The Bounty of the Chesapeake Part 8

Unless the weather grows warmer your fishing this season will, I fear, prove unproductive; for it has always been observed that in cold and windy weather the fish keep in deep water and are never caught in numbers, especially at shallow landings.

And in 1794, he states, with the rather weary voice of experience,

I am of opinion that selling the fish all to one man is best ... if Mr. Smith will give five shillings per thousand for herrings and twelve shillings a hundred for shad, and will oblige himself to take all you have to spare, you had better strike and enter into a written agreement with him.... I never choose to sell to wagoners; their horses have always been found troublesome, and themselves indeed not less so, being much addicted to the pulling down and burning the fences. If you do not sell to Smith the next best thing is to sell to the watermen.... I again repeat that when the schools of fish run you must draw night and day; and whether Smith is prepared to take them or not, they must be caught and charged to him; for it is then and then only I have a return for my expenses; and then it is the want of several purchasers is felt; for unless one person is extremely well prepared he cannot dispose of the fish as fast as they can be drawn at those times and if the seine or seines do no more than keep pace with his convenience my harvest is lost and of course my profit; for the herrings will not wait to be caught as they are wanted to be cured.

Thus did Washington become one of the first to encounter the besetting plague of American ma.s.s production: the problem of distribution.

That fishing was a vital prop in plantation economy is evidenced by a letter of April 24, 1796, to his manager:

As your prospect for gain is discouraging, it may, in a degree, be made up in a good fishing season for herrings; that for shad must, I presume, be almost, if not quite, over.

Salt herrings were a staple in the feeding of the "black people," and were issued to those at Mount Vernon at the rate of twenty a month per head. But he warned about waiting for the annually expected herring "glut" to occur before the slaves were provided for. If it should fail to materialize--as had been known--what then? Save a "sufficiency of fish" from the first runs, he wisely ordered.

In 1781 he suggested that salt fish be contracted for the troops, and possibly it was tried for a while, but the year following, army leaders voted to exclude fish from the rations.

Accounting records for 1774, presumably an average fishing year, show receipts of 170 for the catch at the Posey's ferry fishery, with 26 debited to operating cost. At the Johnson's ferry fishery 114 was taken in and 28 paid out. The catch here represented consisted of 9,862 shad and 1,591,500 river herring, but other large hauls were also made on the estate. Profits would seem to be adequate, although costs of nets and boats were not figured in. Fishing boats were usually small maneuverable craft that never had to put out very far from sh.o.r.e, and cost about 5 to build.

Occasionally Washington was approached by speculators offering to rent the season's privileges at one of his fisheries for a flat sum. About one such proposal in 1796 he expressed the opinion to his manager that "under all chances fishing yourself will be more profitable than hiring out the landing for 60." Nevertheless, the headaches had for years made the transference of fishing to someone for cash on the barrelhead a temptation. In February, 1770, he had entered into an agreement as to sales while retaining the responsibility of catching:

Mr. Robert Adams is obliged to take all I catch at Posey's landing provided the quant.i.ty does not exceed 500 barrels and will take more than this quant.i.ty if he can get casks to put them in. He is to take them as fast as they are catched, without giving any interruption to my people, and is to have the use of the fish house for his salt, fish, etc., taking care to have the house clear at least before the next fishing season; is to pay 10 for the use of the house and 3 shillings 4 pence, Maryland currency, per hundred for white fish.

But in 1787 he wrote: "A good rent would induce me to let the fishery that I have no trouble or perplexity about it." The _Diary_ shows a good deal more interest during the early years in how the fish ran than it does later. In April, 1760, he writes:

Apprehending the herring were come, hauled the seine but catched only a few of them, though a good many of other sorts.... Hauled the seine again, catched two or three white fish, more herring than yesterday and a great number of cats.

August, 1768: Hauling the seine upon the bar of Cedar Point for sheepshead but catched none.

April, 1769: The white fish ran plentifully at my seine landing, having catched about 300 at one haul....

The term "white fish" is not now generally applied to any species caught in the Potomac, but a good guess is that, with Washington, it was an alternate for shad.

The Revolution was fought, but even before the surrender the minds of America's statesmen were actively considering peace terms. Both Richard Henry Lee and Thomas Jefferson suggested that the valuable fisheries off Newfoundland be freely open to American ships. This time it was not a question of the Northern Colony keeping the Southern Colony out as it had been 150 years before. Thomas Jefferson, writing in 1778, wanted the United Colonies to exclude England:

If they [Britain] really are coming to their senses at last, and it should be proposed to treat of peace, will not Newfoundland fisheries be worthy particular attention to exclude them and all others from them except our _tres grand_ and _chers amis_ and allies? Their great value to whatever nation possesses them is as a nursery for seamen. In the present very prosperous situation of our affairs, I have thought it would be wise to endeavor to gain a regular and acknowledged access in every court in Europe but most the Southern. The countries bordering on the Mediterranean I think will merit our earliest attention. They will be the important markets for our great commodities of fish, wheat, tobacco, and rice.

