The Big Oyster

by Mark Kurlansky

  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.

  The Dutch of the seventeenth century were famous throughout Europe for their vegetables, and the early settlers of New Amsterdam quickly planted vegetable and herb gardens. Parsnips, carrots, and beets as well as lettuce and cabbage, and rosemary, chives, parsley, and tarragon became central to New Netherlands cooking. But a native influence was seen in the widespread use of corn, squash, and beans.

  The Dutch drank beer, regarding it as safer than milk or fresh water because the water was boiled in the brewing process. The people of New Netherlands, unlike the other American colonies, were not Puritans and they drank openly and heavily. One of the first American breweries was built in New Amsterdam on the north side of Bridge Street between today’s Whitehall and Broad streets.

  New Amsterdam’s first tavern, Stadt Herbergh, or City Tavern, was built in 1641. It was one of the finer buildings in the city, being two stories high with a view of the East River. It had a basement, which was unusual at the time, but was the forerunner of a long-standing New York tradition of basement food-and-drink establishments. In the nineteenth century, such underground eateries became associated with oysters and were known as oyster cellars.

  The north side of Pearl Street between Whitehall and Broad started to become noted for taverns that offered good meals, local beer, and oysters. The exotic local specialty was terrapin, unique among turtles because it lives in the same brackish tidal waters as the clams and oysters upon which it feeds. While this local specialty went on to be featured in elaborate wine-sauce recipes in the famous nineteenth-century New York restaurants, it was originally prepared in these first few taverns, cooked in the native American way, roasted whole over an open fire.

  Unlike the English of New England, New Yorkers did not develop a deep-sea fishing industry until the 1760s. This may have been because so much food was available to them in their shallow, calm waterways. They did not have the cod and herring of Holland, but the rivers were teaming with shad and sturgeon, and anyone could hand-line from the shore of Manhattan and land striped bass.

  The estuary of the lower Hudson had 350 square miles of oyster beds. The beds were found along the shore of Brooklyn and Queens, in Jamaica Bay, in the East River, on all shores of Manhattan, tucked into the many coves of a coastline much more jagged than it has become today because of landfills. Oyster beds also prospered along the Hudson as far up as Ossining, and along the Jersey shore down to Keyport, in the Keyport, Raritan, and Hackensack rivers, on many reefs surrounding Staten Island, City Island, Liberty Island, and Ellis Island. The Dutch called Ellis Island and Liberty Island Little Oyster Island and Great Oyster Island because of the sprawling natural oyster beds that surrounded them. According to the estimates of some biologists, New York Harbor contained fully half of the world’s oysters.

  Anyone in the area need not have traveled far to reach into shallow waters and pluck oysters like ripe fruit. The following recorded incident suggests the casual harvest. On December 29, 1656, a group of Dutch left Fort Amsterdam to travel by canoe to present-day Westchester, possibly New Rochelle. At Hell Gate, the crook of angry churning water where the East River meets Long Island Sound, there are treacherous rocks that they dared not attempt to pass in low tide. They pulled over to the Manhattan shore at a spot that today would be under the Triboro Bridge and, while waiting for the tide to change, gathered up oysters and ate them.

  Washington Irving, in his 1809 book, A History of New York from the Beginning of History to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, which chronicled Dutch times with only a slightly mischievous license, also referred to this lazy abundance in a story about a shipwreck at Hell Gate that cast survivors on the shor
e of Mana-hata:

  The stores which had been provided for the voyage by the good housewives of Communipaw were nearly exhausted, but, in casting his eyes about, the commodore beheld that the shore abounded with oysters. A great store of these was instantly collected; a fire was made at the foot of a tree; all hands fell to roasting and broiling and stewing and frying, and a sumptuous repast was soon set forth. This is thought to be the origin of those civic feasts with which, to the present day, all our public affairs are celebrated, and in which the oyster is ever sure to play an important part.

  The Europeans had adopted the Indian custom of designating this casual harvest, taking a few oysters for dinner, as a woman’s chore. In 1634, this poem by William Wood was published in London:

  The luscious lobster, with the crab-fish raw,

  The brinish oyster, mussels, perriwigge,

  And tortoise sought by the Indian Squaw,

  Which to the flatts dance many a winter’s jigge,

  To dive for cockles and to dig for clams,

  Whereby her lazy husbands guts she cramms.

  Oysters were also harvested commercially and were served in taverns. But a 1621 diary complained that “very large oysters” were so easily picked up by the seashore that it was difficult to sell them in New Amsterdam. One New Amsterdam settler referred to “oysters we pick up before our fort . . . some so large they must be cut into two or three pieces.” New Amsterdam settlers grabbed so many oysters at the nearby water’s edge that in 1658, the Dutch council issued an ordinance against harvesting oysters in the two rivers immediately at the town’s shore. This meant rowing out to one of the oyster islands to gather them instead.

  Far upriver, it was a great treat for the oyster-loving Dutch in the Fort Orange area on the oysterless upper Hudson to receive a shipment from a friend or relative in New Amsterdam. Maria van Rensselaer, born van Cortlandt on July 20, 1645, was one of the first native New Yorkers of European stock—Catalina Trico’s daughter Sarah is believed to be the first. When she was only sixteen, Maria married Jeremias van Rensselaer, director of the colony of Rensselaerwyk near Albany, a colony within the colony whose fur and wheat trade made it more prosperous than New Amsterdam. An extraordinary seventeenth-century woman, she ran Rensselaerwyk herself after her husband died. In the letters she left behind are numerous thank-you notes for oysters. She would ship apples from upstate to her brother in New Amsterdam and he would ship New York oysters back to her.

