The Big Oyster (7 page)

The Dutch West India Company
always regarded good relations with the Indians as of utmost importance. Isaack de Rasière, company agent, wrote, in a 1626 letter to Amsterdam, “I find it important that the natives are treated well, each according to his station and disposition, and that when two different nations are present one chief is not shown more favor than the other.” Laws were decreed making swindling or other forms of mistreatment of Indians illegal.

Behind most wars lie cultural misunderstandings. The Dutch knew that they did not understand the People. In 1611, Dutch captains Adrieaen Block and Hendrick Christeaensen took back to the Netherlands for study, in reality kidnapped, two Indians whom they renamed Orson and Valentine.

The Dutch appeared to learn little from Orson and Valentine. Misunderstandings followed miscalculations. In 1626, the same year that Manhattan was “sold,” a small group of Wieckquaesgeck, from what is now Dobbs Ferry, were traveling to New Amsterdam to sell their furs. As they approached the Kalck, the pond just north of town, a group of Europeans attacked and killed them and stole their pelts. The number of victims is unclear, but only one small boy, a nephew of one of the victims, escaped.

According to Lenape law, the boy, when he reached manhood, was required to avenge his uncle's death. He waited fifteen years. The Salty People were spreading out and taking over. The Dutch had not only settled in Manhattan but in the intervening fifteen years had spread to Staten Island and Brooklyn. Not only did they dominate the North River, the Hudson, with its connection to Fort Orange, but they were beginning to take over the East River as well. Even though no commercial pier was built in the East River until 1648, they began ferry service between Pearl Street and Brooklyn's Fulton Street. For those Lenape interested in such distinctions, it was not only the Dutch who were moving in on them. In 1642, the Dutch permitted an English settlement, Newtown, in what is today Queens, while to the east, north, and south of Lenapehoking, the land of the Lenape, the English, Swedish, and French were settling in.

After fifteen years, in August 1641, the young boy, now twenty-seven, fulfilled his obligation.

Claes Swits was well known to all the Europeans in New Amsterdam as a talkative old wheelwright. His nationality is uncertain. By the 1640s, many different kinds of settlers lived in New Amsterdam, including Catholics, Quakers, Anabaptists, and Jews. There were Dutch, English, Danish, French, Swedish, Polish, and African—both free and slave. Yet in most matters there seemed to be only two groups—Indians and settlers.

Swits leased two hundred acres in what is today Harlem to grow wheat and graze dairy cows and paid half the grain and two hundred pounds of butter every year as rent to the owner. When he grew too old to work the land, he set up shop on the Wieckquaesgeck trail. His doom may have been tied to nothing more than this choice of location. It was the road of the Wieckquaesgecks, the Indian route into New Amsterdam, along which the group had been slaughtered fifteen years earlier. The trail ran down what would become upper Broadway and past fields of wild strawberries, then cut over to the East Side and dropped down along what would become Second Avenue, veering west to a brook where the Plaza hotel now stands, through the woods to pick up the route that would be Broadway at Twenty-third Street, and followed Broadway down to the town on the southern tip. By 1641, it had become a busy thoroughfare, widened by the Dutch and very different from the quiet trail where the 1626 murders had taken place. Wieckquaesgecks and other tribes from Westchester and farther up the Hudson used it to sell goods in New York. White and black people farming the hinterlands of Manhattan used it to connect with New Amsterdam.

Swits's house and shop along the well-trafficked trail was at present-day Forty-seventh Street and Second Avenue. It was on a bay called Deutel Bay, a reference to the dowel-like shape. Today the bay has been filled in and the neighborhood is mispronounced “Turtle Bay.”

The entire European community had the same view of what happened. A twenty-seven-year-old Wieckquaesgeck whom Swits knew—he knew many and this one had worked for his son—appeared with furs to trade. Swits invited him in and fed him, and as Swits bent over a chest to find goods to trade, the young man picked up Swits's ax and struck him so hard that the elderly man's head was severed.

