Don't confuse it with Haiti's Tortuga, the one made famous by seventeenth-century pirate literature. The story of Venezuela's Tortuga revolves around its great saltpan by Punta Salinas, in the south-east of the island.
The main source
Much of this page draws on Islands of Salt (2019) by archaeologist Konrad A. Antczak, an open-access study of the seafarers who camped by the saltpans of La Tortuga and Cayo Sal (Los Roques) between 1624 and 1880, and on the 2015 paper by Andrzej Antczak and colleagues on the Dutch enclave.
Before Europeans
Long before the Spanish conquest, Indigenous peoples from the Venezuelan coast visited the island for its salt, fish and sea turtles. Excavations at Punta Salinas document a pre-colonial and early colonial Indigenous presence between AD 900 and 1638. The island is named after the sea turtles that come ashore to nest on its beaches.
The Dutch saltworks (1624–38)
From 1624, Dutch saltmen (zoutvaerders) turned the lagoons in the east of the island into solar saltpans to supply their herring industry. They built a wooden fort, emplacements for portable cannon, and jetties. At the end of the dry season, in April and May, evaporation left crusts of salt on the lagoons.
A shipwrecked Spanish seaman, Seledón de Suasola, recorded what seven Dutch fluits loaded between June and August 1630: some 28,344 wheelbarrows of salt, about 1,430 tonnes. In 1632 the Spanish found fourteen water pumps on the island; they took two to Cumaná and burned the rest.
1633: the saltpan flooded
In 1633 the engineer Juan Bautista Antonelli the Younger directed the flooding of the great Dutch saltpan by opening channels to the sea. According to Antczak, the change was permanent: the pan became today's Los Mogotes Lagoon. Large-scale Dutch working stopped until a brief and violent return in 1638.
1638: the attack on the fort
In May 1638 the Spanish learned that eight Dutch fluits were loading salt. The governor of Cumaná, Benito Arias Montano, set out with 13 piraguas, 150 soldiers and 150 Indigenous archers and rowers, reached the western point unseen and attacked the wooden fort by the saltpan at sunrise. By Arias Montano's own account the assault lasted four hours under cannon and musket fire. A Dutch song published in 1661 says the defenders surrendered in exchange for their lives and were massacred despite the agreement; only a few escaped. A plan painted that year by Antonelli shows the fort under attack by Spaniards and Cumanagoto people.
A century and a half of Anglo-American salt-rakers (1638–1781)
That same year, 1638, brought the first known Anglo-American ship: the Desire of Salem, Massachusetts, under Captain William Peirce, which returned with salt and, by way of Providence Island, with enslaved Africans; it is the first record of African captives brought into New England. From then on, ships from New England and Bermuda sailed to "Salt Tortuga" to supply their cod fisheries. In 1670 a Salem court even banned fish cured with La Tortuga salt, because the shells and debris in it left "spots upon the fish".
The buccaneer-naturalist William Dampier, who visited the saltpan in 1682, found it "much frequented" by merchant ships coming to load salt. Between 1686 and 1781 Antczak documents 15 attacks on the salt fleets by Spanish, mostly Basque, corsairs. The era ended in 1781, when the corsair Vicente Antonio de Icuza drove off some thirty "Englishmen" raking salt on the island.
What archaeology found
Punta Salinas was excavated in 1993, 2009 and 2010, and the seafarers' campsites were studied between 2009 and 2014. Across the campsites he studied, thousands of finds include clay pipes, punch bowls, plates, teapots, buttons and bones. At the saltpan campsites of the Venezuelan islands, Antczak concludes, seafarers drank tea from porcelain bowls and rum punch beside the saltpans. In the Dutch period, meals around the fort included the island's rabbits and goats as well as provisions shipped from the Netherlands.
Henry Pitman, castaway of 1687
In 1685 the Englishman Henry Pitman, surgeon to the Duke of Monmouth during his rebellion, was tried, convicted and transported to Barbados as a forced labourer. In 1687 he escaped with several companions in a small open boat and, after a gruelling passage, landed on an uninhabited island: "Salt Tortuga". Privateers already there burned their boat and left them ashore. Pitman lived on the island for about three months until a privateer took him aboard and he made his way back to England. Antczak describes him living mainly on sea-turtle meat.
Pitman told his story in A Relation of the Great Sufferings and Strange Adventures of Henry Pitman, published in London in 1689, thirty years before Robinson Crusoe (1719).
Tim Severin and Seeking Robinson Crusoe
Who was the real Robinson Crusoe? Most people think of the Scot Alexander Selkirk, marooned for four years on Juan Fernández off Chile. In Seeking Robinson Crusoe, the British explorer and writer Tim Severin visits places where seafarers of the buccaneer era were wrecked or abandoned: he starts on Juan Fernández, follows the buccaneer surgeon Lionel Wafer to Panama, and finally sails a hundred-year-old boat to "Salt Tortuga", where he investigates Pitman's story.
Severin argues that Pitman's experiences, more than Selkirk's, inspired much of Daniel Defoe's novel. He identified on the island the places Pitman describes, and notes that back in London Pitman lodged with the family that later published Robinson Crusoe. That is his interpretation: Selkirk has long been considered the model for Crusoe.
The book on Open Library → · the book on Tim Severin's website →
The modern island
- 1871: becomes part of the so-called Colón Archipelago.
- 1938: incorporated into the Federal Dependencies.
- 1974: declared a zone of tourist interest (Decree 1625).
- 2005: Decree No. 3448 sets out the land-use plan and regulations for the island, Las Tortuguillas, Cayo Herradura and Los Palanquines.
- 2007: tourism works are proposed; the National Assembly orders them halted because of the risk to the fragile ecosystem.
- 2014–15: the Ministry of Tourism announces ecologically focused works; the island closes for a season to clean up and remove makeshift structures.
- From 2018: first visits to the new tourist complex at Playa Caldera, Punta Delgada, with a new pier.
Further reading
- Konrad A. Antczak, Islands of Salt (Sidestone Press, 2019), open access.
- Andrzej Antczak et al., "Risky business", Post-Medieval Archaeology (2015).
- Tim Severin, Seeking Robinson Crusoe (Macmillan, 2002).
- Henry Pitman, A Relation of the Great Sufferings and Strange Adventures of Henry Pitman (London, 1689), full text in the Oxford Text Archive.