The Big Oyster (11 page)

Tonging.
BALLOU'S PICTORIAL DRAWING-ROOM COMPANION, 1850S

Oyster tongs and nippers, from Ernest Ingersoll's 1881 study of the oyster industry.
COLLECTION OF THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

By 1770, New York had grown to be the fourth largest port in arriving tonnage after Boston, which was closely challenged by Philadelphia and Charleston. The New England region had a far larger population than the area around New York and consequently Boston received more goods. And while New York frivolously became a center for piracy, Boston was securing serious contracts trading salt cod, agricultural products, and manufactured goods. New Yorkers even received their British goods from Boston until the 1740s, when New York slapped a duty on Boston's English products.

The competition between New York and New England, between the ports of New York and Boston, was brutal and coarse. Boston merchants earned hard silver currency from New York, shaved it down, and bought New York wheat with the whittled money, saving the excess silver for other trade. They also refused to buy flour, insisting on whole wheat, which they milled themselves inexpensively and undersold New York flour in the West Indies.

New England, New York, and Pennsylvania all had the same problem. Under the rules of colonialism they were to sell what they produced to the mother country, but they all produced more than England could buy. The solution was to sell their lumber, flour, salted fish, and pickled oysters to the West Indies and Southern Europe. With the resulting income, they could buy more British products. New York products were sold down the Atlantic coast, in the West Indies, and in Southern Europe, and very little in England itself. New York, like Boston, provided the food of the British West Indies, allowing the slave islands to use all their cultivable land for sugarcane. They provided not only pickled oysters but wheat, rye, corn, salted pork and beef, apples, peas, and onions. The New York ships returned with molasses for rum and, more important, credits for New York merchants to buy manufactured goods in England. Eventually, they sailed to Africa and traded rum and manufactured goods for slaves, and traded the slaves along with pickled oysters and other food in the West Indies. The British ignored this illegal trade because it was earning New York merchants the money and credits to buy British manufacturing goods. New York's imports of British goods grew every year, whereas its exports to Britain remained steady. In 1715, £54,600 worth of British goods entered New York and £21,300 worth were exported from New York to Britain. In 1740, the exports to Britain were about the same, but the value of British goods entering New York had more than doubled to £118,800. It seemed that Britain was steadily increasing its balance of trade with its colony, which was what was supposed to happen with colonies. But this ignored the growing trade that the colony was having with everyone else. In truth, Britain had an ever shrinking participation in the economy of such colonies as New York and Massachusetts. In time, this led to greater economic independence, making political independence a potent concept.

Like Boston salt cod, New York pickled oysters were a by-product of the ports' involvement in the slave trade. Salt cod had a considerable commercial edge, since far more could be caught and the product yielded far more protein both per pound and per dollar and that was what slave owners were looking for in food. But still, New Yorkers had a profitable pickled-oysters trade with British West Indies slave plantations. New York merchants were paid for the pickled oysters six times or more what they had paid local harvesters for the fresh ones.

In the fall, the oysters would be pickled and shipped out. Although New Yorkers ate oysters all year long, it was believed that the oysters in the months without
R
s—May, June, July, and August—were of inferior quality and so they waited for the better oysters to come in the fall. This is an ancient and somewhat mythological belief. In 1599, William Butler, a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote, “It is unseasonable and unwholesome in all months that have not R in their name to eat oysters.” The myth has an element of truth in the case of New York. Oysters take their cue to begin spawning when the water warms up, which is in May, and it is true that spawning oysters tend to be thin, translucent, and generally less appealing. Some argued that letting the beds rest during spawning season was a good conservation measure. Summer oysters are, however, perfectly healthy unless spoiled in the market by summer heat.

Between eating oysters
and pickling them for trade, Manhattan had more oyster shells than ever. Kalm wrote:

   

On our journey to New York we saw high heaps of oyster shells near farmhouses upon the seashore, and about New York we observed the people had scattered them upon the fields which were sown with wheat, noted with surprise that rather than grinding them up for fertilizer the local farms would simply plough into the soil whole shells.

   

The European botanist did not think much of this practice, believing that limestone worked better. But New Yorkers needed to find a use for their growing heaps of oyster shells. Since New York City's oyster trade grew up side by side with the larger New York State wheat trade, the two always had connections, often sharing markets and even containers. In the late nineteenth century, the colonial habit of packing oysters in flour barrels was still common.