The Europeans had forgotten the attack fifteen years earlier and were outraged by this unprovoked violence. In that summer of 1641, the director of the New Netherlands colony was Willem Kieft, an Amsterdamer who, given his family connections, might have been destined for greatness. But his only claim to immortality, aside from the fact that his cousin appears in Rembrandt's painting
The Night Watch,
is the tragedy following Swits's beheading, from which New Netherlands would never recover. There is some speculation that Kieft was picked for the New Amsterdam job because he had previously been sent to the Ottoman Empire to negotiate the ransom of Christians. By freeing only the ones who had small ransoms, he turned his task into a profitable operation, though a lot of wealthy people remained in Turkish prisons. To the company, frustrated by the unprofitable record of their North American holding, Kieft seemed the man for the job.

Kieft's response to the Swits killing was to annihilate the Wieckquaesgecks. The Dutch are a notoriously pragmatic people, and the settlers, though angry, felt this would have too many difficult repercussions. A peace conference was called in the northern stone house of Jonas Jonassen Bronck, a Swedish-born sea captain after whom the borough is named. But in 1643, against the orders of the West India Company, Kieft's troops killed about eighty Wieckquaesgeck men, women, and children and mutilated their bodies. Reportedly, children were hacked to death and thrown into the Hudson. The troops returned with heads of victims. Nothing was ever the same again between the Indians and the settlers. The scalping of settlers and burning of farms became widespread. A decade later the province of New Netherlands—the Dutch never called it a colony—was critically weakened from this violence, just at the decisive moment when the Dutch went to war with the English.

In 1653, the Dutch West India Company
ordered the construction of an enormous wall to protect New Amsterdam. Most of the physical labor was done by African slaves owned by the company. The forty-three wealthiest citizens loaned the financing at 10 percent interest, creating both the first Wall Street financial transaction and the first city debt. The wall was made out of fifteen-foot wooden planks and followed present-day Wall Street from the Hudson to the East River with two gates, one at the present-day intersection of Wall and Pearl streets and the other where Broadway now crosses Wall Street. The settlers of New Amsterdam no longer had open access to the rest of Manhattan.

Today the popularly held belief is that the wall had been built to defend the settlement from Indian attacks. Given the way Indian–settler relations were going, this is not an illogical assumption. But in fact the wall was conceived at the outbreak of the Anglo-Dutch War to defend against a possible British attack from New England. Why would a maritime people expect another maritime people to attack their seaport from the land side? When the British attack finally came, not surprising for the world's leading naval power, it was by sea and the wall was a useless defense.

By this time, 1664, the one thousand settlers of New Amsterdam had spent eleven years huddled behind a wall. They threw their garbage over the wall where it was out of sight, and a huge garbage dump started to form in the marsh just below the serene Kalck Pond. Worse, the citizenry simply dumped their chamber pots and other sewage in the streets, ignoring an ordinance prohibiting this. The city had built drainage ditches and they became sewers, mostly open. Solid waste would often clog them and cause overflow. This made New Amsterdam not only a very odorous village, but an unhealthy one—a dangerous situation for a town with no hospital until 1659, when the company established one doctor in a house.

Town ordinances were preoccupied with this health risk, but no one thought about the fact that these ditches ran into the Hudson River and the East River, which flowed over oyster beds. Oysters had evolved over 500 million years from a deep-sea animal to a creature that lived in less salty water, in the sheltered coves of estuaries where seawater mixed with fresh waters. It was the rivers of the New York area that gave the oyster beds their life, and in time the rivers would kill them.

CHAPTER THREE

The Fecundity of Bivalvency

I
n biology, family is important. All true oysters, regardless
of where they are found, belong to the family Ostreidae. While the family has a number of genera with distinct characteristics and in total about a hundred different species, Ostreidae, the oyster family, does have its own defining characteristics, the things that make an oyster an oyster. In biology, unlike in Tolstoy, even happy families are not alike. Oysters, different from clams and scallops, are permanently affixed to an object, and they accomplish this not by extended threads like a mussel, but by secreting a substance from the foot. And unlike clams and mussels, their two shells are different and they always rest on the deeper, more curved one. To a scallop this would seem to be upside down, but this distinction makes it possible for oysters to be shipped live with the cupped side down, which keeps the liquor, the natural juice, from seeping out and keeps them alive in their shells.

