A Bale of Terrapins Take to the Bay

Diamondback terrapins used to be a regular harvest in the Chesapeake Bay. Pulled out of their cozy wintertime hibernation spots on the bottom of rivers and coves, terrapin were sold wholesale by watermen who progged the marshes in the off-season to supplement their income. Destined to be added to cream and sherry and made into turtle soup, a much loved example of traditional Bay fare, terrapin was a staple on steamboat menus and restaurant specials throughout the Chesapeake and beyond for 200 years.

   

      From the New York Public Library’s historical menu collection, ca. 1900.

By the late 19th century, terrapin was being consumed in record amounts- in 1891 alone, 89150 pounds were harvested to meet the intense demand of the growing gourmand market. But it wasn’t to last. The popularity of turtle soup waned as Prohibition made one of the key ingredients, sherry, nigh impossible to come by. The terrapin population at large, destined to avoid a savory terminus at a porcelain and crystal-bedecked dining car, breathed a sigh of watery relief.

The diamondback terrapin is native to the eastern and southern United States, and can be distinguished by its parquet-patterned shell and squiggly, ink-blot markings on their tender, exposed skin. Found in brackish water estuaries, they are strong swimmers, with webbed feet, and feed upon the varied diet that flourishes in the Bay habitat:shrimp, clams, crabs, mussels, and periwinkles.

The diamondback terrapin harvest was outlawed in 2007 after a precipitous decline in the population of the masked mud-lovers due to the globalization (and subsequent rush to meet the Asian demand) of the terrapin market. Today, as the official Maryland state reptile, efforts are being made to restore their population in the Bay, and Navy Point is no exception. Last week, the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum hosted one of the cutest restoration initiatives I’ve ever seen when we partnered with the Terrapin Institute to release some hand-raised terrapins along our living shoreline. These freckled little fellows have been lovingly attended all year by classes of students in Howard County, and after being tagged and measured, they were off to the shallows of the Bay’s tributaries, cheered on by kids standing in the grasses and on the docks.

   

The Terrapin Institute, located in Neavitt, Maryland, rescues terrapin eggs from unstable or perilous locations (anyone who has ever had a turtle hunker down for an egg deposit right on their driveway knows what I’m talking about). The eggs are incubated, and then the terrapin tykes are sent to be fostered in classrooms throughout Maryland for a year, until they’re large enough to be safely released into the wild.

   

This is Jeff Popp, a herpetologist with the Terrapin Institute who organized the release. Jeff seemed unfazed by the large, excited, crocs-wearing crowd of kindergarteners. He was also unfazed by the unavoidable, yet little-known fact that terrapins are a little stinky. Another little known fact: a group of terrapins is called a “bale”.

 

Jeff took out a tiny drill and gently tagged the shell of each terrapin juvenile and collected data on their size and markings. It didn’t hurt them, Jeff assured the crowd, but the vibrations made the turtles extra-squirmy.

   

                                  The kids were mesmerized.

   

      Even though a fame-hungry water snake nearby tried to steal the show.

     

Before they hit the water, a couple of turtles got a little smooch to send them off.

    

Once released, they paddled purposefully away as if they’d never lived in a tank at all. As diamondback terrapin are long-lived creatures, over 50 years in some cases, we hope our museum-released turtles spend that time they way their predecessors did: bathed in the brackish tide, sunning on a log until the moonrise sends them back down to the bottom, under the eelgrass.

History-lite

Every year, on what is always the first really hot, sticky weekend of the summer, I lay out my annual costume: linen shift, boned undergarment, petticoat, stockings, shortgown, apron, cap, scarf, and hat. I pin together the front of the shortgown, period correct, and under my white ruffled cap, my hair is sturdily pinned also, away from my neck and ears. I slip on my clogs, and then check out the effect: a prim throwback from 200 years ago, dressed in five layers of what will be sweat-sodden 18th century garments by the end of the day.

I am prepared to be asked at least 60 times, “Aren’t you hot?” Of course I’m hot. What a ridiculous question. But clearly, the point isn’t to be cool; otherwise I wouldn’t be smothered by compacted linen like a colonial club sandwich. I’m sacrificing comfort that Saturday for history- or something like it. Let’s call it “history-lite.” History-lite isn’t about history by the book. It’s about history by the heart- and it’s everywhere here in the Chesapeake. In St. Michaels for example, home of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, a sign proudly touts its War of 1812 history-lite, “The Town that Fooled the British”. I’ve overheard local tour guides in my own community, Chestertown, tell their visitors about how the town square was where the colonists “used to burn witches.” History-lite, for sure. And every year, as a Chestertonian first and a historian second, I prepare to don my period sweat-suit to celebrate our most irrepressible history-lite legacy: the Tea Party Festival.

                                            

                             The author, prepared to perspire like it’s 1774.

A festival since 1968, the Tea Party (ahem, not that kind) commemorates the actions of a few Revolutionary Kent County patriots that, in 1774, boarded the Brigantine Geddes in support of their Boston counterparts and dumped overboard the cargo of dutiable tea. In honor of these rebellious forebears, Chestertonians and thousands of tourists eat fried food, drink beer, dress up, buy wind chimes made from old spoons, and generally make merry.  The known but largely ignored fact that the original event probably didn’t happen at all is moot (all researchers have been able to dig up are a series of published “Resolves” in which the prosperous burghers of Chestertown agree not to import tea, down with tyrannical taxes, and so on- not quite as memorable as tea trashing for liberty). In the last hundred years since the legend was resurrected, and in the last thirty or so that it’s been a clarion call to celebrate, it has indeed become local history- just not ‘authentically’ colonial.

     

      Crowds at the Tea Party Festival, cheek-to-jowl with funnel cakes and redcoats.

History-lite is about memory. With each generation, we revise and edit our past, meticulously curating the stories, legacy, and sense of place we pass along, leaving behind the parts that seem irrelevant, uninteresting, or ugly. For example, there are no slave stories told as part of the Chestertown Tea Party, even though by the time of the Revolutionary War, almost 50% of the population in Kent County was African or African-American. Instead, through the festival, the past is rewritten to focus on faceless freedom-loving heroes whose ideals are lofty and motives seek to stamp out the merest whiff of tyranny. History-lite reinforces the things we wish to be (idealistic heroes) while diminishing the things we fear or revile (slavery). And it happens all the time- consider how we think about Thanksgiving: history-lite. Or Christopher Columbus, or Thomas Jefferson, and a hundred other historical events or persons we half-commemorate. We seek tidy, pretty, friendly bits to remember and to inform us about what we come from, and we just discard the bony, gristly pieces of history that are hard to swallow.

        

The Wallis-Wickes House- one of dozens of 18th century houses that populate Chestertown’s downtown.

Even the physical reminders of the past have been edited to conform to the happy rigors of history-lite. Chestertown itself, like many 18th century Chesapeake towns, is peppered with lovely examples of Georgian architecture. These hulking edifices, made of the best materials in the largest quantities for the upper echelons of tidewater society, have been scrupulously renovated and maintained over the several hundred years since their construction. What is missing, of course, are the ramshackle outbuildings each of these houses required to function- slave dwellings, smoke houses, stinking privies. And also missing are the houses that the rest of colonial society, the 99%, called home- one room, crowded, pestilential hovels that were usually worse than most of the slums back in England. Archaeologists frequently find ammonia stains on soil directly outside of what were the windows of these houses- telling us that the contents of chamber pots  were dumped right outside. That paints a bit of a different picture than the one conveyed by Chestertown’s modern day colonial mansions, doesn’t it? Yet these shacks made up the majority of the houses in the county. The present-day Chestertown makes the 18th century version of itself seem clean, orderly, prosperous. But that’s just a little fraction of the real story.

Ultimately, each generation rewrites the past to suit the present. And how (and what) we remember is far about more about us, and what we value, than about 'real history’.In Chestertown, we celebrate independent thinkers, a prosperous period when the town was vibrant and connected to a greater purpose. We also celebrate the men that profited from the sweat and toil of others, and look to a history that champions a very narrow, and very wealthy slice of the story. It makes you wonder what the Tea Party and other 'commemorations’ spawned around the time of the '76 Centennial will look like in 200, 300 years?

       

Who knows? But I bet one thing for certain- there will be funnel cake.

For more information on the roots of the Chestertown Tea Party, I recommend a wonderful article that digs up the skeletons of Chestertown’s favorite legend: “Tea and Fantasy” by Adam Goodheart.

What examples of 'history-lite’ do you have in your community?

