of this was a breakdown in its salt trade.

  The Mayan world extended from Yucatán to the present-day Mexican state of Chiapas and across Guatemala. When Hernán Cortés first went to the Yucatán peninsula in the early sixteenth century, he found a Mayan people with a large salt industry and an extensive trade not only in salt but in salted goods such as salt fish and cured hides.

  The Mayans used salt as medicine mixed with marjoram and xul tree leaves for birth control, with oil for epilepsy, with honey to lessen childbirth pains. It was also used in rituals associated with both birth and death.

  In the Yucatán, salt was made from solar evaporation at least 2,000 years ago, meaning that indigenous Americans have been making solar-evaporated sea salt for at least as long as have Europeans. The Mayans also knew how to extract salt from plants, although plant salt is usually potassium chloride rather than sodium chloride. They would burn plants, certain types of palms as well as grasses, and soak their ashes into a brine that was then evaporated. This technique was practiced by isolated forest people throughout the Americas and in Africa.

  The Lacandon of Chiapas are an isolated and culturally distinct Mayan group who lived self-sufficiently in a rain forest that, unfortunately for them, became the Mexican-Guatemalan border. They made salt from burning a certain species of palm, and they used this salt as money. Dressing in long white gowns, the Lacandon paddled canoes in their rain forest and lived an undisturbed and unique way of life until the twentieth century, when the modern Mexican and Guatemalan states became concerned about the international border running through the Lacandon forest. For the military, the forest made the border more difficult to guard. For some Lacandons the forest was a source of wealth and they sold the hardwood trees to lumber companies. The tribe began losing its traditions and self-sufficiency as their forest disappeared. Because the logging companies supplied them with salt, Lacandons stopped burning palms.

  Typical of the cultural destruction of Chiapas Mayans, the town of La Concordia and its surrounding saltworks were flooded by a dam in the 1970s and now rest on the bottom of a lake. According to Frans Blom, the Danish anthropologist who explored Mayan culture in the 1920s through the 1940s, the site contained the unique saltworks of the Mayan highlands, where brine was diverted from springs by the use of tree trunks into shallow stone pans for solar evaporation, similar to the Hawaiian technique using stone bowls.

  The people of La Concordia placed reeds in the evaporation pans, often shaped into six-pointed stars. Crystals would form on the reeds, making thick, sparkling white ornaments that salt makers sold to be used as religious offerings. By Blom’s time, the Mayans were bringing these offerings to Catholic churches.

  By coincidence, Cheshire salt workers had a similar tradition. At Christmastime, they placed branches in evaporation pans until salt crystalized like a fresh snowfall, and they brought these snowy branches home for Christmas decorations.

  THE ARRIVAL OF the Spanish meant not only a new power controlling the salt but a huge increase in demand for industrial salt. The Spanish introduced herds of cattle that needed to be fed salt and whose hides were cured with salt in a prosperous leather industry. Obsessed with the extraction of precious metals, the Spanish invented the patio process for silver mining in mid-sixteenth-century Mexico. In this process, silver was separated from ore by using salt because the sodium in the salt extracted impurities. Silver mining by the patio process required huge quantities of salt, and the Spanish built large-scale saltworks adjacent to silver mines.

  The Yucatán peninsula has a climate particularly well suited for salt production and geographically is particularly well suited for trade, with its proximity to the Caribbean and Central America. It was the largest salt producer in pre-Columbian America and remained a leader when the Spanish took it over.

  The Spanish, unable to locate precious metal deposits in the Yucatán, began to look for ways of earning state revenue from the Yucatán saltworks. The Spanish Crown proposed various salt taxes. But this made the salt there more expensive, and it could not compete in Cuba with British salt. Cuba, a Spanish colony, should have been a Spanish market. But a time came in the nineteenth century, with the wild fluctuation of salt prices, when Yucatán salt was imported to England through the port of Liverpool.

