Salt: A World History

by Mark Kurlansky

Ships carrying salt tended to be overrun by mice, and for centuries it was believed that mice could reproduce without sex, simply by being in salt.

Salt is a chemical term for a substance produced by the reaction of an acid with a base. When sodium, an unstable metal that can suddenly burst into flame, reacts with a deadly poisonous gas known as chlorine, it becomes the staple food sodium chloride, NaCl, from the only family of rocks eaten by humans.

Chloride is essential for digestion and in respiration. Without sodium, which the body cannot manufacture, the body would be unable to transport nutrients or oxygen, transmit nerve impulses, or move muscles, including the heart. An adult human being contains about 250 grams of salt, which would fill three or four salt-shakers, but is constantly losing it through bodily functions. It is essential to replace this lost salt.

Salt is so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history.

Wherever records exist of humans in different stages of development, as in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America, it is generally found that hunter tribes neither made nor traded for salt but agricultural tribes did. On every continent, once human beings began cultivating crops, they began looking for salt to add to their diet.

Salt became one of the first international commodities of trade; its production was one of the first industries and, inevitably, the first state monopoly.

In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value.

Though jiangyou and shoyu are pronounced very differently and appear to be very different words in Western writing, the two words are written with the same character in Japanese and Chinese.

Soy sauce

The bean is so nutritious that a person could be sustained for a considerable period on nothing but water, soy, and salt.

lactic acid fermentation, or, in more common jargon, pickling.

MOST ITALIAN CITIES were founded proximate to saltworks, starting with Rome in the hills behind the saltworks at the mouth of the Tiber.

as the Romans became ambitious empire builders, they needed it to be available for the army. The Roman army required salt for its soldiers and for its horses and livestock. At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word salary and the expression “worth his salt” or “earning his salt.” In fact, the Latin word sal became the French word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier.

THE ROMANS SALTED their greens, believing this to counteract the natural bitterness, which is the origin of the word salad, salted.

Salt was the key to a policy that made Venice the dominant commercial force of southern Europe.

islands that are now the city of Venice. The area between these islands and the peninsula of Comacchio was called the Seven Seas. “To sail the seven seas” meant simply sailing the Seven Seas—accomplishing the daunting task of navigating past the sandbars of those treacherous twenty-five miles. About A.D. 600, Venetians started using landfill to extend the mainland closer to the islands of modern-day Venice. The Seven Seas became a landmass

Venetians made an important discovery. More money could be made buying and selling salt than producing it.

In Parma, a ten-year prison sentence could be reduced to five years as a galley slave on a Genoese ship. But most of these slaves lived only two years, which caused a constant need for replacements.

At the time of Beuckelzon’s invention, herring already had been barreled in brine by the Scandinavians, the French, the Flemish, and the English for centuries. Nevertheless, the myth, like many myths, lived on.

The booming medieval salt fish market was low end—lenten food for poor people. Upper-class people had their fish sped to them fresh, or if they lived too far from the water, had their royal fish ponds and holding tanks, or farmed fish such as carp. But from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries an estimated 60 percent of all fish eaten by Europeans was cod, and a significant portion of the remaining 40 percent was herring.

fortunes could be made on furnishing the poor with herring. The herring was plentiful. Access to salt was the only limitation.

For a time, the Hanseatics were well appreciated as honorable merchants who ensured quality and fought against unscrupulous practices. They were known as Easterlings because they came from the east, and this is the origin of the word sterling, which meant “of assured value.”

It was considered rude, sometimes even unlucky, to touch salt with the fingers. Salt was taken from the cellar on the tip of a knife and a small pile put on the diner’s plate. Some medieval and Renaissance plates had a small depression for salt. Placing salt on the table was a rich man’s luxury, but all classes ate salted foods.

Monasteries were often located on the sites of ancient mines so that the salt could provide revenue.

Anglo Saxons called a saltworks a wich, and any place in England where the name ends in “wich” at one time produced salt.

Cheshire is the oldest known variety of English cheese and is thought to be more representative of a medieval English cheese than is cheddar or the blue-veined Stilton.

Ketchup derives its name from the Indonesian fish and soy sauce kecap ikan.

The salt in ketchup originally came from salt-cured fish,

Ketchup became a tomato sauce, originally called “tomato ketchup” in America, which is appropriate since the tomato is an American plant, brought to Europe by Hernán Cortés, embraced in the Mediterranean, and regarded with great suspicion in the North.

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.

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.

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.”

