August. Each Wednesday and Saturday, we dine on fish all the summer, always plenty of rock, perch, and crabs, and often sheepshead and trout.
September. We dined on fish and crabs, which were provided for our company, tomorrow being fish day.
September. Dined on fish,—rock, perch, fine crabs, and a large fresh mackerel.
I was invited this morning by Captain Tibbs to a barbecue. This differs but little from the fish feasts, instead of fish the dinner is roasted pig, with the proper appendages, but the diversion and exercise are the very same at both.
An English traveler in 1759, Andrew Burnaby, registered his wonder at the way fish were taken in the reaches of the Chesapeake:
Sturgeon and shad are in such prodigious numbers [in Chesapeake Bay] that one day within the space of two miles only, some gentlemen in canoes caught above six hundred of the former with hooks, which they let down to the bottom and drew up at a venture when they perceived them to rub against a fish; and of the latter above five thousand have been caught at one single haul of the seine.
The "gentlemen" concerned were obviously not slaves serving the needs of a plantation, but, judging from the amount caught, expert commercial fishermen. The sturgeon, after the roe was removed, were stacked in carts and peddled in nearby towns. The shad, after as many as possible were sold fresh, were salted down.
The snagging of big sturgeon as recounted by the French traveler François J. de Chastellux in 1781 remained in common practice into the 20th Century, when the big ones became much scarcer:
As I was walking by the river side [James near Westover], I saw two negroes carrying an immense sturgeon, and on asking them how they had taken it, they told me that at this season they were so common as to be taken easily in a seine and that fifteen or twenty were found sometimes in the net; but that there was a much more simple method of taking them, which they had just been using. This species of monster, which are so active in the evening as to be perpetually leaping to a great height above the surface of the water, usually sleep profoundly at mid-day. Two or three negroes then proceed in a little boat, furnished with a long cord at the end of which is a sharp iron crook, which they hold suspended like a log line. As soon as they find this line stopped by some obstacle, they draw it forcibly towards them so as to strike the hook into the sturgeon, which they either drag out of the water, or which, after some struggling and losing all his blood, floats at length upon the surface and is easily taken.
The frequently met-with term, "fishery," in Colonial writings took on a special meaning as the industry developed. It was used in the sense of what the present Virginia lawbook calls a "regularly hauled fishing landing."