The Big Oyster (4 page)

But even given the effort, oysters do not produce particularly nourishing food. Modern nutritionists estimate that for a diet of oysters to furnish the caloric intake necessary for good health, an individual would have to eat about 250 oysters a day. One modern researcher estimated that it would take 52,267 oysters to supply the same number of calories to be had by eating one red deer.

An intriguing idea emerges. It is clear not only by logic but by the evidence of the kitchen remains that have been found that no Hudson people ever had a diet principally based on oysters. There is a tendency to think of early humans as struggling for survival and therefore eating what was nutritious, easily available, and efficiently exploited. But it seems in the case of the prehistoric occupants of the lower Hudson, exactly as did all of their successors, they supplemented their diets with oysters as a delicacy, a gastronomic treat that was eaten purely for the pleasure of it. And the delicacy was in demand beyond the immediate area of the beds. Oysters were bartered in trade with inland people such as the Iroquois.

The fifty-two thousand oysters required to equal a deer was a European calculation. Red deer, a European species, are larger than the indigenous whitetail. Europe had larger deer and smaller oysters than New York. To calculate the food value of New York oysters relative to the native whitetail deer, one would have to know whether the oysters came from the top or bottom of the midden. It is significant that the deeper archaeologists dig in a midden, the larger the shells they find. The large bottom shells are older than the smaller top ones, which shows that, contrary to popular belief, even before Europeans arrived, people were overharvesting oysters. On the bottom the very largest ones, described as “giant oysters,” measure eight to ten inches. This suggests that Dutch reports of foot-long oysters were only slightly exaggerated.

This discrepancy in the oyster sizes at the top and the bottom of the middens was the first of many warnings unheeded by the Salty People about the bounteous oyster beds of New York. A
Crassostrea virginica,
like fish and unlike humans, if not taken by man or other predators, and not killed by disease, will grow larger every year of their twelve to fifteen year lives. Factors such as salinity and water temperature determine the speed of growth. But the greatest factor in the size of an oyster is age: how long it has been left to grow in its bed before being harvested. Apparently even back in the distant millennia, there was a tendency to harvest all of the older, larger oysters, and then when none was left, the oyster gatherers started taking younger, smaller ones. In fact, everywhere that oyster-shell middens have been studied, including Maryland and Denmark, the same phenomenon has been found: The biggest shells were on the bottom, indicating that the largest oysters were the most valued and consequently taken first. There is even a measurable prehistoric phenomenon that as population density increased, oyster sizes diminished. This shortsighted and uncontrolled attraction for the biggest seems to be an inherent universal human trait. Eventually this could have led to a crisis, but prehistoric New Yorkers never stretched their resource to that point.

CHAPTER TWO

The Bivalvent Dung Hill

T
he Dutch who came to New Netherlands fell in love with
the lower Hudson and especially the island of Manhattan. Beginning with those first few days in the harbor on the three-masted
Halve Maen,
ecstatic descriptions began to flow. One of the officers, Robert Juet, wrote of the “pleasant” grass and flowers, the “goodly Trees,” and the “very sweet smell.” On the first day they rounded Sandy Hook and entered New York Harbor, he wrote in his journal, “This is a very good land to fall with, and a pleasant land to see.” The poet Jacob Steendam, who lived in New Netherlands from 1650 to 1660, called the area Eden. He wrote of “the purity of the air.” Several other Dutch and English made similar comments about Manhattan's air, noting that as soon as a ship rounded Sandy Hook, a wind would blow a fresh breeze consistently described as sweet. There was considerable discussion of what could be the cause of this extraordinarily pleasant air.

Fort New Amsterdam published in 1651 shows the fort's location on the tip of Manhattan with both Lenape and European vessels in the harbor.
NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

The Dutch described the fine, tall-grassed meadows, the woodlands, fields of wildflowers, the streams, the variety of the cooing and clattering birds, the deliciousness of the native nuts, wild cherries, currants, gooseberries, hazelnuts, apples and pears, and especially strawberries. Adriaen van der Donck wrote in his midseventeenth-century
Description of the New Netherlands
that people who lived by the water could not sleep at night because of the clattering of swans and other waterfowl. He noted that the wild turkeys were so large and numerous “that they shut out the sunshine.” Nicolaes van Wassenaer wrote, “Birds fill also the woods so that men can scarcely go through them for the whistling, the noise and the chattering.”