Scientists have agreed to avoid clarity by calling the flat top shell the right side, and the curved bottom one the left side. Only the left side has the ability to attach, so that it is generally on the bottom unless the oyster is resting vertically, which it often is. Asymmetry, having two sides that do not match, is unusual in nature. Humans, insects, fish, and even most bivalves are symmetrical. The oyster is, too, until it attaches the left shell, which then becomes misshapen like a poorly shod foot, sagging to form a cup in which the animal can rest. Since there is a well-established principal in evolutionary science that the growth development of an individual imitates the evolutionary development of the species, this early symmetrical phase of the oyster indicates that their prehistoric ancestors were footed wanderers like their cousins the clams.

It might surprise oyster gourmets, gourmands,
feinschmeckers,
and bivalveophiles to know that all of the oysters in North America, from Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico, up the coast of Florida, in the Chesapeake Bay, in New York City, Long Island, Long Island Sound, Wellfleet, Maine, Nova Scotia, and even beyond, are biologically identical. They are all the same family, genus, and species
—Ostreidae Crassostrea virginica.
The fact that all these
Crassostrea virginicas
along the Atlantic coast vary in size, shape, color, and taste is simply proof that with oysters, as with wine, the deciding factor is not the variety, but where it is planted and how it is grown. Water temperature is critical. Oysters grow faster in warm water, although the length of time they are left to grow is also important. Colder water tends to produce oysters that fans call more flavorful and detractors call too strong. Northerners tend to find Southern oysters large and bland and Southerners find Northern oysters small and harsh. In addition to temperature, oysters are altered by many factors including the salinity of the water, the type of food available in the water, the structure of the seabed, and the degree of crowding.

Crassostrea virginica,
sometimes called the eastern oyster or the American oyster, begins as a fertilized egg about fifty microns or two-thousandth of an inch in diameter—a creature invisible to the naked eye. A quart jar could hold the eggs for more than five billion oysters. Unlike most animals, oyster social life has the curious characteristic that males and females are physically identical. This understandably has confused those who have studied oysters, and left many doubts about their sexuality. But it does not seem to confuse oysters, and by the nineteenth century it was understood that, as songwriter Cole Porter later observed, even oysters in Oyster Bay “do it.”

Though male and female oysters appear identical, at a certain point some start releasing eggs and others start releasing sperm, both of which drift with plankton. Before fertilization each egg is one of 10 million or more discharged into the water by one adult female. Today
Crassostreas
that have been specially conditioned for spawning can discharge more than 50 million eggs at one time. Spawning occurs when water temperature rises above twenty degrees centigrade, sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, which usually happens in New England in midsummer, and slightly earlier in New York. Discharge is stimulated by the presence of eggs or sperm in the water. In other words, a male oyster gets turned on by being surrounded by large quantities of eggs and a female gets excited when sperm are around. Since eggs are buoyant and disperse quickly, it is important for spawning that there are large numbers of adults in close proximity.

It takes only a few hours for a fertilized egg to become a swimming larva. The larva moves through the water with fast-swimming threadlike organs called cilia. The two equal shells are formed within twenty-four hours. The young oyster feeds on phytoplankton, floating masses of minuscule organisms, and after about ten days it dives to the bottom and starts crawling, looking for a place to attach itself. An empty oyster shell is an attractive surface but so are the top shell of a living oyster, bottles, cans, golf balls, old shoes, fronds of eelgrass.

It is now about six times the size of the original egg. At this point it is very similar to a clam, having two matching shells and hobbling across the ocean floor with its foot. But once it finds an appropriate surface, it drops its clammy ways, loses its swimming devices, and attaches by secreting a substance from a gland in the foot. The attaching shell starts to sag, the oyster will never again be capable of movement, and it becomes distinct from other bivalves.

The oyster that nature put on the European coast, the oyster that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch, British, and French were accustomed to eating, is a completely different animal, a different genus and species than they encountered in North America. This is not a scientific splitting of hairs. The animal looks different, reproduces differently, and is anatomically different. The
Ostrea edulis,
the European flat oyster, sometimes called belon because of the famous beds at the mouth of the Bélon River in Brittany, France, which is one of the few places that still produces them, is a rounder and flatter oyster. It is the one pictured in the seventeenth-century Dutch still-life paintings.

