The British did not introduce a law determining a closed season for oysters until over 100 years later – during the 1840s, which was a decade of economic depression and widespread famine in England, Scotland and Ireland. Again the overt motive of this legislation may have been to protect oyster supplies from over-farming, but it is clear that the legislation was also about relations and disputes between Britain and France in the years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The law of 1843 determined a closed season for oyster fishing and dictated that no boat in the English Channel should carry any dredge or other equipment for catching oysters, but it also stipulated that the fishermen of each nation should not fish within three miles of the coast of the other nation. However, the British government rarely enforced this law as far as British fishermen were concerned.
Despite the existence of laws, policing oyster-beds is almost impossible when the beds are invisible beneath the water. Before the availability of instruments that measured latitude and longitude, the boundaries of oyster and fishing grounds were fixed in relation to natural features on the land as this seventeenth-century Whitstable document reveals:
The fishing begins East from an oak called Scott’s Oak in Clowe’s Wood upon Rayham Trees, in the Stream so far off as Blackbourne’s House, a sail’s breadth in Shelness on Sheppey, and as far West in the same Stream as Scott’s Oak upon Whitstable Church.6
In the nineteenth century the increase in demand for oysters caused ferocious disputes to break out between oyster fishermen of different villages. It was not now enough to claim that a tree in the distance was a marking post between one bed and another.
Oyster boats on the Firth of Forth, Scotland, 1900.
Oyster-dredging on the Firth of Forth in the nineteenth century is a good example of the violence of such disputes over oyster-bed boundaries. Charles Darwin enrolled as a student at the Medical Faculty of Edinburgh in 1825 when he was 16 years old. Developing an interest in the anatomy of sea creatures that would eventually lead to the beginnings of his theory on natural selection, Darwin often sailed out with the oyster men from Newhaven, a village a mile or so along the coast from Leith, Edinburgh’s port. The oyster boats were small and carried four men who left at daybreak and rowed and dredged all day, singing fishing shanties to set the pace of their oars. But this was a dangerous occupation in the 1820s, Darwin recorded, for with no demarcations on the sea in the Firth of Forth to mark the end of one bed and the beginning of another, disputes often broke out between the oyster dredgers of Newhaven and those of Prestonpans. There was much at stake: 30 million oysters a year were dredged up from the Firth of Forth. Sometimes a Prestonpans boat would capture a Newhaven boat or vice versa, board it and run it ashore. Curiosity and the opportunity to study rare sea creatures dredged up from the Firth of Forth motivated the young medical student to overcome both his fear of oyster piracy and his severe seasickness.7
These disputes on the Firth of Forth continued throughout the century, long after Darwin had left, as oyster demand remained high. In 1870, when some Brightlingsea smacks sailed to the Firth of Forth to dredge for oysters, the Firth fishermen attacked them with boats laden with stones. The Brightlingsea men had to sleep under police protection, armed with hatchets and pokers, and finally a gunboat was dispatched to restore order.
But the most famous dispute over oyster-bed boundaries broke out in Chesapeake Bay in the United States. There had been oyster disputes there for two centuries between the local fishermen and poachers because of disagreements over titles between the states of Maryland and Virginia: Virginia owned part of the Bay, but Maryland owned the entire Potomac River, and there had been bitter rivalry between the oyster police of the two states. In 1959 a poacher called Berkeley Muse was killed in a blaze of gunfire from an oyster patrol boat. After that death the two states passed an act establishing a joint Potomac River Fisheries Commission, signed by President Kennedy in 1962, which created a bi-state commission to govern the river.
Poachers at Chesapeake Bay dredging oysters at night, from Harper’s Weekly, late 19th century.
In Britain, as oyster production continued to decline, the government established a Royal Commission on Sea Fisheries in 1863 with only three members, T. H. Huxley, G. Shaw Lefevre, and James Caird. This led to the establishment of new laws in 1866 and 1867 through which almost all public regulation of the oyster fisheries was abolished. A system of private enclosure was introduced in the hope that more private control would result in the production of more oysters. When oyster production continued to decline, a Select Committee was established in 1876 that found, of course, that over-dredging was still the cause. A witness who reported to the Select Committee described what had happened when a new bed was found on the Whitstable Flats:
A Victorian era cartoon after Charles Keane from Punch.
