Haunted salt: the Saltpan of La Tortuga Island, slavery, and Atlantic sugar economies, 1638-1781

Abstract

The saltpan of the uninhabited and largely forgotten Venezuelan island of La Tortuga was vital to the functioning of the British and French Atlantic sugar economies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this chapter I retrace the itineraries of La Tortuga's free and low-grade salt as it travelled in the holds of small Anglo-American ships returning to New England, where it was utilized in curing the low-grade category of refuse fish. By reconstructing the commodity circuit of this salt, I then reveal how it returned to the Caribbean aboard the salt ships, preserving the fragile flesh of refuse fish that was sold as provender for the enslaved toiling on sugar plantations in the British and French islands. To this day saltfish has remained deeply embedded in the culinary practices of the region's inhabitants. Finally, I explore how more than a hundred individually sized punch bowls found in the excavations of the Anglo-American campsites are potent exemplars of micro-globalities, where the regional and global came to be nested in the local, specifically in the form of rum punch, the ingredients of which included sugar and rum-products of West Indian plantations. What results is a peculiar story of a haunted salt harvested on a desolate island, trailing spectral entanglements with slavery across the Caribbean.