The population was growing and New York was building. The city was not only paving streets but lining them with trees. Affluent New Yorkers were now building two- and three-story brick structures with tiled roofs and gables, often with a balcony on the roof from which to view the harbor or the town or Brooklyn across the East River. Families passed pleasant summer evenings on their balconies. Several stone churches were built, the grandest of these projects being Trinity Church, an Anglican citadel to compete with the newly constructed Dutch Reformed church.

All of this building required mortar, and mortar required lime paste, which could be made by burning oyster shells. Trinity Church was formed by a royal charter in May 1697, and by that August had already put in its order for “oyster shell lime.” Burning oyster shells for lime was such a common activity that private homes in the New York area built their cellars with one side open for burning shells when household repairs were needed.

The smoke of burning lime was thick and acrid, and an increasing number of New Yorkers believed that it could not be healthy to be breathing it. On June 19, 1703, the New York provincial government passed an act that prohibited both the distilling of rum, a growing economic activity as the port became involved in the Caribbean slave and molasses trade, and the burning of oyster shells within the city limits or within half a mile of City Hall. The royal governor, Lord Edwind Hyde Cornbury, in urging passage argued that “These industries contributed to the fatal distemper” in New York the summer before. But Lord Cornbury was a dubious leader, infamous for not paying his debts—it was alleged that people hid from his wife because she borrowed dresses and jewelry and never returned them. An attempt to repeal the law in 1713 failed, and on March 24, 1714, a tougher city ordinance was passed “that no oyster shells or lime be burnt in the Commons of this city on the south side of the windmill commonly called Jasper's Windmill.”

But no ordinances were passed to deal with the mosquitoes that came out in summertime or the garbage in the swamp.

New York oysters
remained plentiful and large. Kalm wrote, “About New York they find innumerable quantities of excellent oysters, and there are few places which have oysters of such size.” The size was significant because it meant that the number of oysters taken was still a small enough percentage of the total to leave oysters growing many years before picking. New York was still an Eden where resources could be used with extravagance. Gowanus Bay in Brooklyn was particularly known for large oysters. In 1679, Jasper Danckaerts, the Dutch traveler, and his companion Peter Sluyter stayed at the home of Simon Aerson De Hart near Gowanus Cove. Danckaerts wrote:

   

We found a good fire half way up the chimney of clear oak and hickory, of which they made not the least scruple in burning profusely. We let it penetrate thoroughly. There had already been thrown upon it to be roasted, a pailful of Guanes oysters, which are the best in the country. They are large and full, some of them not less than a foot in length.

   

In truth nobody really wanted to eat a foot-long oyster. In the nineteenth century, British novelist William Makepeace Thackeray complained that eating an American oyster was “like eating a baby,” which presumably was not an endorsement. At the De Hart residence on Gowanus Cove, the largest oysters were pickled and shipped to Barbados.

Apparently oysters were plentiful enough and easy enough to harvest that they remained inexpensive. A notice in December 1772 advertised “in the different slips of the harbor, no less than 600,000 oysters for sale.” Kalm not only noted the profit made on buying fresh oysters and selling them pickled abroad, but he noted that the poorest people in Manhattan lived all year on “nothing but oysters and bread.” In 1763, a restaurant opened in a dark and unfavored location, the basement of a building on Broad Street, the old oyster-selling street. This working-class basement oyster bar was New York's first oyster cellar.

On November 22, 1753, an article in the
Independent Reflector
contended that no country had oysters of the quality of the city of New York. “They continue good eight Months of the Year and are, for two months longer, the daily food of our poor. Their beds are within view of the town, and I am informed, that Oysterman industriously employed, may clear Eight or Ten Shillings a Day.”

But all was not well in Eden. In the late seventeenth century, New York and New Jersey started passing conservation measures. As early as 1679, the Long Island town of Brookhaven had passed an ordinance restricting to ten the number of vessels allowed in the Great South Bay, a huge natural oyster bed between Long Island and Fire Island. The European settlers in Brookhaven quickly realized the potential of Great South Bay oyster beds. In 1767, the town negotiated an arrangement recognized by the king of England in which the town, in exchange for control over the oyster beds, agreed to give the crown's recognized owner William Smith and his heirs forever half of all “net income accruing to the town from the use of the bottom of the bay.”