Mhm came across a book at the library by person named Mark Kurlansky abt the the history of salt, which I sadly couldn’t rly take out b/c. But you always want to read abt such things you hardly think about, so ubiquitous they are now: salt, spices, sugar, tea, tobacco, coffee.
All of these things were initially very difficult to obtain, and very expensive.
Lots of pplo who enjoy history tend to have silly glasses abt certain time periods.
In Mediaeval Europe all of the foods we take for granted were unavailable to even the rich. Popular foods like idk [insert here], there were no tomatoes and there was no corn (maize), which are New World species.
Southern Europe had citrus fruits, oranges and lemons, and things like watermelons were grown in Egypt.
Tropical fruits like bananas and mangoes were known (in Asia) but almost completely unavailable due to the difficulty of preservation.
Other tropical fruits, like guava and pineapple, are New World species and were unknown.
It’s a famous trope of Restoration England (second half of the seventeenth century) that pineapples were a status symbol that could only be afforded by the rich, and were generally not consumed but displayed.
In Northern Europe even the famous oranges of Seville (actually introduced by the Arabs after the Muslim conquest of Spain), for ex., were mostly unavailable bc they would rot too quickly.
Everyone’s favourite tuber, the potato, was also completely unknown.
Given the potato’s importance for the Euro poor, this is very difficult to wrap your head around. The potato soon became omnipresent after Columbus, not only in Ireland but also in Central and Eastern Europe.
The famous Potato War, for instance, which so impacted the poor peasants of Bohemia at the end of the eighteenth century.
But such are the facts, the Romans and the Mediaeval Europeans never ate even one potato in thousands of years.
Ofc pplo got used to eating what was available, and it’s hard to see how they could have been depressed abt lacking foods they didn’t know of, but for a modern person this provides some perspective.
Modern people love to eat things and do things that weren’t even possible until the twentieth century.
Including, crucially for me, reading. There were, of course, books and a reading public, but for most of history for most pplo literacy was a luxury and most humans lived and died without ever acquiring it.
There were even Kings who were illiterate.
But at this point I would like to focus in on salt, because, while I haven’t read Kurlansky’s work, this subject keeps appearing in works dedicated to the early modern period.
Primarily bc salt in enormous quantities was necessary for the preservation of fish, and this was especially important for the Dutch herring fleets.
The Dutch initially bought most of their salt from Peninsular Spain, before their revolt, but, strange as it seems, after their rebellion the sources from Spain were much less available.
Some smuggling was done, but after the end of the Twelve Years Truce (1609), Spain went on an econ offensive on an unprecedented scale, not matched again until Napoleon’s Continental System, in order to break the Dutch economy into pieces.
No more salt, or anything else, from Spain.
Interestingly, this shifted the Dutch attention towards the Caribbean.
Previously they cld acquire their necessary products from Spanish ports, including those from the Spanish colonies.
But now the Dutch found the Spanish market barred to them, and too firmly under the control of the Spanish Crown.
The Indies, however, were a different situationship. The Spaniards were thin on the ground and the Crown’s authority lax, so instead of getting tropical products from Seville and Cadiz, the Dutch hit upon the idea of getting them directly from their source.
Not only was smuggling carried on to a considerable extent, but officials and merchants even colluded with it. Spain found it difficult to even physically occupy much of the land, so the Dutch could go ashore in many places w/o ever seeing a Spaniard.
This was to be a very long-lasting problem for Spain, who was still desperately trying to ward off British and American smugglers and interlopers almost two centuries later.
Intrepid Dutch smugglers in their frequent voyages to the Caribbean hit upon a gold mine, to solve their saline problems.
There is an enormous salt pan on the Araya Peninsula of Venezuela. Run off from the highlands would bring salt down near the sea, but wld fail to reach it. Being contained in lagoons the water would evaporate leaving thick layers of salt behind.
This was a virtually inexhaustible source of sodium, and the Spaniards were already too stretched to exploit it or defend it.
Soon the Dutch were sending hundreds of ships a year to break off huge pieces of salt and bring it back to the Netherlands, much to the chagrin of the Spanish Government.
Spanish Admiral Luis Fajardo briefly led a punitive expedition to attack Dutch ships in the Bay of Cumana, but Spain felt that more permanent measures were necessary.
The Council of the Indies actually discussed a proposal of dredging a canal to the sea, so that the salt pans cld be inundated, which seems to me a drastic measure bc it would have made them unavailable to the Spanish themselves.
Ultimately a fortress was constructed, Santiago de Araya, whose ruins can still be seen today.
It was not completed until about 1620, and thereafter it attempted to defend the salt pans against both the Dutch, and later, the English.
An earthquake hit the fort in 1684, and a hurricane seriously damaged it, and incidentally the salt pans themselves, in 1725. Finally, in 1762 the Spaniards gave up attempting to maintain the fort and abandoned it.
It’s not clear to me why they chose to do this, since in that very year they were at war with Great Britain, and had lost Havana to a British expedition.
Very clearly the threats to Spain’s Caribbean possessions were not removed, but perhaps Spain simply decided to prioritize other areas.
But it’s very interesting to me that so much effort and expence shld have been poured into securing salt against the Dutch. Ex. that part of Spain’s economic offensive against Holland actually included an attempt to starve the Dutch of sodium.
Imagine having trouble finding something so basic and so simple for your food…
