The Big Oyster (28 page)

It was unfortunate for the British that Jean Jacques Marie Cyprien Victor Coste, who probably in any case had too many names to be trusted by most Englishmen, had gotten into a heated and arcane dispute in 1838 with a leading English zoologist, Richard Owen, over the reproduction of kangaroos. As a result, Coste, the most important nineteenth-century scientist on the subject of oysters, was regarded with great distrust and dislike by the British scientific establishment. Coste died in 1873, but his work, along with a stroke of good fortune, did save French beds. In 1868, an entire cargo of Portuguese oysters,
Crassostrea angulata,
was dumped in a storm near the mouth of the Gironde. A cousin of the American oyster, they were more durable than the European oysters, and as those declined, the Portuguese took their place.

According to Henry Mayhew's
London Labour and the London Poor, originally published in 1851, 500 million oysters were sold every year in London's Billingsgate Market. If all 500 million had been consumed in London, that would have meant an average of 185 oysters a year eaten by each Londoner, including children. But of course some Londoners ate more than their 185 and some none at all, and a great many oysters from Billingsgate were shipped out of the city. Still, London was an oyster-eating town. They had a market similar to the New York oyster barges. Theirs floated up the Thames and tied up together at a London wharf known as “Oyster Street.” The first to go were the scuttlemouths, large heavy oysters with thick shells and surprisingly small meat. They came from the Sussex coast and were dredged from the Channel, where the French dredged them, too, and called them “horse hooves,”
pieds-de-cheval.
They sold fast because they were cheaper than the quality oysters from the Thames estuary, a short boat ride from the London market. In 1864, it was calculated by the
Times
of London that 700 million oysters were being consumed annually in London and that all totaled, the English ate 1.5 billion oysters a year.

The two most famous English oysters, Whitstable and Colchester, the ones so often compared to New York oysters in colonial times, were both in decline. The Whitstable Oyster Company had grown from 36 oystermen in 1793 to 408 in 1866. The Colne oyster fishery in Colchester grew from 73 in 1807 to 400 in 1866, a number that did not include the many apprentices. In fact, by 1844 its five hundred vessels employed two thousand men. Soon there were more oystermen than beds in Essex and they began moving farther off in search of new oyster beds, which they also cleaned out. With increased pollution and excessive exploitation, the beds began to decline. Further destruction was caused by the arrival of two foreign pests, the oyster drill and
Crepidula fornicata,
which creates muddy conditions.

In another oyster center, Falmouth, on the coast of Cornwall, seven hundred men worked three hundred boats in the extensive inlets of Falmouth Bay. It was a profitable oyster center regulated by “close times” when the beds would be replenished by moratoriums on shellfishing. In 1866, it was decided by regulators ingesting new science that oysters were so fecund that they would continue replenishing the beds and oystering could not possibly take enough to affect the total population. It was a popular theory in the age of Darwin, inexhaustible nature. In 1863, a Royal Commission on Sea Fisheries headed by England's preeminent scientist, Thomas Huxley, was formed to investigate what appeared to be the disappearance of a number of varieties of commercial fish. After two years of investigation, the same commission that assured the public that it was scientifically impossible to overfish cod also assured them that a healthy oyster bed could not be cleaned out. It agreed that the “supply of oysters has greatly fallen off ” but explained:

This decrease has not arisen from overfishing, nor from any causes over which man has direct control, but from the very general failure of the spat, or young of the oyster; which appears, during the year in question, to have been destroyed soon after it was produced. A similar failure of the spat has frequently happened before, and probably will often happen again.

Nineteenth-century Darwinian naturalism often taught that the forces of nature are so great and intricate that man cannot possibly impact on the result. By 1876, only ten years after the regulations were dropped, the Falmouth oyster beds had only forty boats and forty working oystermen and still each boat could only find sixty to one hundred oysters in a day. Before 1866, an average daily take of a Falmouth boat was between ten thousand and twelve thousand oysters. Oystering in the Channel Islands went from four hundred vessels to a few part-time oystermen. By 1886, annual English oyster production was down to 40 million oysters, which at the time was about five weeks' consumption in New York City.

