The Big Oyster

by Mark Kurlansky

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  MAP

  PREFACE: THE HARD SHELL OF THE CITY

  PROLOGUE: A GOOD TIME COMING

  PART ONE: The Beds of Eden

  Chapter One: A Molluscular Life

  Chapter Two: The Bivalvent Dung Hill

  Chapter Three: The Fecundity of Bivalvency

  Chapter Four: A Nice Bed to Visit

  Chapter Five: Becoming the World’s Oyster

  Chapter Six: Eggocentric New Yorkers

  PART TWO: The Shells of Sodom

  Chapter Seven: The Crassostreasness of New Yorkers

  Chapter Eight: Making Your Own Bed

  Chapter Nine: Ostreamaniacal Behavior

  Chapter Ten: Ostracized in the Golden Age

  Epilogue: Enduring Shellfishness

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY MARK KURLANSKY

  PRAISE FOR THE BIG OYSTER

  COPYRIGHT

  To Alvin and Barbara Mass,

  two great New Yorkers

  Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east.

  Others will see the island large and small;

  Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,

  A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,

  Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

  —WALT WHITMAN,

  “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” 1856

  PREFACE

  The Hard Shell of the City

  To me New York is the most wonderful and most beautiful city in the world. All life is in it.

  —CHILDE HASSAM,

  American Impressionist painter, 1889

  To anyone who is familiar with New Yorkers, it should not be surprising to learn that they were once famous for eating their food live. The fact that oysters are about the only food eaten alive is part of what makes them a unique gastronomic experience—that and the sense that no other food brings us closer to the sea. Oysters spend their lives—a dozen years if we left them alone, but only three or four because we don’t—sucking in seawater, extracting nutrients, and pumping it out again. There used to be enough oysters in New York Harbor to process all the water there, which is one of the reasons environmentalists want them back. And perhaps this is also why oysters taste like eating the sea.

  New Yorkers seldom think of it this way, but they live in the estuary of the Hudson River, an expansive interconnected tidal system that also involves New Jersey and Connecticut. Damage anywhere in this system deteriorates the entire estuary.

  Recently, while riding a train from Washington, D.C., to New York, I found myself along the part of New York Harbor’s shoreline that some people unkindly call “the chemical coast.” Many New Yorkers forget that this is part of their harbor because it is “out of town” in New Jersey. Usually when I’m returning to New York, at this point I would look homeward to Manhattan at the never-disappointing skyline of the island where I live. Otherwise I would look out at smokestacks and pipes and flames from refineries. But for some reason, this one time, I looked instead right in front of me and realized that I was in a grassy wetland—a magnificent grassy wetland where egrets and herons could live. As the grass rolled in waves and the sun reflected on narrow waterways, I saw that this could have been a northern Everglades. By what act of blind insanity did people decide to build chemical plants, oil refineries, and heavy industry in a beautiful wetland that belonged to one of the world’s great waterways? Blind madness? It occurred to me that they had probably never really looked at it either.

  The only thing New Yorkers ignore more than nature is history. They have a habit of not spending a great deal of time pondering the history of their city. That is because of a sense that it has always been more or less the same, or, as Edmund Wilson, one of the more venerated New Yorker writers of that magazine’s heyday, explained his waning enthusiasm for reading history in his old age, “I know more or less the kind of things that happen.”

  The history of New York oysters is a history of New York itself—its wealth, its strength, its excitement, its greed, its thoughtlessness, its destructiveness, its blindness and—as any New Yorker will tell you—its filth. This is the history of the trashing of New York, the killing of its great estuary.

  New York is a city that does not plan; it creates situations and then deals with them. Most of its history is one of greedily grabbing beautiful things, destroying them, being outraged about the conditions, tearing them down, then building something else even further from nature’s intention in their place. What could be more typical of New York than “the Doorknob,” a spot in New York Harbor that is contaminated from being used as a dumping ground for the trash created when the city tried to correct decades of neglect on the Lower East Side by tearing down the tenements to build housing projects.

