Salt or Cod- A Revolutionary War study

Codfish or Salt!

by L. Ray Sears, III

Codfish or salt, which do you suppose was more important during the Revolutionary War? I will try to make the case for both and let you decide. I know “beer-batter codfish and chips” is one of my favorite meals of all time. Mom tells me about the little wooden boxes that salt-cod came in and how much effort it took for her family with eight children to reduce the percentage of salt in the “dried” fish to a palatable level. Just take a look at the instructions for how to “freshen” fish on a one-pound box of Sea Star Seafoods salt-cod that you can buy today from Nova Scotia! “Wash fish for 15 minutes in running water. Place fish in pan and cover with water, heat slowly (Do not boil) and pour off water. Repeat this last process until fish is no longer too salty to taste.”

My Dad’s family is from Quivet Neck in the village of East Dennis, Cape Cod. This hamlet is on the eastern shore of Sesuit Harbor which is one of the safer refuge harbors on Cape Cod Bay. Salt is in the family DNA. My great grandpa Elkanah Howes Sears (1849-1914) was a cooper and a mechanic and most likely worked on windmills including those used for salt-works. He lived on Quivet Neck his whole life and was even involved with building clipper ships at Shiverick’s yard. The yard was on the other neck surrounding Sesuit Harbor from where he lived so I picture him rowing to work each morning. His grandfather, Elkanah Sears (1758-1836), was in Capt Micah Chapman's 2nd Yarmouth Company of Militia and served 3 days on alarm at Dartmouth and Falmouth, 6 Sep 1778.  Elkanah probably guarded British captives from the HMS Somerset as they were marched to Boston two months later in November 1778. There was no love lost for the crew of the Somerset since she had been identified in the news as one involved in numerous Revolutionary War battles for the previous four years. In this case the Yarmouth militia would be responsible for escorting the captives from the Harwich town border (now West Brewster), along the old King’s Highway (now Route 6A) to Cummaquid at the Barnstable town border. Elkanah Howes Sears never got to know his grandpa but I am certain there were revolutionary “war stories” told during those early 1800s. The elder Elkanah was a contemporary of “Salt John” Sears who lived about 500 feet away on North Street. Elkanah was about 14 years younger than “Salt John” but they were first cousins and clearly would have been close associates. The fact that prisoners were marched through town probably accounts for the legend that “Salt John” acquired one of the bilge pumps from the Somerset to lift water into his newly designed vats or salt works. This pump would have made life easier than the original process of filling the vats a bucket at a time. 

Captain “Salt John” Sears’s father was Deacon John Sears (1712-1791). I guess the titles are added to keep all these John Sears sorted out. At the age of 46, Deacon John, proceeded to build a new Cape Cod house, now known as #36 North St and named “Sears Homestead” by the current owners. This was the typical low Cape Cod cottage with a door in the center leading to a staircase and center chimney probably with back to back fireplaces. A pair of 6 or 9 pane windows hung on each side of the central door. I think the carpentry and construction trades were second nature to these families and the mother of invention was central to their lives. Judy Dubin recently came across a file about this house from 1979. 

 “Salt John” Sears Homestead built 1758- 36 North Street

[probably Harriet (Fish) and husband Elijah Bailey Sears (1826-1900)- “Salt John’s” grandson]

You see, after Deacon John and Priscilla and their 18 children lived there, the house would pass to their son Capt “Salt John” Sears (1744-1817) who had nine children with his wife (and cousin) Phebe Sears (1747-1818), then to their son Heman Sears (1780-1836) who had ten children. The echoes of Sears kids playing on North Street can probably still be heard.

In a story from Judy Dubin’s file by an unknown author written in 1975 they talk extensively about Captain Sleepy John’s saltworks invention (Sleepy because he was known for fits of abstraction) and say that “A room in this house where he experimented with his vat with sea water and sun in the southwest window is still called “Sleepy John’s room” today. [The southwest window is at left next to the tree.] This third John in the line is also called “Salt John” after the 1799 patent he received for “Sears Folly” to distill salt from seawater.  This was one of the very early patents issued by the United States. It turns out it was not such a folly as by 1832 there were more than 1.4 million “feet” of vats along the shores of Cape Cod producing 360,000 bushels of salt each year. 