Within 48 hours of that fishery being discovered, I counted, I think it was, 75 boats upon this one little spot. I went there myself; it was quite a narrow limit, about 30 yards long and 10 broad, and upon this I dredged. The boats were jammed together. You went up and down with boats on each side touching.8
But during the 1860s the price began to rise. By 1865 the price of natives was between 50 pence and 75 pence per oyster in modern terms and, by 1889, closer to £2 each. Oyster production had collapsed. On 15 October 1867 The Times lamented the results of such over fishing:
From prehistoric man to August, 1864, is a long stretch of time – ‘from July to eternity’, the Americans are wont to say when they speak of such intervals. And what has been done in that period? Why, all the Oysters in the sea, or at least in our seas, have been eaten up. There are no longer as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. The Oysters are gone and no wonder . . .
The fact is that a wild Oyster has become pretty well as rare as a wild horse. We are obliged to economise what stock we have got, and breed a supply for ourselves – no easy matter. An Oyster takes three times as long to grow as a sheep. The creature must actually be four years old before he is fit for the table, whereas we can get very good mutton now-a-days in thirteen months . . .
Our fishermen, French and English between them, have cleared the bottom of the sea out . . . It is the old story of the salmon fisheries over again, with this aggravation, – that the Oysters cannot run away from their destroyers, nor be induced to come back again when the persecution is over.
This sense of scandal at human greed and exploitation of natural resources must also have been behind Lewis Carroll’s famous poem ‘The Walrus and The Carpenter’, written for Alice Through the Looking-Glass and published only four years later, in 1871.9 The young oysters are lured from the sea onto the beach by the charms of the walrus and the carpenter and then eaten by the two gluttonous epicures (once again, both are men):
‘O Oysters, come and walk with us!’
The Walrus did beseech.
‘A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
Along the briny beach:
We cannot do with more than four,
To give a hand to each.’
The eldest Oyster looked at him.
But never a word he said:
The eldest Oyster winked his eye,
And shook his heavy head –
Meaning to say he did not choose
To leave the oyster-bed.
But four young oysters hurried up,
All eager for the treat:
Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,
Their shoes were clean and neat –
And this was odd, because, you know,
They hadn’t any feet.
The Walrus lures the oysters not only with charm but with the wit of his conversation: ‘The time has come, the Walrus said/To talk of many things./Of shoes – and ships – and sealing wax – / And cabbages – and kings –’. When the time comes for the oyster feast the Walrus is contrite, but not contrite enough to abstain from eating the young oysters:
John Tenniel, illustration for Lewis Carroll’s poe
m, ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’. In a later version of the poem in operatic form the oysters rise up and take their revenge.
‘I weep for you,’ the Walrus said.
‘I deeply sympathize.’
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size.
Holding his pocket handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.
‘O Oysters,’ said the Carpenter.
‘You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?’
But answer came there none –
And that was scarcely odd, because
They’d eaten every one.
When Alice discusses the poem with Tweedledee and Tweedledum – a mock heroic argument about whether the walrus or the carpenter is the better person – her dilemma concerns having to choose between judging a person in terms of his acts or his intentions. She remembers that the carpenter ate fewer oysters, but the walrus ate his larger share with remorse.10 How to weigh one against the other?
Interestingly, when Henry Savile Clarke reworked ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ into an operetta in 1886 called Alice in Wonderland: A Dream Play for Children in Two Acts, with music composed (appropriately enough) by a composer called Walter Slaughter, Carroll suggested changing the ending so that the oysters could have their revenge. Whilst the Walrus and the Carpenter, engorged from their oyster feast, sleep on the sand, the ghosts of the oysters rise up. The ghost of the second oyster dances a horn-pipe and sings:
O woeful, weeping Walrus, your tears are all a sham!
