Great Dismal Swamp, “like the ravens . . . neither plowed nor sowed but subsisted chiefly upon oysters, which his handmaid made a shift to gather from the adjacent rocks.” The Pilgrims of Plymouth were more discriminating: they fed their clams and mussels to the hogs, but kept the oysters for themselves.

By the time of the Revolution, Americans had apparently acquired the taste. Oysters were still food for the poor: slaves rolled theirs in cornmeal and fried them, and in Southern coastal areas slave cabins sometimes seemed barricaded by great mounds of C. Virginica shells. But oysters were by then a fixture on elegant tables in the Big House as well. Landen Carter of Sabine Hall, who otherwise hardly mentions food in his diary (except to complain about how his slaves stole it from him), lovingly records every arrival of a wagonload of oysters. He fretted when a shipment was late and dashed off intemperate inquiries to his supplier. Once in July, 1776, when Carter got his hands on eight bushels, he pickled six and polished off two on the spot. According to his diary, he was far more preoccupied with defying the “r” taboo than with the defiant proceedings in Philadelphia. When a troubled neighbor reminded him of the “r” rule, Carter “shewed he not only could eat them but did it in every shape, raw, stewed, caked in fritters and pickled.”

Long within reach of the poor, C. virginica was now also coveted by the rich. And its accessibility was not limited to coasts, for the oyster could be “educated.” That is, it could be taught to clamp its shell tightly shut by a procedure involving several cycles of immersing it suddenly in weak brine and just as abruptly draining it off. This simulated the tides with which oysters had coped for millenniums, except that these man-made ebbings and floodings were erratic indeed: several short cycles and then a long, dry, low tide for purposes of transit with which, obligingly, the oysters came to terms. In this way Blue Points could be hauled not only to the Eastern metropolitan markets; they and a shimmering variety of Cotuits, Wellfleets, Cape Cods, Narragansetts, Gardiners Bays, Peconic Bays, Oyster Bays, Fire Islands, Girdletrees, Kent Islands, Lynnhavens, Bobbins Islands, and Chincoteagues might be and were shipped far into the interior. Even before the railroad, great lumbering express wagons hauled live oysters hundreds of miles inland. An ambitious former congressman named Abraham Lincoln seems to have been admired locally for his oyster orgies, and the Lincolns several times threw parties at which huge quantities of the mollusks were eaten raw and subjected to every method of cookery then practiced in Springfield, Illinois.

One oyster recipe that would not have made its way to Illinois was “Hangtown Fry,” a California Gold Rush specialty. The memory of the Eastern oyster apparently haunted the forty-niners. Indeed, their monotonous hardtack and soda-bread diet made them willing

to pay as high as a dollar apiece for the bivalves. (An oyster sold for a cent on an Eastern wharf at the time.) The demand was such that, in 1851, a schooner plied its way up the Northern coast, through Oregon and into Washington, shucking and sampling as it went, in search of supply. The best were found in what soon became Oysterville, Washington, a place which, in Gilded Age atlases, was labeled in larger type than Seattle or Tacoma. Although the tiny native Olympia oyster is noted for its flavor, it never made the big commercial splash of its distant Eastern cousin. But the Olympia was the oyster that figured in the invention of the gold miners’ special.

The story goes that a miner from Shirt-tail Bend whooped into the big city (Hangtown), loaded with nuggets and dust. At the Gary House, he demanded the most expensive meal in the house. The most expensive ingredients, he was told, were oysters and eggs. Fair enough. One version has the cook inventing the dish, and another has him following the miner’s orders, but in any case, he poured beaten eggs over frying oysters, and Hangtown Fry was born.

On the whole, the European tourists of the era were condescending toward American oysters. Captain Marryat, in 1837, responding to the American complaint that English Colchesters and French belons tasted of copper, replied that the Americans were correct; European oysters did taste of copper, “and that’s the reason we do not like American oysters, copper being better than no flavor at all.”

Even the sniffy Captain was awed by the abundance of oysters in the United States, however. It was a country where the recipes began, “Take 200 nice oysters.…” Mrs. J. Chadwick’s successful Home Cookery of 1853 spoke of “enhancing” a “Gumbo Soup” with one hundred oysters as if she were writing “add salt to taste.”

Another famous traveler was impressed by the size of the American varieties. Upon being presented with half a dozen six- to eight-inch beauties, William Makepeace Thackeray “first selected the smallest one … and then bowed his head as though he were saying grace. Opening his mouth very wide, he struggled for a moment, after which all was over. I shall never forget the comic look of despair he cast upon the other five over-occupied shells,” wrote a companion. “I asked him how he felt. ‘Profoundly grateful’ he said, ‘as if I had swallowed a small baby.’ ”

The size and quantity of American oysters seemed as appropriate a symbol of New World greatness as the steamboat, thousand-mile-long railroads, and ten different churches in a two-year-old town. A cartoonist of the Gilded Age depicted shriveled “Count Ostend” shrinking sourly in the presence of a “Mr. American Oyster” who was as fat as Diamond Jim Brady and beamed like a successful traveling salesman.

