The Big Oyster Read online

  But soon shifting winds forced the Europeans, with great reluctance, to return to their ship and sail on. This was probably the first sighting of Salty People by the inhabitants of the harbor, although their grandparents may also have seen Ésteban Gomez, a Portuguese explorer who passed this way. An early Portuguese map suggests that Europeans, probably either Portuguese or Basque fishermen, may have sailed to this place at the time of Columbus. Some of those who now met Hudson and his crew may have heard of or even had contact with the Frenchman Samuel de Champlain, who only a few months earlier had traveled south from what is now Canada to the lake that is named after him. Jamestown, near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, was just south of the Lenapes’ Delaware Bay and was already two years old when Hudson arrived in New York. By the time Hudson arrived, the Lenapes knew Salty People when they saw them. They had been coming for a long time with very little consequence.

  This group stayed longer than the others. They explored the upper harbor, then chose the river west of the island and sailed up what is now called the Hudson as far as what is now Albany. From there, it must have been clear that this narrowing river was not leading to China and they left.

  In the Lenape language, lenape translates as “the common man.” Sometimes they called themselves Lenni Lenape, which means “we, the people.” Europeans have labeled the language and the people Delaware. They were a loose confederation of populations living between the South River, the Delaware, and the North River, the Hudson. Until the twentieth century, it was believed that between eight and twelve thousand such people lived in what is today Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut when Hudson arrived. But these low estimates were based on the count in the year 1700, which was three thousand. Starting in 1633, the Lenape had already been through at least fourteen epidemics of such European diseases as smallpox, malaria, and measles. More recently, archaeologists have concluded that as many as fifteen thousand lived in what is today New York City and possibly as many as fifty thousand others lived in the Lenape region.

  Lenape villages were busy little clusters of longhouses made of bark and grass. They lived on fishing and hunting, and gathering nuts, fruit, and shellfish. They made clothes of cured deer and elk skins. In spring, coastal Lenapes set up large fishing camps. They trapped, netted, and speared shad and other river fish. They had monogamous marriages, but sexual relations between the unmarried were acceptable until Europeans introduced venereal diseases. The dead were greatly mourned. Sometimes mourners would blacken their faces for an entire year. The dead, it was believed, traveled along a star path. Each star in the Milky Way was believed to be a footprint.

  Lenape village drawn on a Dutch map (circa 1655–77) by Claes Janzoon Visscher.

  NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

  The Lenape believed that their history began when Kishelemukong, the creator, brought a giant turtle up from the deep ocean. The back of the turtle grew into a vast island, North America. They believed they had come to the mid-Atlantic from farther west and archaeologists agree, saying they arrived at the Atlantic three thousand years ago.

  There were three major groups of Lenape and numerous subdivisions within those. They had few unifying institutions except language, and even that broke down into dialects. One of the groups, the Munsey, which means “mountaineers,” controlled the mountains near the headwaters of the Delaware. They also maintained hunting grounds in what is now the New York City area. It is the Munsey language that gave Manhattan and many other New York places their names. It is uncertain from which Munsey word the name Manhattan is derived. One theory is that it comes from the word manahactanienk, which means “place of inebriation,” but another is that it comes from manahatouh, meaning “a place where wood is available for making bows and arrows.” The even more prosaic possibility that is most often cited is that it comes from menatay, which simply means “island.”

  Lenape and Lenni Lenape are Munsey words. Many of the subgroups have become place names. On Long Island, the Canarsee, the Rockaways, and the Massapequas all spoke Munsey. The Raritans, Tappans, and Hackensacks, all of whom spoke Unami, a different language in the same family as Munsey, controlled different parts of Staten Island, northern Manhattan, the Bronx, and parts of New Jersey. All of these people and other locals such as the Wieckquaesgecks of Westchester, ate oysters, and some may have traveled some distance for them. The Lenape who gave Hudson his first taste of New York oysters were from what is now Yonkers.