Long ago but not so far away

Photographs are particularly rich with all sorts of historical clues about what life was like in an earlier era. Since the daguerreotypes and ambrotypes of Civil War battlefields when photojournalists published some of the first images that broke away from the static “painterly” format of early photography, we’ve been poring over them with magnifying lenses and insatiable, gnawing curiosity. We look for signs that these captured people dressed, ate, slept, loved, worked, and played like us- or something like it, at least. We look to see that they are connected to us, somehow; that we understand their purposes and ambitions, and through a patch on a skirt, the jaunty grin of a picket fence, and a bead of sweat easing down a stevedore’s face, we see through the film of time and distance that they are indeed human, after all. Often, too, we see that not so much has changed.

This image, entitled “Hut of Oyster Fisherman, Chesapeake Bay near Sherwood, MD USA” is a stereoscope card produced in 1905, and it comes from the photography collections of the Library of Congress (source). Made to fit into a 19th century stereoscope device that was held up to the viewer’s face and pointed at a source of light, the effect produced was one of a three-dimensional “real” view.

          

The picture of the Sherwood waterman would have been one of a series purchased by theme- you could buy shots of Yellowstone National Park, Niagara Falls, scenes of orchards or vistas of cities or lakes. Some stereoscope images were topical- like a stranded U boat from World War I. Others were comical, or even risque (but very tamely so). The Chesapeake series would have been the sort that illuminated a picturesque landscape, peppered with rustic shots of working class people like our oysterman. Members of the burgeoning middle classes could have enjoyed an evening of diversion looking at pictures like these, popping out into vivid relief and providing a contrast to their own overstuffed, over-draped interiors.

            

It’s autumn in this image. Two women chat with the oysterman of the description. But he isn’t oystering today- he’s hunting. Shotgun slung over his shoulder, our oysterman has probably returned from a morning spent hunting waterfowl on an usually warm fall day. In the distance, a fleet of waiting log canoes are moored in in Waterhole Cove. It’s not a work day, or they would all be out, plying their trade on the Miles River or the Bay. But instead, the furled sails and their waiting canoes are floating like dried leaves on the slight chop of the inlet. It’s probably a Sunday, a day for watermen to go to church with their families and eat a big, hot dinner at home, or plunge into the marshes like their counterparts in other fishing villages like Wittman, Bozman, McDaniel, and Bellevue to see what the tide and wind would bring.

Small communities of African-American watermen, their wives, and families clustered in protected coves like this one throughout the Chesapeake. After Emancipation, many African-American men found steady work on the water, where the pay for your catch was the same for everyone, regardless of race. It was hard work and a life with no luxuries, as we can see by the size and state of the small dwelling clinging to the ramshackle waterfront. But many of the Bay’s riches were free, and there for the taking, if you had a boat and some know-how. The waterways pulsed with life, the air filled seasonally with the cries of dinner on the wing, and for these people, it all sat there at their doorstep.

Back in a gaslit apartment building in Baltimore, a woman lowered the stereoscope from her face and sighed for a life that seemed so far away. And her modern counterpart looks away from her computer to the harbor of St Michaels and thinks that it all hasn’t changed, so much.

The mother of millions

Like dutiful children all over the country, I spent time with my mother yesterday. I brought her a bouquet from my the petal explosions in my flowerbeds, and spent some quality time with the woman who gave me life, along with a penchant for irreverence, as the fifth-generation link in my Chesapeake family. Mothers are important, and it’s always good to stop and consider your gratitude to the woman who bore and raised you.

We also owe a debt of gratitude to a different Chesapeake mother, on Mother’s Day; the source of our summer picnics, our satiation from a pile of the Bay’s finest, a medium for one of the most deliciously fiery spices known to man. The Chesapeake sponge crab.

   

                                           Source

Each of these expectant females is laden with a whopping 750,000 to 8 million eggs. They’re a crustacean carrying the equivalent of a year’s population boom in China. It’s pretty wild stuff, and it gives you a sense of how big an impact the moratorium on female harvests from a few years ago had. As any Museum-visiting student will tell you, we need the mommies if we want the babies. And that moratorium on catching sponge crabs is especially important when the babies happen to be so delicious, and drive so much of our summertime economy here in the Chesapeake.

   

                                              source

The survival of sponge crabs, and the success of their great migration at the end of the summer from the mudflats of our rivers to the salty confluence of the Bay and ocean’s meeting point, is pivotal to our summertime picnic table’s success. As each inseminated female makes her way to the briny mouth of the Chesapeake, she runs a gauntlet of nets, pots, traps, and the occasional dead zone, sidling ever closer to her winter hibernation grounds. Once she succeeds, she’ll nestle in the saline sands of the Bay’s terminal point, waiting for the warmer waters of spring as her eggs develop from a bright orange to black. Watermen in Virginia used to harvest females at this point, as they lay in expectant stasis in the wintertime brackish depth.  They would use dredges to unearth the females from their fluffy mud comforters, and would sell the sponge crabs, resplendent with eggs, to restaurants that simmered them in a decadent she-crab soup.

    

One of our historic vessels here at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, Old Point, was part of that wintertime fleet that went out searching for the lower Bay’s hibernating matrons. As the crab population dropped, so too did log-built crab dredges like her, as the sponge crab catch was limited and ultimately discontinued for good. Nowadays, Old Point spends her time docked alongside our small boat shed, as her would-be catch winkles away along the bottom unscathed. And that sponge crab crab limit, while putting boats like Old Point out of business, has exponentially increased the crab populations in the Bay.

So, today, the day after Mother’s Day, send a little prayer of thanks to some of the Bay’s most prodigiously-producing mothers. Because they made it from the mouth of the Bay to the river and back, carrying a glistening burden of apricot-colored life, you can look forward to bushels bursting at the sides this summer with the tasty little children she bore at the Bay’s beginning.

Raise a Glass to Sassafrass

The sassafras is not a showy tree. Tucked in along the scrubby areas where forest meets meadow, Sassafras albidum grow in congenial thickets of their ilk, tolerating poor soils but yearning for light and the opportunity to propagate their seeds via the flocking birds that consume their fall berries. The most visible trait of the sassafras tree is its distinctively tri-lobed leaf that looks like a dinosaur’s footprint. At one point, they were related to evergreens, but the sassafras was open to change, and survived as a deciduous remnant of a tenacious primordial forebear.

      

But the sassafras tree has a secret. Where the trunk plunges tendrils of spidery roots into the sandy loam, something is brewing. Simultaneously earthy and light, spicy and sweet, complex yet distinctive, deep in the veins of the sassafras a nectar harvested by Indians and colonists alike is slowly emerging: safrole. A pungent oil produced by the sassafras tree, safrole is the sassafras’ self-supplied insecticide. It permeates the wood of the tree, especially in the roots, which exude high concentrations of the strongly aromatic oil. Humans have dug up these fragrant roots of sassafras saplings for thousands of years to expose their gripping follicles to the green light of the understory and harvest the bounty for medicinal purposes. The trademark scent of the sassafras root is immediately identifiable upon first encounter- in fact, you’re probably pretty familiar with it already. It’s root beer.

    

      Homemade sassafras root beer fermenting in the bottle. source

Today, the flavoring for root beer is a chemical substitute for the original sassafras-derived ingredient, due to fears of its carcinogenic properties. It’s ironic that we would avoid consuming sassfras for health reasons, when for centuries, that was the whole reason people boiled it in tea, pounded it into powder for capsules, smoked it like a woody cigarillo, and yes, mixed it into frothy soda water with a few mounded spoonfuls of sugar. Since the era of the Indian, Chesapeake residents have been infusing sassfras into every conceivable medium, searching for natural remedies to cure their complaints. In an era before formalized medicine, sassafras was a panacea for a world riddled with disease.

As described in Rafinesque’s 1830 Medical Flora, there wasn’t an ailment that the miracle plant couldn’t soothe:

“[Sassafras is used] in opthalmia, dysentery, gravel, catarrh…as stimulant, antispasmodic, sudorific, and depurative…in rheumatism, cutaneous diseases,
secondary syphilis, typhus fevers… to purge..the body in the spring …for purification of the blood… leaves to make glutinous gombos…buds to flavor beers and spirits…useful in scurvy, cachexy, flatulence. bark … smoked like tobacco. Bowls made of the wood, drives bugs and moths.”

Valued as a cure-all, sassafras root even enjoyed a brief golden era as one of the top exports from the new Chesapeake colonies, as Europeans sought (and ultimately failed) to find exotic treatments to cure the sexually transmitted disease du jour, the “French Pox”. Spreading voraciously throughout the continent in the 16th century, syphilis was typically treated with mercury, a remedy that could often be more horrible than the disease itself. Sassafras, a much gentler option, was therefore understandably popular in spite of the fact that it was probably completely ineffective.

