The Big Oyster (8 page)

In 1932, at a convention of the Oyster Growers Association in Atlantic City, Dr. Vera Koehring of the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries said that it was cruel and inhuman to crack open an oyster's shell and pry the animal loose. Dr. Koehring proposed, “The oysters, before being shelled, should be given an anesthetic.” She suggested several harmless ones like lactic acid, boric acid, or a light solution of carbon dioxide. She even calculated that since the anesthetized oyster would release its abductor muscle and lie open, the cost of shucking would be reduced from twenty-five cents to two cents a gallon. But the oyster growers seemed to feel that the entire subject would be best not raised with the public.

As with most creatures,
the more oysters eat, the more they grow. Warmer water tends to have more oyster food, which is why it produces larger oysters in the same period of time. A three-year-old Chesapeake Bay oyster is considerably larger than a three-year-old New York oyster, but smaller than one from Florida. This is not purely a matter of food supply. The
Crassostrea virginica
grows best in water between twenty and thirty degrees centigrade, sixty-eight and eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit, and growth completely stops at five degrees centigrade, forty-one degrees Fahrenheit. Under good conditions, an oyster spawned in late spring or early summer will be larger than fifty millimeters or two inches long by midfall when the first growing season ends.

Crassostrea
thrive in warm, brackish water in intertidal and subtidal areas along shorelines where there is fresh water flowing from rivers that are rich in organic matter—a perfect description of the New York Hudson estuary. Oysters of genus
Ostrea
prefer clear and cooler water of high salinity and do best in subtidal areas. New Yorkers may want to eat
Ostrea,
but the
Ostrea
wouldn't want to live there.
Ostrea
are also slower growing, requiring four to five years to reach marketable size, whereas the
Crassostrea
are usually of a marketable size, with a shell of seventy-five millimeters, three inches, and a weight of fifty grams, one and three-quarters ounces, in three years.

Oysters hibernate in the winter and resume feeding and growing in the spring as the water becomes warmer. It is then, in the first new spring, that the
Crassostrea
begins to develop reproductive cells and becomes clearly male or female. Hermaphroditism, having both sexes, is a rare but not unknown occurrence.

Crassostrea
yearlings are fully capable of reproduction and, unless eaten by a predator, buried in silt from a storm, or infected with a fatal disease, will live at least another ten years. Despite the assertion of the Scottish poet Robert Burns that he envied the oyster because “It knew no wish and no fear,” the oyster has a lot to fear. Predators include oyster drills, little snails that attach themselves to oyster shells, slowly cutting a round hole with a long toothy tongue and then inserting a tube with which to suck the animal out. Among other equally efficient oyster slayers are starfish, crabs, whelks, and humans. Juvenal oysters are also eaten by flatworms (
Stylochus ellipticus
).

The starfish is so deadly to oysters that centuries ago the Admiralty Court of England fined oystermen who did not attempt to kill any starfish they ran across, which some hesitated to do because magical powers, including poison, were often attributed to these small creatures. The starfish nibbles at a mollusc's shell with tiny but multitudinous teeth until, faster than an oyster drill drills, the creature is exposed and eaten. Without any royal incentives, New York oystermen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would collect every starfish they found in their beds, tie them in small packets, slice the packets in two and throw the dead starfish back into the sea, where, they later came to understand, the two parts would each grow back their missing limbs, so that the oystermen were actually increasing rather than decreasing the population. Some varieties, when sensing danger, will even pull themselves into pieces, each of which will later grow into a full starfish. Starfish will sometimes move in armies, invading an oyster bed and destroying the inhabitants. Worse, they have few natural enemies. Almost no fish wish to eat starfish with the exception of cod, which will eat almost anything. The starfish did, however, have a natural enemy in the French, who ground them up, finding that the resulting fish meal made excellent fertilizer for vineyards.