  We know that the Lenape ate copious quantities of oysters because oyster shells last a very long time and they left behind tremendous piles of them. These piles, containing thousands of shells, have been found throughout the New York City area. Archaeologists call them shell middens. The most common marker of a pre-European settlement anywhere in the area of the mouth of the Hudson are these piles of oyster shells, sometimes as much as four feet deep, sometimes buried in the ground, sometimes piled high. The early-seventeenth-century Dutch were the first to note the shell middens. One such mountain of oyster shells gave Pearl Street, originally on the waterfront in lower Manhattan, its name. Contrary to popular belief, the street was not actually paved with oyster shells until many years after it was named for a midden. The Dutch found another midden at what is now the intersection of Canal Street and the Bowery and called it Kalch-Hook, Shell-Point.

  Another pile was found alongside a forty-foot-deep inland pond, a favorite fishing spot of the Lenape and later the English, in the marshlands of lower Manhattan. The Dutch named the pond after the pile of oyster shells, calling it Kalck, which is Dutch for “lime,” the principal component of oyster shells. Later in the seventeenth century, when the British replaced the Dutch as the administrators of Manhattan, they, too, were struck by these shell piles. In 1692, Charles Lodwick wrote a letter back to England in which he reported, “Many shells of oysters and other shellfish are found up on high hills as well as valleys and sometimes two or three foot within the earth, but are supposed to have been brought there by the natives and fishing having served them for food, and the shell rotting serve for dung which is common in these parts now coming the Christians.”

  Actually, shells don’t rot even for Christians, and some of them are thousands of years old. But the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European settlers sometimes took these shells and placed them in fields, where the lime would neutralize acid soil, a technique known at the time as “sweetening” the soil. They also burned shells to render lime paste to be used in colonial construction.

  The middens were simply piles of shells. No one thought to seriously study these piles until the late nineteenth century. But they had always been something of a fascination on the landscape for some New Yorkers. Daniel Tredwell, a Brooklyn writer and journalist who lived from 1826 until 1921, wrote in his diary how he and his father enjoyed exploring middens in the 1830s. He wrote in 1839: “On the way out we pass many Indian shell heaps bleached as white as snow, which they much resemble at a distance. Some of them on the banks of the creek extend from fifteen to thirty feet upon the bank, and under water, in many instances entirely across the creek. These shell heaps, long ere this, has excited our curiosity and we had proposed all manner of questioning concerning their authors. These questions my father did not and could not satisfactorily answer, and we were consequently unsatisfied, and hence there was a constantly recurring inquiry.”

  Many shell middens have survived. Up until the end of the nineteenth century, there were a number of them on the Rockaway Peninsula area—in the marshes of Woodmere Bay, Inwood, Hog (or Barnum’s) Island, and Far Rockaway. A particularly large one was a familiar sight in the Bayswater section of Far Rockaway. The middens even survived after Rockaway was developed as a beach resort in the late nineteenth century with the help of a fifty-cent train fare from Manhattan. But in the early twentieth century, when roads were being built for new automobiles, thousands of tons of shells were hauled away to use for road fill.

  Most of the middens in Manhattan,
Staten Island, and western Long Island are now gone. Numerous known sites lie beneath railroad tracks, city streets, dredged landfill, highways that hug the coastline, and docks. The Hudson railroad line was built along the eastern bank of the Hudson, tearing through numerous middens in the area just north of the city without regard for their archaeological value. What little remains of the midden near the Kalck Pond is covered by federal and state courthouses and the shops and restaurants of Chinatown. Archaeologists have found shells under some of the courthouses. In the twenty-first century, archaeologists and preservationists have been battling developers along the eastern Hudson bank to save some of the oldest middens of North America. In Dobbs Ferry, locals fought to stop a forty-four-acre condominium project that threatened to obliterate the oldest midden ever found on the Atlantic coast of North America.

  Shell middens have been found all along the Atlantic coast of the United States and a few even older ones have been found in Europe, notably Denmark, but the lower Hudson from Peekskill to Staten Island and east to Long Island had an unusual concentration of them.

