Courtesy Mariners Museum
An 18th century plan of a solar-evaporating works. Sea water is channeled into the primary reservoir (DD), from which it is conducted to (FFF) and (KKK) by progressive stages to the final basins where it crystallizes.
The kernel of the situation was reflected by the Dutch traveler, David De Vries, who made voyages to America from 1632 to 1644:
In going down to Jamestown on board of a sloop, a sturgeon sprang out of the river, into the sloop. We killed it, and it was eight feet long. This river is full of sturgeon, as also are the two rivers of New Netherland. When the English first began to plant their Colony here, there came an English ship from England for the purpose of fishing for sturgeon; but they found that this fishery would not answer, because it is so hot in summer, which is the best time for fishing, that the salt or pickle would not keep them as in Muscovy whence the English obtain many sturgeon and where the climate is colder than in the Virginias.
The effects of the Virginians' favoring tobacco-growing above fishing were also noted by De Vries on a visit to Canada:
Besides my vessel [at Newfoundland] there was a small boat of fifty or sixty lasts [110 tons], with six guns, which had come out of the Virginias with tobacco, in order to exchange the tobacco for fish.
A rather aggrieved reaction to the tales of abundant natural resources in Virginia is contained in this letter from one Tho. Niccolls to Sir Jo. Worstenholme in London in 1623:
If the Company would allow to each man a pound of butter and a portion of cheese weekly, they would find more comfort therein then by all the deer, fish, and fowl [that] is so talked of in England, of which, I can assure you, your poor servants have not had so much as the scent since their coming into the country.
To prevent profiteering in Canadian fish the Virginia authorities had set the selling prices: