WHITSTABLE: THE OLD LIGHTHOUSE AND THE OYSTER FLEET.
The natural history of the oyster is interesting. There is, for one thing, no “race-suicide” about what would-be eloquent journalists were once used to term the “succulent bivalve,” for it has been estimated that each oyster produces 276,000 little ones. It will thus be readily supposed that it takes all the efforts of the busy dredgers to prevent over-population. But the oyster has many enemies, from his birth upwards. Beginning as “spat,” or spawn, in June or July, the young swim about for a while, a prey for everything else that swims. They then settle down to grow shells, at the rate of one inch in diameter every year, for three years, after which the growth is slower. Meanwhile, sand, mud, and weeds, but especially crabs and starfish, slay the oysters in hundreds of thousands; and frosts often cause great havoc, that in the winter of 1890–91 being responsible for £15,000 damage. But the starfish is the oyster’s worst enemy. He spreads two or three of his arms over the upper shell of the oyster and places the others firmly on the ground, his position being such that his central orifice, or mouth, is at the edge of the shell at the point farthest from the hinge. Then he applies a steady pull. In course of time the oyster gets tired, his big muscle gradually relaxes, and the shell reluctantly opens. The rest is silence.
Thus it happens that the oyster-fishers regard the starfish with the bitterest hatred. It is probably the worst feeling these burly, genial, jerseyed fellows entertain; for they don’t really dislike the person who doesn’t eat oysters. Him they regard merely with a half-amused, half-pitying contempt. Always, of course, excepting oyster-poachers, against whom no law can, of course, be sufficiently severe. To deal with the poachers who come out at night to dredge in the preserves of the fishermen who, after ages of oyster-culture, were incorporated by Act of Parliament into the Corporation of Free Dredgers, in 1793, and have in latter years converted themselves into the “Whitstable Oyster Fishery Company,” there are guard-boats always at hand, and, should they not be sufficient, there are artful contrivances laid upon the sea-bed, called “the creeps.” These consist of chains with barbed grapnels attached at intervals, which intercept and destroy the dredge-nets of these illegal dredgers.
There are not many prettier sights than that of the oyster-fleet, on a sunny day; the red-brown sails of the ten- to twenty-ton yawls going in stately procession over these shallow waters. They come back with uncounted millions of “brood” for laying down in this restricted pasture off Whitstable, or with mature oysters for the markets. In the season, which extends by Act of Parliament from August 5th to May 14th, as many as 200,000 “natives” are despatched from Whitstable in a day; and great is the activity to be observed here in that time, on the foreshore, and in the wooden shanties where they are scrubbed clean and packed carefully in barrels. Be sure, the Whitstable folk will impress upon you that there is no competition possible with the local specialty.
Surely he must have been one of these local patriots who originally propounded this excruciating conundrum: “What is the difference between a Whitstable oyster and a bad one?” the answer being, “One is a native, the other a settler!”
A pretty, pretty wit!
Among other efforts on this subject this may be recalled: “Why is an oyster the greatest curiosity in the world?” “Because you have to take it out of its bed before you can tuck it in.”
One quaint old feature of Whitstable beach is the unconventional lighthouse, cobbled up out of some old copperas-works. It makes not a bad picture, looking out across the Swale, with the cliffs of Warden Point beyond, and the oyster-dredging fleet in between. At low water the shallow channel displays a long rocky ridge called the “Street Stones,” supposed to be the remains of a Roman causeway.
At the farther end of Whitstable, and giving character to an otherwise featureless shore, is the wooded bluff of Tankerton, the growing residential suburb that Whitstable is at last throwing off. New roads strike through it, and there are fond hopes that the place will become a great seaside resort; but it has hitherto been slow in developing. Meanwhile, the cliff-top—a very modest cliff-top though it be—affords the best view of the “Street Stones” and of the crowded flotilla of the oyster-fleet. The coast-line through the hamlet of Swalecliffe, and on to and through Herne Bay, is protected from wastage by the sea by serried ranks of closely-set wooden groynes, erected in the shingle at enormous expense and looking, in the long perspective, like gigantic combs.