  One of the great New York paradoxes is that the metropolis is both unique and typical. Many of its stories are true for other cities as well. The oyster history of New York often matches that of other great oyster capitals such as Paris, and London on the oyster-encrusted estuary of the Thames. It is interesting that London, rich in its own oysters like New York, also destroyed them, whereas Paris, which was the commercial and consuming capital of oysters brought in from other regions, did more to preserve its beds.

  Before the twentieth century, when people thought of New York, they thought of oysters. This is what New York was to the world—a great oceangoing port where people ate succulent local oysters from their harbor. Visitors looked forward to trying them. New Yorkers ate them constantly. They also sold them by the millions, supplying Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, and San Francisco, but also shipping to England, France, and Germany. As New York transportation improved, New York oysters traveled ever farther. In the nineteenth century the British credited New York with meeting their oyster needs when their own famous beds failed.

  Oysters were true New Yorkers. They were food for gourmets, gourmands, and those who were simply hungry; tantalizing the wealthy in stately homes and sustaining the poor in wretched slums; a part of city commerce and a part of international trade.

  If eating an oyster is tasting the sea, eating a New York oyster was tasting New York Harbor, which became increasingly unappealing. The oyster was New Yorkers’ link to the sea, and eventually it was lost. Today New Yorkers eat not as many oysters, but still quite a few, albeit from a dozen other places, and now when they think of the sea, they think of somewhere else—perhaps the eastern tip of Long Island or New England or even Florida. Though they live by the sea, they take vacations to go somewhere else to be by the sea. Of the many odd things about New Yorkers, there is this: How is it that a people living in the world’s greatest port, a city with no neighborhood that is far from a waterfront, a city whose location was chosen because of the sea, where the great cargo ships and tankers, mighty little tugs, yachts, and harbor patrol boats glide by, has lost all connection with the sea, almost forgotten that the sea is there? New Yorkers have lost their oyster, their taste of the sea. This is the story of how it happened.

  PROLOGUE

  A Good Time Coming

  “Fruges consumere nati [born to eat produce],” may designate humanity elsewhere, but here the quotation may be out of place, for man seems born to consume “oysters.”

  —CHARLES MACKAY ON NEW YORK CITY,

  Life and Liberty in America or Sketches of a Tour in the United States and Canada in 1857–58

  Life had been working out very well for Charles Mackay,
a Scottish songwriter. Every week, from 1851 to 1855, the London Illustrated News had published one of his songs and they were becoming a popular phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic. The sheet music of one tune, “A Good Time Coming,” had sold four hundred thousand copies.

  In 1857, at the height of his popularity, Mackay accepted an offer for a lecture tour of the United States and Canada. Though originally he had enthusiastically embraced this opportunity to see North American cities, while he was waiting in Liverpool for his ship to sail, his exuberance was quickly fading.

  The wind ripped through the harbor with such a loud eerie howl that he could not sleep at night. It was only early October and winter was already settling into Liverpool. Surely the North Atlantic in the weeks to come would be even worse. The dark, opaque sea, almost indistinct from the muddy, dark sky, churned at the mouth of the Mersey, throwing up little peaks that even in their sheltered moorings made the ships’ spars swing like anxious pendulums as the rigging creaked gloomily. He thought of weeks in this rasping wooden box under blackened skies on a heaving, dark sea.

  A disturbingly cheerful friend was hosting him at the Waterloo Hotel while he waited for the hour to board ship. As his friend saw him to the door, Mackay studied the rain beating against the windows. It was not just falling on the panes, it was pelting them, tiny hard beads that bounced off the glass.

  His friend wished him a safe and speedy crossing and then added grandly in a voice that rose above the howling wind and pelted panes, “I envy you your trip to America.”

  Mackay, probably unconvincingly, attempted an appropriately jovial expression, but all he could manage to say was “And why?”

  “Because,” the friend answered with a joyous, beaming smile, “you will get such delicious oysters! New York beats all creation for oysters.”

