[59] OYSTER CULTURE. 811 
Escale, near the port of Esnandes, and founded here the first bouchot 
or fishing-crawl. Thrown by the tempest upon a barren coast, among 
a scattered and indigent people, without hope of again seeing his native 
land, Walton at once sought means of existence by hunting marine birds. 
The bay, or rather cove, of Aiguillon is only a great mud-flat, a vast lake 
of mud, where, at low tide, one cannot travel with safety. It was on this 
bottom, nevertheless, that Walton made his domain. In order to traverse 
this flat without danger and at all seasons, he constructed a sort of 
“pirogue” or wooden box 8 or 9 feet long, bent up in front, square be- 
hind, and flat upon the bottom. This “acon,” or flat-bottomed boat (Fig. 
19), is still used by the fishermen, successors and imitators of Walton. 
In using this boat to travel in various directions over the flat, the fish- 
erman places one knee in the beat near the bind end, and then with his | 
hands upon the sides he pushes himself along with his other leg, which 
is covered with a long stout boot, and remains outside the boat, acting 
as a pole to impel it over the mud. In this manner the fishermen can 
proceed very rapidly in any direction where their labor may require 
them. In the vacant portion of the box he places his tools, or necessary 
materials, and whatever he may have gathered in his labors, and trans- 
ports them without much fatigue. Furnished with this ingenious ap- 
paratus for locomotion, Walton planted stakes about in the mud, by 
means of which he spread vast nets, in whose meshes he caught those 
aquatic birds which in skimming over the flats flew across these lines 
of nets. But soon Walton noticed that the stakes which sustained his 
nets became covered upon those portions just above the mud which were 
under water at every tide, with great numbers of mussels, which very 
rapidly attained a size much superior to those in the mud only a short 