You’re greedier for Oysters than children are for jam.
You like to have an Oyster to give the meal a zest –
Excuse me, wicked Walrus, for stamping on your chest!
For stamping on your chest!
For stamping on your chest!
For stamping on your chest!
Excuse me, wicked Walrus, for stamping on your chest!
The oyster uprising brought the audiences to their feet, cheering. This was clearly both a class act and a gastronomic one. The oyster gluttons had received their comeuppance. The enthusiasm of the crowd for the oyster uprising is not surprising, for the 1880s were a decade of marked anti-aristocratic feeling and of organized working-class protest. In 1885 the journalist W. T. Stead had led a passionate newspaper campaign in the Pall Mall Gazette drawing attention to the prostitution of children in London, portraying the aristocratic clients in search of under-age virgins as monsters feeding on the daughters of the poor. In 1888 the Bryant & May match-girls came out on strike, supported by radical journalists and suffragettes who called their employment a ‘white slave trade’ and portrayed their employers as greedy exploiters of the urban poor. There are countless other examples of the demonization of sexual and capitalist greed in the 1880s in political invective, speeches, journalism and in poetry and literature. Carroll saw the opportunity of turning his tale of epicurean greed into a parable of class conflict in which the oysters, though dead, were given a chance to act out the revenge of the repressed.
Greed, then, in relation to oysters is largely relative. In the eighteenth century stories about animal oyster eaters may have been used as warnings about greed, but by the middle of the nineteenth century human oyster gluttons acquired a legendary character coming to represent a flamboyantly lawless epicureanism. By the 1880s, when anti-aristocratic feeling and protestations about the exploitation of the weak by the rich and powerful converged with new ideas about the conservation of natural resources, the oyster glutton of Carroll’s operetta was now to be punished by the ghost victims of his greed. By this point the oyster-beds of Europe were perceived to be almost beyond rescue, depleted by over-farming and by greed.
Oyster-eating competitions are still held as the jewels in the crown of oyster festivals around the world. The oyster festival and oyster-eating competition has its roots in the nineteenth-century when the restrictions on oyster selling were lifted at the start of the season on 1 September, and epicures mobbed oyster sellers at their stalls. In truly Dionysiac and carnivalesque spirit, excessive consumption of wine or oysters temporarily replaces the usual restraints and moral imperatives and etiquette about food consumption within daily life. Oyster eating competitors, still largely male, gorge on sweet oyster flesh washed down by wine in marquees or town halls across America, Britain, France, South Africa, China and India. New competitions have emerged recently, however, in which paired (usually male–female) entrants compete as one partner opens the shells and passes the oyster flesh into the open mouth of his or her blindfolded companion.
A 1950s Guinness advertisement. Its reference to ‘going native’ plays on flat oysters or ‘natives’, which were, of course, produced on Irish shores. It also implies a barbarism about the eating of oysters that echoes, probably unintentionally, the 19th-century association of Irishness and savagery.
A 1960s US advertisement for Porsche cars. In its implication that oysters are an acquired taste associated with the aristocracy, this ad contrasts interestingly with the Guinness one.
In America and Japan, however, food competitions are not relegated to the marquees of annual festivals, but are held all year round, sponsored and regulated by the supposedly ‘International’ Federation of Competitive Eating. One of its members is Boyd Bulot, a Louisiana self-publicist and professional eating-contest competitor, who travels the world entering hot-dog, burger, matzo ball and oyster-eating competitions. He set a world record at the Acme Oyster House World Oyster Eating Competition in Louisiana in 2003 by swallowing 216 Louisiana oysters in just 10 minutes, beating his main rival, a New Yorker called ‘Crazy Legs’ Conti, who won the Coveted Belt of Oyster Eating Greatness in 2002. ‘And after that I had a seafood platter, French fries and some cheesecake’, Bulot told journalists. Whilst such stories may conform to European social stereotypes about American – and indeed Western capitalist – greed, such stereotypes also gloss over age-old cultural contradictions, for whilst Louisiana is the home of the World Oyster Eating Competition, the state of Louisiana continues to be a leading agency in the conservation of oyster reefs.