My Mom discovered a deed in the family papers which shows how “salt works” were bought and sold. Salt works were measured in linear feet apparently 20 feet wide by deeded feet in length. This land next to Quivet Creek is now part of the Crowes Pasture conservation area and can no longer be claimed since taxes were not paid. You can see it did not take long for Grandfather Elkanah (and his father Captain Edmund Sears - who participated in the Boston Tea Party) to catch on to the business of making salt from his Cousin John- 

“This indenture of three parts made between Edmund Sears & Joshua Sears & Elkanah Sears all of Dennis…21 Jan 1802 [who] hold as tenants in Common in equal Shares – up Land and Cleared Land and beach & Marsh… a portion of the Sam… first that the Said Edmund Sears… hold and possess… the one third part of all the Cleared Land and marsh… begining with the Land Lying in Quivet neck at a place Called Colls pond… begining at the South West Corner of his Share at a Corner in the Stone wall… then Sets westerly in the rang of the Said Edmund Sears Near the corner…of Elkanah Salt works then Sets Northerly round by the Said Elkanah Sears & the Said Joshua Sears Salt work to the first… and it futher agreed that the fence in the pond So as to let his Cattel to water when need it – and it agreed that the Said Elkanah Sears Shall have the Land and marsh to Set one Salt work by his old Salt work of the Same Length as the old one – and it agreed that the Said Edmund Sears & Elkanah Sears Shall have the privilege to take Salt water out of the Salt pond whare their drums and premises now are – and it agreed that their Shall be a Cart way to the pinte land to Cart hay and other Carting and driving Cattel over each one land whar it List prditul to Each parties – and it futher agreed that each one Shall have the priviliges to pass to his Share in the Green Meadow to take of his hay off…” Together with Six hundred and Forty Seven feet of Salt works Standing on Said Land: also the Salt House and pump Mill ––

But getting back to the Somerset’s bilge pump- In the 1836 manual Officer’s Manual for His Majesty’s Ships- PUMPS, AND PUMP-WELL section – “The perfect efficiency of the pumps should be the ship carpenter's constant care. He should therefore frequently inspect their fixed and moveable geer, but particularly that pertaining to the chain apparatus. He will be held responsible for the healthy and wholesome condition of the well.” Part of the pump was made from wooden tubes.

 

Chain Pump 

Another note says two men working on a chain pump could lift a ton of water in 55 seconds. I had imagined the Somerset would have a monolithic Burr pump or suction pump but the chain pump makes more sense to me now. We don’t need the rocking-horse action of a fire engine pump with the resulting pressure to spray water. We need only to lift the water from a lower compartment up to the deck. Or, in the case of salt works, from the creek to the vats. This way we don’t worry about leather gaskets wearing out or losing suction or having to prime the pump.   

So which is more important, salt or cod? Dr. Magra in an article from The New England Historical Society claims that codfish started the revolution?  They called the fish, The Sacred Cod. “When the revolution broke out 10,000 New Englanders worked as fisherman.” That was nearly one in ten of every man in the region. The British merchants back home were worried about their livelihood as the codfish is known for its ability to be preserved, stored and shipped around the world. The protein content of the fish is 80 percent and it is a great source of nourishment for the rebels. This preservation can only be accomplished with salt. As a way to put pressure on the colonies, the British passed the 1764 Sugar Act limiting trade with the French and in March 1775, the New England Restraining Act prevented the colonies from trading with any party other than Britain and the British West Indies. That act also barred New England ships from North Atlantic fisheries. Is it any wonder so many Cape Cod fishermen ended up in Canada, still loyal to the crown (Canada that is, not necessarily the fisherman)? The British really tried to clamp down on the colonial fishing industry requiring permission to even carry fishing tackle.

The Boston Tea Party in December 1773 is well known but the 1773 Tea Act – a tax of 3 pence per pound of tea- also carried a tax on salt. Salt was imported from the Caribbean at that time and had previously been exempted from most duties. On 29 December 1775, the Congress “earnestly recommended to the several Assemblies and Conventions to promote by sufficient public encouragement the making  of salt in their respective colonies.” In March 1776, Pennsylvania Magazine published a lengthy excerpt from Brownrigg’s essay on making bay salt. The article was reprinted as a pamphlet and circulated by the Congress. A British embargo cut off salt supplies completely so that on 28 May 1776, the Continental Congress placed a “bounty” of one third of a dollar for each bushel produced. In June 1777, a congressional committee was appointed “to devise ways and means of supplying the United States with salt.” Ten days later the committee proposed that each colony could offer financial incentives to both importers and producers of salt. Some of the thirteen colonies had already been doing this. “New Jersey declared that any saltwork could exempt up to ten employees from military service.”  General Washington’s salt supply had been captured by British Lord Howe in September 1777 when Washington was driven out of Philadelphia. It was not long after that Washington wrote- “To Major-General Schuyler. Head-Quarters, Middlebrook, 18 December, 1778 I have directed the Commissary-General to lay in as large magazines of flour and salt provisions &c. at Albany and any other places, which may be thought proper, as he possibly can.”