  For the first 60 miles of the 315-mile-long Hudson River, from the southern tip of Manhattan until somewhere near what is now the town of Newburgh, the water remains salty enough for oysters and many other ocean species. The exact point where this ends and the Hudson becomes a freshwater river, what is called the salt line or the salt wedge, shifts from year to year and season to season. In a drought year the salt wedge can be seventy miles up the river. A few days of heavy rain can send it down to Manhattan. But the salt water will quickly rise up the river again even though this goes against the river’s normal flow. About thirty miles north of Manhattan, around the town of Peekskill, the Hudson veers to the northwest, which causes tidewaters to move toward the eastern bank, and any oyster eggs deposited in the salt water would drift there. Shellfish beds and therefore middens were clustered on that bank.

  The several hundred midden sites that have been identified in the New York City area, ranging from a few square yards to several acres of dense heaps, are believed to be only a fraction of the number existing at the time of Hudson’s arrival. Middens are still being discovered. A midden was uncovered on Liberty Island during construction in the 1980s. In 1988, workmen found a midden below the Metro-North Railroad track while repairing cables.

  The earliest oyster species by far predate man. Fossils of tiny, barely visible oysters have been dated to the Cambrian period 520 million years ago. During the Permian period, 250 million years ago, before mammals or dinosaurs appeared, there was a sweeping shake-up in marine life that left many species extinct. Oysters, however, not only survived but became bigger and more numerous. They continued to prosper in the flowering Cretaceous period, the lush epoch when dinosaurs mysteriously vanished, from 144 million to 65 million years ago. About 65 million years ago, when humans first began developing, oysters started evolving into the species that exist today. Although modern species have significant differences from their ancestors, the fossil of a prehistoric oyster looks remarkably similar to a contemporary oyster shell.

  The native shell beds of the New York area and their residents, Crassostrea virginica, are believed to have first appeared about 10,000 B.C. The oldest Atlantic shell midden, in Dobbs Ferry, has been carbon-dated to about 6950 B.C. give or take a hundred years—long before the arrival of the Lenape three thousand years ago. This marks the oldest evidence of humans ever found in the Hudson Valley. Numerous other middens have been dated to long before the Lenape, which means they must have been left by an earlier people. But many date to Lenape times, and the People continued to leave oyster-shell mounds into the nineteenth century.

  Throughout the more than a century that the Hudson shell middens have been studied, historians and archaeologists have puzzled over an unsolvable mystery. Although it is known that like the Lenape, their aboriginal predecessors ate a wide range of shellfish available in the vast estuary that is New York Harbor, the middens almost exclusively contain oyster shells. Where are the clam and mussel shells? While the Lenape valued oysters as food, they regarded hard clams as money, especially the large ones with bluish inner shells that New Englanders call quahogs. They would make long, cylindrical blue-and-white shell beads and drill a lengthwise hole in the center, though how this was accomplished with the tools they had is not known. The beads were then strung together and traded by the string. A six-foot string, of considerable value, could have seven thousand beads. This may explain the fate of quahog shells but not what happened to the shells of other clams and other molluscs.

  Adding to the confusion and mystery, when the Lenape buried their dead, they often covered them in oyster shells. They also did this when burying their dogs and numerous dog graves have been found throughout Manhattan with the animals curled nose to tail and covered with oyster shells. Was there then a religious significance to the shells? Or were they added to graves for their lime content?

  Archaeologists have identified two distinct types of middens, which they have labeled kitchen middens and processing middens. The principal difference between them is that kitchen middens contain evidence of bones, nuts, and other food scraps, and sometimes tools—stone ax heads are particularly common in Manhattan kitchen middens—whereas processing middens exclusively contain oyster shells. It is supposed that a processing midden was a site in which oysters were preserved for winter provisions. The Lenape smoked and dried oysters in the same way they preserved fish. The kitchen middens, on the other hand, are thought to be places where shells were dumped after the oysters were eaten fresh. This still leaves unexplained the absence of other kinds of shells.