Diamond Jim was not the all-time champion oyster

glutton. That distinction seems to belong to the Emperor Vitellius who, it was said, ate a thousand at a sitting. The modern record is held by Vernon Bass, competing in a contest at Waif’s Fish Market in Sarasota, Florida, in November, 1975. Bass downed 588 oysters in 17 minutes and 32 seconds.

But such heroic sprints are somehow less inspiring than the long-distance, amateur careers of Diamond Jim and his long-time friend, Lillian Russell. Jim restrained himself at breakfast. He ate no oysters, that is. But as a late-morning snack throughout his life, including holidays spent at the seashore during non-”r” months, he swallowed two or three dozen oysters and clams. More oysters preceded his lunch, and he downed another dozen for an afternoon snack, then ate some with his dinner. If he were supping that midnight, as he was inclined to do, he swallowed a few dozen more.

As for Miss Russell, she could never quite keep up with Jim. But he always said that “for a woman, Nell done damn well,” maybe two dozen to Jim’s three.

The bulk of these two enthusiasts must not, however, be blamed on Bluepoints. Prodigious feats of oyster consumption were possible because oysters are as much as 89 per cent water. There are only about seven calories in the most colossal C. virginica . Eating a hundred is scarcely more filling than drinking a quart of beer.

The striking fact about oysters in Diamond Jim’s time was not, however, that a big spender could indulge himself so, nor that, in 1889, genius guided the hand of New Orleans’ Antoine Alciatore to bake oysters with eighteen other ingredients (celery, shallots, chervil, tarragon, Tabasco, anise, and Herbsaint among others: the restaurant will name the fixings, but not the proportions or the procedure) to create Huitres en coquilles àla Rockefeller , Oysters Rockefeller, perhaps the single greatest American contribution to haute cuisine .

The most striking fact was that, as Dickens observed, oysters and poverty still went together. They were cheap. Oysters were a workingman’s staple. The “oyster house” was a social institution of the urban Irish as sacred as church and saloon, and the latter was likely to have oysters too. A laborer could lunch for pennies on a plate for which an American today would pay five dollars and up. The “Canal Street Plan,” observed in Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore as well as in New York, advertised “all you can eat” for six cents (although it generally was assumed that the management would discourage excessive appetites by dipping into a hidden bin stocked with spoiled C. virginicas ). In New Orleans the oyster “po’ boy,” fried oysters stuffed into a buttered loaf of bread, was nicknamed the “peacemaker": the workman who had lingered too long at his saloon, and perhaps overspent his allowance, bought one to ease his readmission to the domestic hearth.

The workingman’s

oyster bar was no Waldorf. There were no “plates” at all. The happy connoisseur stepped up to a marble counter with his mug of lager and nodded a taciturn shucker into action as one starts a race. Faster than the customer could swallow them whole, a good shucker pried the sheik open with a heavy knife and placed them on the cool slab. The documented record for opening oysters is 100 in 3 minutes, 1 second. When the customer had had his fill, he signaled again and the shells were stacked, counted (by the dozen), and the bill rendered. Because the purist ate his oyster not only raw, but alive, the sadistic but poetic legend was often posted on the wall describing how, as the oyster died from attack by gastric juices in “exquisite agony,” it emitted a long, unheard, metaphysical scream.

In New Orleans, and here and there elsewhere, as in the Grand Central Station Oyster Bar and Restaurant in New York City, a semblance of the old institution survives. But the golden age of the oyster is gone. Just about the time that the gaslights were dimmed for the last time, the oyster retreated too, until, today, he is something like the gas lamps that urban redevelopers install on “pedestrian malls,” a bauble of the nostalgia boom accessible principally to the affluent.

It is a matter of supply. In 1850, the Mid-Atlantic and Chesapeake states alone recorded a catch of 145,000,000 pounds of oyster meat (shells excluded). In 1901 this had declined to 111,000,000, to 45,000,000 in 1935, 28,000,000 in 1960, and 26,000,000 in 1970. These figures work out to a national oyster feast on Chesapeakes alone in 1850 of six pounds, six ounces for every American man, woman, and child; by 1977 the catch amounted to a paltry six ounces per person, not much more than a middling Lynnhaven on the half shell.

Nature did its part in this dirty work. The oyster has plenty of natural enemies. Oyster drills, a kind of snail, can wreak amazing havoc on a bed. A single starfish can consume fifty oysters in a week. In 1958, perhaps 95 per cent of the oysters in Long Island Sound were wiped out by a starfish invasion, and the Grand Central Oyster Bar and Restaurant was obliged to announce, with a fitting air of regional disgrace, that Chesapeakes would be served during the shortage. A blight called MSX, “multinucleate sphere X,” destroyed the Delaware Bay beds between 1956 and 1959 and menaced the Chesapeake. “MSX has finished us down here,” an oysterman on the lower bay said, “just as sure as go-to-be-hung.” Hurricanes suffocate C. virginica by the millions in stormy years.

