by Craig Welch
No sooner had the naturalists stashed their wares below deck than the vessels’ sailors began swiping the most interesting finds as keepsakes. The ships sailed back east where the precursor of the Smithsonian Institution would ultimately hold the remaining specimens. After their arrival, the collections were ransacked again. “I am ashamed to record the fact that when the boxes and packages were placed in charge of the National Institution, the seals were broken and a general scramble for curiosities took place,” Titian Ramsay Peale wrote. “Many valuable specimens were lost, particularly shells and skins of birds.”
Chaos among the shellfish handlers wouldn’t end there. Naturalists in the field had matched notes on mollusks with numbered tin tags, which they sealed with specimens in jars of alcohol. Once in the laboratory, a priest appointed to guard the collections yanked the metal tags from the jars. “This gentleman, finding that the presence of some lead in the tinfoil tags was whitening the alcohol, carefully removed all the tags and put them in a bottle by themselves without any other means of identification,” naturalist William H. Dall wrote. For a fee, the reverend let prominent scientists sneak off with a number of the rarest species. “Some of those contemporary with events have told me of the prizes secured in this immoral manner, unworthy of a true naturalist, though doubtless the temptation was great,” Dall wrote. Scientists hoping to describe and classify discoveries found mountains of mismatched shells and notes. Many specimens had simply disappeared.
Eventually Dr. Augustus Addison Gould, a Harvard botanist and zoologist directed by Congress to report on the expedition’s mollusks, painstakingly sorted the unusual from the common. The geoduck plucked from the mudflats at Nisqually, which Gould in 1850 had chosen to call Panopea generosa, caught his attention. While many Pacific shellfish retained characteristics of those along the Atlantic seaboard, the unusualness of the geoduck provided Gould with evidence that the two coasts were ecologically distinct. “Where, for instance, have we the [East Coast] analogues of Panopea generosa?” he wrote.
The sheer variety of marine creatures brought back by the expedition awed Gould. “The number of new species is quite remarkable,” he wrote. “To the scanty list of naked mollusks previously known, [I found] additions of many new and beautiful forms.” He took special note of the squid and marine shells of Puget Sound, “every one of which appear to be new to collections.”
Shellfish had been central to human experience far longer than scientists like Gould knew. When humans sought a place to hunker down and wait out central Africa’s glacial chill nearly 165,000 years ago, they wandered to the sea. In caves in South Africa overlooking the Indian Ocean these early people gorged on whale flesh, whelks, mussels, and other shellfish. These were mankind’s first seafood lovers, and the hunger for shellfish would prove habit forming.
From the opening of the Oregon Territories, settlers and outsiders salivated over Northwest mollusks. Puget Sound’s shorelines were packed with so many little necks, cockles, butter clams, stubby horse clams, and geoducks that a Washington judge in 1874 penned a song: “No longer the slave of ambition / I laugh at the world and its shams / I think of my happy condition / Surrounded by acres of clams.” Timber schooners tried ferrying tender Olympia oysters no bigger than poker chips to California after gold diggers and crooks wiped them out in San Francisco Bay. (One of the thieves had been a teenage Jack London; he eventually switched sides and became a fish cop and patrolled the bay for shellfish pirates.)
For those with a taste for shellfish, geoducks were a meaty discovery. Geoducks, like oysters and other bivalves, are filter feeders. One column of a geoduck’s siphon sucks down water to sort and extract nutrients. The other exhales the clean, filtered liquid. Because the creatures are so huge, all that pumping takes lots of energy, so the geoduck spends its days doing nothing, just waiting for enough phytoplankton to float by to justify the effort of eating. Between meals, the geoduck metabolizes the glycogen stored in its body, and these vast reservoirs of sugar help make the clams sweet.