Lee saw how fishing in Northern waters had started America on its way to being a maritime power. In a series of letters to George Mason and others he expresses his opinions forcibly:

Our news here is most excellent; both from Williamsburg and from Richmond it comes that our countrymen have given the enemy in the South a complete overthrow.... Heaven grant it may be so. I shall then with infinite pleasure congratulate my friend on the recovery of his property, and our common country on so great a step towards really putting a period to the war. I think that in this case we may insist on our full share of the fishery, and the free navigation of the Mississippi. These are things of very great and lasting importance to America, the yielding of which will not procure the Congress thanks either from the present age or posterity.

I rejoice greatly at the news from South Carolina. G.o.d grant it may be true. If this should force the enemy to reason and to peace, would you give up the navigation of the Mississippi and our domestic fishery on the Banks of Newfoundland? The former almost infinitely depreciating our back country and the latter totally destroying us as a maritime power. That is taking the name of independence without the means of supporting it.

I rejoice exceedingly at our successes both in the North and in the South. If we continue to do thus, it will not be in the power of the execrable junto to prevent us from having a safe and honorable peace next winter. In this idea I shall ever include the fisheries and the navigation of the Mississippi. These, Sir, are the strong legs on which North America can alone walk securely in independence.

If you do not get a wise and very firm friend to negotiate the fishery, it is my clear opinion that it will be lost, and upon this principle that it is the interest of every European power to weaken us and strengthen themselves.

I heartily wish you success in your negotiations and that when you secure one valuable point for us (the fishery) that you will not less exert yourself for another very important object,--the free navigation of the Mississippi, provided guilty Britain should remain in possession of the Floridas.

Fishing as a matter of states' rights resulted in the pioneering Potomac River Compact of 1785, when representatives of Maryland and Virginia met under George Washington's sponsorship at Mt. Vernon to deal with fishing and tolls. Maryland owned the river to the Virginia sh.o.r.e line, and agreed to allow Virginians to fish in it in return for free entry of Maryland ships through the Virginia capes. The compact, in force to this day, was the first step taken in behalf of interstate commerce. With its example to follow, other states eased the barriers to their commercial interests, with immeasurable benefit to the Union.

Commercial fishing in Virginia was, as the century closed, on the verge of the stability it had sorely lacked. Its reliance on Indians for knowledge and skill, as in the first of the 17th century, was as dead as its reliance on England for manufactures in the last of the 18th.

Just around the corner were railroads and steamboats with their comparatively swift transportation. Teeming cities needed to be fed, and after nearly two centuries of education in the ways of the Chesapeake Bay and its marine life, Virginia fishermen knew how to keep the markets stocked. In 1794 a French visitor, Moreau de Saint Mery, wrote:

Fish is the commodity that sells for a ridiculously low price in Norfolk. One can purchase weakfish weighing more than twenty pounds for 4 or 5 francs and sometimes one that weighs three times more for a gourde, 5 francs, 10 sous. Drum is also very cheap. Sturgeon, weighing up to 60 pounds, can be bought for 6 French sous a pound, about the same price paid for little codfish that are brought in alive and are delicious to eat. Shad is also plentiful there. In addition, one can get perch, porpoise, eels, leatherjackets, summer flounder, turbot, mullet, trout, blackfish, herring, sole, garfish, etc. In short, fish is so abundant in Norfolk that sometimes the police find it necessary to throw back into the water those that are not bought.

Herring fishing began to be abandoned by the planters, many of whom were up to their necks in a variety of enterprises, in favor of business men intending to specialize. Letters from a Virginia speculator, John F. Mercer, to Richard Sprigg, sketch the situation:

April 19, 1779. To cure fish properly requires two days in the brine before packing and they can only lie packed with safety in dry weather. These circ.u.mstances joined with the heading and drawing almost all the fish (a very tedious operation) will show that no time was lost--only 9 days elapsed from his arrival here to his completing his load of 15,000 herrings, a time beyond which many wagons have waited on these sh.o.r.es for 4,000 uncured fish and many have been obliged to return without one, after coming 40 and 50 miles and offering 2 and 5 dollars a thousand. Several indeed from my own sh.o.r.e and six who want 36,000 herring will, I believe, quit this night without a fish, after waiting all this storm on the sh.o.r.e five days.

