Salt of the Earth

Mark Kulansky observes in his Salt: A World History that “Almost no place on earth is without salt. But this was not clear until revealed by modern geology, and so for all of history until the twentieth century, salt was desperately searched for, traded for, and fought over.” Salt’s importance declined with the invention of canning and refrigeration. Before the fairly recent past, though, salt was one of the commodities that shaped the world we live in.

People wanted and knew they needed salt, and so the desperate “search for salt has challenged engineers for millennia and created some of the most bizarre, along with some of the most ingenious, machines. A number of the greatest public works ever conceived were motivated by the need to move salt. Salt has been in the forefront of the development of both chemistry and geology. Trade routes that have remained major thoroughfares were established, alliances built, empires secured, and revolutions provoked—all for something that fills the ocean, bubbles up from springs, forms crusts in lake beds, and thickly veins a large part of the earth’s rock fairly close to the surface” (16).

Salt inspired technical ingenuity. The Chinese drilled brine wells, and transferred brine through extensive bamboo piping to places where the brine was boiled to produce salt. They burned the natural gas produced by the mines to power their salt boilers (28-29). During the middle ages, “Venetians built salt ponds along the newly formed land of Chioggia. Cassiodorus wrote that the Venetians were using “rollers,” but sometimes this is translated as “tubes” or “cylinders.” It is not clear if he was speaking of rollers to smooth down the floors of artificial evaporation ponds or cylindrical pottery to boil seawater into crystals. Both techniques had been common in Rome. Between the sixth and ninth centuries, the last great technical advance in salt manufacturing until the twentieth century was invented. Instead of trapping seawater in a single artificial pond, closing it off, and waiting for the sun to evaporate the water, the salt makers built a series of ponds” (76).

Salt was not merely a condiment. Around the time William was conquering Britain, the Chinese has come up with a salt compound that was the earliest form of gunpowder. “In the Middle Ages, salt already had a wide variety of industrial applications besides preserving food. It was used to cure leather, to clean chimneys, for soldering pipes, to glaze pottery, and as a medicine for a wide variety of complaints from toothaches, to upset stomachs, to ‘heaviness of mind’” (107).

Artisans were inspired to create salt-dispensers that were worthy of the substance they contained: “In the fifteenth century, Jean, duc de Berry, featured on his banquet table a gold ship that held not only salt but pepper, as well as, according to some accounts, powdered unicorn horn. Since it is doubtful that anyone has ever seen a unicorn, the powder may have been from the tusk of a narwhal, a single-horned relative of the whale. Unicorn horn was believed to be a poison antidote, which many monarchs wanted to have close-by at mealtime. Some nefs contained “’erpent’s tongue,’ which was actually shark’s tooth, for the same purpose. The compartments in nefs were frequently locked. Elaborate saltcellars in all forms, not only ships, were popular. In addition to his nef, in 1415 the duc de Berry, a notable patron of the arts, received from the artist Paul de Limbourg an agate saltcellar with gold lid and a sapphire knob with four pearls. In the sixteenth century, when things Italian were especially fashionable, Benvenuto Cellini, the Florentine high-Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith, made a saltcellar for King François I of France, perennial war maker and insatiable art enthusiast. The dish of salt was held between the figure of Neptune, god of the sea” (129). In Poland, “The miners of Wieliczka began carving religious figures out of rock salt. Three hundred feet below the surface, miners carved a chapel out of rock salt with statues and bas-relief scenes along the floor, walls, and ceiling. They even fashioned elaborate chandeliers from salt crystals” (152).

Control of salt was the cause of war, especially in the Americas, where all the great pre-European civilizations “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” (180). British blockades and attacks on saltworks during the American war for independence left the colonists with a salt shortage. During the civil war, “the Union army attacked saltworks wherever it found them, from Virginia to Texas. The Union navy attacked salt production all along the Confederate coast” (233). Controlling salt meant controlling the means for preserving food, essential in war.