Salt

by Mark Kurlansky

  But the climate in Bermuda was not warm and sunny enough for a successful sea salt operation. What Bermuda did have was cedar. So Bermudians, most of whom were originally sailors from Devon, built small, fast sloops out of cedar. Until the early eighteenth century, when New England fishermen invented the schooner, the Bermuda sloop with its single mast and enormous spread of sails was considered the fastest and best vessel under sail, capable of outrunning any naval ship. These sloops dominated the trade between the Caribbean and North American colonies and were even used in the Liverpool-to-West Africa trade.

  In the Caribbean, the leading cargo carried to North America—more tonnage than even sugar, molasses, or rum—was salt. The leading return cargo from North America to the Caribbean was salt cod, used to feed slaves on sugar plantations.

  In the southern part of the Bahamas chain and the group south of it known as the Turks and Caicos, salt rakers found small islands with brackish lakes in the interior. Great Inagua, Turk, South Caicos, and Salt Cay (pronounced KEY) had salty inland lakes well suited for salt making. Since Columbus and his Spanish successors had already annihilated the indigenous population, these scarcely inhabited islands were easily converted into salt centers.

  Great Inagua was first raked by the Spanish and Dutch. After the Spanish killed the few local tribesmen, it was an uninhabited island and sailors from various nations stopped by and filled their ships. The Spanish named it Enagua, meaning “in water.” In 1803, salt rakers from Bermuda built a small town, Matthew Town, by the edge of a salt pond at one end of the flat grassy island.

  First came salt rakers, who simply scraped up what had evaporated on the edge of ponds. The crew would be dropped off on the island, where they would spend a few months or sometimes as long as a year gathering salt while the captain and three or four slaves would sail off, fishing for sea turtle, scavenging shipwrecks, and trading with pirates or between islands. Sometimes they would hide in coves by treacherous rocks or uncharted shoals and wait, or even lure the ships onto the rocks so that they could scavenge them.

  An eighteenth-century Bermuda governor complained that “the Caicos trade did not fail to make its devotees somewhat ferocious, for the opportunities were in picking, plundering and wrecking.” He was also concerned with the practice of sending the slaves plundering while the free sailors were gathering salt. The governor wrote, “The Negroes learned to be public as well as private thieves.”

  When the captain and his slaves had finished with their profitable adventures months later, they would return and pick up their crew and a full hold of salt to sell in the North American colonies.

  In the 1650s, British colonists from Bermuda sailed down to Grand Turk, a small desert island, and Salt Cay, its tiny neighbor, only two miles long by one and a half miles wide. In Salt Cay, passing ships would stop to rake the ponds that occupied one third of the island. In the 1660s, Bermudians began exploiting it more systematically, at first only in the summers, which were dry.

  By 1673, the arrival of Bermudian rakers on Salt Cay was a regular event. Five years later, salt raking had become equally well organized on the slightly larger island to the north, Turk or Grand Turk Island, which was named after a native cactus thought to resemble a Turkish turban. But the Spanish would come in the winter and take the salt rakers’ tools and destroy their sheds. By the early 1700s, Bermudians started living full-time on Salt Cay to protect their property. No one knows when the small harbor was built with its stone piers, but it was the most stormproof in the Turks and Caicos, a safe shelter for ships to spend a few weeks loading. But as vessels became larger, the little harbor was too shallow, and light ships had to be used to carry the salt out to mother ships anchored offshore.

  Salt Cay salt makers built a system of ponds and sluices. Every year, they had to spend weeks overhauling the system. The ponds had to be drained in order to mend the stone or clay bottoms so that they would hold water and not crumble into the salt. Then the ponds would be refilled for the slow process of solar evaporation.

  Salt makers came from Bermuda and built large stone houses in the Bermudan style with thick walls to hold up a cut stone roof built in steps like a pyramid. The heavy roof was designed to resist hurricanes. Mahogany furniture was brought to the island. These were the manor houses of slave plantations, but they had none of the elegance of the Virginia tobacco, or Alabama cotton, or West Indian sugar planters’ homes.