  Two months later, writing in his diary from New York City, Mackay noted, “Mine host spoke the truth. There is no place in the world where there are such fine oysters as in New York . . . .”

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Molluscular Life

  Obviously, if you don’t love life, you can’t enjoy an oyster.

  —ELEANOR CLARK,

  The Oysters of Locmariaquer, 1959

  In 1609, when Henry Hudson, a British explorer employed by the Dutch, sailed into New York Harbor on his eighty-five-foot ship, Halve Maen, with a half-British, half-Dutch crew of sixteen, he found the same thing Mackay would two and a half centuries later—a local population with the habit of feasting on excellent New York Harbor oysters.

  Hudson was a seventeenth-century man in search of a fifteenth-century dream. His employer, Holland, would soon be in its golden age, offering the world Rembrandt, the microscope, and the stock exchange, but not, as Hudson and his sponsors had hoped, a river through North America leading to China.

  A water route to Chinese trade replacing the long, arduous Silk Road was a great dream of the Renaissance. The only alternative ever found was in 1499 when Vasco da Gama sailed from Portugal and went around Africa to the Indian Ocean. All of the westward voyages of exploration had ended in failure, with endless landmasses standing in the way between Europe and China. Cabot was stopped by Canada in the north, Verrazano was stopped by the United States farther south, Columbus by Central America in the middle, and Magellan showed that it was a hopelessly long way around South America to the south. Only one idea still held any possibility and that was a passage through arctic waters.

  And so Hudson was essentially an arctic explorer. In fact, he was a failed arctic explorer. On his first voyage for the British he sailed straight north, attempting to travel beyond the ice and down the other side of the globe. The plan was geographically astute but meteorologically absurd and he was stopped by ice. At the point he could go no farther, his seventy-foot wooden vessel was only six hundred miles short of Robert E. Peary’s 1909 achievement, reaching the North Pole. His second voyage, heading northeast over Russia, was also stopped by ice. At this point his British sponsor, the Muscovy Company, dropped him.

  A new idea came along. In the early seventeenth century, Captain John Smith, the ruggedly handsome legendary adventurer famous for his conquests both military and sexual, was the great promoter of European settlement in North America. He charted the coastline, reported on his findings, and pitched North America to any Englishman who would listen. He was to play a role in the promoting of Britain’s two leading North American colonies, Virginia and Massachusetts. Hudson knew Smith and they corresponded in 1608, by which time four-fifths of Smith’s 1607 Virginia settlers had already died. There was a growing belief that North America was uninhabitable in the winter. But Smith’s contagious enthusiasm never faltered. Not only did he believe in North American settlement—this entire debate taking place as if no one was already living there—but his maps and letters to Hudson promoted an alternative to the theory that a water route to China could be found north of Canada—the so-called Northwest Passage. Smith’s theory was that somewhere north of Virginia a major river connected the Atlantic to the Sea of Cathay.

  This is a case of people hearing only what they want to hear. Smith’s Chinese sea was presumably the Pacific Ocean, but rivers are not known to flow from one sea to another. Smith’s theory was based on statements from northern tribes who trapped for fur. They talked of an ocean that could be reached from a river. They probably said nothing about Cathay, China, which was an obsession of Europeans, not North Americans. It seems likely that the North Americans were talking about how they could travel up the Hudson and follow the Mohawk tributary and with a short land portage—for a canoe—arrive at the Great Lakes. Standing on the shore of Lake Erie, one can have the impression of being on the coast of a vast sea. Furthermore, the currents of the Hudson are so multidirectional, the salty ocean water travels so far inland, that according to Indian legend, the first inhabitants came to the Hudson in search of a river that ran two ways, as though it flowed into seas at both ends. Whether such early Indian explorers existed, the Europeans came looking for exactly that.

