Haunted salt: how the saltpan of Venezuelan La Tortuga Fed the enslaved and powered the Sugar Revolution, 1638-1781

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Sal, Bacalhau e Açúcar : Trade, Mobility, Circular Navigation and Foodways in the Atlantic World", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The saltpan of the largely forgotten Venezuelan island of La Tortuga was during the seventeenth and eighteenth century central to the functioning of the British Atlantic economy. I retrace the itineraries of the free solar sea salt that was harvested by Anglo-American seafarers at the saltpan of Punta Salinas and used to preserve “refuse fish” from the Grand Banks that was sold in the West Indies to feed the enslaved toiling on sugar plantations. Today, saltfish is still deeply imbedded in the culinary practices of the region’s inhabitants. I reflect here on how the unique mobilities potential of the sea not only fomented interimperial interconnectivity, but also collapsed spatial scales, creating instances where the global came to be nested in the local, and the intimately local could have far-reaching repercussions. What results is a peculiar tale of a haunted salt, harvested in the long shadow of slavery.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Sal, Bacalhau e Açúcar : Trade, Mobility, Circular Navigation and Foodways in the Atlantic World

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow