If they’re ill, charge them extra

James Meek

• Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky
  Cape, 452 pp, £17.99, February 2002, ISBN 0 224 06084 8
• Salt: Grain of Life by Pierre Laszlo, translated by Mary Beth Mader
  Columbia, 220 pp, £15.95, July 2001, ISBN 0 231 12198 9

In 1870, the Imperial authorities in London ordered a heraldic designer to come up with a flag and crest for a part of the British Empire called Turks and Caicos. The designer had never heard of the place, but he was sent a sketch by a local artist which showed a typical scene: men wielding long-handled instruments and, behind them, large white mounds. Public interest in Arctic exploration was high, and the designer gave the white mounds a prominent place in the finished crest, a panorama of igloos with doors which remained the emblem of Turks and Caicos until 1968. The people of the islands, which are in the Caribbean, were too shy or too polite ever to tell their Imperial masters that frost and snow were unknown to them, and that the white mounds were heaps of the only product that made money in Turks and Caicos: salt.