The Big Oyster (5 page)

Only the Russians knew how to remove the longer “guard hairs” from the fur. Alternatively, these hairs would wear off the pelt after about a year of use and therefore the beaver pelt of choice, known as a coat beaver, had been worn by an Indian for a year. Unused pelts, parchment beavers, could be sold only to the Russians until Westerners learned the technique of plucking the hairs with a thumb and a knife blade at the end of the seventeenth century, after the fall of New Netherlands.

New Netherlands included the entire land of the Lenape,
Lenepehoking,
from the South River—the Delaware—to the North River—the Hudson—north to Albany, where the Dutch established the settlements of Fort Orange and Rensselaer, to the Fresh River—the Connecticut—where they established a settlement in what is now Hartford. The capital, New Amsterdam, on the southern end of Manhattan, was a maritime people's idea of choice real estate, along the sheltered and defendable inner harbor of an immense waterway, with 770 miles of waterfront. From New Amsterdam, all of New Netherlands was reachable by water. A vessel could sail through the Narrows, out the lower bay rounding Sandy Hook, and follow the coastline to the mouth of the Delaware and up to where Philadelphia now stands. Or it could have taken the Newark or Raritan River into present-day New Jersey. Or sailed east from the harbor along the southern shore of Long Island out to sea and across the Atlantic. Or sailed up the Hudson River to Albany or up the East River to Long Island Sound, and up the Connecticut River to Hartford or beyond through the center of New England.

In 1623, a shipload of settlers sailed to New Netherlands—two families and six men to the Connecticut River, two families and eight men to the Delaware River, eight men to New Amsterdam, and the rest were shipped up the river to Fort Orange, today Albany, which was considered the most important part of the territory because it was where the furs could be acquired from the Indians. Catelina Trico, one of the Fort Orange–bound settlers, wrote years later that the Indians were “as quiet as lambs and came and traded with unimaginable freedom.”

The 1624 Provisional Regulations of the West India Company stated that the colonists were free to pursue the inland trade as long as they sold the goods they collected to company agents. They were also free to carry on their own hunting, fowling, and fishing, but “all minerals, newly discovered or still-to-be-discovered mines of gold, silver, or any other metals, as well as precious stones, such as diamonds, rubies and the like, together with the pearl fishery, shall be allowed to be worked by the Company's men only. But anyone who discovers any of the aforementioned will be granted to him and his heirs one tenth of the proceeds for the first six years.”

The colonists “shall not permit any strangers (whereupon are understood all persons who are outside the jurisdiction of the Company or its commissaries) coming to their shores to do any trading . . . .” They were also sworn to secrecy about anything they knew of the inner workings of the company and had to make a commitment to stay where they were sent for six years and plant what they were told. They were also required, under threat of “being rigorously punished,” to honor any agreement made with an Indian.

No wonder the company emphasized the fur trade. Though they were never able to ship enough pelts to realize the profits of which they had dreamed, at least the furs were there and were valuable. Gold, silver, diamonds, precious stones, were a fantasy. As for the “pearl industry,” it was a gross misunderstanding of biology that still exists today. Word had reached Holland of the tremendous oyster beds throughout the huge estuary. This was exciting news for the Dutch, whose pearl industries in Brazil and in Asia were so profitable that the word
pearl
was almost synonymous with wealth, which was why every Dutch town had a Pearl Street. Oysters abounded in the lower Hudson. And, as most everyone knows, pearls come from oysters.

The problem was that they don't.

If an irritating foreign particle, something indigestible, is sucked in by an Ostreid, a true oyster, the animal will eject it. In a few cases, a coating is built up, but it is a dull gray substance, usually applied in an irregular sphere. Several chroniclers of the time complained of the “brown” pearls. Van der Donck wrote of the local oysters:

   

Some of these are like the Colchester oysters, and are fit to be eaten raw; others are very large, wherein pearls are frequently found, but as they are of a brownish color they are not valuable.

   

Lustrous, bright, valuable pearls are found in an animal popularly known as a pearl oyster but known in biology as
Meleagrina
or
Pintada.
While being a bivalve whose shell bears a physical resemblance to an oyster shell, the pearl oyster, which is most commonly found in tropical waters, belongs to the family Pteridae, and not the family Ostreidae. A number of animals in this family have the characteristic that if an indigestible food particle—not a grain of sand, as is commonly believed—gets trapped in the shell, the animal will build up a coating of a calcium-carbonate crystal called argonite and a protein, conchiolin, the two materials it uses to build its shell. These two ingredients, in surrounding the particle, become nacre or mother-of-pearl.

The pearl oyster and its relatives in the Pteridae family are more closely related to mussels than oysters. Pearl oysters attach to objects by extending threads, the way a mussel does, and not by secreting a substance from a foot, the way a true oyster does.

