Times of the Islands Spring 2022

astrolabe newsletter of the Turks & Caicos National Museum
The discovery that the Turks Islands were well suited
for the commercial production of salt by the solar evaporation
of seawater came about accidently.
Shipping between Bermuda and the West Indies was
common during the early 1600s. During these passages,
Bermudian vessels would sometimes stop at Grand Turk
or Salt Cay to salvage cargoes from ships wrecked on the
reefs near these islands. The practice of “wrecking” began
in Bermuda in the early 17th century and the practice
soon extended to the Caribbean.
The Turks & Caicos Islands were uninhabited in
the 1660s—the Lucayan population had been gone for
more than a century. The Islands were not only unpopulated,
but were unclaimed by any other country. It was
during this wrecking activity on the Turks Islands that
Bermudians noticed that salt collected in naturally occurring
shallow pans or ponds after seawater held in them
evaporated in the sun.
Bermudians began collecting salt by hand from these
shallow depressions on the Turks Islands on an informal
basis in the 1660s. By 1673 salt collection became more
organized—first on Salt Cay and five years later on Grand
Turk. In the beginning, Bermudians and their slaves occupied
the Turks Islands on a seasonal basis—arriving in
March and returning to Bermuda in November. The summer
months provided the Bermudian “salt rakers” with
the weather conditions needed to extract salt from seawater
by solar evaporation—hot temperatures, little rain
and steady trade winds.
The success of the Bermudian salt merchants did not
go unnoticed by the Spanish in Santo Domingo or the
French in Hispaniola. Between the years 1710 and 1783,
they repeatedly attacked the Turks Islands, the ships carrying
salt and the salt rakers working the salt ponds. In
1764 Great Britain declared the Islands a British possession.
In 1767, Andrew Symmer from Nassau was appointed
as the King’s Agent on Grand Turk. He devised the Royal
Regulations that year. These regulations, approved in
1781, established rules of governance for the Turks
Islands and for the salt industry. The Head Right System
that outlined who had the right to work the salt ponds was
part of these regulations. Under the Head Right System,
shares of the salt ponds were issued each February to
This postcard bears an image of East Harbour on South Caicos circa 1906. East Harbour would eventually become the largest producer of
salt on the Turks & Caicos Islands.
Times of the Islands Spring 2022 69