Oyster populations can be decimated by epidemics, violent storms and hurricanes, oil spills, pesticides, sewage, and other pollutants. As it opens and closes its shell to pump in water through its system to absorb nutrients, the oyster is also taking in anything else that is in the water. Oysters under normal conditions feed continually, and between twenty and fifty gallons of seawater are moved through a single oyster's gills every day. Assuming the water is in fairly good condition, oysters serve a natural function, filtering and cleaning the water. It has been found that a few oysters placed in a tank of algae- and phytoplankton-laden green water will make the water clear in only a few hours. The original oyster population of New York Harbor was capable of filtering all of the water in the harbor in a matter of days. One of the formulas of the balance of nature is that estuaries overproduce plant life and depend on animals to consume it. Oysters and other bivalves play an important role in this process. In his brilliant study of the role of oysters in Chesapeake Bay, published in 1891 before the word
ecology
was in use, William K. Brooks said, “In the oyster we have an animal, most nutritious and palatable, especially adapted for living in the soft mud of bays and estuaries, and for gathering up the microscopic inhabitants and turning them into food for man.”

Unlike most other bivalves that live around
Crassostreas—
soft-shell clams, mussels, and bay scallops—oysters are able to survive long periods out of the water because of the protection of their thick shells. They can also survive an amazing range of conditions. The American oyster, the same species that prospers along Florida and Louisiana in water that heats up to more than thirty-two degrees centigrade, or ninety degrees Fahrenheit, can live in water that seasonally plunges below freezing. They are at home in almost fresh water and water that has more than 30 percent salinity.

It took a remarkably
long time, well into the nineteenth century in America, to understand that the best thing to do with oyster shells was not make wampum, burn them for lime, or use them for roadfill, but to dump them back into the oyster beds. This became clear with the study of oyster physiology. The mantle that sends out warnings to the oyster brain also creates the shell. It produces a first pearly layer of shell and throughout the animal's life constantly creates new shells, each a little larger than the one before. That is why an oyster shell looks like many paper-thin layers pressed together. The oyster shell will conform to the surface it is next to, smooth if attached to a bottle, following the contours of a rock, even molding itself to the shape of a crab claw if attached to it. Oysters can also repair their shells and mend cracks. They are able to do all this by using the lime that they extract from the water. Oysters need lime to grow, and no matter how rich the water is in nutrients, without the presence of lime growth cannot take place. Throwing the shells back into the water not only provides good material for seedlings looking for a surface to attach to, which has come to be known as
cultch,
but also enriches the growing environment of the water. The sea will break down the shell and the oyster will absorb the lime. The more lime that is available, the faster and thicker the shells will grow. The sooner an oyster has a thick shell, the more likely it is that it will survive its many enemies.

It took considerable observation to grasp this about oyster shells. But elsewhere in nature it is readily apparent. William Brooks pointed out that old dried bones in the woods invariably have wood snails on the underside and rivers that run through limestone beds are generally rich in freshwater mussels. Nature chooses estuaries that are fed by rivers running through limestone to establish oyster beds. Sometimes the ocean beds themselves are rich in lime, which is often a decomposition of coral reefs and shellfish. This is why limestone frequently contains fossils of sea life. Limestone containing fossilized oysters, such as has been found in Kansas, reveals vanished prehistoric seas. All seawater contains lime, but the added lime of decomposing oyster shells or limestone makes the water more suitable for oyster growth.

But almost none of this was known by the seventeenth-century Dutchmen who rejoiced that their New Netherlands that did not seem to have much real wealth at least had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of very large oysters.

CHAPTER FOUR

A Nice Bed to Visit

B
y 1654, the Dutch had lost their colony of pearls and
sugarcane in Brazil and began to think that their Eden of oysters in North America might have to be their star New World property after all. But it did not seem promising. A 1644 audit showed that New Netherlands had cost the company more than 550,000 guilders, while earning only about 60,000 guilders a year. Indian relations were only one of the preoccupying problems. The settlers themselves were tired of living in a company and wanted a homeland with a real government.

To try to make the New Netherlands work, the company had brought in their tough, one-legged troubleshooter, Peter Stuyvesant. A military man with a religious background—his father was a Calvinist minister—he was not known for open-mindedness, nor patience. Nor was he a son of the flowering intellectualism of his native seventeenth-century Holland. He was expelled from the university after two years, according to some accounts, for his sexual relations with the wrong person's daughter. In the Caribbean he had been a fierce and impassioned warrior in the brutal war for territory with the Spanish and the Portuguese.

