2 THE OYSTER. 



business has taken place since, the business of 1862 

 may be used as an average for the whole period, 

 with little danger of error through excess. We have 

 no statistics for 1862, but in 1865 C. S. Maltby made 

 a very careful computation of the oyster business of 

 the whole bay for the year. He says there were 1000 

 boats engaged in dredging and 1500 canoes engaged 

 in tonging. The dredgers gathered 3,663,125 bushels 

 of oysters in Maryland and 1,083,209 bushels in Vir- 

 ginia, while 1,216,375 bushels were tonged in Maryland 

 and 981,791 bushels in Virginia, or 6,954,500 bushels 

 in all. About half of these were sent to Baltimore, 

 and the rest to the following cities in the following 

 order : Washington, Alexandria, Boston, Fair Haven, 

 New York, Philadelphia, Seaford, and Salisbury. Of 

 the 3,465,000 bushels which came to Baltimore, 625,000 

 were consumed in the city and its vicinity, while 

 2,840,000 bushels were shipped to a distance by Balti- 

 more packers. Ten years later the harvest of oysters 

 from the bay had increased to 17,000,000 bushels, 

 and it has continued to increase, year after year, up 

 to the last few years. We may safely regard the 

 harvest of 1865 as an approximation to the annual 

 average for the whole period of fifty-six years, and 

 other methods of computation give essentially the 

 same result. 



The total harvest of oysters from the Chesapeake 

 Bay since the establishment of the packing houses is 

 therefore about 56 times 7,000,000, or 392,000,000 

 bushels, and the local consumption along the shores 

 of the bay brings the grand total fully up to four 

 hundred million bushels. 