  The salt makers’ house had an eastern porch that looked out over his salt ponds and a western porch that looked over his loading docks. The houses were always built at the water’s edge by a loading dock. The salt, too valuable to entrust to anyone else, was kept in the basement, which was one story below ground, but the windowless first story of the house had no floor, so that actually each house had a two-story storage bin at its base. Salt was the salt makers’ wealth, and they watched over it day and night.

  Windmills pumped the seawater through successive ponds, and the mills and sluices were maintained by a blacksmith shop at the house. Slaves grew some vegetables in gardens, but the soil became poorer and poorer as the trees were all chopped down to fuel salt pans. The island was hot and dry and naked, and food and even fresh water were becoming increasingly scarce.

  In 1790, a man named Stubbs who had left the North American colonies because he remained loyal to British rule, sent for his brother, Thomas Stubbs, and settled in Providenciales, an island in the Turks and Caicos. The Stubbs family were salt producers in Cheshire, but Thomas and his brother wanted to start a new life as West Indian planters. They called their plantation Cheshire Hall and tried to grow sisal, a hemp substitute from the fibers of the agave plant. But sisal growing at Cheshire Hall was a failure. Then they tried to grow sea island cotton, but that failed also. On these flat, arid little islands, everything failed except salt. Salt makers brought in livestock: donkeys to haul carts of salt to the wharves, and cattle to feed themselves as they made salt.

  All that these small, salt-making islands had was their location in shipping lanes, sunshine, and marshes that trapped seawater. Yet for a time they prospered because the British Empire needed salt.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Salt and Independence

  THE ENGLISH, THE Dutch, and the French hunted for salt, the magic elixir that could turn their new American seas of limitless fish into limitless wealth. The Dutch gave incentives to colonists and, in 1660, granted a colonist the right to build saltworks on a small island near New Amsterdam, known as Coney Island. The French learned from the indigenous people the location of licks, springs, and marshes. They used many existing saltworks, including those at Onondaga, New York, and Shawneetown, Illinois.

  In 1614, Captain John Smith had explored by sea the coast of New England from Penobscot Bay to Cape Cod. Smith, one of the 105 original settlers of Jamestown and a leading force in the English settlement of North America, had also charted Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay. He did this work, both in Virginia and New England, with the intention of enticing settlers, noting the prospects for enrichment from fish, salt, fruit, precious metals, furs, and even the possibility of producing silk.

  A portrait of John Smith from a 1616 map of New England based on Smith’s notes. The Houghton Library, Harvard University

  Although known for a swaggering boastful nature, Smith described the riches of these new lands with notable restraint. By the early seventeenth century, a considerable literature on the wealth of the Americas had already accumulated, and most of it was outrageously exaggerated to the point where, Smith observed, settlers would quickly leave in disappointment. And so he resolved to be a realist, though his trademark style could be seen in naming Cape Ann after a woman he had been fond of during his military service in Turkey. Back in England, it was renamed Cape Ann after Prince Charles’s mother.

  Although personally disliking fishing, Smith understood that if it was a profitable endeavor, it would attract settlers. “Herring, cod, and ling is that triplicitie that makes their weal
th and shippings multiplicities such as it is,” he wrote in his unmusical prose and devoted several pages in his Description of New England to describing the wealth various nations had garnered from these fish. He demonstrated his point with characteristic flair, by ordering his crew to fish and salt cod while he was exploring coastlines, then earning a modest—but widely reported—fortune selling the salt cod in England and Spain.