Oysters of the genus
Ostrea
produce fewer eggs than do
Crassostreas,
only about one million, and the eggs have three times the diameter—about 150 microns. They live in much saltier water and begin spawning when the water reaches only fifteen degrees centigrade, fifty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, which means that they do not have the southern range of a
Crassostrea,
which thrive from Labrador to Mexico. Rather than being excreted into the water, the eggs are secreted from the female gonads, then held in the female. The male releases sperm into the water and the female pumps it into her eggs. The fertilized eggs are held in the female for more than a week so that when discharged into the water, they are already halfway through their larval stage. The genus
Ostrea
spend much less time drifting with plankton and are less likely to drift away to less favorable areas. This is why they can produce fewer eggs. Nature always balances risks with fecundity.

Up until the nineteenth century,
the oyster was thought to be a simple primitive creature. We like to think this of the creatures we eat, especially the ones we pop into our mouths whole and raw. But it turns out that an oyster has a brain and a nervous system. In the words of the nineteenth-century British Darwinist Thomas Huxley, “I suppose that when the sapid and slippery morsel—which is gone like a flash of gustatory summer lightning—glides along the palate, few people imagine that they are swallowing a piece of machinery (and going machinery too) greatly more complicated than a watch.”

The creature is surrounded by what is called a mantle and this mantle has what appears to be a dark fringe, which is actually a battery of sensory nerve endings. The oyster at rest has its mantle fringe exposed to perceive danger. When that message is transmitted to the brain, the brain sends an impulse to the muscle, and the oyster shell slams shut.

Oysters eat mostly plankton. They feed by pumping in water with fine cilia on the surface of the gill. Like hungry young birds, they rest with their shells open, letting the water feed them. But if disturbed, they will snap shut and can remain that way for days. That is in fact what they do if yanked out of the water. When feeding, they will eject unwanted particles by snapping their shells shut to push out the water. This action for a long time was confused with a mammal's habit of closing its mouth around food. To this day, the snapping closed of an oyster is called feeding, but it is actually the opposite, the ejecting of food. Oysters cannot break down cellulose and thus reject anything with thick cellulose walls such as most plant life. Any particles larger than ten microns are ejected.

The anatomy of an oyster from
The Oyster,
William K. Brooks, 1891.
Figure 1.
The left side of an oyster lying in one shell, with the other shell removed. The mantle has been turned back a little, to show its fringe of dark-colored tentacles, and in order to expose the gills.
Figure 2.
An oyster in the left shell, with the right shell and right fold of the mantle removed, to show the gills and the body of the oyster.
a
is the hinge,
b
is the edge of the mantle,
c
is the muscle,
d
is the pericardium,
f
is the hinge ligament,
g
the gills,
h
the lips.

The oyster snaps its shell by means of a ligament, which it squeezes in order to close. If the animal relaxes, the ligament springs the shell open. This ligament is like a piece of rubber and is not alive. Like the shell itself, it is manufactured by the oyster from a substance it excretes. The ligament will cause the shell to open any time the oyster does not apply pressure, which is why a dead oyster has an opened shell.

The muscle that an oyster uses to squeeze its shell closed has extraordinary strength relative to its small size. Oyster shuckers sometimes refer to it as “the heart.” They think of it as a vital organ, because once it is cut the oyster easily opens and so is presumed dead—stabbed in the heart. Oyster shuckers may not want consumers to know the truth. All they have done is destroy the oyster's ability to squeeze the ligament. William K. Brooks, the nineteenth-century Maryland pioneer in the study of oysters, said, “A fresh oyster on the half-shell is no more dead than an ox that has been hamstrung.” If the oyster is opened carefully, the diner is eating an animal with a working brain, a stomach, intestines, liver, and a still-beating heart. As for the “liquor,” that watery essence of oyster flavor that all good food writers caution to save, it is mostly oyster blood.