One of the earliest explorers to document his discoveries along the Chesapeake’s terminal connection with the ocean was Thomas Herriott. He observed the native people ingesting the sassafras’ pungent roots, and remarked in his 1588 book, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia:

“Sassafras, called by the inhabitants Winauk, a kinde of wood of most pleasant and sweete smel; and of most rare vertues in phisick for the cure of many diseases.“

Some of the early maps even included depictions of the redolent resource, like John Ferrar’s 1667 map entitled A mapp of Virginia Discovered to ye hills:

     

                         

Sassafras remained popular in Europe as a remedy for various ailments throughout the colonial period, and the majority of it was exported from the lush, humid forests of the Chesapeake tidewater. 76.5 tons of sassafras were imported to London in 1770 alone, to the tune of 28 pounds per ton. More sassafras stands were discovered as the colonial footprint expanded, and the price of Europe’s favorite snake oil plummeted. But the taste for sassafras had been whetted, and sassafras was favored as a distinctive flavoring even as its popularity as a literal root medicine waned.

   

Many 19th century concoctions featured sassafras root as a key ingredient. Salop was a popular late-night warming beverage for all classes in London, and the piping restorative was sold by street vendors from steaming samovars. The licorice scent of the sassafras was savored over large white bowls which warmed the hands as the liquid was sipped. An memoir titled Unctuous Memories from 1863 remarks of the experience:

"Suddenly we came upon a still, whence arose the steam of Early Purl, or Salop, flattering our senses. Ye Gods ! what a breakfast ! …I feel its diffusive warmth stealing through me. I taste its unaccustomed and exquisite flavour. Tea is great, coffee greater ; chocolate, properly made, is for epicures; but these are thin and characterless compared with the salop swallowed in 1826. That was nectar.”

    

According to this ad, even 19th century babies (and their dogs) drank root beer! source

On the other side of the pond, Americans continued to craft sassafras into all sorts of dishes and drinks, and was even utilized to make a kind of rich, red small beer, the alcoholic predecessor to its later sweetened counterpart. Teas, tisanes, jellies and ice cream were mediums for the earthy taste of the safrole. But the most long-lasting of sassafras’ legacy is, of course, root beer. Marketed to the masses for the first time as a soft drink at the 1876 Centennial Exposition by Philadelphia druggist Charles E. Hires, Hires Root Beer retained its whiff of the medicinal and was promoted as a “temperance” drink and a cough cure.

Today, root beer has been stripped of the ingredient that makes it so distinctive: safrole. Feared to be a carcinogen, safrole is now substituted in food and drink with a chemical additive that recreates the flavor of the Chesapeake forest. And the sassafras stands throughout the Bay sigh greenly in relief, knowing their secretly sweet roots will remain deep in their sandy swales, undisturbed by those wishing to savor the taste of a tree’s essence.

(ant to read more about the role of the sassafras tree in early colonial Chesapeake exports? Check out this article.

Shipshape

    

Early spring is a quiet time at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. Since so much of our campus is outside, most of our visitors come see us in the warm months, when you can arrive at the Museum by boat, or in flip-flops, padding down from St. Michaels’ main historic area. The cold months are usually a planning time, an improvement time, when you can hunker down and research, write grants, develop new programs. This is also a great time to leave St. Michaels and see a little of what the outside world and its historical connections have to offer; to “sharpen your tools”, if you will.

Recently, a group of museum volunteers and I headed over to Baltimore to check out some the vessels and landmarks at Historic Ships of Baltimore. Historic Ships, like CBMM, is a non-traditional museum, where the exhibit spaces are floating in the harbor rather than the stereotype of a single building with art-lined walls. Focusing on ships and artifacts with military history, the collections of Historic Ships are as varied in theme and era as they are location in Baltimore Harbor. They’ve got a sloop-of-war from 1855, a lightship from 1930, and a 19th century lighthouse, and those are just the things we explored. There is a lot more on top of that, if you’re in Baltimore and feeling adventurous: http://bit.ly/8GXNBb

     

The first one is hard to miss: The USS Constellation. Most interestingly used (amongst other things) to capture illegal slave ships off the coast of Africa, she also has a great story of a double identity: for a long time, she was wrongly assumed to be the frigate Constellation built in 1797, famously built in Baltimore’s Sterret Shipyard and participating in the War of 1812. “Restored” in 1955 to resemble the 1797 vessel,  the confusion started with the Navy and continued on down the line, according to the definitve report on the matter, “Fouled Anchors: the Constellation Question Answered.” From the report:

“The first Constellation, was designed by Joshua Humphreys and Josiah Fox in 1795 and built by David Stodder in Baltimore. Completed in 1797,it saw considerable service before it was brought to Gosport Navy Yard, dismantled in 1853 and her timbers auctioned off. At about the same time, the second Constellation was built in Gosport about 600 feet away. The second Constellation was designed by U.S. naval constructor John Lenthall as a completely new ship. The new ship was built simultaneously with the destruction of the old, and employed the old name.

The second Constellation was commissioned in 1855 and saw long service but by 1909 the Navy had confused the 1855 ship with the 1797 one. In 1946 the Navy decided to scrap the ship but citizens, especially from Baltimore, pressed to save her. In 1948 Howard I. Chapelle. a well-known naval architectural historian, revealed that the present ship was built in 1855. The public was confused and turned to the Navy for advice. The Navy did not investigate historical records thoroughly at this time. It based its opinion on the negative findings that it could not locate a document which specifically said that the first Constellation had been destroyed, therefore the Navy had to presume that the present ship was built in 1797.”

That’s a pretty epic historical “uh-oh, ” and one that, in the public consciousness at least, is tenaciously (and mistakenly) memorable.  You can read more about what must have been a pretty embarrassing mix-up on the original document here: www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA241916

    

            Constellation #1 or Constellation #2, we love her either way.

We also had the pleasure of seeing some familiar faces while exploring Constellation #2 and learning about the crew and officers that lived aboard the ship in her heyday with one of their living history programs reenactor, a former (and very talented) CBMM staffer and intern, Marian Robbins.

    

Can you guess which one is Marian and which one is the author of this blog? Yes, you think so? The one in the black seaman’s attire is Marian? Very good, gentle reader. It appears your eyesight is just fine.

Other captures from the day in Baltimore:

  

                       Peerless (but not pier-less) volunteers

   

View of Baltimore Harbor from the deck of the Constellation, looking towards Federal Hill with the Domino Sugar factory in the distance.

     

  Rakishly handsome and bewhiskered crew members pose in the mid 19th century.

      

                   A jungle of hammocks swing from a lower deck.

     

Listening to the audio tour. It was like touchdown at the airport- everybody was on their own cell phone.

     

The lightship Chesapeake

Seven Foot Knoll lighthouse, which once housed a head keeper, an assistant keeper (who was also the head keeper’s wife), their four children (one of whom was born in the lighthouse and was summarily nicknamed “Knollie”), and another assistant keeper, is the oldest example of a cast-iron screwpile lighthouse in Maryland. While the interior was much more spacious than our own Hooper Strait Lighthouse at CBMM, it was hard to imagine the keeper and his ever-growing family suffering through an intensely humid Chesapeake summer in the stifling hotbox the iron lighthouse must have become. Also, the idea of being that second assistant keeper, stranded out in the middle of the Chesapeake with another keeper’s small, energetic children, nursing wife, and wailing baby seemed like the best reason for cabin fever and/ or a nervous breakdown that I can imagine.

All in all, it was a wonderful day spent, as the Water Rat said in Wind in the Willows, “simply messing about in boats.” Like every trip away, as much as we enjoyed soaking up the salty history of Baltimore, everyone sighed with satisfaction as the gently curved twin spans of the Bay Bridge and the Eastern Shore, with our own slice of Chesapeake maritime culture, came into view. 

          

                                            So long, Baltimore!

"Chesapeake" crab meat

Maryland crabcakes are a veritable melting pot of crabmeat from different parts of the world these days. Often, when you order a  “Maryland” crabcake off the menu at your favorite crab house, it may have no Maryland-originating crab meat in it at all, thanks to the globalization of the crabmeat markets. In an economy where Chesapeake crab meat is competing with brands sourcing their far-less-expensive crabmeat in the Gulf of Mexico, the Carolinas, and even as far away Venezula or Indonesia, consumers (whether restaurants buying in bulk or individuals ponying up $20 a pound) may have a hard time justifying how eating Bay seafood make sense to their wallet’s bottom line.