5 Oyster Flesh: Desire and Abjection
THE FIRST OYSTER EATER
What might have driven prehistoric woman to prise open a barnacle-encrusted oyster-shell and slip its grey, wet flesh into her mouth? Jonathan Swift listed as a proverbial cliché in ‘Polite Conversation’ (1738) the statement ‘He was a bold man that first did eat an oyster’, but it is a scenario that has taxed food historians and philosophers in a number of musings on the subject. All such meditations start from the assumption that the first oyster eater was a man. John Gay wrote in Trivia; or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London in 1716:
The man had sure a plate covered o’er
With brass or steel, that on the rocky shore
First broke the oozy oyster’s pearly coat
And risked the living morsel down his throat.
And in 1857 the American lawyer and judge James Watson Gerard’s first oyster eaters in his satirical Ostrea; or, the Loves of the Oysters were not prehistoric hunters but ancient epicurean kings:
Was’t Phut, or Peleg, or Shem, or great Magog?
Or lively Nimrod, or perhaps his dog?
Or did the royal lips of great Nebu
Chadnozzor first smack over you;
Ere yet, a ruminant, this stately sinner
Was sent, with cows and goats, to pick his dinner?
Or broiled, or roasted, did thy unctuous savour
Perfume the marble halls of old Belshazzar?
Did Pharoah gulp thee, ‘ere the sea gulped him?
Or Troglodyte, or Scandinavian grim?
Long, long ago.1
When the nineteenth-century popular science writer Louis Figuier, who wrote several pieces speculating on early human life, meditated on the psychology of the first oyster eater in The Ocean World (1868), he portrayed prehistoric man as a romantic outcast, an anti-diluvian
flâneur:
Once upon a time a man of melancholy mood was walking by the shores of a picturesque estuary, listening to the monotonous murmur of the sad sea-waves when he espied a very old and ugly oyster-shell, all coated over with parasites and sea-weeds. It was so unprepossessing that he kicked it with his foot, and the animal astonished at receiving such rude treatment on its own domain, gaped wide with indignation, preparatory to closing its valves still more tightly. Seeing the beautiful cream-coloured layers that shone within the shelly covering, and fancying that the interior of the shell itself must be beautiful, he lifted up the aged native for further examination, inserting his finger and thumb between the valves. The irate mollusc, thinking, no doubt, that this was meant as a further insult, snapped its pearly doors down upon his fingers, causing him considerable pain. After releasing his wounded digits, our inquisitive gentleman very naturally put them in his mouth. ‘Delightful’ exclaimed he, opening wide his eyes. ‘What is this?’ and again he sucked his fingers. Then the great truth flashed on him that he had found out a new delight – had, in fact, achieved the most important discovery ever made . . . and there and then, with no other condiment than its own juice, with no accompaniment of foaming brown stout or pale chablis to wash it down, no newly cut, well-buttered brown bread, did that solitary anonymous man inaugurate the first oyster banquet.2
George Frederick Watts, Experientia Docet: Tasting the First Oyster, 1882–3, oil on canvas.
Speculations about early human life reached a peak in the late nineteenth century, of course, with the impact of geological discoveries, evolutionary theory and advancements in both anthropology and archaeology, and all such speculations are infused with gendered and racial assumptions. In 1882–3 the artist G. F. Watts painted Experientia Docet: Tasting the First Oyster, a large oil painting that portrays a prehistoric man and woman sitting on a sea shore. The man has just opened and swallowed an oyster; his face registers his disquiet; the woman looks on quizzically. Watts, accused in reviews of being too sombre, chose this subject apparently to show he could handle lighter subjects, but it is difficult to see the humour here. Is it a failed meditation on the nature of desire or does Watts play on the oyster as a fruit de mer, a marine version of the apple that so tempted Eve? Here it is Adam and not Eve who tastes the first fruit.
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