  Also puzzling is why these people ate so many oysters. Oysters are not an efficient food source. Between 90 and 95 percent of their weight comes from the inedible shell, so gathering bags of oysters from the beds and dragging them to the middens for shucking yielded fairly little food for the effort. The Lenape approach of gathering oysters in dugout canoes, which may have also been used by earlier peoples, somewhat reduces the labor. Probably to lessen the amount of hauling, no midden has been found more than 160 feet from water. But it still was not an easy way of obtaining nutrition.

  Furthermore, until the Europeans arrived, the Lenape had no way of prying open an oyster shell. No one has ever seen a stone tool capable of this task. The small abductor muscle that holds the shells closed on a living oyster exerts about twenty-two pounds of pressure. One theory is that the Lenape used a flint tool that could have been slipped in to cut the abductor muscle. But since the shells in the middens are mostly undamaged, it is thought that rather than force, some sort of heat was used to kill the oyster, which relaxes the muscle. Only about 120 degrees Fahrenheit is needed to kill and open an oyster. Some deep pits that have been found are thought to have been used for baking oysters. Indians taught the first Europeans in New York to wrap oysters in wet seaweed and throw them on hot coals until they opened. However they managed it, processing oysters is thought to have been the earliest form of year-round mass production practiced by New Yorkers.

  But even given the effort, oysters do not produce particularly nourishing food. Modern nutritionists estimate that for a diet of oysters to furnish the caloric intake necessary for good health, an individual would have to eat about 250 oysters a day. One modern researcher estimated that it would take 52,267 oysters to supply the same number of calories to be had by eating one red deer.

  An intriguing idea emerges. It is clear not only by logic but by the evidence of the kitchen remains that have been found that no Hudson people ever had a diet principally based on oysters. There is a tendency to think of early humans as struggling for survival and therefore eating what was nutritious, easily available, and efficiently exploited. But it seems in the case of the prehistoric occupants of the lower Hudson, exactly as did all of their successors, they supplemented their diets with oysters as a delicacy, a gastronomic treat that was eaten purely for the pleasure of it. And the delicacy was in demand be
yond the immediate area of the beds. Oysters were bartered in trade with inland people such as the Iroquois.

  The fifty-two thousand oysters required to equal a deer was a European calculation. Red deer, a European species, are larger than the indigenous whitetail. Europe had larger deer and smaller oysters than New York. To calculate the food value of New York oysters relative to the native whitetail deer, one would have to know whether the oysters came from the top or bottom of the midden. It is significant that the deeper archaeologists dig in a midden, the larger the shells they find. The large bottom shells are older than the smaller top ones, which shows that, contrary to popular belief, even before Europeans arrived, people were overharvesting oysters. On the bottom the very largest ones, described as “giant oysters,” measure eight to ten inches. This suggests that Dutch reports of foot-long oysters were only slightly exaggerated.

  This discrepancy in the oyster sizes at the top and the bottom of the middens was the first of many warnings unheeded by the Salty People about the bounteous oyster beds of New York. A Crassostrea virginica, like fish and unlike humans, if not taken by man or other predators, and not killed by disease, will grow larger every year of their twelve to fifteen year lives. Factors such as salinity and water temperature determine the speed of growth. But the greatest factor in the size of an oyster is age: how long it has been left to grow in its bed before being harvested. Apparently even back in the distant millennia, there was a tendency to harvest all of the older, larger oysters, and then when none was left, the oyster gatherers started taking younger, smaller ones. In fact, everywhere that oyster-shell middens have been studied, including Maryland and Denmark, the same phenomenon has been found: The biggest shells were on the bottom, indicating that the largest oysters were the most valued and consequently taken first. There is even a measurable prehistoric phenomenon that as population density increased, oyster sizes diminished. This shortsighted and uncontrolled attraction for the biggest seems to be an inherent universal human trait. Eventually this could have led to a crisis, but prehistoric New Yorkers never stretched their resource to that point.