Salt (31 page)

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.

I
N 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.

T
HE 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.

T
HE 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.

T
HE 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.