Salt was not only a preservative but also an antibiotic. In 1812 thousands of Napoleon’s soldiers died during the retreat from Moscow because there was no salt to treat their wounds. Unfortunately boiling sea water to extract salt was not economical so the colonists turned to the evaporation process. “Salt John” Sears is known for constructing shallow vats into which sea water was placed for solar evaporation. These were called “salt works.” The price of salt increased from 50 cents a bushel at the beginning of the war to $8 by the time the war finished in 1783. In 1785 he built a windmill to pump the water automatically from the sea.

Salt works vats were about 20 feet square and 12 inches deep. That means a vat could hold about 3,000 gallons. The chain pump we saw earlier could lift a ton of water per minute. That correlates to 250 gallons per minute, so it could take about 12 minutes to fill the first vat. 

“Three vats were placed on an incline so that water could flow from one to the other simply by lifting a board. In the first vat, called the water room, sea animals and plant life were removed. The second vat was called the pickle room, and here much of the lime was precipitated before the brine flowed to the third vat, known as the salt room. Here crystallization occurred until salt could be raked out and placed in warehouses to dry. The salt thus produced was in the form of large crystals suitable for salting fish or meat, but for table use the crystals had to be ground. 

Salt precipitates from the evaporating sea water at different rates. A gallon of sea water has about a quarter-pound of salts. When the sea water evaporates you get layers of salt in the vat in this order- first,  calcium carbonate; then, calcium sulfate, sodium chloride (table salt-80%), magnesium sulfate (Epsom Salts-5%), and small amounts of potassium chloride, and magnesium chloride. Now when you see “Sea Salt” in the market you have an idea of what could be included. If you wanted a particular salt you could scrape the bottom of the vat at the proper time in the precipitation process. It could take a month for the water to evaporate from a vat.

My cousin Lelia Brownscombe told me grandfather, Elkanah Howes Sears, as a boy in 1860, had to rush down to Quivet Creek, day or night when it started raining to cover the vats to prevent any more water from entering and counteracting the solar evaporation. Sleepy John Sears had received a patent in 1799 for a rolling apparatus to make covering the vats easier and this was still being used in the middle 1800s.

What about the cod connection? There is an amazing Ph.D. thesis by Dr. Christopher Paul Magra who studied the cod fishing industry in detail. The problem is you have to deal with units of measurement like quintal, hogshead and tons of displacement. 

By 1768, dried cod was the most valuable export commodity in all of New England, bringing in £152,155 every year, or 35% of the total export revenue for the entire region. In 1775 –“4,405 New Englanders (just half the number previously mentioned by him in the New England Historical Society article-maybe due to embargoes) in 3,000 vessels of 25,630 tons [8 tons per vessel] caught 350,000 quintals of fish. That is about 11,000 pounds of fish per vessel). A schooner at the time was between 50-100 tons displacement .

Schooners would travel several days to offshore banks, take in cod, and fishermen would salt the catch wet, right out of the ocean. The lightly salted cod would then be stacked in the holds of the schooner for a prolonged time. Later, the crew would return to their home port, where shoremen would air-dry the damp, salty catch. 

It is sometimes difficult to understand just how many fish there were in the grounds off New England.  I love this sailing order to ”load fish” that I discovered in Captain Peter Sears’s papers at the University of Ann Arbor- were that the process were that simple but it was once said that a man could walk on water across the backs of fish.

Sailing Orders for Schooner Sukey Capt Nathan Crowell Boston th 6 June 1795 Sir You being Master of Schooner Sukey and Ready for Sea our Desire and Orders are you Proceed from this to the Banks of New found Land or any other Bank or Banks you may think Best and after Loading said Schooner with Fish you proceed with the same to some One or More Ports in France where you may think Best to make Sale of the Same and Bring in Return the Hard Cash.

So that brought me to the issue- how much salt do you need to load up to make a run out to the fishing grounds?

The New England fisheries seemed to use the “light salting” process in which one hogshead of salt could treat eight quintals of fish. So a 500 lb hogshead of salt treated about nearly 1,000 lbs of fish. This means you would need to load about 11 hogheads of salt before setting sail for the fishing grounds.

The men lightly salted the filets and stacked them in the hold. This light salting was part one of a two-stage curing process. The entire crew then repeated the process for as long as they were physically able, or until the schooner’s hold had been filled.