       

But some things are tough to put a price on- and that’s exactly what Maryland is hoping customers will think when spending a little more for Chesapeake crabmeat that’s not only delicious, but certified ‘sustainably harvested’. Maryland is still in the early stages of applying for the certification through the Marine Stewardship Council, which has provided similar stamps of approval (and summarily increased marketability) for Oregon’s dungeness crab harvest and lobsters caught off California’s Baja peninsula. The hope is that as shoppers assess all the different options for crabmeat, that stamp of sustainability will give Maryland meat the edge.

In an article in Businessweek, Jason Ruth, a seafood buyer for Harris Seafood in Grasonville, said he also has seen a shift toward sustainability over the past three or four years.

“A lot of the food service industry – your chain food stores like Whole Foods, Wegman’s, Safeway – are all leaning toward that right now,” Ruth said. “They only want to deal with MSC-certified fisheries.”

And Maryland has certainly taken steps to protect the populations of blue crabs in the Chesapeake, most notably a severe restriction on the harvest of female crabs several years ago that ultimately increased substantially the amount of crabs in the Chesapeake. (I should note that crabs in particular are well-suited to respond positively and almost immediately this kind of restriction due to their very short life-cycle.) In a marketplace where almost 80 percent of the seafood is imported, population-sustaining measures protecting local species helps promote eating fresh regional seafood, harvested with an eye towards the future, while also eating well.

To read the full article on Maryland’s move towards MSC certification, click through here: http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-03/D9TOMKG00.htm

Widow Sticks

There was a day, centuries ago, when a hungry man could walk to the Chesapeake’s shallow edge and prise an oyster from its brothers without getting his pants wet above the knee. Oysters furred the edges of the waterline, submerged when the tide was high, and stonily groping towards the sky in jutting promontories when the tide was out. If you didn’t mind monotony, oysters could have been yours for the taking to enjoy or endure in each and every meal.

            

Oysters in North Carolina’s tidal flats show us what the Chesapeake of 400 years ago might have looked like.

As waves of colonists appeared in the Chesapeake tidewaters, those oysters were included in their paltry, limited methods of survival. A familiar food from Europe, oysters were consumed with relieved gusto. The colonists preferred to eat things they recognized and liked, like today’s armchair traveler who seeks out the warm glow of the Golden Arches in each unsettlingly foreign city. Until beef or pork could be imported and raised in an approximation of England’s ‘civilized’ fields and tables, oysters would do just fine.

                       

                                           Oyster tongs and nippers.

Quickly, the shoreline oysters were reaped by the first generations of Chesapeake transplants, and tools were needed to gather more from deeper waters. The double rake, or 'tongs’, were the answer- a way to reach down to oyster level, scrape together a pile, and raise them to the surface. Some say oyster tongs were an improvement on an original Indian idea. Others say they were a bigger version of a European implement. Either way, because of their simplicity, their efficiency, and their longevity, they’ve become a traditional element of the Chesapeake oyster harvest.

     

Image of oyster tongers in Harper’s Weekly courtesy of The Maryland Historical Society.

Variations on the two-handled, double-headed rake form were developed over time. Nippers, a small tong, were handy for spotting and plucking that one shoe-sole-sized oyster in the days when the water was clear and the market was slow and local in the 17th and 18th centuries. Tongs of huge capacity with expansive 6’ 'baskets’ were used in the oyster “white gold” boomtime of the 19th century by watermen whose back muscles were like hardened angel wings. The continually-harvested oyster reefs sunk under the maws of the tongs and their cousin the dredge further into the recesses of the Bay, diminished from their tide-breaking towers high in the water column. The watermen responded by creating tongs that sprouted shafts almost comically spindly in their weedy length of 25’- 35’ or more in order to reach the ever-distant bounty. These wobbly, unwieldy oyster catchers got the nickname “widow sticks” from their reputation for unbalancing a novice waterman and sending him to the bottom of the Chesapeake, where he could watch the tongs around him opening and closing as his boots filled up with water and his lungs emptied of air.

    

                 Watermen tonging from a log canoe in the late 19th century.

As the oyster population in the Bay had dwindled, taking the days of a booming oyster catch along with them, so the tools favored by oystermen have also subsided. The disappearance of the bigger tools, like skipjacks and dredges, has been much more lamented than the parallel attrition of their slower, simpler counterpoints, the log canoe and the oyster tong. Oyster tonging today is a dying art, and as you might imagine, so too is the art of creating the tong itself. In an article this weekend on DelmarvaNow!.com, tong shaft maker Turner Messick says of his trade:

“We sold some in 2008 and then they (the DNR) closed up everything (oyster grounds) in the bay tongers use. Since then, I haven’t sold any tong shafts. I got some real nice lumber in 2009 and now I’m just waitin.’ I’m on hold,” he said. “I’m makin’ 'em now and stockpilin’ so when they do open the tongin’ grounds, I’ll have some tong shafts made up for the guys. I’m workin’ things up around here, ready for business if anybody comes.”

   

                           Turner Messick in his Bivale, Maryland shop. (source)

The grandson of a former casket maker, Messick is the last craftsman of oyster tongs shafts on the Chesapeake. His shop has stockpiles of shafts made of sweet Southern longleaf yellow heart pine, waiting for the pulse of the oyster harvest to thrum through the Bay economy again. He continues:

“They say the oysters are comin’ back. I hope they are, 'cause I can sure sell some of these shafts. I love doin’ this. Business isn’t very good. Only sold a couple pair last year to a guy in St. Mary’s County. Business was really good here 100 years ago. They were sellin’ 'em by the dozens at one time. A pair of 16-foot shafts back around 1905 was $7, now they are $175.

"Some people think that tongin’ is over in the bay, a thing of the past, somethin’ that won’t happen again. But I got people waitin’ for the governor to open areas they can tong in. Watermen are just waitin’ to buy tongs,” he said. “We have a pretty good reputation, considered the best tongs on the bay, but they’re also the only ones on the bay,” he said, laughing.

“As long as somebody’s tongin’, I’m gonna make tong shafts. Somebody will buy them someday, maybe.”

To read the full article on Turner Messick and the solitary art of shaft making: (source)

Real time fish hawks

    

Osprey were born ready for a closeup. They were also born ready to say things like, “Go ahead. Make my day,” or “I pity the fool.”

Animal watchers are a hardy bunch. Usually awake, clothed, fed, and caffeinated, all before 4 am, they head out before sunrise to eagerly observe the object of their interest when it’s out and and about. Those observations often are high on the “suffering” factor and low on the “observation” factor- chiggers, mosquitoes, low temperatures, ticks, and inclement weather can all drive the most ardent enthusiast from their hiding spot, animal sighting or not.

The recent influx of webcams documenting different Chesapeake animals has been a boon to the comfort seeking or just plain lazy proportion of our population that wants to see cool animals- from their couch. Thanks to these tiny stationary “eyes”, you get to check out all sorts of things you’d normally only get to see through an expensive pair of binoculars from a remarkably uncomfortable stump, if you were lucky. Osprey, eagles, otter, fox, and once, even a lone black bear that somehow stumbled onto the Eastern Shore have all been followed, filmed, and discussed like the Kennedys.

            

                  A female osprey carefully turns her eggs.

Care for a little dabbling as a raptor paparazzo yourself? It’s completely mosquito-free, and a great way to have a nice long gander at some of the Chesapeake most fascinating recluses. So check out some of these great webcams and learn a little about the predators circling your backyard.

Blackwater osprey camera

VIMS osprey camera

Blackwater eagle camera

Delmarva peregrine falcon camera

More crabs- less pickers?

This year’s warm winter weather has encouraged the Chesapeake blue crab to emerge from their muddy channel hibernation early this year. But a March boom in crabs isn’t necessarily a good thing- especially when you don’t have enough hands to pick the early bounty. Most H2-B workers come in April, making packing houses scramble to process the prematurely plentiful harvest. Read all about it by clicking through to this article from the Annapolis Capital.

History Stew

   

Photo of Michael Twitty, African-American foodways historian, via The Talbot Spy.

We had a wonderful (and quite tasty) program yesterday afternoon featuring the stories, anecdotes, and recipes of Michael Twitty, a dynamic African-American foodways historian. The event was beautifully written up by local writer/ photographer Kathy Bosin for the Talbot Spy. Read her article, and learn more about Twitty’s program as well as other opportunities to enjoy his historic foodways demonstrations and lectures by clicking through here.

Soule, Slipe, Luck, and Duck Pye

One of the things I love about old records is that they are deceptively dry reading. Names, dates, crimes, births, and deaths, all impassively recorded in droning legalese, seem impossibly removed from our world of the here and now. They are blanched of life, and coated in dust. Nothing strips history of its vitality faster than to capture it and pin it to the page, then leave it to moulder in some dank courthouse basement.

