Mullet Pond, the Great Salt Pond and the Proselyte wreck: three places in Sint Maarten

Mullet Pond is a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance (site number 2270), designated on 23 May 2014 and covering 26.4 hectares. Its information sheet describes a semi-enclosed area of permanent shallow marine waters within Simpson Bay Lagoon. The site holds some of the few intact seagrass beds in the wider lagoon and, in the sheet’s words, 70% of the mangrove forest remaining on Sint Maarten. The sheet calls the mangroves and seagrass a nursery for juvenile fish that later move to local coral reefs, among them those of the Man of War Shoal Marine Park. The sheet also names the buttonwood Conocarpus erectus, listed as nationally critically endangered, and says the site is the last remaining habitat in the wider Simpson Bay area of Anolis pogus, a species endemic to the island, and the last intact foraging grounds in the lagoon of the globally endangered green turtle Chelonia mydas.[1]

Jay Haviser, director of the Sint Maarten Archaeological Center, gives the island’s Indigenous name as Soualiga, identified by the Carib and meaning ‘land of salt’, and considers it probable that the salt areas of the Great Pond lagoon mattered already in prehistoric times. He writes that salt was one of the key reasons for the first European settlement in the 17th century, and that by 1850 production had reached 337,000 barrels a year, with people of African descent as the main labourers. The archaeological site consists of dry-stone walls laid in geometric patterns to form the pans in which seawater was evaporated; the main historical pans cover the whole eastern side of the Great Salt Pond. Two further features are a Dutch-style wind-pump of the 19th century, lost in the mid-20th century, and a steam-powered facility built in the 1870s to pump fresh water and crush the salt. The saltpans were worked commercially from the early 17th century until the 1940s, and their eastern part was placed on the St. Maarten Monuments List in 2008.[2]

The Nature Foundation, which manages the Man of War Shoal Marine Park south of Philipsburg, says it was established on 31 December 2010 through a Marine Park Ordinance and covers 3,100 hectares of coral formations, historical shipwrecks and sunken artificial reefs. On a sandbar directly out from Great Bay harbour lies the wreck of a Dutch frigate named Jason in 1770, taken by the British and renamed Proselyte in 1796; it sank on the reef outside Great Bay on 2 September 1801. The entry in the Maritime Stepping Stones (MaSS) programme describes cannon, ballast, barrel hoops and anchors in about 50 feet (roughly 15 metres) of water. It records archaeological research by K. Bequette in 1994–1995, published in 1996, and by Wil Nagelkerken in the 2000s, and says the wreck is protected under the name of the sea mount it rests on, Man-O-War Shoal, as a nature and culture area of the Sint Maarten National Marine Park.[4][3]