The Bounty of the Chesapeake Part 1

The Bounty of the Chesapeake.

by James Wharton.

FOREWORD

Just as a series of personal letters may const.i.tute an autobiography, so the extracts from Colonial writings that follow tell the unique story of the fisheries of Virginia's great Tidewater. In them it is possible to trace the measured growth of a vital industry. The interspersed comments of the compiler are to be understood as mere annotations. This is the testimony, then, of those who from the beginning partic.i.p.ated in one of the foremost natural resources of this country.

I gratefully acknowledge guidance in research to Mr. John C. Pearson of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, who masterfully surveyed the field and first brought the early fishery reports to public notice.

JAMES WHARTON Weems, Virginia

THE BOUNTY OF THE CHESAPEAKE

The voyage to America in 1607 was like a journey to a star. Veteran rovers though the English were, none of them had any clear idea of what to expect in the new land of Virginia. Only one thing was certain: they would have nothing there but what they took with them or wrought from the raw materials of the country.

What raw materials?

They had reliable information that the climate was mild. Therefore, crops could be raised. They learned of inexhaustible timber: so ships and dwellings and industrial works could be built. They hoped for gold and dreamed of access to uncharted lands of adventure. But putting first things first, how would they eat in the meantime?

When Sir Walter Raleigh established the first English colony in "Virginia"--on what is now Roanoke island, North Carolina--two good reporters, one a writer, the other an ill.u.s.trator, were commissioned to describe what they saw. This was twenty-two years before Jamestown and naturally all the material consisted of Indian life and customs. Thomas Hariot wrote:

For four months of the year, February, March, April and May, there are plenty of sturgeon; and also in the same months of herrings, some of the ordinary bigness as ours in England, but the most part far greater, of eighteen, twenty inches, and some two feet in length and better; both these kinds of fish in these months are most plentiful and in best season which we found to be most delicate and pleasant meat.

There are also trouts, porpoises, rays, oldwives, mullets, plaice, and very many other sorts of excellent good fish, which we have taken and eaten, whose names I know not but in the country language we have of twelve sorts more the pictures as they were drawn in the country with their names.

The inhabitants use to take them two manner of ways, the one is by a kind of weir made of reeds which in that country are very strong.

The other way which is more strange, is with poles made sharp at one end, by shooting them into the fish after the manner as Irishmen cast darts; either as they are rowing in their boats or else as they are wading in the shallows for the purpose.

There are also in many places plenty of these kinds which follow:

Sea crabs, such as we have in England.

Oysters, some very great, and some small; some round and some of a long shape. They are found both in salt water and brackish, and those that we had out of salt water are far better than the other as in our own country.

Also mussels, scallops, periwinkles and crevises.

_Seekanauk_, a kind of crusty sh.e.l.lfish which is good meat about a foot in breadth, having a crusty tail, many legs like a crab, and her eyes in her back. They are found in shallows of salty waters; and sometimes on the sh.o.r.e.

There are many tortoises both of land and sea kind, their backs and bellies are sh.e.l.led very thick; their head, feet and tail, which are in appearance, seem ugly as though they were members of a serpent or venomous; but notwithstanding they are very good meat, as also their eggs. Some have been found of a yard in breadth and better.

In a charming drawing of a group of Indian maidens John White, the artist a.s.sociate, commented: "They delight ... in seeing fish taken in the rivers."

Over and over the first visitors to the Chesapeake bay painted rosy pictures of its marine life, stressing the abundance, variety and tastiness of the fish and sh.e.l.lfish. Exploration and communication were chiefly by water: it was natural that emphasis be laid on water resources. Though it is proverbial that fish stories partake of fiction, in the case of John Smith and his successors, it is doubtful whether they were greatly exaggerated. This was a world where nature, especially in the waters, was immeasurably prolific.

On the other hand, the conclusions drawn by many of those reading the reports were probably unjustified. The infinite plenty was one thing.

Making constant and profitable use of it was another.

Thus, although Smith cited an impressive roster of edible fish in the vicinity of Jamestown, it was not to follow that the settlers were always able to turn them to advantage. There were several good reasons.

Long before Jamestown the fisheries off the coast of Northern America and Canada were known to be richly productive, with promise of an organized and dependable industry. But farther south conditions were found to be quite different. The fishing in the Chesapeake bay had frustrating ways. Sometimes there were hordes of fish. Again they stayed away in large numbers. They were usually present during warm weather when spoilage was worst. The first colonists had no ice at all and very little salt. Frequent spells of damp weather made sun-drying impractical. If more fish were caught than could be eaten at once, the excess was very likely wasted. Fishing gear was consistently inadequate. But from the very first, fishing and its development had been kept in mind by the promoters of the colony.