While he was fighting to retake Saint Maarten, a Spanish cannonball demolished his right leg. Just before losing consciousness, he ordered the siege to continue. Then, surviving a seventeenth-century amputation, a frequently fatal operation, he became administrator of the Caribbean for the Dutch West India Company based on the island of Curaçao. In 1647, the Dutch West India Company sent Stuyvesant to New Netherlands to replace Kieft, who had become a gruesome figure associated with the killing and grisly torturing of countless Indians.

Stuyvesant was more drawn to the often noted Dutch yearning for order than the equally often invoked Dutch claim to tolerance. He immediately decreed ordinances against alcohol and mandating religious observance on Sunday. He persecuted all religious practice other than that of the Dutch Reformed Church, singling out Quakers and attempting to bar Jews from settling in New Amsterdam, serving in the militia, or owning land, saying that they were “a deceitful race.” Asser Levy, a Polish Jew, and Manhattan's first kosher butcher, opposed Stuyvesant, a stance made easier when it turned out, to Stuyvesant's chagrin, that a number of officers of the Dutch West India Company were Jewish. The Dutch settlers had always been proud that their city was not like Boston, that it was an open, a diverse city. But now New Amsterdam was starting to resemble New England.

In Holland, the Dutch government did not recognize slavery, but in the Americas, the Dutch West India Company created its own law. Having come from Curaçao with its slave market, Stuyvesant bought Africans from there to build fortifications against the British in New Amsterdam. But increasingly the merchants, with their own agenda, were taking control of the city, gradually forcing Stuyvesant to allow city government instead of company rule. There were only three sizable buildings in New Amsterdam, the notoriously ill-constructed fort, the West India Company, and the City Tavern. These were the three places where public notices were posted. As the people of New Amsterdam became impatient with tyrannical company rule and the despotism of Peter Stuyvesant, the West India Company was forced to create some government institutions, and in 1652, the City Tavern became City Hall. It also doubled as a prison, and in 1656 held twenty-three Englishmen who had attempted to settle in what is now Westchester without company permission.

The little city's new government ordered the dirt or planked roads to be paved with stones. In 1658, this village of 120 houses for the first time began to designate its paths and lanes with street names. The long path through the entire length of Manhattan used by Indians delivering fur pelts was now officially called “Beaver Path.” But once the path was broadened, people started calling it “Breede Wegh” or “Broadway.”

Other improvements came with self-government. Residents started building brick houses. The city forbade residents from dumping animal carcasses and other garbage in the streets and each home owner was responsible for cleaning the street in front of his house. But the townspeople continued, despite a city ordinance, to toss their chamber pots into the street.

The settlement was still at war with the Indian tribes, and Stuyvesant, still in command, even ordered an attack against the Spanish who attempted settling on New Netherlands land. In 1664, British colonel Richard Nicolls sailed from England with a four-ship squadron, stopped in Boston, where the colonists showed no interest in joining the expedition, and sailed on to establish a naval blockade of New Amsterdam. When the British threatened to attack, not surprisingly from the harbor and not over the wall, few residents were interested in fighting for the Dutch West India Company and most had no objections to British rule as long as they were promised fair treatment. Ninety-three leading citizens, including his son, petitioned Stuyvesant to surrender and avoid suffering. Stuyvesant said that he would rather die, but he nevertheless negotiated terms at his farm on what is today Stuyvesant Street in the East Village. Richard Nicolls became the first governor of New York.

The British inherited
a small Dutch town of windmills and canals, though not many of either. They had snidely referred to the Dutch as “Jankees,” a sarcastic joining of the name John and the word cheese. Soon their own colonists would adopt the name. The Dutch accepted their conquerors. Many anglicized their names. Brugge became Bridge. Rather than the Dutch style of a first name, van, and the father's name, they began using full last names in the English manner.

The British legal system under Nicolls combined English, Dutch, and New England law, but unlike New England there were no provisions for public school, no town meetings or elected assembly. But also unlike New England there was religious freedom.

In 1681, when the British crown sent George Carteret to establish a British colony in formerly Dutch New Jersey, Carteret promised settlers, “The Bay and Hudson's river are plentifully stored with sturgeon, great bass, and other scale-fish, eels, and shellfish, as oysters, etc. in great plenty and easy to take.” The new settlers who had replaced the Dutch wrote home to England about the oysters. One letter from what is today Perth Amboy said, “And at Amboy point and several other places there is abundance of brave oysters.” Another said there were enough oysters “to serve all England.” Another said that oysters provided them with lime for building inexpensive stone houses “warm for winter and cool for summer.”