  THE BRITISH FIRST arrived in North America in the north, at Newfoundland, and they took cod. They next arrived in the south, the Caribbean, where they took salt, which they needed for the cod. Only after they had a significant population of colonists in between did they think of America as a market in which to sell Liverpool salt.

  To the British admiralty, the solution to a lack of sea salt was to acquire through war or diplomacy places that could produce it. Portugal had both sea salt and an important fishing fleet, but needed protection, especially from the French who were regularly seizing their fishing boats. And so England and Portugal formed an alliance trading naval protection for sea salt.

  The Portuguese alliance gained England access to the Cape Verde Islands, where British ships could fill their holds with sea salt on their way across the Atlantic. The islands on the eastern side of the archipelago, Maio, Boa Vista, and Sal, which means “salt,” had marshes with strong brine, and in the seventeenth century Portugal granted the British exclusive use of the salt marshes of Maio and Boa Vista.

  British ships had only from November until July to make salt before the summer rains ruined the brine. They usually stopped off in January, anchoring off Maio, which they called May Island. From there the sailors would row their launches less than 200 yards to a broad beach. Behind the beach was a salt marsh, where a mile-long stretch of ponds would be eight inches deep in brine. It could take months before the sailors had scraped enough salt crystals for the ship to be full. Sometimes early rains would force them to leave. Some ships had to go to Boa Vista because they found too many crews already working at Maio. At Boa Vista the brine was weaker and took longer to crystalize and the anchorage was farther out, forcing the sailors to row a mile to bring salt to the ship.

  But sea salt was valuable enough for a shipload of it to be worth the labor of an entire ship and crew for several months.

  IN THE SEVENTEENTH and eighteenth centuries, while European powers were fighting bitterly for Caribbean islands on which to grow sugarcane, northern Europeans—the English, the Dutch, the Swedish, and the Danes—also looked for islands with inland salt marshes like the Cape Verde Islands.

  In 1568, under William of Orange, the Dutch began an eighty-year independence struggle against Spain, which cut them off from Spanish salt. But in the Americas, the Dutch could come ashore unobserved on the coast of Venezuela at Araya, a hot and desolate eighty-mile lagoon, and steal Spanish salt from the beach, where Caribbean seawater evaporated into a thick white crust. The Dutch also got salt from Bonaire in the nearby Dutch Antilles.

  The British gathered salt illegally from the Spanish on another
small island in the area called Tortuga or Salt Tortuga, which is today part of Venezuela. They also made salt on Anguilla and the Turks Islands, which had the advantage of being closer to North America, where the cod fishery was. They would stop off in one of the salt islands, and, as in the Cape Verdes, the sailors themselves would scrape up salt and load up their ships and sail on to New England, Nova Scotia, or Newfoundland.

  Fearing enemy warships and pirates, the salt ships traveled in convoys. They also did this in Europe for the same reasons. Huge armed fleets of ships of various nationalities would anchor off Le Croisic while salt was being loaded. Sailors were not allowed to be armed when they came ashore, because if convoys of two nations arrived at the same time, a port scuffle could turn into a land war. English and Dutch sailors were especially hostile toward each other.

  At the end of winter, fleets of several dozen British ships, accompanied by warships, would meet in Barbados. There they would combine into one large fleet and choose a commander. Then they would go to one of the salt islands, usually Tortuga, and the crews would work for months to load their ships. If the fleet was too large or if it was a wet year, there would not be enough salt to fill all the ships, and since they were only together as a temporary arrangement, they would compete, working as fast as possible, each ship trying to secure a full hold. Then they would sail north together, and when they believed they were out of danger, especially from the Spanish fleet, each would veer off on its own course.

  IN 1684, WHEN Bermuda, first explored by the British more than 150 years earlier, finally became a British colony, the first governor was given instructions to “proceed to rake salt.” English ships sailing to American colonies could stop off in this cluster of minuscule islands in the middle of the Atlantic some 600 miles from the coast of North America, and pick up salt for the fisheries. It was a chance to make Bermuda productive.