The rivers and streams had so many fish—striped bass, sturgeon, shad, drum fish, carp, perch, pike, and trout—that they could be yanked out of the water by hand. The Dutch delighted in examining every fish caught to see if it was a new, unknown species. They identified ten familiar species in the Hudson and named each new one numerically. They dubbed shad
elft
for eleventh, striped bass was called
twalft,
twelfth, and drums were
dertienen,
thirteen. Like oysters and numerous other much-valued foods, the striped bass was credited with powers of sexual stimulation. Thus the Hudson was a river with a choice of aphrodisiacs. Isaack de Rasière, a New Amsterdam commercial agent, wrote of the striped bass in 1620, “It seems that this fish makes them [Indians] lascivious, for it is often observed that those who have caught any when they have gone fishing, have given them, on return, to the women, who look for them anxiously. Our people also confirm this.”

The harbor was crowded with bass, cod, weakfish, herring, mackerel, blackfish, as well as frolicking, diving mammals—whales, porpoises, and seals. Bears, wolves, beavers, foxes, raccoons, otters, elk, deer, and even a few “lion,” which may have been panthers or mountain lions, lived in the area. The Catskills, originally called Katzbergs by the Dutch, were named for their abundance of bobcats and lynx.

Jasper Danckaerts, a Dutchman who traveled the New York City area from 1679 to 1680, wrote, “It is not possible to describe how this bay swarms with fish, both large and small, whales, tunnies, and porpoises, whole schools of innumerable other fish, which the eagles and other birds of prey swiftly seize in their talons when the fish comes to the surface.”

Sizes were enormous. Juet reported the first morning of fishing—it is not clear if his ship landed to the port on Sandy Hook or starboard at Coney Island—netting “ten great Mullets, of a foot and a halfe long a peece and a Ray as great as foure men could hale into the ship.” According to van der Donck, the pears were larger than a fist, the wild turkeys weighed forty pounds, the lobsters were six feet long, and the oysters measured twelve inches. Van der Donck assured the Dutch, “There are some persons who imagine the animals of the country will be destroyed in time, but this is an unnecessary anxiety.”

Most of the early European descriptions of North America share this enthusiasm and also, no doubt, a tendency toward hyperbole. Washington Irving pointed out that there were also reports of unicorns, and the missionary Hans Megapolensis reported on four-foot tortoises with two heads. Despite repeated Dutch claims of Hudson River salmon, these sightings are most likely mistaken, since such a fish has never been seen in the Hudson. Some of these claims may have resulted from a mistranslation of the Dutch words
salm
and
salmpie,
which could refer to trout. But even Robert Juet, an Englishman, reported seeing salmon in the harbor, possibly misidentified striped bass. Most of the exuberant seventeenth-century accounts of fecund nature in North America were probably true, including the enraptured descriptions of the island of Manhattan, its streams, meadows, and marshes. Any contemporary New Yorker who has ever watched nature consume an empty New York City lot might suspect as much. Lower Manhattan was a teaming wetland of grassy marshes, which the Mohawk called
Gänóno,
reedy place, filled with birds and marine life. A salty wetland extended to what is today Rivington Street. About where Center Street intersects White today, a stream left the Kalck Pond and turned northwest, flowing along what is today Canal Street across a grassy meadow and into the Hudson. A second stream flowed from the pond to the East River. In times of heavy rains these streams swelled and cut the island of Manhattan in two. Another little trout stream ran past what is now Times Square west into the Hudson. Minetta Brook, from the Dutch word meaning “little one,” in what is now Greenwich Village, was also known for its trout. Teawater Spring, which fed the Kalck Pond, was known for its exquisite drinking water. The marsh where Washington Square now stands was known for its ducks. The early Europeans always praised the natural richness of the place and in their rhapsodic descriptions almost always included some mention of oysters.