Native Americans for centuries had grubbed geoducks from Puget Sound’s mudflats whenever the tide retreated far enough to collect them. They chopped the rich meat and ate it fresh or smoked and later fried up geoduck fritters. European settlers, too, relished the giant clam. “Its flesh is, I think, the most delicious of any bivalve I have ever eaten, not excepting the best oysters,” naturalist Henry Hemphill wrote in 1881. He compared the taste to that of scrambled eggs. Skillfully cooked, a geoduck would “puzzle persons who tasted it for the first time as to whether they were eating fish, flesh, or fowl,” naturalist R. E. C. Stearns wrote a year later. Sliced, rolled in meal, and fried in superheated pork fat, “it would prove highly satisfactory for the daintiest epicure.”
Geoduck, Panopea generosa
Geoducks reached epicurean heights a few years later. In 1884, the clams landed on plates before the founders of New York City’s elite Ichthyophagous Club. Led by the head of New York’s state fish commission and the New York Times editor in chief who helped expose Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall, the club brought together New York’s most gastronomically inquisitive. Dining on the marine world’s most unusual delicacies, these mayors, bank presidents, ship captains, and university professors hired scouts to scour oceans and streams for the most remarkable amphibian and fish species. The men bested one another by eating starfish and hellbenders (salamanders), moss-bunkers (oily bait fish), and sea spiders. They laughed over geoducks and washed them down with La Tour Blanche.
But a shellfish’s popularity sometimes came at a price. By the turn of the century, Olympia oysters were all but gone and geoducks had become increasingly hard to find. “There are a number of beaches that have been entirely denuded of geoducks,” regional game commissioner W. W. Manier told the Morning Olympian newspaper in 1916. “Geoducks will be exterminated within a few years unless they are given more protection.” No one knew how many geoducks existed, so state leaders set gathering limits and fined those who cheated. They made it illegal to gather the clams for sale in markets or restaurants. To make sure geoducks survived in perpetuity, geoduck collectors could only eat or give away what they dug.
It would take a folksinger with a bad mustache and a precocious vaudevillian wit to turn the Sound’s shellfish into farce and make a fortune off its clams. Seattle’s Ivar Haglund had spent his early years belting out songs onstage in a smooth tenor and rounding out his act with absurdist comedy. He landed gigs on radio and made friends with Woody Guthrie and opened Seattle’s first aquarium in the 1930s. Ivar drew crowds with comic ditties he pretended to croon to captive sea creatures and earned publicity with stunts like wheeling a juvenile seal in a stroller to see Santa Claus. When he opened the cornerstone of a seafood restaurant empire, the name would come as no surprise: Ivar’s Acres of Clams.
Ivar advertised his businesses like a P. T. Barnum of the sea. He hosted a boxing match between a heavyweight fighter and a dead octopus. When a railcar spilled a load of corn syrup, Ivar grabbed a bib and a dish of flapjacks and phoned the media to watch him ladle up the spill. When a Maine senator asked the post office to honor New England fishermen by putting sardines on a stamp, Ivar telegraphed a counterproposal: “Urge substitute bill calling for use of Puget Sound clam on stamp instead.” When the government balked, Ivar sold his own four-cent stamp until postal inspectors informed him it was a crime.
His restaurants served shrimp, halibut, steak, and salmon, but Ivar made everything about the clams. Clams are slimy, enigmatic, beautiful, and disgusting, and Ivar knew that made them funnier than fish. And funny was everything to Ivar Haglund. He would produce television commercials that were both loopy and nonsensical. Cavemen chanted and circled an eight-foot clam (“Ivar’s: Dancing around clams since 1938”). A time traveler in a sports car did a jig with a clam riding a unicycle. Bearded Norwegians in rain gear exchanged rhyming verses about shellfish.
Ivar liked his humor risqué and over-the-top. On a windowsill in his office, he kept a
tiny plastic clam that showed a tiny plastic couple copulating inside. Ivar’s personality was perfectly suited to the geoduck, which, of course, he adored. But through most of his career the clams were presumed rare, and it remained illegal for anyone, especially restaurateurs, to buy or sell them as seafood. “Because we can’t sell geoduck in any form we must try to match its true glory with other clams,” Ivar lamented to Sports Illustrated in 1964. “It’s just as well it is against the law. If I ever put it on the menu, I’d start a geoduck riot. Before you know it, nobody would be eating other seafoods, everybody would be out hunting geoducks and Puget Sound would be swamped with strangers. Why, even the whole economy might collapse.”