  The People, the Lenape, continued to enjoy and trade oysters. They made knives from the shells, probably using them to scrape hides in their fur trade with the Salty People. Hudson had noted that the Indians had “killed a fat dog and skinned it in great haste with shells that they had got out of the water.” But the few Dutch records on the subject showed other uses for oyster-shell knives. There was a complaint against a Dutchman who gave alcohol to the Indians, one of whom, inebriated, cut someone with an oyster-shell knife. In another incident, a Lenape tortured a captured Dutchman by cutting off several fingers with an oyster-shell knife.

  Relations were not going well between the People and the Salty People. In truth, despite all the reports of friendliness and easy trading, from the start it had been a difficult relationship. On Hudson’s third day on Staten Island, after a prosperous second day of trade, a dispute broke out in which a petty officer, John Coleman, commanding a shore party, was killed from an arrow wound in the throat. Hudson retreated, most authorities believe, to Sandy Hook, but the Brooklyn legend is that he crossed the harbor to a safe anchorage in a narrow inlet, a place now called Gravesend Bay. The hilly strip of land along the bay was about five miles long and a half mile at its widest and it was overrun with wild rabbits or conies. The land may have been named Coney Island after the rabbits, or possibly after Coleman. A third theory is that it was named after a Dutchman named Cnyn who settled there. At the time the Dutch arrived, Coney Island was the Canarsee tribe’s principal site for making wampum.

  Aside from a love of oysters and a proclivity for trade, the Lenape and the Salty People had little in common. The Lenape never fully understood that Salty People operated under completely different rules. This inability to understand the intruder, not even completely grasping their desire to take power, would soon prove the end of the People.

  Nothing better illustrates the lack of understanding between the two groups than the famous “selling” of Manhattan. Perhaps because nothing more quickly seizes the imagination of the New York mind than a story of a real-estate bargain, the most widely known event of the little-known history of New Netherlands is that in 1626 Peter Minuit, the newly arrived director general of New Netherlands, bought Manhattan from the Indians for twenty-four dollars. The figure of twenty-four dollars, which has remained the same through centuries of fluctuation in the value of a dollar, seems an uncertain calculation. An assortment of cloth, wampum, fishhooks, hatchets, and other goods, according to some later versions, was handed over to Lenape chiefs of a group known as the Wappinger Confederation. But there is no certain documentation of what goods were involved in the trade. The goods are often described as “beads and trinkets,” but some beads were currency, and objects made of metal or glass were very valuable to a society that didn’t make them. One Dutchman in 1626 estimated the value of the goods handed over to “the wildmen” to be sixty 1626 Dutch guilders. But items such as wampum and iron fishhooks were worth considerably more to the Lenape than to the Europeans, just as beaver and otter pelts were worth considerably more to Europeans. In 1846, a New York historian calculated that sixty 1626 Dutch guilders was worth twenty-four 1846 U.S. dollars.

  But the terms were also appraised differently by the two groups. Minuit thought he had purchased the land and began settling large tracts of the island. But in Lenape culture, and in most North American cultures, the concept of owning land did not exist. Land was used and a tribe could negotiate with another tribe on rights to use the land. Land was created by God and could not be owned any more than someone could buy a piece of the ocean, lay claim to the sky, or purchase a star. Perhaps this was why, although the Lenape had periodic outbreaks of violence, they never had true wars of the kind Europeans were prone to. The Wappinger Confederation accepted the tribute from the Europeans in exchange for supporting their claim to use the land. This meant that the Wappingers would defend Dutch rights in Manhattan. To them it was a treaty, an alliance. The Indians lived among a great many competing groups and alliances were a way of life.

  Other sales followed. In 1630, Minuit purchased Staten Island from the Tappans for metal drill bits, wampum, and axes. Some Jew’s harps were also thrown in. Kiliaen van Rensselaer bought a thousand acres near Fort Orange and established Rensselaerwyk. The same year, 1630, an island known in Lenape as Kioshk or Gull Island was bought by the Dutch and renamed Little Oyster Island. In the eighteenth century, it would be renamed after its then owner Samuel Ellis. In 1652, the Dutch bought several sections of Brooklyn, including what is now called Bay Ridge, from the Nyacks. A settlement began in the Brooklyn woods called Vlackebos, Dutch for “wooded plain.” The name would eventually be pronounced by the English as “Flatbush.” In all, twenty-two such sales were negotiated, the last being between the English and the Canarsee tribe, selling a section of Brooklyn in 1684.

  The Europeans believed that they needed a bill of sale to take possession, and they were generally extremely scrupulous about this. It was not until after Minuit “bought” Manhattan that he officially began the settlement of New Amsterdam, with its thirty wooden houses and one more substantial stone building for the company headquarters, as a capital for New Netherlands. Two windmills at the tip of the island powered a lumber mill. The Dutch also dug canals and started building a little Amsterdam.

  But they observed a strange phenomenon and were not certain what the best response to it should be. After the sale, the sellers never left. Manhattan continued to have a large Lenape population and many temporary visitors who camped at their customary campsi
tes and hunted the forests and marshes, fished the streams and rivers, and harvested oysters.

  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.