Perversely, that’s why I love old court documents. Normally, no one else is reading them, so any little nuggets of historical fascination are all mine to savor. And the earlier the records, the easier it is to see the little chinks of vitality shining through the crabbed handwriting and archaic language. Those Chesapeake people of 200, 300 years ago have been dead for centuries, but their unruliness, idiosyncrasies, and general disregard for the order imposed by the legal system fairly sings off the page. It is almost impossible to miss the people hiding behind the words.

So it is with this penchant for colonial manuscript archaeology that I approached a volume with the title, “Land Office Kent County Rent Rolls, 1658-1704, Volumes 1-4.” No title could possibly be less inviting. But lo! What a delicious lode of Chesapeake social history I unearthed. The rent rolls may have bloodlessly captured surveys and conveyances, acreage and possessors, but it also recorded places names. And for a family in the first hundred years of Chesapeake colonization, the name of your property could explain a lot: where your land was, what resources it boasted or obscured, your family connections, your hopes and visions, even your disappointment or trepidation about the New World.

The land-reflecting names are pretty obvious. “The Hills,” “Broad Oak,” and “The Marshes” all tell us some important feature of the property, as does “Hills & No Dales”. Some are succinct to be almost mysterious, like “Fork,” “Coffin,” “Pool,” or the enigmatic “Soule.” Others are whimsical, and lightheartedly approach the years of toil that turning a malarial swamp to arable land would require, like “Bair’s Grin,” “Forrester’s Delight,” “Warner’s Adventure,” “Providence”, or the delightedly gluttonous “Duck Pye.” “Norrest’s Desire” seems a little overeager for a part of the world where dysentery was a frequent occurrence. A name like “Cock of the Game” rings a bit arrogant and self-important, or perhaps means the land was won in a bet, while “Hen’s Roost” makes me wonder if the family was rich in daughters, chickens, or both. “Covent Garden” seems a bit optimistic (or perhaps nostalgic), given that by the 1683 date of its survey, the original Covent Garden in London was the largest market in England, while the Eastern Shore was a remote, barely-populated backwater.

The ‘faint praise’ names have a whiff of, if not contentment, then at least resignation about the one’s fate in this Chesapeake wilderness, like “Carvill’s Prevention,” (of what, I would ask) any number of places named “Chance” or “Choice,"  and the slightly desperate "Hopeful Unity”. “First Part Free Gift” is notably not followed by a second free gift. “Stand Off” was the property, we would assume, of the guy who drew first. And we can conclude from the rather non-descriptive “James Inspection” that the land was thoroughly explored yet possessed no remarkable qualities at all- or perhaps was just the property of a truly uncreative soul.

The names that convey fear, ennui, or disappointment are some of my favorites. You have to wonder what would compel someone to saddle a property with a moniker that would seem to doom its future. “Terson’s Neglect” and “Prior’s Neglect”,“ "Doutch’s Folly or "Hangaman’s Folly” all smack of a general sense of failure or absurdity. (I always imagine that those places were squalid little outposts, with ramshackle buildings and hogs rooting through the food scrapings and nightsoil discarded out the window.) My personal choice for most depressing name, by far, goes to the wretched “Cuckhold’s Hope.” We can only hope that their far-flung little Chesapeake tributary gave some restorative solitude to a very publicly humiliated, yet obviously grudge-holding jilt-ee.

For an idle riffing behind a nondescript cover, this little fishing expedition has yielded results that wriggle with messy, disappointing, joyful, fanciful life. The names people designated for their slice of the Chesapeake frontier tell us a bit about the property, but far more about the temperaments and prerogatives of those who were embarking on the best or possibly worst adventures of their lives. We may not know all the details, but once again, history affirms that though the settings and trapping might change, the human experience is truly a property owned by the commons.

No mallets allowed

Do you use a mallet to open your blue crab claws or carapace? Do you wield that sucker like a sledgehammer, crushing those pincers until you get to the delicate meat inside, take-no-prisoners-style?

Well, you could probably use a few lessons from these ladies: professional crab pickers employed at the J.M. Clayton packing house in Cambridge, Maryland.

                J.M. Clayton Crab Picking Facility from Jason Lenhart on Vimeo.

Of course, they’re fast. So fast it can be hard to really grasp exactly what they’re doing. Since crab pickers are paid by the pound, not the hour, precision speed picking is the goal. With a sharp crab knife pinched between thumb and first knuckle, they divide white flesh from shell in a repeated rocking motion, each swipe prizing morsels from the frame.

The top shells come off first, exposing the compartmentalized interior of the crab. Next, the legs are pried off the body and discarded, with only claws retained for later extraction by claw crackers (a job that in the pre-labor law past was often done by children). Then the crabmeat is efficiently divorced from its pearly niche, and separated out into lump, special, backfin, claw, and regular. It’s said that women are the best at this fine picking work, due to their small, dexterous hands, and the photos that we have bear testimony that this is no new idea.

 

These African-American crab pickers from Crisfield, Maryland ca. 1930 represented the ‘average’ seasonal picker in the Chesapeake during early 20th century. As the cost of labor has increased, and alternative occupational opportunities (often with regular hours and steady pay) for African-American women have grown, the profile of today’s crab pickers has expanded to include migrant workers from Central America and Mexico here on H-2B visas.

These migrant crab pickers are essential to the continuing existence of the crab packing industry in Maryland, an iconic economy that’s dwindled significantly, with serious labor shortages, over the last 50 years. But as the clip below explains, there is controversy over the wages and working conditions for these migrant pickers. The situation came to a head in 2011, when a legislated mid-summer wage hike intended to improve the income for pickers threatened to shut down the industry.

Looking ahead to the summer of 2012, biologists are optimistic about the population of crabs in the Bay, which is good news to the watermen and the packing houses that process the blue crabs they catch. (Read more about the 'crab forecast’ in this Baltimore Sun article from February:http://bit.ly/AmAUlf) So, if all goes well this spring, then in J.M. Clayton and other crab packing houses throughout the Chesapeake will be rows of women from far beyond the Chesapeake, nimbly taking knife to shell, lump to container, all summer long. All without a single mallet.

Want to learn more about crab picking in Maryland? Here at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, we have a wonderful exhibit full of objects and stories from the Maryland Crabmeat Company of Crisfield, Maryland, one of the hundred of crab packing houses that’s closed its doors over the last 50 years.

Can’t make it to St. Michaels? Check out the links below to explore the topic in more detail:

An in-depth look at modern migrant crab pickers in Maryland: http://www.wcl.american.edu/clinical/documents/20100714_auwcl_ihrlc_picked_apart.pdf?rd=1

On the globalization of the crabmeat industry- http://bit.ly/wtLyNe

On the struggling Chesapeake crab industry- http://bit.ly/hk7oCK

On crab management in the Chesapeake- http://bit.ly/xtLkKK

Commonly caught, uncommonly served

                                    Image courtesy of Maryland DNR flickr page

You know spring is coming when you see them on the side of the road. People swathed in coats and hats, fishing pole in hand, fixedly watching the tip of the rod for any dip or tickle. It’s still brown in the marshes, and there isn’t much to see yet- a straggling flock of Canada geese, an industrious muskrat, maybe an early osprey. But it isn’t what’s on top of the water that really matters, anyway, not for these scrappy roadside anglers. It’s the pulses of finned life, newly emerged from their wintertime channels, waiting just below the surface. And if you’re lucky, and the lure is just right, you just might snag one of these darters, these yellow perch, bound for cornmeal and egg and a hot, well-seasoned skillet.

      

Watermen are catching the perch too, at the last gasp of winter, to the very tentative beginnings of a perch-friendly local market. You see, we have so many exotic choices when it comes to the fish we eat. Our fish are veritable world travelers. They may have come from Chile, from Alaska, from Japan- all sorts of countries only the most intrepid of us will visit in a lifetime. On any given night, you can stroll into the grocery store and peruse the resources of far-flung lands as suits your whim- as long as you don’t mind your fish being less than fresh. We don’t often eat our local fish- even if a watershed teeming with life is only minutes away. It’s just not how our food system works these days.

But with the local food movement has come the revisiting of old ways of gathering, consuming, and preparing food- and for the watermen in the Chesapeake, there’s been a subsequent interest in also eating regional fishes. It’s a good thing for us as eaters, us as fishers, and us as a Chesapeake community. The more ‘non-traditional’ fish we eat, the more the whole market works to better ends for sustainable living and a healthy and flourishing estuary- where no one fish need meet the population-crippling demands of our hungry mouths.