  Smith also understood the importance of salt to his dream of a British America. He had established saltworks in Jamestown in 1607. As he sailed the rocky coastline of New England, he noted places that seemed suitable harbors, but also locations that seemed favorable for salt making. He thought conditions were suitable for “white on white,” reevaporating sea salt the way the English improved French bay salt. He thought that Plum Island, just north of Cape Ann, would be a particularly good site for a saltworks. In his list of twenty-five “excellent good harbors” for fishing, he completely ignored the best harbor on Cape Ann, which only nine years later would become the fishing station of Gloucester and eventually the leading cod port of New England.

  Smith’s Description of New England was an important factor in the Pilgrims’ decision to go to New England, and when they arrived, they found Smith’s portrait to be accurate. They were, as promised, in a land of cod where salt could be made. Though they accepted the royal name Cape Ann, they used Smith’s name for Cape Cod, a name originated by his fellow Jamestown founder, Bartholomew Gosnold, because they intended, like Smith, to amass wealth from fishing. In 1630, the Reverend Francis Higgenson wrote in New England Plantation, “There is probabilitie that the Countrey is of an excellent temper for the making of salt.” But the Pilgrims had no idea how to make it, and for that matter, they didn’t know how to catch fish either.

  Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony sent to England for advisers on fishing, salt making, and ship building. Within a few years the colony began to thrive on fishing. But it was still limited by salt supply. The salt adviser tried to make bay salt in the French manner, digging evaporation ponds lined with clay. But New England weather was ill suited to this technique. According to Bradford, the salt maker was “an ignorant, foolish, self-willed fellow.”

  Massachusetts, like Queen Elizabeth, encouraged salt making through the granting of monopolies to those who showed the skill to produce salt cheaply. The colony granted Samuel Winslow a ten-year monopoly to employ his ideas on salt producing, which is considered the first patent issued in America. The same year, John Jenny was given exclusive salt-making rights in Plymouth for twenty-one years. Saltworks were started in Salem, Salisbury, and Gloucester. Salt was needed not only for fish exports but also for furs. The settlers traded with the native Americans for bear, beaver, moose, and otter pelts, for which there was a lucrative European market. Because furs were salted, they were frequently exported on the same ships as cod. But to get the indigenous people to produce more furs, the British had to supply them with more salt.

  The New England household also needed a great deal of salt for domestic purposes. The typical colonial New England house—the New England saltbox—got its name from being shaped like the salt containers that were in every home. New Englanders slaughtered their meat in the fall and salted it. They ate New England boiled dinner, which was either salt cod or salt beef with cabbage and turnips. They also ate a great deal of salted herring, though they seem to have preferred lightly salted and smoked red herring, perhaps because of their limited salt supply. When these early settlers hunted, they would leave red herring along their trail because the strong smell would confuse wolves, which is the origin of the expression red herring, meaning “a false trail.”

  Wealthy Virginians imported enormous amounts of English salt beef in spite of raising their own cattle. They regarded the British beef as better cured, perhaps because the British had ample salt. But Virginians made some salt of their own and imported more from England. They built a cottage industry of salted pork fat, and by the time of the American Revolution, Virginia hams were famous and exported not only to other colonies from New York to Jamaica, but even to England.

  During the Revolution, when it was a part of the provisions of the Continental army, Virginia ham earned the admiration of the French, which is always considered high praise for a ham. In 1781, the Comte de Rochambeau, a French hero of the American Revolution and later tyrant of the Haitian Revolution, while engaged in the Virginia campaign said that French ham “cannot be compared to the quality and taste of theirs.”

  This undated recipe from Charlotte County, Virginia, is believed to have been used by the Jefferson family at Monticello.

  BAKED SPICED HAM

  Select a nicely cured Ham. Soak overnight in cold Water. Wipe off and put on in enough water to cover. Simmer for three Hours. Let cool in the Water it was cooked in. Take out and trim. Put into baking-pan, stick with Cloves and cover with brown Sugar. Bake in moderate Oven for two Hours. Baste with white Wine. Serve with a savoury Salad.