In 1882,
as the fall oyster season opened, the
London Daily News
reported:

In the present dearth of oysters, turning what was once a season of joy, into one of regret, a pang of envy will seize the gormand who reads of the great oyster beds formed and in process of formation in that arm of the sea between Long Island and continental New York known as the Sound of the East River. Oyster farming in that favored region is carried out on a stupendous scale, which dwarfs the puny efforts of the Old World to insignificance. There are among the oyster-culturists of the Sound proprietors owning beds with an area of 4,000, 6,000, and 10,000 acres apiece and the bedding of the oyster is an operation on which considerable care, skill, time and labour are employed. The American oyster, which, when fresh torn from its natural bed, is a very different animal from the unhappy bivalves after an ocean voyage, lends itself very readily to cultivation and grows with extraordinary rapidity. In this country we are too apt to confound size with coarseness as the Zulus do fat with dignity, but the better advised Americans know by agreeable practice with Blue Points, Shrewsburys, Mobile Bays and other favorite oysters that the bigger they are the better they are and for every kind of roasting, broiling, steaming, and stewing immeasurably superior to any to be obtained in Europe. The East River farmers are gaining knowledge by experience, and have already discovered facts, which, if known, are practically ignored in Europe, to wit, that oysters thrive far better in deep than in shallow water, and prefer a bottom artificially made of oyster shells to any other. While they are eagerly laying down spat “full fathom five” beneath the surface, English and French oyster-growers appear to cling fondly to the shallow puddles in which oysters take an unconscionable time in growing to maturity.

This ignores the fact that the American oyster is a completely different, faster-growing species than the European oyster. But what is significant is the extent to which the British were turning to American oysters. New York oyster producers had long been shipping to Europe. Before the Civil War, Colonel Harmon Thorne was known to give receptions in Paris featuring fried oysters from Downing's. Downing's was a New York trademark. This would be like a Paris reception today serving smoked fish from a famous New York deli. Downing also sent oysters to Queen Victoria, in appreciation for which the Queen sent him a gold chronometer watch.

But in the second half of the nineteenth century, foreign markets, especially the English, were no longer an occasional outlet but an important part of the New York oyster trade. In 1883, a year after the
London Daily News
article appeared,
The New York Times
noted:

The oyster men now do a heavy business in furnishing oysters for the European market. It has all grown up within the last five years. Five years ago I sent ten barrels to Liverpool as an experiment and had the greatest difficulty imaginable in disposing of them. There seemed to be a prejudice against things American and in order to sell them men had to be employed to peddle them around the streets in hand baskets. That was only five years ago. The statistics show that during the year 1882, 5000 barrels a week were shipped to Europe and sold after they reached there. The English people have acquired a taste for American oysters and are obliged to admit their superiority over their natives.

Oysters were being shipped from New York not only to Liverpool, Bristol, Cardiff, and Glasgow, but also to Le Havre, Bremen, and Hamburg. Bluepoints, not an obvious choice for shipping because of their thin shells, became a European favorite as they had long been in New York. Though not large by New York standards, they were known for their flavor, and their round thin shell that looked more like a European oyster than most New York varieties. Struggling to supply the demand for the brand name, producers in the 1870s attempted to pass off as Bluepoints Southern oysters that they tossed into the Great South Bay for a year. But the European market was demanding, and it rejected Bluepoints that were not truly native to the area.

The leading merchants realized that such practices were damaging the reputation of their most valuable product. One of the leading New York City houses grew concerned that Chesapeake oysters were being sold to England as Bluepoints. An agent for the house intercepted a shipment of Bluepoints, opened the barrels as they were being loaded, and found that they were mostly “Virginias.” It was a new age of communications and the agent was able to telegraph Liverpool so that British authorities were waiting for the shipment when it landed. The oysters were confiscated, though it is not clear what happens to a healthy confiscated oyster. The American shipper was charged under British law with mislabeling, which carried considerable fines. The New Yorkers were not accustomed to such stringent consumer protection and the American agent argued that the oysters had spent a little time in the Great South Bay and they had thought that this was all that was required to label them Bluepoints. That the Americans don't know any better is always an argument of some currency in England, and the charges were dropped.

New York's oyster markets were also supplying the nation. After the rail link was established from Atlantic to Pacific, the transcontinental railroad, a project passed by Congress during the war but not completed until 1869, New York had the continent for a market. This was true not only for all the goods brought into New York's port from Europe and other points in the world, but also for local oysters. Every Christmas, thousands of barrels of oysters labeled Saddle Rock or Bluepoint, the best marketing names, were shipped to Denver, San Francisco, and other Western cities.

The agents who bought oysters for shipping were called packers, and they sailed the New York waters on sloops with a crew and a basket hanging from the masthead. The basket was the sign that this vessel was buying. Oystermen would row out to the sloop with oysters packed in two-bushel tubs and the packers would buy their product for cash and ship it around the world. In the winter, a packer would dispense several thousand dollars a day in cash and then retreat to his “shanty”—a seaweed-packed shed along a beach. There his crew would sort the oysters by size. Since New Yorkers have always been willing to pay for size, the crew would set aside the largest few to be sold in the city. They would separate the middle- and small-size oysters, unpopular in the city, and pack them in flour barrels, the traditional New York oyster container since colonial times, to be shipped to Europe, where oyster lovers did not have the New York obsession with size. Sometimes packers would buy out an oyster planter's crop a year in advance at an agreed-upon price. Occasionally a packer would even advance money to a planter to finance his developing of a new bed whose oysters the packer would be guaranteed.