To read more about this trend, and to find out more about how you can help the Bay with a choosy fork, check out this great article in the Washington Post: http://wapo.st/zVtelM

The Cultural Roots of the Sot Weed

Most of us are aware, probably vaguely, that the success of colonization in the Chesapeake rode on the insatiable English demand for one thing: tobacco. But how did it all begin? Our modern concepts of what tobacco is, how you use it, what is in it, and where it came from are leagues away from its cultural origins in England as an exotic New World indulgence, tinged with danger, indolence, and even reputed to have ties with the devil himself. Today, cigarette butts speckle city gutters and we concoct schemes to scare away and restrict would-be smokers. But the English settlers who streamed into the Bay’s low-lying landscape knew that their fortune, and that of their future offspring, could be cultivated in the wide, soft leaves of Nicotiana tabacum. Tobacco, the craze it had created, and the vast sums of currency paid for its smoke, was the future.

     

Tobacco, like that grown at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum’s Heirloom garden, was widely grown in Europe initially for its beauty in addition to its intoxicating properties.

Tobacco was introduced to the Chesapeake twice. The first time, it was through Indian trade around 300 AD. The second time, it was in the form of seeds from Trinidad, carried by John Rolfe (famously the husband of Pocahontas). In between, tobacco occupied an important role in the daily ceremonial and social life of Chesapeake Indians, whose partook their tobacco through pipes. Like most North Americans pre-European contact, Chesapeake Indians grew their own tobacco, and when they couldn’t grow it, they traded for it. The variety they cultivated, Nicotiana rustica, was harsh, strong, and, when smoked in large quantities, caused hallucinations, stupor, or even death.

The European perception of such an intoxicating herb was initally to regard it as a dangerous and savage habit- especially the Spanish, who associated it with the bloodthirsty, cigar-smoking Aztec culture. But other Europeans, like the English, had no such baggage. As tobacco became available in shipments from the New World, wealthy or powerful English sophisticates took a page from Drake and Ralegh’s book and consumed their precious, astronomically-expensive import in ‘fairy’ pipes- the technique revealing the influence of North American Indians and the tiny pipe bowls indicating high price of the New World indulgence.

                                     

The British called their minuscule tobacco pipes “Little Ladells.” Image courtesy of Colonial Williamsburg.

The popularity of tobacco skyrocketed throughout England, eventually reaching all levels of English society. The domestic use of tobacco, first documented in Harrison’s 1573 Chronology, describes the domestic use of tobacco: “In these days the taking in of the smoke of the Indian herb called Tobaco, by the instrument formed like a little ladle, wherebye it passeth from the mouth into the head and stomach and is greatly taken up and used in England.” (Tobacco’s appetite-suppressing qualities were another bonus in an era when stretches between meals could be long and rumbly.)

Within a few years, fans of the fragrant weed could now pursue their pleasure in 'tabagies’, or smoking dens, where habitual immolators (nicknamed 'reeking gallants’) could 'drink’ the tobacco in the company of like-minded aficionados.   An early English experimenter of tobacco commented, “While we drink this in, it does not inebriate quickly, nor drive one mad…but it fills the ventricles of the brain with a certain vaporous perfume.’

               

The earliest image of a man smoking, from Of the Tobaco and Greate Vertues, 1577, by Anthony Chute.

But the smoking craze drew a few vehement detractors, like the historian Camden who criticized the widespread trend, stating, "In a short time many men, everywhere, some from wantonness, some for health sake, with an insatiable desire and greediness, sucked into he stinking smoke thereof…which presently they blew out again through their nostrils, insomuch that tobacco shops are now as ordinary as taverns and tap houses.”

Even King James decried the use of tobacco, to the extent that he published a rather  grumpy pamphlet entited A Counterblaste to Tobacco, where he compares the spread of the 'herb’ to syphilis, ascribes its use to “wild, god-less and slavish Indians”, and calls smoking “filthy abuse” and a “vile custom.” He summarily raised the taxes on tobacco a sobering 4000%.

Taxes aside, the English demand for tobacco, which was the highest throughout Europe, had another serious problem- its availability. By the late 1500’s, not a single English tobacco plantation existed in the New World, which meant the entire economy tenuously relied on trade, smuggling, or capture of vessels bound to Portugal or Spain from Central or South America. This, of course, increased the price drastically, and proved to be one of the dominant factors in the move towards establishing an English colony in the Americas.

So, skip ahead a few years to Jamestown.  Things weren’t looking too good for the new settlement in the Chesapeake. The tiny, struggling colony on a malarial spit of marsh on the James River was comprised of a motley and ill-suited crew of laborers, tradesmen, and gentry. Far from producing gold, silk, or lumber, the way the Virgina Company had hoped, the majority would die in the first two years of things like starvation, toothache, bilious fevers (dysentery), ague (malaria), and the rapacious Indian arrow.  (Jamestown had been unfortunately established in a drought period and as a result, the Indians quickly grew tired of supplying food for the ever-demanding Englishmen. John Smith would famously attempt Machiavellian negotiations, with mixed results). Farming anything in those early years was pretty much out of the question. But the English were loathe to abandon an investment, and by 1612, several ships of new settlers had come to infuse the hardscrabble colony with relief bodies. On one of those ships, laden with the wealthy, poor, and above all, desperate,  were some tiny tobacco seeds from the Carribbean.

     

Tobacco is a notoriously hard crop to cultivate. Producing that crumbly, aromatic dried leaf means a year of hard labor, with painstakingly exact work at 16 steps throughout the process. As the colonists around him hunted for fool’s gold, mistaking it for the real thing, or prepared shipments of sassafras root for export to England as a “cure” for veneral disease, John Rolfe toiled over his tobacco plants, spending four years perfecting the cultivation and curing of his “sot weed”. By 1613, Rolfe was able to send his Jamestown tobacco back to England, where it was noted for its delicacy and aroma. By 1617, the trend had spread. The colony’s new governor arrived to find, “only five or six houses, the Church downe, the palisades broken, the Well of fresh water spoiled (but) the market-place, and streets, and all other spare places planted with Tobacco.”

From there, tobacco continued to spread its verdant, stimulating leaves throughout the Chesapeake. Forests were felled to make room for the egg-carton shaped fields. The first boatload of African slaves were brought over in 1619 to work the clay hummocks of tobacco land . Even today, the dead continue to speak of the insatiable English demand for tidewater tobacco. A man’s skeleton, dated to the middle of the 1600’s, was recently found along the Patuxent River. Estimated to be between 25 and 29 years of age, the man’s teeth were crenelated like castle fortification, pierced over time by the stem of his tobacco pipe.

      

A Steamboat Song

The digital era has been an amazing time for fans of the dark, cluttered alleyways of history’s forgotten minutia. Speeches, music, photographs, and personal items have been disgorged and digitalized, and suddenly are exposed to the pale green light of modern culture for perusal. Hours can pass as you become a sort of informational Indiana Jones, wending your way through tangled warrens of links and web pages. Sometimes, though, you’re rewarded with the most splendid prizes that remind you what a charmed age this is.

At the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, steamboats and the culture around them have a special place in the affections of many of our visitors and interpreters, especially those who can remember traveling throughout the tidewater on them. In the late 19th and early 20th century, you could pack up a shoebox of cold fried chicken, biscuits, tea in a jar, and cake, and jump on board with your family at Light Street for an excursion on the Chesapeake. Often, the destination seemed secondary to the delights of a steamboat trip.  A day of fresh air and bright sun prickling your skin, and the calliope music trailing behind you as it mixed with steam from the great stacks, would have been a treat long remembered and treasured.

Today, in my online rummaging, I found a gem that evokes just this kind of feeling. “Sailing Down the Chesapeake Bay” is a little ragtime ditty written in 1913 at the height of the daytrip era for steamboats. The slightly nasal chorus, the almost chugging tempo, and the sweetly earnest lyrics perfectly convey the innocence of the pre-World War I years, when a day on the Bay with your sweetheart was a small luxury almost everyone could enjoy.

So close your eyes and listen to the sound of a time period that is gone, but thanks to the wonders of the digital era, is anything but forgotten.

Living Fossils

           

Horseshoe crabs are one of the most familiar, if not beloved, animals in the Chesapeake. Their muddy, dun-colored shells plow through the eelgrass like barnacle-studded hubcaps, bristling below with a phalanx of terrifyingly jointed legs that wave feebly when the crab is turned over. From the top, they appear to be camouflaged, self-propelled shields, from the bottom they remind us how closely they're  related to spiders and scorpions.  The first settlers referred to horseshoe crabs as “Kings Crabbes” and some of the earliest images we have from European exploration of the Chesapeake show them awkwardly scuttling along the water’s edge, much as we see them today:

      

A detail from John White’s The Manner of their Fishing, painted in 1585 in region of modern-day Roanoke Island.