At the height of Ivar’s popularity, a scuba diver’s find would change everything. Through most of human history the seafloor had been a riddle, silent, wine dark, and mysterious as deep space. Few understood what lived buried in the bottom even in relatively shallow bays. The seafloor was the planet’s last great frontier, and Robert Sheats was among its pioneers. He’d served as a navy diver in World War II and afterward was sent to Puget Sound, where he worked from a base that tested marine warfare systems, from underwater mines to sonar. When test-fired torpedoes lodged in the muck, Sheats and his team dived and dug the wayward missiles out. The men used hydraulic pressure hoses, which they turned toward the sand, liquefying the mud and loosening the stuck projectiles. During one excavation in 1960, Sheats and his team saw something extraordinary: a field of geoducks, the tips of their fleshy necks pushing through the seabed.
The discovery excited marine biologists and seafood aficionados. Logging and fishing still powered the Northwest, and bureaucrats saw the waving siphons as an invitation. In the years before the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, or the first Earth Day, natural wealth still existed to be exploited, and scuba-diving surveyors were sent to count and map geoducks. Tens of millions of geoducks were found in pockets throughout Puget Sound. Northwest government officials looked for ways to market this abundance, just as the region had done with its salmon and its trees. After years of research, the government agreed to lease underwater plots of geoducks to divers, like sections of forest timber sold at auction to loggers. The politicians hoped a clever entrepreneur could find something to do with these clams that would catapult them into the realm of seafood icons—Louisiana shrimp, New England cod, Maine lobsters, Washington geoducks.
Robert Sheats scored the first plot and knew just what to do. On a chilly Saturday afternoon, May 29, 1970, Sheats, his wife, Margaret, and their teenage son loaded a VW van, tied a faded black rubber raft to the top, and bumped down an old logging road past spindly pines and firs. They arrived at a splash of sand and sea on Puget Sound. They dumped the boat, threw in a gas-powered air compressor and some hose, and piled in scuba gear. They paddled a quarter mile into Thorndyke Bay.
Sheats loved this stretch of water. On clear days he could look twenty miles down Hood Canal and see his old duty station. More than that, he loved to dive. When his ship had been captured during the war, the Japanese had made Sheats and other divers retrieve tons of silver pesos that had been dumped overboard by the Allies. But Sheats hid gunnysacks in the water and secretly stuffed them with extra coins that he later slipped to fellow prisoners, who bribed greedy guards for food and radios. Later, Sheats participated in Sealab II, a navy experiment in deep-ocean survival, where he lived in a capsule at the bottom of the sea and had mail delivered by a trained porpoise. Now fifty-four and retired, Sheats just wanted to keep diving, and he wanted to do it here. Ivar had shown there was cash in clams, so Sheats hoped to start a tiny side business. His family would sell geoducks from roadside stands, and with any luck, Robert Sheats could dive forever.
They dropped anchor. With their son looking on, Sheats and Margaret strapped on tanks, double-hose regulators, and fins. In patched and marred dive suits that zipped down the front, the couple squatted on the raft’s pontoons, flipped backward, and dropped thirty feet to the bottom. Sheats showed his wife how to run her hands along the floor while keeping her eyes peeled for the telltale tube of flesh. Margaret grabbed that first clam, pointed a spray nozzle in the sand, and pulled out the prize. She plucked the world’s first commercially fished geoduck.
The couple hauled up fifty clams and carted them home, dumping them in the grass and across a picnic table. “We’ll probably deliver some to local meat markets or seafood processors, perhaps keep a few ourselves,” Sheats told the Kitsap County Herald. For a brief moment, the entire world’s geoduck industry belonged to Sheats and his family.
Sheats’s discovery might have remained a quirky footnote in Northwest history if not for a state utilities auditor with a head for numbers—and for serendipitous changes on the other side of the globe. Brian Hodgson grew up outside Olympia and had spent his childhood digging clams. He saw early on the geoduck’s potential but knew that to be successful he’d need to jump-start a culinary sensation. Even before securing his first underwater clam plot, Hodgson and several partners quietly began their research.
