From rocks to riches.

• Author: Muilenburg, Peter
• Position: Salt - Includes article on The Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain

AUBIQUITOUS WHITE CRYSTAL Was once widely smuggled under sail from the Caribbean coast of South America back to Europe, where it spread to every comer. Millions of people used it compulsively, while others shunned it as a poison. Respectable businessmen grew rich from the traffic and military personnel tried to halt it. it controlled island governments, became a burning issue among powerful nations, and saved the Dutch economy from collapse.

Of course, the subject is salt. Compared to the legendary Caribbean cargos of gold, silver and pearls, plain old salt lacks a little savor. Its innate sex appeal must rank somewhere near guano as one of the least glamorous cargoes ever to fill a ship's hold ... but it had its day.

Almost 400 years ago the Dutch were sailing nonstop from Holland to the West Indies to fetch it back, and not just one or two bold ships, but hundreds annually. It was at once routine commerce and high adventure. It was smuggled out of Spanish territory, fleets did battle, throats were slit--all over salt. The story makes a good yam for travellers in the West Indies who wonder, as they wander by derelict old salt pans and crumbled coral block buildings on some remote cay, just what brought men to labor under the sun on such far-flung rocks.

The magnificent old fort at the end of Venezuela's Araya Peninsula still stands as a mute symbol to that era. Its massive battlements have been cracked and toppled in places by earthquake, but they remain largely intact, brooding over the sunblasted, windstruck barrens. The question posed by this grand structure is ... why here, in such a remote and pointless place, presiding over such a shabby town? A clue appears when one climbs the fort's walls and looks past the town to see the huge lavender salt lake that lies a few hundred yards from the sea.

Salt had greater value in the days before canning and refrigeration, when the best way to preserve meat or fish was either to pickle it in brine or salt and dry it. All long voyages depended on a store of salt meat packed in barrels, and on shore salt fish was staple fare for common people for centuries. The Basques and Portuguese, who not long after Columbus were crossing the Atlantic to fish the Newfoundland banks, brought their catches home packed in brine. But it was the Dutch whose very nationhood depended on a reliable supply of salt. Towards the close of the 16th century their herring fishery employed 1,000 vessels and 30,000 men; to them it was "the mother of all commerce." They exported their phenomenal catches all over Europe, especially to the Catholic south, where every meatless Friday made the Low Country Calvinists that much richer.

The Dutch had always relied on Iberian salt, in a smooth, symbiotic trade that carried herring to Spain and salt back to the Netherlands. Smooth, that is, until the Dutch struggle for independence from Spain flared up in the late 1500s. Spain cut off the rebels' salt supply and in one fell swoop seized 100 Dutch ships anchored from La Coruna to Cadiz, including 30 salt carriers.

The prospect of watching their herring rot--and their country along with it--sent the enterprising Dutch in search of new sources. The Mediterranean had lots of salt, but getting it through the Spanish-controlled Straits of Gibraltar required both stormy weather and good luck. The Dutch searched the African Atlantic coast, but found shoals extending far offshore, and the few available harbors were all subject to Spanish attack. They fetched salt from as far south as Ilheu do Sal in the Cape Verdes, but the quality was mediocre and the return trip against wind and currents took months.

Finally, the Dutch decided that the best way to get salt was to cross the Atlantic to the Caribbean coast of present-day Venezuela and steal it point blank from their enemy. At the end of the Araya Peninsula, on a sparsely inhabited desert coast, lay an immense bed of pure, concentrated white salt, hard by a convenient anchorage. A Spanish friar writing aroung 1620 described it thus:

Three leagues from the city of Cumana

lie the salt beds of Araya, the

most abundant and the richest in

salt to be found in the universe, for

under the water lies rock salt in such

quantities that if a hundred boats or

galleons finish loading there, as has

often been seen, and another hundred

arrive, there is cargo for all of

them and one notices no diminution

in consequence of the earlier cargos

... it is so concentrated that the foreigners

profit by the fact in their

countries and make three boatloads

out of one; whenever they use it they

dilute it for salting down, it is so

strong.

The "hundred boats or galleons" referred largely to Dutch vessels. Cut off from Iberia in 1585, they discovered Araya's potential by 1590, and within a decade 100 Dutch ships were loading salt there annually. By 1603, 200 salt ships were making the crossing to Holland each year. What sweetened the salt was the act of robbing it from the despised Spanish crown-unpaid, untaxed, in broad daylight. This was Araya's brief moment on the world stage.

Of course, the salt had always been there, but the Carib Indians wouldn't touch it and shook their heads to see the white man "poisoning" his food. The Spanish, although they didn't need more salt, denied it to others. They were effectively able to protect their claim during the first half of the 16th...