Mr. Clarke has had his fish completed two days.... He has been delayed by the almost continual storm that has prevailed since his arrival and which has ruined us fishermen.

My fishery has been miserably conducted from the beginning as might be expected from my entire ignorance and the penury of my partner who was poorer than myself.... Still I have expectations that it may turn out an immense thing from the trial we have made. The sh.o.r.es being opposite to Maryland Point, the reach above and below with the mouths of the two creeks on this side form a sweep, both tides upon them, that must collect for fish; and they are kept in by a kind of pound on the Virginia sh.o.r.e's trend. There apparent advantages accord with the experiment for, with a desperate patched-up seine that always breaks with a good haul, we have contrived to land 20,000 a day, every day we can haul. We are nearer to the Fredericksburg and Falmouth Virginia markets than any sh.o.r.e that is or can be opened on the river by 10 miles notwithstanding every discouragement and particularly the activity and lies practiced against us by the Little Creek fisheries on each side, who must fail with our success.

April 10, 1795. Herrings they tell me are 10 shillings per thousand at all the sh.o.r.es. If I had your lease I could make a fortune. I have a great mind to send Pollard and George up for your small boat and seine.... If Peyton comes down with his seine to haul at my sh.o.r.e, I will seine salted herrings enough for us both.

That acidulous but always colorful roving reporter from the mid-west, Anne Royall, offers the best picture, for accuracy and detail, of hauling a seine ever presented by anyone not a technician. Though written almost 50 years after the Revolution, it describes the kind of fishing on which Virginians had princ.i.p.ally depended since Christopher Newport began the Colonial era and George Washington ended it:

The market of Alexandria is abundant and cheap; though much inferior to any in any part of the western country, except beef and fish, which are by far superior to that of the western markets....

Their exquisite fish, oysters, crabs, and foreign fruits upon the whole bring them upon a value with us.

Their fish differ from ours, even some species. Their catfish is the only sort in which we excel; they have none that answer to our blue cat, either in size or flavor, and nothing like our mud-cat.

Their catfish is from ten to fifteen inches in length, with a wide mouth, like the mud-cat of the Western waters; but their cat differ from both ours in substance and color; they are soft, pied black and white. They are princ.i.p.ally used to make soup, which is much esteemed by the inhabitants. All their fish are small compared with ours. Besides the catfish which they take in the latter part of the winter, they have the rock, winter shad, mackerel, and perch, shad and herring. The winter shad is very fine indeed. They are like our perch, but infinitely smaller. These fish are sold very low; a large string, enough for a dozen persons, may be purchased for a few cents. No fish, however, that I have tasted, equal our trout.

The Potomac at Alexandria, is rather over a mile in width; it is celebrated for its beauty. It is certainly a great blessing to this country in supplying its inhabitants with food in the article of fish.

Fish is abundant (at Washington), and cheap at all seasons, shad is three dollars per hundred; herrings, one dollar per thousand.

Great quant.i.ties of herring and shad are taken in these waters during the fishing season, which commences in March, and lasts about ten weeks. As many as 160,000 are said to be caught at one haul. When the season commences no time is to be lost, not even Sunday. Although I am not one of those that make no scruple of breaking the Sabbath, yet, Sunday, as it was, I was anxious to see a process which I had never witnessed--I mean that of taking fish with a seine--there being no such thing in the Western country. It is very natural for one to form an opinion of some sort respecting things they have never seen, but the idea I had formed of the method of fishing with a seine was far from a correct one. In the first place, about fifteen or twenty men, and very often an hundred, repair to the place where the fish are to be taken, with a seine and a skiff. This skiff, however, must be large enough to contain the net and three men--two to row, and one to let out the net. These nets, or seines, are of different sizes, say from two to three hundred fathom in length, and from three to four fathom wide.

On one edge are fastened pieces of cork-wood as large as a man's fist, about two feet asunder, and on the opposite edge are fastened pieces of lead, about the same distance--the lead is intended to keep the lower end of the seine close to the bottom of the river.

The width of the seine is adapted to the depth of the river, so that the corks just appear on its surface, otherwise the lead would draw the top of the seine under water, and the fish would escape over the top. All this being understood and the seine and rowers in the boat, they give one end of the seine to a party of men on the sh.o.r.e, who are to hold it fast. Those in the boat then row off from the sh.o.r.e, letting out the seine as they go; they advance in a straight line towards the opposite sh.o.r.e, until they gain the middle of the river, when they proceed down the stream, until the net is all out of the boat except just sufficient to reach the sh.o.r.e from whence they set out, to which they immediately proceed.