They borrowed money, rented a warehouse, and bought a boat. They dived nonstop and yanked geoducks by the dozens. Wives and friends shucked clams at all hours. Neighbors complained about the noise and the stench. They experimented in the kitchen, scalding clams like tomatoes to float off the skins. They broiled geoducks and basted them, baked, fried, and sautéed them. They stripped off the shells and hammered at the tough breasts with mallets. They chopped clams into chowder and smoked them to create jerky. Hodgson tenderized one moist, pale, lumpy neck by slapping it between slabs of wood and backing over it in a pickup.
Even as Sheats struggled to sell his catch, Hodgson made inroads with restaurants, including Ivar’s. Hodgson sold clam meat for pennies a pound to use in chowder. Late that first summer, Hodgson told the Wall Street Journal that his brand-new company, Washington King Clam, already “couldn’t keep up with the orders.” In truth, his venture looked far less promising: “We couldn’t give the things away,” Hodgson later confessed. “No one knew what to do with them.”
Finally Hodgson asked one of his best customers, a Japanese-American seafood distributor, how she made money reselling his geoducks. She told him she took the clams to Asian groceries and sold a few overseas. Some wound up in Seattle’s first full-service sushi bar. The chef there had come to Seattle from Japan’s Ginza district, a region famous for classically trained sushi masters, and had spent many dawns at Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market, the world’s largest seafood trading post. There, buyers could find everything in the sea: dried minnows and whale meat and hunks of bluefin tuna carved on band saws. Chefs who frequented Tsukiji prided themselves on using only the freshest ingredients, a habit this sushi master brought with him to Seattle. And in Seattle, his customers raved about geoducks, the crisp, springy clams that tasted fresher than everything else.
Hodgson formed a partnership with this seafood distributor in the early 1970s. He and some of his workers flew to Tokyo and marketed this clam to the Japanese. Hodgson’s timing was exquisite. Personal income in Japan was rising. Shipping frozen seafood by air was getting easier and cheaper. Geoducks made an early splash. Hodgson finally started making real money, trading these durable old clams for those precious thin green strips of paper. With his success, Hodgson grew increasingly cutthroat. He bid up lease prices for geoduck beds until he drove out competitors like Sheats. For a while he would run a near monopoly.
But Hodgson lacked the connections and cultural acumen to see the next big market. The real demand for geoducks ultimately would come from a country that seemed unlikely to import anything: China. But after decades of famine, crushing poverty, and an insular economy, the world’s most populous country had begun to boom, reconnecting people with their love of edible curiosities.
Like few other civilizations, the Chinese express their values through food. Lavish feasts have been part of the country’s culture since at least the tenth century’s Song Dynasty, but the extravaga
nce of these imperial meals reached new heights during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rulers hosted smorgasbords packed with hundreds of eccentric dishes, from bear’s paw and camel’s hump to duck brains and rhino tails. That creativity lives on in modern China. In major cities, aquariums filled with snakes, scorpions, frogs, and turtles line the walls of restaurants as cavernous as shopping malls. Chefs carve meats into ornate sculptures and arrange plates of dumplings to look like flowers. Businessmen order dishes piled with a thousand rooster tongues or stacked to their chins with the meat of a hundred abalone. Popular meals are made from pigeons and sea slugs.
Claude Tchao, unlike Hodgson, understood these delicacies. In the 1970s, his Chinese father had fled the Communists for Hong Kong, where he dragged young Claude to his business meetings. Diners gorged on hearty portions of unusual dishes much as eaters did during celebrations like weddings. Few youngsters had more exposure to the specialty dishes of Chinese banquets—abalone, shark’s fin, sea cucumber, fish gas bladders.
Tchao moved to the United States for college and eventually relocated to British Columbia, which by the early 1980s boomed with transplants from Hong Kong. These businessmen and families feared they would lose their assets in the transfer back to Chinese rule in 1997, and they invested billions of dollars buying land and businesses in Vancouver’s suburbs. Those with strong ties to China brought with them their taste for banquet foods.