Salt (33 page)

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

T
HE 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 wealth 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.

F
OR 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.