  Hudson, the out-of-work explorer, had something to sell: a possible new passage to China. The Muscovy Company had listened and voted against the project. But Britain’s new and fast-growing competitor, Holland, was interested. The Vernenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC, known in English as the Dutch East India Company, hired him. The Dutch were not interested in new theories from John Smith or Henry Hudson. They hired Hudson to search for the northeastern passage, a route through the ice floes north of Russia. Hudson had no faith in this northeastern theory, but the VOC gave him a commission with a new ship, and so he took it and sailed north until well out of the view of Dutchmen. Then he picked up a westerly gale and crossed the Atlantic, thousands of miles in the opposite direction of his orders, and reached the North American coast off Newfoundland.

  More than a century after John Cabot’s voyage, this was a well-known route. Hudson then followed the coastline south to Cape Hatteras and the mouth of the Chesapeake within miles of his friend Smith at Jamestown but, sailing in a Dutch vessel, did not visit the British settlement. Perhaps he needed to locate Smith’s Jamestown to find his bearing on Smith’s maps. Then he began exploring the coastline for a river to China.

  In this search he became the first European to enter Delaware Bay. But seeing the shallow waters, shoals, and bars at the mouth of the Delaware, Hudson felt certain that this was not a river great enough to cut through North America to China. He continued on, viewing the forest lands of an unknown continent off the port side, seemingly uninhabited, with only an occasional bird chirp for counterpoint to the rolling surf on sandy beaches and the creaks in the Half Moon’s rigging.

  Then, rounding a flat, sandy, narrow peninsula, today accurately labeled Sandy Hook, Hudson and his men, almost as if falling through a keyhole, found themselves in another world. The wide expanse of water, one hundred square miles, lay flat, sheltered by the bluffs of Staten Island and the rolling hills of Brooklyn. Sandy Hook on the port and
the shoals of Rockaway Peninsula on the starboard, an ideal barrier furnished with several channels, protected the opening. When they looked into the water, they could see large fish following them.

  This was the place. From all directions they saw rivers pouring into the bay. If there were a chasm in the heart of North America opening up a waterway all the way to China, this is what it would look like.

  Hudson identified three “great rivers.” They were probably Raritan Bay, which separates New Jersey and Staten Island, the opening to the Upper Harbor, and the Rockaway Inlet on the Brooklyn–Queens shore of Long Island. He had not yet sailed through the narrow opening between Staten Island and Brooklyn—not yet seen the Upper Bay, the Hudson River, the Harlem River, and the East River that connects with Long Island Sound. He had not yet seen the lush, green, rocky island of ponds and streams in the middle of the estuary.

  Hudson sent a landing party ashore on Staten Island. It was late summer and the plum trees and grapevines were bearing fruit. Immediately upon landing, as though Hudson’s crew had been expected, as though invited, people dressed in animal skins appeared to welcome them. These people in animal skins saw that the leader of the people who arrived in the floating house wore a red coat that sparkled with gold lace.

  In what would become a New York tradition, commerce instantly began. The Europeans in red had tools, while the skin-clad Americans offered hemp, beans, and a local delicacy—oysters. The Europeans thought they were getting much better value than they were giving, but the Americans may have thought the same thing.

  Hudson and his men had no idea with whom they were trading. They reported that the people in skins were friendly and polite but not to be trusted. These people the Europeans distrusted called their land Lenapehoking, the land of the Lenape. The Lenape thought they knew their visitors. They were a people they called in their language shouwunnock, which meant “Salty People.” The grandparents of the Lenape who saw Hudson may have seen an earlier Salty Person, the Italian, Giovanni da Verrazano, sailing the coast with his crew for Francis I, king of France, in 1524. Verrazano had chosen to moor his ship off Staten Island, farther up than Hudson, in the narrow opening that bears his name and where Staten Island is now connected to Brooklyn by a bridge. Verrazano could see the second interior bay with its wide rivers and well-placed island and described the bay as “a pleasant lake.” He named it Santa Margarita after the sister of his patron, Francis. “We passed up with our boat only into the said river, and saw the country very well peopled. The people are almost like unto the others, and clad with feathers of fowls of divers colors. They came toward us very cheerfully, making great shouts of admiration, showing us where we might come to land most safely with our boat.”