Fishing rights were defined in 1606 in letters patent to Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers and others, as recorded in the Charter granted in 1606:

They shall have all ... fishings ... from the said first seat of their plantation and habitation by the s.p.a.ce of fifty miles of English statute measure, all along the said coast of Virginia and America, towards the west and southwest, as the coast lies ... and also all ... fishings for the s.p.a.ce of fifty English miles ... all along the said coast of Virginia and America, towards the east and northeast ... and also ... fishings ... from the same, fifty miles every way on the sea coast, directly into the mainland by the s.p.a.ce of one hundred like English miles.

In the new fishing territory around Jamestown the Indians were the professionals and their methods were of great interest to the English novices. A description is furnished by William Strachey, secretary of state of the colony and author of _The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia_:

Their fishing is much in boats. These they call quintans, as the West Indians call their canoas. They make them with one tree, by burning and sc.r.a.ping away the coals with stones and sh.e.l.ls till they have made them in the form of a trough. Some of them are an ell deep and forty or fifty foot in length and some will transport forty men, but the most ordinary are smaller and will ferry ten or twenty, with some luggage, over their broadest rivers. Instead of oars, they use paddles and sticks, with which they will row faster than we in our barges. They have nets for fishing, for the quant.i.ty as formerly braided and meshed as ours and these are made of bark of certain trees, deer sinews, or a kind of gra.s.s, which they call pemmenaw, of which their women between their hands and thighs, spin a thread very even and readily, and this thread serves for many uses, as about their housing, their mantles of feathers and their [?] and they also with it make lines for angles.

Their angles are long small rods at the end whereof they have a cleft to which the line is fastened, and at the line they hang a hook, made either of a bone grated (as they nock their arrows) in the form of a crooked pin or fishhook, or of the splinter of a bone, and with a thread of the line they tie on the bait. They use also long arrows tied on a line, wherewith they shoot at fish in the rivers. Those of Accowmack use staves, like unto javelins, headed with bone; with these they dart fish, swimming in the water....

By their houses they have sometimes a scaena or high stage, raised like a scaffold, or small spelts, reeds, or dried osiers covered with mats which gives a shadow and is a shelter ... where on a loft of hurdles they lay forth their corn and fish to dry....

They are inconstant in everything but what fear constrain them to keep; crafty, timorous, quick of apprehension, ingenious enough in their own works, as may testify their weirs in which they take their fish, which are certain enclosures made of reeds and framed in the fashion of a labyrinth or maze set a fathom deep in the water with divers chambers or beds out of which the entangled fish cannot return or get out, being once in. Well may a great one by chance break the reeds and so escape, otherwise he remains a prey to the fishermen the next low water which they fish with a net at the end of a pole....

The earliest observers reveal how intimately food from the waters was linked with the colonists' experiences. George Percy wrote in 1607:

We came to a place [Cape Henry] where they [natives] had made a great fire and had been newly roasting oysters. When they perceived our coming, they fled away to the mountains and left many of the oysters in the fire. We ate some of the oysters which were very large and delicate in taste.

This was April 27 of that year. Oyster roasts have been a Virginia inst.i.tution ever since. He continued:

Upon this plot of ground [Lynnhaven Bay] we got good store of mussels and oysters, which lay on the ground as thick as stones. We opened some and found in many of them pearls.

The pearls would probably not have been worth mentioning, except as a novelty, if they had come from oysters alone. The Virginia oyster pearl lacks l.u.s.ter. But the mussel, particularly the one found in the James river, yields an iridescent pearl of some little value.

A month later more oysters, in a form unknown in Virginia today, were obtained from Indians by Captain Christopher Newport in return for ornaments, according to Gabriel Archer in 1607:

He notwithstanding with two women and another fellow of his own consort followed us some six miles with baskets full of dried oysters and met us at a point, where calling to us, we went ash.o.r.e and bartered with them for most of their victuals.

A letter from the Council in Virginia to the Council in England in 1607 stated:

We are set down eighty miles within a river, for breadth, sweetness of water, length navigable up into the country, deep and bold channel, so stored with sturgeon and other sweet fish as no man's fortune has ever possessed the like. And, as we think, if more may be wished in a river it will be found.

After various vicissitudes John Smith confessed:

Though there be fish in the sea, fowls in the air, and beasts in the woods, their bounds are so large, they so wild, and we so weak and ignorant, we cannot much trouble them.

George Percy introduced a happier note:

It pleased G.o.d, after a while, to send those people which were our mortal enemies [Indians] to relieve us with victuals, as bread, corn, fish, and flesh in great plenty, which was the setting up of our feeble men, otherwise we had all perished.

John Smith tells about another crisis: