The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [126]
So the method was to move the water up a line of pans, so that it gradually evaporated and achieved a higher salt concentration as it went. To keep it moving along the pans, they used wind pumps.
They were very simple; they had probably been used on the marshes below the New Forest in Saxon times and were hardly different from those known in the Middle East two thousand years before. They were about ten feet high, with a simple cross carrying four little sails like a windmill. As the sails went round they drove a cam, which operated a rudimentary water pump below. From shallow pan to shallow pan the water was pumped along, until it reached the final part of the process at the boiling house.
Totton’s reason for going out today was to make a thorough inspection so that any repairs needed after the winter could be made in good time. He and Jonathan went over it together.
‘The channel to the feeder pond needs dredging,’ remarked the boy.
‘Yes.’ Henry nodded. Several of the mud walls in the salt pans needed mending, too.
Here Jonathan made himself particularly useful, walking lightly over every one of the narrow barriers, marking each crack he found with a splash of whitewash. ‘Don’t we have to clean out all the bottoms, too?’ he asked.
‘We do,’ his father said.
The final process was the actual salt-making. By the time the evaporated sea water reached the last salt pan it was a highly concentrated brine. Now the salt-maker would place a lead-weighted ball into the pan. When it floated, he would know the brine was thick enough. Opening a sluice, he would allow the brine to flow down into the boiling house.
This was just a shed, with strengthened walls. In here was the boiling pan, a huge vat over eight feet across, under which there was a furnace, usually heated by charcoal or wood. Here the vat gradually boiled away all the water, leaving a great piecrust of salt.
The boiling was almost continuous during the salt-making season. Each boiling, or turn, took eight hours. Starting on Sunday night and ending on Saturday morning, this allowed sixteen turns a week. At this rate Henry Totton’s boiling pan was able to produce almost three tons of salt each week. It was crusty and not very pure, but it was pure enough.
‘We burn nineteen bushels for each ton of salt produced,’ Totton remarked. ‘So,’ he started to calculate for the boy, ‘if the cost of fuel per bushel is …’
It was only moments before Jonathan’s concentration had started to wander. He didn’t enjoy the boiling house as much as the rest. When the boiling was going on, the clouds of steam, impregnated with salt, were blinding. His throat would feel on fire after a while. The area all round the boiling house would grow hot and cloudy. He would run away whenever he could to the fresh sea breeze, the curlews and seagulls along the shore by the feeder pond.
His father had just finished explaining how to calculate the total profit achievable if the weather held good for the full sixteen-week season when he noticed that Jonathan was looking at him thoughtfully.
‘Father, can I ask you something?’
‘Of course, Jonathan.’
‘Only’ – he hesitated – ‘it’s about secrets.’
Totton stared. Secrets? It was nothing to do with salt, then. Nothing to do with anything he had been trying to teach the boy in the last half-hour. Had Jonathan taken in anything he’d said? The all too familiar wave of disappointment and irritation started to sweep over him. He fought to control himself, not to let it appear in his face. He wished he could bring himself to smile, but he couldn’t. ‘What sort of secrets, Jonathan?’
‘Well … It’s like this. If someone tells you something important, but they make you promise not to tell anyone, because it’s a secret; and if you wanted to tell someone, because it might be important; should you keep it a secret?’
‘Did you promise to keep a secret?’
‘Yes.’
‘And is the secret something bad? Something criminal?’
‘Well.’ Jonathan had to consider. Was the secret that his friend Willie Seagull had told him so bad?
It concerned Alan Seagull and his boat.