John Smith had effused over the plenitude and sizes of edible aquatic life
in the bay—oysters a foot long—despite substantial populations of indige-
nous people who fished with nets as well as hooks, spears, and arrows.
European and American denizens of the bay followed suit. They angled for
many species, for sport and table. They strung huge seines across rivers to
trap migrating shad. And elegant little boats, called skipjacks, sailed the
bay gathering oysters, most of them the hard way. This was the muscular
business of tonging on an oyster bank, filling the boat, and sailing back
to a town to sell by the bushel. Regeneration of oysters requires mainte-
nance of banks of shells in the water. Skeletons of the dead harbor the life
of the future: infant oysters, or ‘‘spats,’’ which cling to the banks and feed.
We know of few skipjack captains or river tongers returning with shucked
shells. These accumulated in great piles by docks and packing houses, to
be spread on paths and roads as paving and, later, to be ground into grit for
chicken feed supplement. So two centuries of oystering by Euro-Americans
surely reduced the banks. Then came industrial technology.
Shortly after the Yankee invasion that destroyed fences, cattle, and hogs,
but preceding that of the industrial lumber operators, came the dredge
boats. Steam-powered craft pulling large iron- or steel-toothed scoops, or
dredges, had already raped the oyster beds of New England and Long Is-
land Sound. Now their migration carried them southward, to Delaware Bay
and to the Chesapeake. Chugging up to ancient shell banks, the dredgers
scraped up and dumped on their decks loads of oysters unimagined by
local watermen. The harvests were in turn dumped at canneries, especially
in the new town of Crisfield, Maryland, where some oysters were shucked
and packed in tins, while others were shipped in-shell. The Baltimore and
Ohio Railroad gained good business, while midwesterners and Plains folk
savored undreamed-offruits de mer. Hoosiers took up the custom of eating
oyster dressing with their Christmas turkeys, and oyster-shell paths began
to appear in inland gardens.^22
In the first in a series of ‘‘oyster wars’’ began when dredge boats
steamed into rivers where dredging was against the law. River tongers, frus-
trated with Maryland’s failure to enforce the prohibition, took up arms.
Both Maryland and Virginia finally established fisheries police; but some
dredgers persisted, and local tongers again took the law into their own
hands. Meanwhile, in , a U.S. navy engineer began the very first survey
of the Chesapeake’s bottom. In Tangier Sound, always a rich and contested
oyster ground, the engineer found on average only one oyster for every three
square yards—evidence confirming long-held suspicion that the bay was