So the famously mercantile
Dutch were disappointed by this newfound trove of oysters. Hard-shelled clams were more valuable to them, even though most Dutchmen preferred to eat oysters. Clamshells were money. The Dutch had adopted the Lenape currency for trade with all the American tribes and with their metal awls and drills they could make wampum far more efficiently than the people who had invented it. It was a matter of picking up clamshells and fashioning them, which cost the Dutch very little in material or labor. Some wampum was made from conch shells. They used inmates of jails and poorhouses to make wampum or to string Indian-made beads, and in time it began to look suspiciously as though the company was taking people to these institutions to make sure there was a good supply of wampum makers. But the Indians of eastern Long Island were considered the best wampum makers. The Dutch showed their acumen for economics, regulating the value of wampum and the price of fur pelts. Though they were never able to control the “money supply”—the amount of wampum in circulation—they devaluated and reevaluated wampum to the Dutch guilder like a regulated currency and also fixed the price of fur pelts in wampum. In this way they could keep the price satisfactory to induce the Indians to supply the pelts but still keep the cost of buying pelts low while the cost of the furs in Europe continued to rise.

Isaack de Rasière came to New Netherlands in 1626, at the age of thirty, as chief commercial agent for the West India Company and secretary of the province. Shortly after arriving, he wrote a letter to the Amsterdam Chamber of Commerce in which he observed that Indians allied with the French “come to us for no other reason than to get wampum, which the French cannot procure unless they come to barter for it with our natives in the north, just as the Brownists [Puritans] of Plymouth come near our place to get wampum in exchange.” The Dutch had put themselves in the enviable position of being the primary producers of the currency of trade.

Upon his arrival
in New Amsterdam in April 1628, the Reverend Jonas Michaëlius, the first minister of the Dutch Reformed Church to go to America, wrote of the “large quantities of oyster shells to burn for lime.” But oysters were considered less a profitable resource than one of the pleasures of this Eden.

The Dutch, like the French and the British, were tremendous oyster eaters. Oysters and mussels were essential components of Dutch cuisine and a frequent subject of the great seventeenth-century Dutch still-life paintings with their complex composition and soft lighting. The Dutch invented the term
still life—stilleven.
Not only are oysters present where they would logically be expected in these paintings, such as a tray of opened oysters in a still life by an unknown artist titled
Preparation for a Feast;
Clara Peeters's still life of oysters with cod, prawn, and crayfish; Jacob Foppens van Es's
Lunch Table with Fish;
Abraham van Beyeren's
Preparation for a Meal,
showing beef innards hung by the windpipe, a plucked rooster, and both opened and unopened oysters; Frans Snyders's
The Fish Monger;
or Joris van Son's still life of seafood representing water, but oysters also whimsically appear in paintings of other subjects, such as Jan van Kessel's still life of fruit with opened oysters, Clara Peeters's pastry and cookies with opened oysters, or Jan Davidsz de Heen's
Still Life with Glass and Oysters.
All of these paintings were done during the period of New Netherlands. The mother country liked its oysters.

The only known cookbook from the seventeenth-century Netherlands,
De Verstandige Kock,
“The Sensible Cook,” was first published there in 1667 with no author's name. Although it first appeared several years after the British takeover of New Netherlands, the population was still largely Dutch and the book, which clearly made it across the Atlantic, is thought to reflect and have influenced the cooking of Dutch people in America.

To Stuff a Capon or Hen with
Oysters and to Roast [Them]

Take a good Capon cleaned on the inside then Oysters and some finely crushed Rusk, Pepper, Mace, Nutmeg-powder and a thin little slice or three fresh lemons, mix together, fill [the bird] with this. When it is roasted one uses for a sauce nothing but the fat from the pan. It is found to be good [that way].

—DE VERSTANDIGE KOCK,

1683 edition, translated by Peter G. Rose

The settlers of New Netherlands tried to maintain their traditional Dutch cuisine. They domesticated cattle, to have beef, which had become popular in Holland after being imported from Denmark in the sixteenth century. With cattle came dairy products because the seventeenth-century Dutch loved butter and cheese. They distrusted milk, which turned too easily, and they recommended that after drinking milk the mouth should be rinsed with honey. They also raised pigs and chickens, the longtime standbys of Dutch cooking. They raised their livestock in the English style of smaller, easier-to-maintain animals, while back in Holland, the Dutch raised enormous cattle and pigs.

The settlers also adopted the local habit of eating a great deal of wild game, an aristocrat's meal in Holland. Analysis of bones from kitchen scraps shows that in the early years in both the Fort Orange area and New Amsterdam, a large proportion of the meat that was consumed was deer. This suggests that though they tried to eat like Dutchmen, they also took advantage, especially in the early years, of the bounteous products of their new Eden. Wheat, always in short supply in Holland and imported there, grew abundantly, and along with pelts was the chief export of the upper Hudson. The settlers became avid bakers, but the company, ever mindful of the wheat shortages in the homeland, became concerned that too much baking could diminish the wheat supply. The company declared it illegal to sell bread or cookies to Indians in Fort Orange. One man was fined because an Indian was seen leaving his house with a sugar bun.