A Transatlantic Commodity: Irish Salt Beef in the French Atlantic World

Fig. 1.

Slaves preparing cassava flour from manioc. From Jean-Baptiste DuTertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les Français, contenant tout ce qu'il s'est passé dans l'établissement des colonies françaises, etc . . . et l'histoire naturelle des ces îles, Paris, 1661–1667, tome 2, p. 418.

In February 1674 Jean-Charles de Baas, the governor-general of the îles françaises de l'Amérique,¹ reported to Colbert² that the previous year of famine had paradoxically had some advantageous effects on the French colonists residing on Martinique. It had focused the minds of the planters on their sugar crops and lessened their debt to French creditors from whom they would have borrowed money to buy wine and flour, and in any case, de Baas wrote,

. . . one needn't worry about them dying of starvation in the absence of French merchant vessels, Monseigneur; in every month of the year, the habitants have local foodstuffs available to them – peas of different kinds, manioc, yams, potatoes, as well as many delicious fruits. There is good water with which they make refreshing drinks; they have fowl which multiply in front of them; beef, goats, sheep and pigs for their meat supply and the sea furnishes them with fish.³

De Baas's depiction of this colonial idyll was, in fact, disingenuous; in previous and subsequent years his correspondence to the Ministère de la Marine was overwhelmingly concerned with the privations suffered by colonists and slaves alike, and, on occasion, he himself actively circumvented the strict controls that forbade foreign (non-French) traders to sell their cargos on French islands, in order to alleviate their suffering.⁴

More importantly, de Baas's report displayed an abrupt change in tone when it described the situation of the slaves who worked the sugar plantations of the French and who continued to develop the French colonial settlements that had been in place since 1626 in the case of St Christophe, and 1635 in the cases of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Here all was not well: exceptionally, de Baas asks Colbert's permission to send French merchants directly to Ireland to buy salted beef – 'the most important commodity of all' – to feed the slaves, promising that the profits will be good. The famine may have forced the colonists out of their 'laziness and debauchery', but:

. . . to speak the truth, the beef that is lacking to feed the slaves is a calamity which they [the colonists] resent greatly – the rest is nothing by comparison. This is why, Monseigneur, depriving these people of all their commodities for another year, other than Irish beef, would be no great ill . . .⁵

Clearly there was a firm distinction to be made between the 'beef, goats, sheep and pigs' that could hypothetically supply colonists with meat, and the salted provisions from Ireland that were necessary for the enslaved population. Indeed, de Baas's letters to Colbert throughout his tenure (1667–77) testify over and over again to the centrality, specifically, of salted beef derived from Ireland to the African slaves, and to the effect of its absence.⁶ In 1672, he summarized the situation that emerged during a temporary ban on trading in Irish beef:

I am daily tormented with trying to explain to you that if the prohibition on Irish beef continues, it is certain that the Islands couldn't be struck by a worse catastrophe, because if the slaves are lacking in beef, colonists will be lacking in slaves . . . .⁷

The Irish salted beef that de Baas isolates in relation to slave diets in the 1670s was a central element of the general colonial diet. The formal beginnings of French colonization in the region in 1626 had triggered a crisis in food provision that gained momentum mid-century after colonists turned from tobacco to sugar cultivation and began importing enslaved West Africans in vast numbers to work the plantations. Indeed, 'the inability to produce livestock, meat, flour and lumber in the West India islands laid the...