Meanwhile, New Amsterdam was being reshaped. In 1679, Jasper Danckaerts, the Dutch visitor, was still noting the sweet smell of Manhattan: “I must add that in passing through this island we sometimes encountered such a sweet smell in the air that we stood still, because we did not know what it was we were meeting.” But in 1699, when the British province of New York dismantled the wall, a garbage dump was found behind it, spreading to the Kalck, the pond the English called the Collect. This pond where the Lenape once fished, where the Dutch picnicked on an adjacent hill to have a view of it, was becoming a mucky, malarial swamp, strewn with trash and festering with disease. The trashier it became, the more it was abused. Since it had become a despoiled zone, the most polluting industries, such as butchers and hide tanners, were installed there. The butchers gathered at the nearby Bull's Head Tavern, which provided pens for livestock. By 1700, the shores of the Collect was the only spot in Manhattan where slaughtering animals was allowed, and the area had an unendurable stench. An island in the middle of the Collect was used as a place to carry out executions. After a 1741 slave uprising, numerous black conspirators were brought there and hanged. Some were burned at the stake.

In the city to the south, Peter Kalm, a botanist at the University of Abbo in Swedish Finland, who was sent to America by the Swedish Academy in 1747, reported that the townspeople got so bitten up by mosquitoes at night that they would be “ashamed” to show their swollen faces. He also found New Yorkers suffering from what he called “fever and ague.” This was probably malaria. Until 1748, it was not known that malaria was spread by mosquitoes. And even what medical knowledge existed at the time was seldom available in New York. After the small Dutch hospital was abandoned in 1674, New York City had no hospital until 1776, not even during the smallpox epidemic of 1727 that killed five hundred people in less than a month.

Also, the city was running out of fresh water. The drinking water came from local wells that caught the rainwater that washed down the foul streets. By midcentury, the quality of Manhattan water had become so bad that out-of-town horses refused to drink it.

Though short on drinking water, New Yorkers had no lack of oysters, which Kalm compared in quality to England's famous Colchesters. In 1748, he wrote:

   

The sea near New York affords annually the greatest quantity of oysters. They are found chiefly in a muddy ground, where they lie in the slime, and are not so frequent in a sandy bottom: a rocky and a stony bottom is seldom found here.

   

Since New Yorkers
have always felt themselves different from the rest of the people in the United States, it is intriguing to reflect on what endured from Dutch culture in New York. New Jersey and part of Connecticut also were settled by the Dutch. But it was in New York that the Dutch established their ways in the midst of English colonies and that is one of the factors in making New York different. New Amsterdam was a more cosmopolitan place than Boston and other ports because, with the notable exception of Stuyvesant, the Dutch West India Company was open to most anybody settling there who would work with the company. In fact, in the seventeenth century, Amsterdam was one of the most open cities in Europe, taking in people who were not wanted in England and France, including, for a time, the Puritans who later settled Massachusetts.

English New York continued the cosmopolitan tradition. New York was less English and more diverse than any other British North American colony. It became known for its Jews. Kalm said that when he was in New York he often found himself in the company of Jews. He was surprised to find that unlike in Europe, New York Jews had full rights of citizenship. “They have a synagogue, own their dwelling houses, possess large country seats and are allowed to keep shops in town. They have like wise several ships which they load and send out with their own goods. In fine, they enjoy all the privileges common to the other inhabitants of this town and province.” In 1679, Jasper Danckaerts commented on the racial integration of Broadway. “Upon both sides of this way were many habitations of negroes, mulattoes, and whites.” The first black in Manhattan was an explorer named Jan Rodrigues who came on a Dutch ship in 1613 and for a number of years was the only non-Indian full-time resident of the island. By the 1630s, a free black community had been established north of the pond. By 1750, Manhattan was 18 percent black, comparable to today's ratio. However, this did not necessarily indicate progressive attitudes. British New York became far more involved in the slave trade than New Amsterdam had been, and between 1701 and 1774, 6,800 slaves were imported to New York, about one-third of them directly from Africa. By 1750, New York had the most slaves of any American city except Charleston.