Traditionally, humans have found a few uses for horseshoe crabs, even though we haven’t managed to make a fritter, cake, salad or soup from their compartmentalized carapaces. From the 1800’s onward, Chesapeake and Delaware residents would descend to the water’s edge in the spring when the horseshoe crabs beached themselves to spawn and lay their eggs. Easily plucked from the sand and rendered totally ineffective once turned over, the crabs would be gathered by the thousands and processed for fertilizer or animal feed. In the 20th century, fisherman also found that the eggs of female crabs are a veritable caviar for eels and conchs. There was a subsequent run on horseshoe crabs female crabs, with the predictable results that their populations declined rapidly. Today, horseshoe crabs are protected in several states from harvest, and their numbers are steady.   

                                   

                 Image of horseshoe crabs harvested for bait use, courtesy of Virginia Tech.

Far away from the brackish shallows of the Chesapeake, scientists have found uses for horseshoe crabs that would have been inconceivable to the watermen and farmers that processed them into field nutrients or chicken feed. In hospitals, doctors have used the crabs in eye research, the manufacture of surgical sutures, and the development of wound dressings for burn victims. Immunology labs have even become literal vampires of horseshoe crab blood, draining the crabs of their unique hemoglobin-free, blue-tinted plasma for use in the detection of bacterial endotoxins, which can cause severe immune diseases in human beings.

     

Horseshoe crabs being “milked” for their unique blood. The crabs are returned to the water after this process, with an 85% survival rate. Photo courtesy of fresh photons .

The most important use for horseshoe crabs, though, is as a critical part of the Chesapeake’s estuarine food chain. While they have no known predators when they mature, horseshoe crabs eggs sustain shore birds throughout the spawning season. Oystercatchers, terns, and sandpipers can be seen fixedly probing the sand with their beaks in the spring, seeking out the tender turquoise clusters of buried eggs. Conservation efforts are underway to on the shorelines of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia to protect the horseshoe crab spawn by opening up expanses of beach that are currently rip-rapped,  providing more places that the crabs can spread their bird buffet.

This video from Host our Coast explains more about the efforts to protect the Chesapeake’s “living fossil”, the horseshoe crab.  And while they may never  be described as beautiful (their latin name translates to “An askew giant with one eye”),  the humble horseshoe crab’s value has never been in dispute.

Mollusks that make you say "hmmm."

    

If you’re a follower of any Chesapeake conservation, or even just read newspapers in the local area, what you’ve probably seen over the past few days are a lot of headlines like these: “Virginia oyster harvest soars”, “Virginia oyster harvest up sharply in past decade”, and “Virginia oyster landings largest since 1989.” Time to celebrate, right?

Well, maybe not so fast. If you read these articles critically, there are quite a few gaping holes and a somewhat…fishy (oystery?) smell about them. Everyone knows the oysters in the Bay are struggling- right? Which is why it is so startling to read articles like the one from Northern Neck News:

“ Virginia’s oyster landings in 2011 were the largest they have been since 1989 and marked a tenfold increase over landings just 10 years ago. The news follows years of efforts aimed at increasing oyster populations in the Chesapeake Bay, which have been decimated by disease.

On Feb. 7, Gov. Robert McDonnell ® announced the boom that he said was fueled by the Virginia Marine Resources Commission’s use of a rotational harvest system, sanctuaries and targeted shell plantings on public oyster grounds.

The 236,000-bushel harvest in 2011 contributed $8.26 million to Virginia’s economy while 2001’s oyster harvest of 23,000 bushels only generated $575,000.”

The first thing that I noticed in the article was that the harvest of the oysters is being used to determine the strength of the wild oyster population. But the population of oysters and the amount of oysters harvested is correlation, as the economists say, not causation.

Another thing that seemed a little, well, “oystery”, was the fact that this announcement was being made by the governor (rather than the Virginia Institute for Marine Science, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or another scientific organization) in an election year. The oyster harvest, as the article mentions, has been in serious decline over the last decade and prior throughout the Chesapeake, and the prospect of a healthy oyster harvest and the financial impacts it effects are strong platform tools. While Virginia governors can only serve one term, other legislators in the state are stumping this year, and oysters make an environmental and economic two-fer, as far as campaign speeches are concerned.

So I decided to do some data hunting, and what I found was pretty confusing. First of all, Virginia uses bushels to tally their catch. NOAA defines the harvest in numbers of pounds sold. Comparing data from the two sources about the harvest over the last decade makes it difficult to draw similar conclusions, and major differences in just generally whether the catch was bad, good, or somewhere in between makes it even harder:

First, the data from Virginia as distributed by the Governor’s office, in numbers of bushels per year (I highlighted this year’s catch):

Then, data from NOAA (in pounds per catch). It stops in 2008 but still gives you a sense of the discrepancies:

They just don’t match up in terms of trends - at all. NOAA has Virginia’s worst harvests in 1993 and 2004. Virginia has their worst years in 1999-2001. NOAA actually shows a harvest spike in the years that Virginia reported as their worst harvest years to date! The year Virginia compared this year’s catch with, 2001, looks pretty bad on their chart, but things look relatively stable in 2001 on NOAA’s data. These are big differences! While I don’t have a NOAA report from 2011, I would imagine there are similar discrepancies between what Virginia purports to be their catch and the number other scientific organizations report. So, between the numbers angle, and the political rhetoric peppering the governor’s and other official statements, I am a little skeptical. For good reason: here is NOAA’s report going back as far as 1880 (Virginia’s information starts in 1957):

A little sobering, isn’t it? Even if you factor in minor disagreements about the  specific yearly catch, the overall impact is a little stunning. When I look at this graph, I wonder if it is a bit premature to be celebrating a return of a healthy oystering harvest, or to be anticipating bigger catches (and the revenue and jobs that go with them) anytime soon. There are up years and down years, but this shows us the catch is trending down, down, down, and has been since the end of the oystering boom at the close of the 19th century .

What are your thoughts in the news from Virginia? Are you a skeptic, like me, or an optimist who thinks this is the start of a whole new Bay?

Dip into a few of the articles on the “comeback,” look at some of the details, and then comment on your findings on this blog- perhaps you, gentle reader,  will notice a crucial argument for the governor’s announcement that I’ve missed.

Washington Post: http://wapo.st/zNCl2l

Daily Press: http://bit.ly/yJO08X

Richmond Times-Dispatch: http://bit.ly/xESkKV

The Bay's Own Breed

The moment before release is the most magnificent. Their entire body trembles with intent and purpose, thick muscles vibrate with contained energy crawling down the barrel chest to wet, muddy hocks shivering with instinct. Each quick breath a steamy dragon waft, puffing out in white bursts that linger in the frigid morning air. Their blonde eyes pulse from owner to bird and back again, watching, waiting in delicious and terrible anticipation. They were made for this. They are Chesapeake Bay retrievers.

     

Bred as a ‘gunning dog’ for use in market hunting in the 19th century, Chesapeake Bay retrievers, or “chessies” as they are commonly called, are thick-coated, strong swimmers with stamina, drive, and soft mouths. They will retrieve tirelessly and with the singular purpose that only a working dog, developed for its particular task, will do. Loyal companions, joyful in their job, and fiercely intelligent, chessies have become as essential to a gunner’s rig as his shotgun, his call, or his waders.

     

Historically speaking, the origin of the breed is unique in that primary documentation exists to verify the actual catastrophe that precipitated their arrival in the watershed. In 1807, two Newfoundland pups were being transported on an English brig, bound for the British coast, that foundered in a gale. Loaded with codfish and sailors (that were also loaded, but not with codfish), the vessel began to sink, when it was serendipitously intercepted by the ship Canton. From the 1845 account of George Law, who wrote of witnessing the event:

“In the fall of 1807 I was on board of the ship Canton, belonging to my uncle, the late Hugh Thompson, of Baltimore, when we fell in, at sea, near the termination of a very heavy equinoctial gale, with an English brig in a sinking condition, and took off the crew. …I boarded her, in command of a boat from the Canton, which was sent to take off the English crew, the brig’s own boats having been all swept away. …I found onboard of her two Newfoundland pups, male and female, which I saved, and subsequently, on our landing the English crew at Norfolk, our own destination being Baltimore, I purchased these two pups of the English captain for a guinea apiece. Being bound again to sea, I gave the (male) pup, which was called Sailor, to Mr. John Mercer, of West River; and (the female) pup, which was called Canton, to Doctor James Stewart, of Sparrow’s Point. 

Both attained great reputation as water-dogs. They were most sagacious in every thing, particularly so in all duties connected with duck-shooting. The (female) remained at Sparrows Point till her death, and her progeny were and are still well known, through Patapsco Neck, on the Gunpowder, and up the bay, amongst the duck-shooters, as unsurpassed for their purposes.”

