Salt: the cargo that kept the Atlantic fed

Why was salt so important around 1715?

Before refrigerators, salt was the main way to stop food from going bad. Sailors on long voyages lived on salt beef, salt pork and salt fish.

The biggest users were the cod fisheries of Newfoundland and New England, which needed salt for every catch. Much of that salt cod went south to the Caribbean. The cheapest, worst-cured grade, called refuse fish, was sold to sugar planters to feed the enslaved people who worked their land. So salt linked the cold northern fisheries to the sugar plantations and to slavery.

Where did Caribbean salt come from?

Salt came from hot, dry islands with shallow lagoons. Seawater flowed in, the sun and wind dried it, and a crust of salt was left behind. The main places around 1715 were:

• The Turks Islands, south-east of the Bahamas, empty since the Lucayan people were destroyed after Spanish contact.
• Bonaire, taken by the Dutch in 1636. The Dutch West India Company began making salt there in 1639.
• La Tortuga, or Salt Tortuga, an empty island off Venezuela.
• Maio, in the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands off West Africa.
• The Bahamas, where English ships were loading salt by 1713.

Who raked salt on the Turks Islands?

From the 1670s Bermudians sailed south every year in their sloops to the uninhabited Turks Islands. Local historians date organised raking on Salt Cay to 1673 and on Grand Turk to about five years later. The rakers arrived around March and went home around November, working through the hot, dry months.

Enslaved people were part of the trade early on. Bermuda’s governor John Hope reported that white men did much of the raking while enslaved Black men sailed the sloops. Captains often took three or four enslaved people on each trip, and the enslaved workers’ share of the profits went to their owners. Over time, more of the raking itself fell to enslaved men, women and children. By the 1770s about 800 people worked the ponds each season.

French and Spanish forces captured the islands in 1706, the Spanish attacked again in 1710, and in 1729 Spanish warships seized Bermudian ships there with their crews.

What was it like for enslaved salt workers?

One enslaved salt worker left her own account. Mary Prince was born into slavery in Bermuda in about 1788. She was shipped to Turks Island, where she worked in the salt ponds for about ten years. Her autobiography, published in London in 1831, describes standing in salt water from about four in the morning, painful boils on her legs from the brine, and nights sleeping on bare boards in a shed. Her story comes from long after 1715, but it shows what the work did to the people forced to do it.

On Bonaire the pans were worked by enslaved Africans for the Dutch West India Company. Most lived inland at Rincon and walked for hours to the pans, sheltering there in rough huts of sticks and thatch. The small stone huts that visitors see beside the pans today were built later, in 1850. Slavery in the Dutch colonies ended on 1 July 1863.

How was salt raked and shipped?

Raking was simple but exhausting. When the sun had turned the shallow water into a crust of crystals, workers pulled the salt into heaps with toothed wooden rakes, above the reach of the next tide. On the Turks Islands, Bermudians built sluices, stone walls and channels to control the flow of seawater.

The English sea captain William Dampier described the work on Maio in February 1699. The salt pond there filled only at the highest tides, and salt formed from November to May. The salt itself cost nothing. Ships paid the islanders in food, a little money and old clothes for their labour and their donkeys, and the governor expected a small present. In some years, Dampier wrote, a hundred English ships came, and several he met were loading salt for Newfoundland.

Salt was measured by the bushel and shipped north to the fishing ports and mainland colonies.

What was Salt Tortuga?

Salt Tortuga is not the famous Tortuga of the buccaneers, which lies off Haiti. It is La Tortuga, a dry, empty island about 60 km off Venezuela with a large natural salt pan.

The Dutch ran salt works there from 1624, guarded by a fort, until 1638, when Spanish forces from Cumaná drove them out, wrecked the works and flooded the pans. The island stayed empty, but from 1638 to 1781 crews from North American ports kept coming for salt. Archaeologist Konrad Antczak’s research points to some 60 merchant ships a year, mostly for the New England cod fishery.

Spain treated these visitors as trespassers. In 1713 the Board of Trade in London heard that English ships had been seized while loading salt there. One, the Marlborough galley, was taken at anchor by a privateer with a Spanish commission, and her crew were warned that if caught there again they would be sent to the mines as slaves.

What was salt worth, and what laws covered it?

At the pans, salt was nearly free: its value came from the labour of raking it and the voyage to deliver it. Even so, governments treated it as essential. England’s 1663 Staple Act made most European goods for the colonies pass through England first, but it made a special exception for “Salt for the Fisheries” of New England and Newfoundland, which could sail straight from anywhere in Europe.

The 1713 complaints show why: the Board of Trade was told that without New England’s salted fish, Caribbean planters could not feed the enslaved people on their plantations. By 1772 Britain’s North American colonies were importing about 660,000 bushels of salt a year from the West Indies.