By 1800, a small initial investment in a Cape Cod saltworks would quickly yield returns of 30 percent. Most of the stretches of virgin sand beach and upland dunes, land considered useless until then, were becoming marred with windmills, pipes, and huge vats with rolling roofs. The prices were high, and the market seemed endless. Whatever salt was not used by local fishermen was shipped to Boston or New York. As long as the profits were copious and easy, Cape Codders cared no more about their spoiled dunes than did the people in Cheshire worry about their blackened skies.

The glassworks in Sandwich, famous in the nineteenth century for their little glass saltcellars, needed intense heat for glassmaking. The cooling fires still gave off enough heat to evaporate seawater, and salt became a by-product of their glassmaking.

In 1788, New York State negotiated a treaty with the Onondaga establishing a 10,000-acre reservation with joint ownership. But in 1795, the treaty was renegotiated, and the Onondaga, a people that traditionally had not even used salt, gave up their rights to the land in exchange for the annual delivery to the Onondaga nation of 150 bushels of salt.

The state is still delivering its annual salt payments, though some Onondaga now feel that they would rather have the land returned.

In 1808, a resolution recommending consideration of a canal connecting the Great Lakes to the Hudson River was introduced in the New York Assembly by Joshua Forman, from the salt-producing town of Salina.

The final argument for the canal was the inevitable war with Britain from 1812 to 1815. When this war broke out, the Americans were faced once again with a salt shortage. The British blockaded Massachusetts and tried to prevent Cape Cod salt from reaching Boston or New York,

AS SOON AS the war ended, lawmakers pushed to approve the Erie Canal, and work began in 1817.

Among the state’s plans to finance the completion of the canal was to tax upstate salt at a rate of 12.5 cents per bushel. It was one of the few salt taxes in history that was not resented.

In 1837, Cape Cod alone had 658 salt companies producing more than 26,000 tons per year. But Cape Cod lost its competitive advantage once upstate New York had its own waterway to New York City.

The Erie Canal ran west to east, and the Oswego Canal, which connected the Erie Canal to Lake Ontario, ran north to south. The two intersected in the center of the town of Syracuse. With its torch-lit bridges over reflecting canals, Syracuse became known as the “American Venice.”

Not only did New York have a Venice, it had a Liverpool, the town being named so that Onondaga salt could be shipped around the United States with that trusted old brand name “Liverpool salt.”

In fact, it was animals, not so-called trailblazers such as Daniel Boone, that had carved the original trail across the Allegheny Mountains to the Ohio River Valley.

Kanawha was in the state of Virginia, which had a huge slave-based tobacco industry that was slowly declining. The large tobacco plantations had more slaves than they could use, and the owners saw an economic opportunity in renting these people to Kanawha salt producers. According to the 1810 census, Kanawha county had 352 slaves, but by 1850, 3,140 slaves lived in the county, mostly assigned to saltworks.

The United States as a whole was still dependent on foreign salt, but most of those imports went to the South.

From 1857 to 1860, 350 tons of British salt were unloaded in New Orleans every day, ballast for the cotton trade.

Slaves on long shifts kept the wells operating twenty-four hours every day. The saltworks were so close to each other that the area became a single undulating gnarled mass of slave labor. Land was set aside for a graveyard, which quickly filled as shivering slaves fell over from malaria or smallpox. Shoving and bumping against each other as they frantically labored to produce salt, slaves slipped and fell into boiling pans. Some died a quick death, but others died only after days of pain.

In April 1862, when the first Confederate draft was declared, there were no exemptions for salt makers, but by August Jefferson Davis revised the conscription to exempt them. Making salt became a way to avoid military service.

Soon after Hayes found this natural brine spring in Petite Anse, a man named Jesse McCaul bought nineteen acres there and began making salt. He dug several wells, and at a depth of three to six inches, he found pottery fragments. Later it would be discovered that these fragments were spread over a five-acre area, the site of a prehistoric saltworks in the manner of the early Romans, where brine was evaporated in pottery and then the pots were broken. Piles of ancient shards are occasionally still found on the island. Archaeologists believe these saltworks are 1,000 years old. But recently a mound was found on the island in a place called Banana Bayou that was carbon-dated to about 2500 B.C., which would make it one of the oldest man-made structures ever found in the United States.

April 17, 1863, a Union colonel took his troops south of New Iberia and attacked the saltworks, destroying eighteen buildings with their steam engines, boiling and mining equipment, as well as 600 barrels of urgently needed salt that was about to be shipped throughout the Confederacy. The Union troops were surprised at how easily they took this major saltworks and interpreted the inability of the Confederates to defend this strategic point as a sign that the South was crumbling. But some of the bloodiest battles of the war were yet to come.