The Harvest of the Sea / A contribution to the natural and economic history of the British food fishes

by James Glass Bertram

In all countries there are records of the excessive fondness of great men for oysters. Cervantes was an oyster-lover, and he satirised the oyster-dealers of Spain. Louis XI., careful lest scholarship should become deficient in France, feasted the learned doctors of the Sorbonne, once a year, on oysters; and another Louis invested his cook with an order of nobility as a reward for his oyster-cookery. Napoleon, also, was an oyster-lover; so was Rousseau; and Marshall Turgot used to eat a hundred or two, just to whet his appetite for breakfast. Invitations to a dish of oysters were common in the literary and artistic circles of Paris at the latter end of last century. The Encyclopedists were particularly fond of oysters. Helvetius, Diderot, the Abbé Raynal, Voltaire, and others, were confirmed oyster-men. Before the Revolution, the violent politicians were in the habit of constantly frequenting the Parisian oyster-shops; and Danton, Robespierre, and others, were fond of the oyster in their days of innocence. The great Napoleon, on the eve of his battles, used to partake of the bivalve; and Cambaceres was famous for his shell-fish banquets. Even at this day the consumption of oysters in Paris is enormous. According to recent statistics the quantity eaten there is one million per day!

Among our British celebrities, Alexander Pope was an oyster-eater of taste, and so was Dean Swift, who was fond of lobsters as well. Thomson, of The Seasons, who knew all good things, knew how good a thing an oyster was. The learned Dr. Richard Bentley could never pass an oyster-shop without having a few; and there have been hundreds of subsequent Englishmen who, without coming up to Bentley in other respects, have resembled him in this. The Scottish philosophers, too, of the last century—Hume, Dugald Stewart, Cullen, etc.—used frequently to indulge in the “whiskered pandores” of their day and generation. “Oyster-ploys,” as they were called, were frequently held in the quaint and dingy taverns of the Old Town of Edinburgh. These Edinburgh oyster-taverns of the olden time were usually situated underground, in the cellar-floor; and, even in the course of the long winter evenings, the carriages of the quality folks would be found rattling up, and setting down fashionable ladies, to partake of oysters and porter, plenteously but rudely served. What oysters have been to the intellect of Edinburgh in later times, who needs to be told that has heard of Christopher North and read the Noctes Ambrosianæ?

The Americans become still more social over their oysters than we do, and their extensive seabord affords them a very large supply, although I regret to learn that, in consequence of overfishing and of carrying away the fish at improper seasons, the oyster-banks of that great country are in danger of becoming exhausted. In City Island the whole population participates in the oyster-trade, and there is an oyster-bed in Long Island Sound which is 115 miles long.

The oyster can be cooked in many ways, but the pure animal is the best of all, and gulping him up in his own juice is the best way to eat him. The oyster, I maintain, may be eaten raw, day by day, every day of the 214 days that it is in season, and never do hurt. It never produces indigestion—never does the flavour pall. The man who ends the day with an oyster in his mouth rises with a clean tongue in the morning, and a clear head as well.

The secret of there being only a holding-on place required for the spat of the oyster to insure an immensely-increased supply having been penetrated by the French people—and no doubt they are in some degree indebted to our oyster-beds on the Colne and at Whitstable for their idea—the plan of systematic oyster-culture was easy enough, as I will immediately show. A few initiatory experiments, in fact, speedily settled that oysters could be grown in any quantity. Strong pillars of wood were driven into the mud and sand; arms were added; the whole was interlaced with branches of trees, and various boughs besides were hung over the beds on ropes and chains, whilst others were sunk in the water and kept down by a weight. A few boat-loads of oysters being laid down, the spat had no distance to travel in search of a home, but found a resting-place almost at the moment of being exuded; and, as the fairy legends say, “it grew and it grew,” till, in the fulness of time, it became a marketable commodity.

But the history of this modern phase of oyster-farming, as practised on the foreshores of France, is so interesting as to demand at my hands a rather detailed notice, for it is one of the most noteworthy circumstances connected with the revived art of fish-culture, that it has resulted in placing upon the shores of France upwards of 7000 fish-farms for the cultivation of the oyster alone.

It is no exaggeration to say, that about fifteen years ago there was scarcely an oyster of native growth in France; the beds—and I cite the case of France as a warning to people at home, I mean as regards our Scottish oyster-beds—had become so exhausted from overdredging as to be unproductive, so far as their money value was concerned, and to be totally unable to recover themselves so far as their power of reproductiveness was at stake. And the people were consequently in despair at the loss of this favourite adjunct of their banquets, and had to resort to other countries for such small supplies as they could obtain. As an illustration of the overdredging that had prevailed, it may be stated that oyster-farms which formerly employed 1400 men, with 200 boats, and yielded an annual revenue of 400,000 francs, had become so reduced as to require only 100 men and 20 boats. Places where at one time there had been as many as fifteen oyster-banks, and great prosperity among the fisher class, had become, at the period I allude to, almost oysterless. St. Brieuc, Rochelle, Marennes, Rochefort, etc., had all suffered so much that those interested in the fisheries were no longer able to stock the beds, thus proving that, notwithstanding the great fecundity of these sea animals, it is quite possible to overfish them, and thoroughly exhaust their reproductive power. It was under these circumstances that M. Coste instituted that plan of oyster-culture which has been so much noticed of late in the scientific journals, and which appears to have been inspired by the plan of the mussel-farms in the Bay of Aiguillon, and the oyster-parcs of Lake Fusaro, so far at least as the principle of cultivation is concerned. At the instigation of the French Government, he made a voyage of exploration round the coasts of France and Italy, in order to inquire into the condition of the sea-fisheries, which were, it was thought, in a declining condition. It was his “mission,” and he fulfilled it very well, to see how these marine fisheries could be artificially aided, as the fresh-water fisheries had been aided through the rediscovery by Joseph Remy of the long-forgotten plan of pisciculture, as already detailed in a preceding portion of this work.

The breeding of oysters was a business pursued with great assiduity during what I have called the gastronomic age of Italy, the period when Lucullus kept a stock of fish valued at £50,000 sterling, and Sergius Orata invented the art of oyster-culture. There is not a great deal known about this ancient gentleman, except that he was an epicure of most refined taste (the “master of luxury” he was called in his own day), and some writers of the period thought him a very greedy person, a kind of dealer in shell-fish. It was thought also that he was a housebroker or person who bought or built houses, and having improved them, sold them to considerable advantage. He received, however, an excellent character, while standing his trial for using the public waters of Lake Lucrinus for his own private use, from his advocate Licinus Crassus, who said that the revenue officer who prevented Orata was mistaken if he thought that gentleman would dispense with his oysters, even if he was driven from the Lake of Lucrinus, for, rather than not enjoy his molluscous luxury, he would grow them on the tops of his houses.

Lake Fusaro, of which I give a kind of bird’s-eye view, is highly interesting to all who take an interest in the prosperity of the fisheries, as the first seat of oyster-culture. It is the Avernus of Virgil, and is a black volcanic-looking pool of water, about a league in circumference, which lies between the site of the Lucrine Lake—the lake used by Orata—and the ruins of the town of Cumæ. It is still extant, being even now, as I have said, devoted to the highly profitable art of oyster-farming, yielding, as has often been published, from this source an annual revenue of about £1200. This classic sheet of water was at one time surrounded by the villas of the wealthy Italians, who frequented the place for the joint benefit of the sea-water baths and the shell-fish commissariat, which had been established in the two lakes (Avernus and Lucrine). The place, which, before then, was overshadowed by thick plantations, had been consecrated by the superstitious to the use of the infernal gods.