                

Two cast-iron statues of Canton and Sailor flanking the entrance to Koppers Co. in Baltimore in the late 19th century. A version of this statue now resides at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.

It is the rare myth whose roots are supported by good documentation. And so we know that in 1807, the ancestor of the classic Bay water dog was introduced to its new hunting grounds. Of course, the 19th century Chesapeake retriever would have served a very different purpose than today’s web-footed companion. Prior to the Migratory Waterfowl Act of 1918, market hunting was legal, which meant that the amount of downed birds a chessie would need to retrieve could be multiplied four-fold or more as compared to today’s limits. (To learn more about this legislation and how it changed watefowling, click through here: http://bit.ly/w22sVn) When hunting ducks and geese was an endeavor of bulk efficiency and there were no restrictions on the amount of birds bagged in a day, 30 to 40 canvasbacks, swans, or mallards were considered a good haul.

Sold to steamboats and restaurants that would serve the wild birds in savory brandy and cream sauce on porcelain plates, wildfowl were not a sport; rather, a way to make a living come winter. Chesapeake Bay retrievers were an essential element to this occupation. With one blast from the great punt guns, sleeping fowl would be scattered like dropped jacks across the creek or inlet by the shot. Gathering up all the dead and wounded birds was time-consuming work, especially in places where the water was so low or the mud so thick that making your way by boat or foot was tricky. Enter the Chesapeake Bay retriever, whose physiognomy couldn’t be more perfectly suited for the task. Wide webbed feet push water aside efficiently, and provide stable maneuverability through the marsh tumps. Thick, oily fur to repels the cold water, even on the most ice-glazed winter days. A powerful physique lends athleticism, and a wide, jowly 'soft’ mouth means no teeth marks in your market-ready wood duck. Their ability and comfort in the Bay environment is clear to anyone who has ever watched a chessie retrieve, and their exuberance in the water is so effusive it can be hard to get them out of it.

     

                    A chessie and water go together like scrapple and eggs.

Even as the regulations for hunting have changed to manage the population of waterfowl, and therefore changed gunning itself to a sport of finesse and skill, Chesapeake Bay retrievers are one element that has remained consistently valued. You might even say that waterfowlers are as loyal to the breed as their individual companions are to them. In their two hundred years of buoyant, barking service, Chessies have become an iconic figure in the history and heritage of the Bay. They also have the distinction of being the only Chesapeake icon that can sleep comfortably the foot of your bed, legs akimbo and twitching with dreams of the next morning’s tidewater adventures.

      

                The author’s father and his Chesapeake Bay retriever, Boozer.

Chesapeake Cause and Effect

I often get letters from kids at the Museum. Some of them have requested brochures, or pictures, or letters for different kinds of projects they are working on. Usually they are very simple to answer, and I jot down a few words or take a Flat Stanley picture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Stanley), and voila! Question answered.

But today, I got a question that was a warranted a more in-depth response.  The inquirer is a middle school student working on a National History Day project, and she’s focusing on oystering (felicitously, one of my favorite topics to blather about). I thought I would share with you, dear reader, her question and my response, and in the process, we’ll all learn a little bit about Chesapeake cause and effect.

“Dear Ms. Livie,

          Thank you very much for your quick response, I’m really looking forward to working on this part of my project. Unfortunately there was a glitch in my computure {sic in original} and it wiped all of my research, so now I’m reconstructing my notes. I don’t have all of my questions in line yet, but I do have one at the moment. I was wondering how canning affected oystering and the population of oysters. I know that they made shipping oysters easier, but I was wondering if you could tell me anymore because I have had trouble finding sources for it. When I’m done reconstructing my notes I plan on visiting the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum and was wondering what I should see and when the best time to come would be.

Thank you so much,

Emma”

First of all, the computer crash is a classic new researcher mistake. We’ve all been there (and probably shed a few tears over it, too). And as for her inquiry, well, this is a juicy question, and covers a lot of material. Definitely out-of-the ordinary, as far as kid’s questions go. My delightedly comprehensive response:

“Hi again Emma,

Sorry to hear about your computer! That really stinks, and it’s happened to me, too. My advice is to always back up your work, and save it in a few places!

Anyway, I would be very happy to answer your question about canning. As you know, each oyster packing house represented the processing of possibly millions of oysters a year. And since oysters reproduce and grow rather slowly, it meant that they couldn’t keep up with the demand- and really, from the late 19th century onward, you see the oyster population declining every year.

But let’s back up. In the 1700’s (which I’ll refer to going forward as the 18th century), people did eat and harvest oysters, but primarily using tongs, which are a rather slow method. But it didn’t matter that you could only harvest a small amount of oysters, since you had to sell your catch almost immediately. Also, you couldn’t really transport the oysters anywhere, either, at least, not before they spoiled. This is because of limited technology- both for preserving oysters, and also for transporting them. Oystering in the 18th century was a small, local business, undertaken by usually just one or two guys in a simple log canoe, and the people that ate oysters lived in towns close to the water. There were no canneries, and no railroad. The attempts people made at preserving oysters, like pickling them, didn’t really catch on, probably because pickled oysters sound awful.

   Tonging for oysters, the  way people  in the 18th century harvested them- and continue to do today.

However! What happens by the end of the 18th into the 19th century? The Industrial Revolution! New technology, new science, and new innovations were being dreamed up all the time. And among all the wonderful and mysterious new devices, there were three that had a big impact on oysters: the steam locomotive, canning and food preservation technology, and dredges. Also, the population in the United States is growing by leaps and bounds at this time period. What you’ve got is the perfect storm: within 30 years, you have a way to harvest more oysters than ever, a way to package and ship more oysters than ever, and more people to eat the oysters than ever.

Piles of oysters at a packing house in St. Michaels, on land now occupied by the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.

By the end of the Civil War, oystering in the Chesapeake became a real money maker. They even had to design new boats, first schooners, then the bugeye, then the skipjack, just to pull these new dredges that were able to efficiently harvest huge amounts of oysters from deep in the Bay’s channels. These big boats employed big crews, and could make lots of money in a single winter season. There were even boats that met the skipjacks and brought the oysters they had caught in FOR them (called buyboats), so the skipjacks could stay out for weeks at a time, dredging, dredging, dredging. Once the buyboats sold the oysters to the packing houses, there were hundred of people employed there, too, shucking, canning, and preparing the oysters to be sent on trains, all over the growing country.

Workers in an oyster packing house in Baltimore ca 1914-15, courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society’s tumblr page: http://bit.ly/zZVgD9

But, it all comes back to the oyster. These animals take usually about three years to become ‘market size’, or big enough to sell, and dredging meant that in many places where oyster reefs had been growing for centuries, getting bigger and bigger, these oyster reefs were gone, and what oysters they left behind were scattered on the bottom of the Bay- a bad place to be if you’re an oyster who wants to reproduce. The problem is oysters want to attach to other oysters to grow- they need something hard to attach to. There aren’t many rocks in the Bay, but for years, there were plenty of healthy oyster reefs that provided solid nooks and crannies for baby oysters (called spat). But you take away the oyster reefs, and many spat have no place to attach to (or, as scientists say, "set”). Also, many of the living oysters on the bottom were covered over by silt in the water, which will smother them. And then you’ve got the constant dredging, which meant a lot of the oysters were being eaten that would have otherwise reproduced. We even dug up the ancient oyster reef foundations (called “cultch”) in the 19th century and ground up the giant shells for fertilizer. So the oysters were pretty much hit in every direction.

It is a cycle that ultimately lead to the end of the 'traditional’  (meaning, skipjacks and dredges) oystering industry. Within about 60 years, people had harvested so many oysters that there just weren’t enough to meet the demand. The oyster industry moved South, to North Carolina, Florida, and around the Gulf to Louisiana. The oyster packing houses here closed one by one. And the skipjacks stopped sailing, now that there weren’t enough oysters to make any real money. There are still some people oystering today, but a much, much smaller percentage than there were in 1900. The amount of oysters in the Bay are at their lowest ever, and the ones that are left suffer from diseases. Big storms with lots of fresh water are another problem for the little oysters that are left.

So yes, canning DEFINITELY affected oystering. If you visit the Museum, you can learn more about this history in our Oystering on the Chesapeake exhibit, which should really cover all the information you’re interested in.

Got some more questions for me? I’m happy to answer them!

Happy research,

Kate"

Did you learn something too, dear readers? I hope, like the studious Emma, that you too now understand how just one change (namely, people), can have a butterfly effect on the Chesapeake Bay. Our latest oyster innovation is aquaculture. How will that change us, and in doing so, change the Bay around us? Only time will tell.