514 HISTORY AND METHODS OF THE FISHERIES. 



One of the first acts of white settlers ou the forested coast of Maine, where every stream 

 affords good water-power, was the erection of saw-mills. These mills began at once to pour great 

 quantities of sawdust into each stream, which was carried out into the bay or river below, where 

 it soon sank. At the same time woodmen were clearing the forests and draining the swamps, and 

 fanners were breaking the turf. Each of these operations tends to the carrying away by rain of 

 a far greater amount of silt than under natural conditions. The oysters thus found their clear, 

 salt home freshened by an unusual influx of rain-water, the currents always roily, and themselves 

 gradually smothering in a sediment of sawdust and earth. This, with steady depletion, would put 

 an end to any of the isolated beds like those at Thomastou and Damariscotta, to both of which, 

 tradition asserts, sloops used once to go and get loads of the bivalves for sale in neighboring 

 colonies. 



In the Sheepscot River they had a little better chance, and have disappeared only within the 

 last twenty years.* Tradition has it that no more than a century ago vessels used to go to Great 

 Bay, New Hampshire, heretofore alluded to, to be loaded with oysters, the surplus of the home 

 demand. The lagoon became depleted, however, so long ago that the people of the vicinity 

 generally forgot that these mollusks had ever existed there. Hence it was looked upon as a 

 "discovery" when, in 1874, the Coast Survey announced that oyster beds still flourished in 

 Great Bay. At first little was done to make this knowledge available. The following year, 

 however, witnessed great activity. For several mouths a dozen boats, with two or three men in 

 each, were raking every day, the average take being about five bushels to the man. They used not 

 only tongs and rakes, but in winter they would cut long holes in the ice, and dredge the beds by 

 horse power, stripping them completely. It was seen that this rash and wholesale destruction 

 would speedily exterminate the mollusks, and protective laws were passed by the State, one of 

 which forbade fishing through the ice. This was the most needed, for, as in New Brunswick, the 

 ice-rakers were accustomed to pile upon the ice the de'bris of dead shells, &c., to all of which 

 young mollusks were attached, and were thus destroyed by freezing instead of being returned to 

 their nursery. But these beneficent restrictions came too late, and the business of oystering is now 

 of no consequence. 



History shows that the oysters naturally growing along the upper coast of Massachusetts 

 were all valuable to the early settlers, who quickly exhausted them, not only through use as food, 

 but by digging up the shells to be burned into lime, and by pouring sawdust and sediment into the 

 waters that surrounded them. 



So valuable a property were the oyster beds about Boston deemed by the Pilgrims, yet so 

 ruthless were the drafts upon them, that before the end of the seventeenth century the colonies 

 (especially Plymouth) passed restrictive laws, taxed every barrel exported, and prohibited out- 

 siders from fishing. 



Natural beds in Massachusetts Bay persisted longest, however, at Wellfleet, near the extreme 

 end of Cape Cod. There originally they were widespread, and, with other shell-fish, a blessed food- 

 resource in the early struggles of the Pilgrim colonists against starvation. It appears that they 

 continued to be fished until about 1775, when a sudden mortality occurred which ended the matter. 



* Speculation has been indulged as to whether this little colony of oysters is a natural one or not. There seems 

 to be good evidence to show that it was planted designedly by the Indians, before the advent of white men, with 

 mollusks brought from the Damariscotta beds. The position and condition of the colony ; the fact that the banks of 

 this river were thickly populated by Indians, who might be supposed to know enough to save themselves the trouble 

 of going 4 miles every time they \v;niti'cl oysters, by transplanting them to their own stream ; the fact that no more 

 distant stream has them, although no good reason can be discovered for their absence, and the fact that no shell-heaps 

 of any account exist to attest ancient use of the bed, all seem to confirm this supposition. 