The settlers wrote of how good the oysters were for stewing and frying and how “as each one fills a spoon they make a good bite.” They often referred to their large size and one settler added that they found them “occasionally containing a small pearl,” which is difficult to believe, since
Crassostrea virginica
is not a pearl-producing species.

Back in Holland,
for all the lyrical depictions, New Amsterdam was mostly seen as a business proposition. Soon after Henry Hudson returned, Dutch traders visited the coast near the mouth of the Hudson, which led to formation of the New Netherlands Company in 1614. The charter granted rights to certain merchants to the exclusion of all others. This included the exclusive right to make four voyages within three years, beginning January 1615, to the new lands between the fortieth and forty-fifth latitudes, which, for the first time, were designated as “New Netherlands.”

The purpose was trade, not settlement, which explains the short term of the contract. But voyages continued after the charter's 1618 expiration, and on June 3, 1621, the West India Company, an idea first proposed by Willem Usselinx in 1592, was established. It was given a trade monopoly for twenty-four years on the coasts of North and South America, the west coast of Africa from the Tropic of Cancer to the Cape of Good Hope, and to all places and islands westward to the eastern end of New Guinea. Within these borders the company had the right to negotiate alliances with local leaders, establish colonies, appoint and discharge governors and other officers, administer its own justice, and promote colonization. But the governor was not a colonial ruler in the British or French sense. He was an officer of the company who made decisions based on the needs of the company. There was no actual government. Anyone who wished to settle in New Netherlands placed himself under the absolute authority of the company.

The interests of the company were in making a profit, but beyond that, the Dutch government that chartered the company had a political objective. In 1562, the Dutch had begun a fight for independence from the Spanish, who had ruled them for a century. In 1618, the year the contracts of the New Netherlands Company had been set to expire, the Dutch began the final phase of their independence struggle, what was called the Thirty Years War, which lasted, as the name implies, until 1648.

In 1621, when the Dutch granted a charter for the West India Company, the fundamental idea was to attack Spain, Spanish colonies, and as many Spanish ships as possible. This failed to attract investors. So the charter was amended to include the saltworks in Punto del Rey, which attracted merchants who had interests in the Dutch herring trade. But in general, the company still failed to attract large-scale investment.

New Netherlands, located far from the Spanish Main—the Spanish land holdings in the Americas, which were principally the coastline from Panama to the Orinoco River, the Caribbean coast of South America—had limited impact on the war with Spain. But this water-laden Eden seemed to have wealth, and the mission of the company in New Netherlands was to exploit resources. It was remembered that Verrazano had speculated that the area “must contain great riches, as the hills showed many indications of minerals.”

Most of the records of the Dutch West India Company, including Hudson's log, vanished in a series of fires and other calamities, culminating in an 1821 public auction of what remained in the hands of the Dutch government. New Yorkers did not even learn of this loss until twenty years later, when the legislature sent for records to refute Washington Irving's disparaging portraits of Dutch settlers as both lazy and incompetent administrators. “As most of the council were but little skilled in the mystery of combining pot hooks and hangers,” Irving wrote, “they determined most judiciously not to puzzle either themselves or posterity, with voluminous records.”

The few records and correspondence that remained made clear that above all, the Dutch interests in New Netherlands were beaver and otter pelts. The fur of beavers, the second largest rodent on earth next to the capybara, was from about 1550 to 1850, the more valuable. It was used primarily for hats, and the Russians, who had been the chief suppliers, had so greedily pursued this industry that by the dawn of New Netherlands, these rodents were nearly extinct in Russia and Scandinavia. Western Europeans, trying to compete with the Russians, had driven their beavers to complete extinction. The beaver hat industry was able to continue only because of North American pelts. The French had moved into the hat business with Canadian pelts, but now the Dutch had a chance to compete. Van der Donck estimated in midcentury that eighty thousand beavers were being killed annually.