The Indian invention of weirs in fishing is mightily improved by the English, besides which, they make use of seines, trolls, casting nets, setting nets, hand fishing and angling and in each find abundance of diversion. I have sat in the shade at the heads of the rivers angling and spent as much time in taking the fish off the hook as in waiting for their taking it. Like those of the Euxine Sea, they also fish with spilyards which is a long line staked out in the river and hung with a great many hooks on short strings, fastened to the main line, about four foot asunder. The only difference is that our line is supported by stakes and theirs is buoyed up with gourds.
The abundance of the fisheries never ceased impressing visitors. A French tourist added to the chorus in 1687:
Fish too is wonderfully plentiful. There are so many shell oysters that almost every Saturday my host craved them. He had only to send one of his servants in one of the small boats and two hours after ebb tide he brought it back full. These boats, made of a single tree hollowed in the middle, can hold as many as fourteen people and twenty-five hundredweight of merchandise.
As if to crown the final emergence of recognition of the home fisheries William Byrd I instructed his agent in Boston in 1689 to send him a variety of commodities in return for a bill of exchange but no salt fish:
By the advice of my friend, Captain Peter Perry, I made bold to give you the trouble of a letter of the 1st instant with two small bills of exchange which I desired you to receive and return the effects to me in the upper part of James River, either in rum, sugar, Madeira wine, turnery, earthenware, or anything else you may judge convenient to this country (fish excepted)....
Evidently at least some good salt was now at hand to preserve the roe herring that choked the rivers and creeks in the spring. The salt-herring breakfast was on its way to becoming a Virginia institution, and the salt-fish monopolies of New England and Canada were cracking after three-quarters of a century.
The score of "firsts" in the Virginia fishery world have been noted as they occurred. Among them were the first fishery statistics, the first licensing law, the first price control, the first diamond-back terrapin, the first conservation measures. And now in 1698 there was the first agitation against polluted waters:
We, the Council and Burgesses of the present General Assembly, being sensible to the great mischiefs and inconveniences that accrue to the inhabitants of this, his Majesty's Colony and Dominion of Virginia, by killing of whales within the capes thereof, in all humility take leave to represent the same unto Your Excellency and withal to acquaint you that by the means thereof great quantities of fish are poisoned and destroyed and the rivers also made noisome and offensive. For prevention of which evils in regard the restraint of the killing of whales is a branch of His Majesty's royal prerogative.
We humbly pray that Your Excellency [the Governor, Francis Nicholson] will be pleased to issue out a proclamation forbidding all persons whatsoever to strike or kill any whales within the bay of Chesapeake in the limits of Virginia which we hope will prove an effectual means to prevent the many evils that arise therefrom.
As Jamestown reached the end of its span, the fisheries came of age. Inequities were being ironed out, methods were being perfected, and planners were at work on ways of employing more and more of the fast-growing population in searching out and making available the bounty of the fair Chesapeake.