I had quite a time trying to locate an island called Salturtuda for my most recent article about Jeremiah Higgins and Richard Caverley.
Along the way, I found a web site and a reference and thought I would share those with you here.
Along the way, I found a web site and a reference and thought I would share those with you here.
“Tavern” by the Saltpan: New
England Seafarers and the Politics of Punch on La Tortuga Island, Venezuela,
1682–1781
New England seafarers from small merchant ships visited the
natural saltpans of the Venezuelan island of La Tortuga from the late seventeenth
century up until 1781. The liminal space of the island set the stage for the
creation of an improvised “tavern” where the communalism of shipboard life was
suddenly changed to more markedly vertical relations. Drawing from
archaeological excavations and original documentary sources it is argued that,
while on land, captains no longer worked alongside their crews who now labored
extracting salt. With leisure time available to them, punch drinking offered
captains a means of discursive practice through the manipulation of fashionable
material culture and an opportunity to negotiate their social position among
peers. When given to the crew, punch served as a labor incentive and a way of
obfuscating the sudden change in customary captain-crew relations while on the
island.
There is also this article about excavations of La Tortuga:
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