And these are all natural hazards, quite apart from the works of man. The bon secours of Mobile Bay have been just about extinguished in recent years by industrial pollution, and any hopes for the recovery of Delaware Bay are precluded

by the same modern hex. The sunbelt construction boom of the 1960's and 1970's appears to have doomed Galveston Bay oysters as their cultch (old shells) is scraped up by the megaton for manufacture into concrete, plate glass, and aluminum (and textiles, dry ice, soap, fertilizer, magnesium, and chicken feed). The universally honored small oysters of Yaquina Bay, Oregon, are no longer to be found in regional restaurants, the victim of “high mortalities from unknown sources” under study at Oregon State University.

But the major source of the oyster lover’s despair has been his own gluttony. So prodigious was it even in the colonial period that New York and New Jersey assemblies enacted conservationist laws in the seventeenth century. Several other colonial legislatures followed suit before the Revolution. The fabled Wellfleets temporarily disappeared before 1775. Local gourmands attributed the tragedy to a quarrel among oystermen, rather than to their intemperance at table. In fact, New England beds were so mercilessly raked over by the early nineteenth century that New England schooners began harvesting spats (seed oysters) from Long Island Sound and, later, the Chesapeake, for transplanting in their home waters. By the time of the Civil War, 650,000 bushels of seed oysters were carried annually from Maryland and Virginia to the North, but there was no tempering Puritan lust. They ate the transplanted three- and four-year-old “oysterlings” before the C. virginicas were fairly able to reproduce themselves. The New England beds never recovered.

But the Yankee foragers had demonstrated to the watermen of the Chesapeake that there was a demand for their oysters beyond the nearby plantations. “Foreign” oystermen were banned from the Bay, and New Englanders, New Yorkers, and the whole country were put on notice that, henceforth, they would buy their prizes from Virginia and Maryland. They were willing. In 1867, Northern capital financed a spur of the New York, Philadelphia, and Norfolk Railroad out the Anemessex peninsula on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Its sole purpose was to reach the town of Crisfield, the sleepy marketing center of the Maryland watermen. Although the Anemessex line had a modest aim, it presented its own engineering problems. The last quarter mile to Crisfield consisted of tidal marsh and open water, and constructing the trestle over it took a year to complete. It was a temporary expedient. Shells from Crisfield’s processing sheds were dumped into the swamp so that, after a few years, the tracks ran on a solid pearly grade. Crisfield itself is built on the remains of countless generations of C. virginicas. Several downtown blocks are six feet higher than they were in 1867.

Although Maryland and Virginia oystermen acted together to expel the Yankee oystermen from their beds, they soon turned against one another. Actually, the “civil war” between the two states can be dated all the way back to 1632, when Charles I failed to draw the water boundary between Maryland and Virginia at the

thalweg , or deepest part of the channel, as was the common practice. Rather, he decreed the border on the Potomac and other parts of the great estuary to be the highwater mark on the Virginia side. As might be expected, this annoyed Virginians, but not until the commercial oyster boom of the mid-nineteenth century did it cause undue violence. Then, the ancient charter had the effect of granting to Maryland practically all the Bay’s highly marketable oysters.

The “Jenkins Award” of 1877 transferred 23,000 acres of prime bottom to Virginia. (Today, 985 square miles of Chesapeake Bay are in Virginia, 703 in Maryland.) But the mischief was done. Maryland’s Smith’s Islanders especially refused to accept the Jenkins decision; their best beds were over the thalweg . The result was a shooting war until 1910, when the disputed beds finally played out. At least fifty men are known to have been killed between 1860 and 1890, another fifty wounded, and the actual figures are likely much higher. Fortunately, although both sides regularly employed artillery as well as small arms, the oystermen were not sharpshooters. As Harper’s Weekly observed in 1894, “They have fired abundantly, but not accurately, and enough lead has been wasted to supply sinkers for all the fishing lines along the Atlantic Coast.”

The hostilities were complicated by the fact that Marylander not only fought Virginian over territory, but tonger also fought dredger over methods of collecting the catch regardless of state allegiance. “Tonging” is the older and simpler method of oyster gathering. Working in a vessel which can be as small as a canoe, the oysterman pinches the oysters from their rocky moorings with a pair of hinged intersecting iron or steel rakes on the end of two long wooden handles. The tonger has several sets of his tools and usually works in a maximum of twenty feet of water (although tongs with forty-foot poles are still in use).

However, the best beds are at just these depths and, by the late nineteenth century, the conservation-minded Maryland legislature had reserved the prime areas for the tongers. Dredging—dragging a toothed scoop to which is affixed a sack made of chain—was banished to the less accessible, less productive bottoms. It is, of course, far more efficient than tonging and, in being so, is also more destructive. Those beds it does not scrape bare it disturbs and often ruins.

A complicated regulatory code had been enacted practically as soon as Maryland (and later Virginia) appreciated the economic value of the Chesapeake oysters. According to a scholarly study, the typical waterman, however, was “fanatical in his belief that the oyster, as a product of nature, is not amenable to such laws as apply to other kinds of food or property. ” So, in order to enforce its laws, Maryland in 1868 established the “State Fishery Force” or, as it was dubbed even in government documents, the “Oyster Navy.”