My summer home overlooks a salt marsh on Cape Cod. We love this marsh for many reasons: beautiful vistas, abundant marine and birdlife, invigorating air, and constant sea breezes. The sea air is full of salt.
We curse salt’s destructive power: how little time it takes to corrode metal objects (deck furniture, door knobs, lanterns or window frames) that face the marsh and the bay beyond it.
But we also recognize that salt is essential to life.
Now that I’m reading Salt: A World History, I have a much greater appreciation for the impact salt has had on civilization and commerce. Not to mention language (words such as “salary” or even “soldier,” for example).
The Power of Salt
Once upon a time, for those who controlled access to it, salt fueled wealth creation, financed wars, inspired long and arduous trade routes. People enslaved others to help in the making or transport of salt.
Salt was so valuable that cities were founded near salt mines or saltworks; wars were fought to control salt, or get access to it. Salt was the basis of the first-known monopoly (in China thousands of years ago).
Even here on Cape Cod sea salt was once a source of wealth — in the 18th and early 19th centuries when the British blockaded New England during two wars. Their blockade drove resourceful Cape Codders to create their own sources of salt when they could no longer trade with Europe for it.
Thanks to plentiful wind, sun and salt water, there were almost 900 saltworks on Cape Cod by the 1830s, the heyday of saltmaking in this tiny region.
From Power to Symbolism
Because of its economic value and intrinsic properties, salt has taken on many symbolic meanings over the centuries, such as:
Loyalty and friendship are sealed with salt because its essence never changes.… In both Islam and Judaism, salt seals a bargain because it is immutable.
— Mark Kurlansky, in Salt: A World History, © 2002
Other symbolic meanings include:
- The keeping of promises or covenants with God (Judaism)
- Blessing a new home
- Associations with longevity and permanence (think: mummies)
- Protection from evil spirits or the evil eye
It’s also associated with wisdom in some religions:
In Christianity, salt is associated not only with longevity and permanence, but by extension, with truth and wisdom.
— Mark Kurlansky, in Salt: A World History, © 2002
It used to be high praise to say a person was “worth his salt.” Centuries ago your stature was indicated by where you sat, relative to the saltcellar on the table. Powerful or important folk sat “above the salt.”
Although salt no longer commands high prices nor drives mankind to war, it’s still essential to life.
On cloudy days like this, looking out over a salt marsh and the herons fishing there, it’s good to be reminded of what’s truly valuable in life. It’s not just the boating…