  FOR A WHILE, the American colonists pursued their own salt making with characteristic self-reliance, producing a significant amount. But the securing of these colonies by the British had coincided with the discovery of rock salt in Cheshire and its increased production. In time, the British made Liverpool salt cheaper and more accessible than local salt, and domestic American production dropped off. This was exactly the way colonialism was supposed to work.

  While relations were intact with England, the colonists had enough salt for their domestic needs, but the salt supply was inhibiting their foreign trade. Of course, they were not supposed to be engaging in foreign trade. They were supposed to buy everything from England and sell everything to England. But the American colonists produced more, especially more salt cod, than the British could sell. As long as the Americans were making their products with British salt, the British were happy to let them overproduce.

  But the British often failed to supply enough salt for American needs. In 1688, Daniel Coxe wrote about New Jersey that fish were abundant but the colony was unable to establish a successful fishery because of a “want of salt.” The New Jersey colony sent to France for experts—“diverse Frenchmen skillful in making salt by the sun.” This was not how colonialism was supposed to work.

  The American colonies, especially the two most productive, Virginia and Massachusetts, became accustomed to selling their products around the Atlantic world. New England began by selling salted cod and salted furs but soon was selling manufactured goods, buying iron and Mediterranean products in the Basque port of Bilbao, selling cod for slaves in West Africa, slaves for molasses in the Caribbean, rum made from molasses in West Africa.

  By the early 1700s, Boston merchants did not feel that they needed England anymore. In one important respect, they were wrong. Despite increasingly independent and sophisticated trans-Atlantic commerce, they still depended on England for salt. New Englanders occasionally imported salt from other countries. Ships selling cod to Bilbao would pick up salt from southern Spain at Cadiz or Portuguese salt at Lisbon. But in 1775, like exemplary British colonists, the Americans were still relying on British salt—either Cheshire salt from Liverpool or sea salt from the British colonies, especially Great Inagua, Turk Island, and Salt Cay.

  Tom Paine’s contention that a continent obviously could not be ruled by an island was increasingly resonating among the merchant class. In 1759, the British, sensing that American trade was leading to American independence, started imposing punitive tariffs, taxes, and other measures designed to inhibit American trade. The Americans responded angrily, and the British responded with even harsher measures. In 1775, the atmosphere was so embittered that the British thought it necessary to place 3,000 troops in rebellious Boston under Major General Thomas Gage. When these soldiers attempted to spread out into the countryside, Americans went into armed rebellion, firing on the British troops at Concord and Lexington on April 19. The Continental Congress, first called in 1774 as a protest, reconvened in May 1775 to p
repare for war.

  In June, while the Congress was still meeting, the rebels marched on Boston and Gage committed all but 500 of his troops to a battle on Breed’s Hill above Boston Harbor. Although the British objective of holding Boston was accomplished, Gage lost more than 40 percent of his soldiers in this engagement. Incorrectly known as the Battle of Bunker Hill, this was to be the worst British loss of the war.

  In the summer of 1775, the British declared the colonies in open rebellion and responded with a naval blockade, causing an immediate and serious salt shortage, not only for the fisheries but for the soldiers, horses, and medical supplies of George Washington’s Continental army. In addition to the blockade, British ground forces isolated the mid-Atlantic colonies from their two sources of American salt: New England and the South. They even attacked and destroyed mid-Atlantic saltworks.

  AFTER THE BUNKER Hill debacle, Gage was replaced as commander of British forces in America by General William Howe, an illegitimate relative of the royal family. In 1758, Howe had been elected a Member of Parliament and had opposed measures against American commerce, fearing British policy would lead to a loss of the colonies. Now he was ordered to hold them by force. In August 1776, he took Long Island and then New York City. The next year, he drove Washington from Philadelphia. At this point in the war, he had successfully cut off Washington’s army from its coastal salt supply and even captured Washington’s salt reserves, despite the American general’s desperate dispatch warning, “Every attempt must be made to save it.”