When the fish are being piled in salt bulk care should be taken over one or two points. They should be piled with the flesh side up and more salt sprinkled on thick fish than on thin fish, with most salt over the thick part of each fish. Obviously the thickest part of the fish contains most water and most salt will be necessary to extract the water. The kench should be built in such a way that the pickle formed should drain off, and fish should be placed carefully on the pile so as to avoid kinks or folds. The kench should be built in a place where there is good drainage from the bottom.

Don’t take the word filet too lightly. Realize that the crew broke the task down to splitter, header, and salter. 

 

Dressing cod on deck of fishing schooner

Drawing by H. W. Elliott and Capt. J. W. Collins

Credit: NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service

The following is quoted directly from Newfoundland Department of Natural Resources, Division of Fishery Research because it describes the process so well and how careful the fisherman must be when fileting fish to prevent bacterial contamination.

It is advisable, therefore, to bleed the fish by cutting the throat as soon as they are taken from the water... When the fish are landed water should be thrown over them to help to remove the blood and slime. The usual processes of throating, gutting, beheading, trimming, and splitting should be carried out as carefully as possible. That is to say, care must be taken to avoid gashes and tearing of the fish, for these, besides spoiling the appearance, become easy places for bacterial attack. In splitting, the point where the backbone is cut should be just far enough back to avoid leaving a blood spot, and the knife must not be allowed to slip deep into the flesh, forming a crevice where conditions become ideal for the activities of decomposition. A cut should be made into the part of the backbone that remains in the tail in order to remove any blood there. The final appearance of the fish should show the fish split evenly along the backbone from head to tail, with the backbone cut, not broken, about half way down, with no round tail and no ragged edges, no sliver and no gashes. At this stage the black skin of the belly wall is to be seen on the napes of the fish.

Sodium chloride is all that is necessary for extracting water by osmosis, and sodium chloride is not distasteful to the human palate, so that its presence on fish food is not disagreeable to the taste. Other substances are impurities, and it is desirable to find out what these impurities are and what their action is on the water extracting process and on the subsequent appearance and taste of the fish.

Very often solar salts contain a kind of bacteria which gives rise to that condition of fish known as "Red" or "Pink." Only fish heavily salted with solar salt will develop red, and only if the fish have been allowed to become warm. Fish that have been heavily salted with solar salt should be kept in a cool, well-ventilated storeroom. The condition of fish known as "Dun" is due to an infective mould. Dun is a mouldy, dust-like fungus which, in its advanced stages of development, spreads over the entire fish, and causes putrefactive decomposition. Though imported salt does not contain this mould, it is possible to contaminate the salt by keeping it in store-rooms where there has been an outbreak of "Dun." Calcium and magnesium impurities in salt will draw moisture from the air to the dried fish and moisture, combined with a warm temperature, favours the growth of "Dun."  

So we have salt and we have cod and without a ready supply of either one we might still be British subjects.

===

[1]-Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors, Vol. 13, pg. 951.

[2] SEARS, JOHN; MACHINE FOR MANUFACTURING SALT; 24 JAN 1799- Most of the patents prior to 1836 were lost in the Dec. 1836 fire. Only about 2,000 of the almost 10,000 documents were recovered. Little is known about this patent. There are no patent drawings available. This patent is in the database for reference only.

[3] How Do Chain Pumps Lift and Discharge Water, by Walter Biles, 2013 https://modelshipworld.com/topic/605-how-do-chain-pumps-lift-and-discharge-the-water/

[4] Historic Manual Bilge Pump on Balclutha Returned to Working Condition, by Courtney Andersen, Historical Ship; also Rigging Supervisor 9 April 2014, https://www.nps.gov/safr/learn/historyculture/historicbilgepump.htm

[5] How Codfish Started The American Revolution by Christopher Paul Magra, 2022 https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/how-codfish-started-the-american-revolution/

[6] Salt: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky, Knopf Canada, Mar 18, 2011. Kurlanksy also wrote the best selling book "Cod."

[7] The Salt Works of Chatham by Spencer Gray. 2014, The Cape Cod Chronicle, https://chathamhistoricalsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/AtAtwood_ccc_5-1-14.pdf

[8] THE NEW ENGLAND COD FISHING INDUSTRY AND MARITIME DIMENSIONS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION by Dr Christopher Paul Magra, The Pennsylvania State University, 2006, https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/7982/1/Magra_ETD_1_.pdf

[9] Newfoundland volume 2- No 4 - 1935 - Reports of the Newfoundland fishery research laboratory (dfo-mpo.gc.ca) https://waves-vagues.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/library-bibliotheque/31172.pdf