Here an equal number of men take hold of the net with those at the other end, and both parties commence drawing it towards the sh.o.r.e.

As they draw, they advance towards each other, until they finally meet, and now comes the most pleasing part of the business. It is amusing enough to see what a spattering the fish make when they find themselves completely foiled: they raise the water in a perfect shower, and wet every one that stands within their reach. I ought to have mentioned, that when the fish begin to draw near the sh.o.r.e, one or two men step into the water, on each side of the net, and hold it close to the bottom of the channel, otherwise the fish would escape underneath. All this being accomplished, the fishermen proceed to take out the fish in greater or less numbers, as they are more or less fortunate. These fishermen make a wretched appearance, they certainly bring up the rear of the human race.

They were scarcely covered with clothes, were mostly drunk, and had the looks of the veriest sots on earth.

A Virginian born in 1792, Col. T. J. Randolph of Edgehill near Charlottesville, was asked to search his earliest memories in order to record 18th century fishing conditions. He wrote a letter in 1875 to the newly-const.i.tuted Virginia fish commissioners describing an era well-nigh incredible to today's Tidewater fishermen:

Shad were abundant in the Rivanna at my earliest recollection, say prior to 1800. They penetrated into the mountains to breed. I have heard the old people, when I was young, speak of their descending the rivers in continuous streams in the fall, as large as a man's hand. The old ones so weak, that if they were forced by the current against a rock they got off with difficulty. Six miles north of Charlottesville three hundred were caught in one night with a bush seine. A negro told me he had caught seventeen in a trap at one time. I recollect the negroes bringing them to my mother continually. An entry of land near Charlottesville about 1735 crossed the Rivanna for two or three acres as a fishing sh.o.r.e. The dams absolutely stopped them, but they had greatly declined before their erection. In 1810 every sluice in the falls at Richmond was plied day and night by float seines. I never heard of rockfish above the falls, and supposed they were confined to Tidewater....

Rockfish were hunted on the Eastern Sh.o.r.e on horseback with spears.

The large fish coming to feed on the creek sh.o.r.es, overflowed by the tide, showed themselves in the shallow water by a ripple before them. They were ridden on behind and forced into water too shallow for them to swim well, and were speared. I inferred from this fact that they confined themselves to the Tidewater. When young, I have heard the old people speak of an abundance of other fish. The supposition was that the clearing of the country, and consequent muddying of the streams, had destroyed them.

By sluicing the dams, and prohibiting fishing in sluices, or trapping, or anything that should bar their progress, I do not see why the shad should not return.

The shad have never returned to the up-country. But they still visit the vast inland waters below the Fall line, sometimes so abundantly that the price declines, as it did so recently as 1956, to where the fishermen can scarcely make a profit. Other fish referred to by the first Virginians continue to return, and will do so as long as our outreaching civilization does not deprive them of the natural conditions they need for survival.

The years closely following the Revolution brought profound readjustment in American commerce. Observations on whaling, a minor but vital home industry, filled many pages of a 1788 communication of Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, one of his confreres in the shaping of national policy.

After sketching the uses of whale oil, its economic position and its history, he took up the particular problem facing the people of Nantucket, perhaps the foremost whalers in America. As long as they had been subjects of the British Empire they had been able to sell their oil duty-free in England. Now as aliens they must pay the same tariff charged other foreign traders. This meant the difference between a profitable and unprofitable enterprise. A few Nantucket seamen had even transferred to Nova Scotia in order to become British citizens again and thus receive exemption from whale-oil import duty. This trend alarmed the French in particular, who could visualize thousands of the United States' best sailors going over to their enemies the English.

The remedy was suggested: make France the most attractive market for U.S. whale oil. At the same time, English whaling had been government subsidized and could undercut compet.i.tion.

The international chess game went briskly on, to the concern of Jefferson and the well-wishers of the infant Union. Before the Revolution England had fewer than 100 vessels whaling, while America had more than 300. But by 1788 England had 314 and America 80. Such was the result of the conflict, aided by the bounty paid by Britain to its own whalers. Jefferson hoped that the United States producers could develop a market in France, in part, by bartering oil for the essential work clothes which hitherto had been bought for cash in England. But he warned that without some kind of subsidy American whalers could neither compete with foreign countries nor make a living commensurate with other pursuits. The growing nation's sea-faring men would decrease to the point where the country's sea power would be in question.