from it. It provides a kind of catalogue for us of the marine 
life that was then visible in the Chesapeake Bay. Captain 
Archer wrote, "The main river abounds with sturgeon." Imagine! 
Not the Caspian Sea, the Chesapeake Bay abounds with sturgeon, 
"...large and excellent good." I wonder if they got any caviar 
from that sturgeon? Think of what we're missing as a product. 
He goes on to say, "....having also at the mouth of every 
brook and every creek exceedingly good fish of diverse kind.. . 
and in the large sounds near the sea are most fish, banks of 
oysters and many giant crabs better in taste than ours, one able 
to suffice four men." Think of it. Frightening thought, isn't 
it? 
Well, unhappily, it's been a long time since we in the Chesa¬ 
peake have been able to see one crab able to suffice four men. 
And I suppose that brings us to the next chapter in the story. 
We ought to consider the economic cost of the degradation of the 
Bay. Not just being deprived of huge crabs, but very practical 
costs in terms of the harvest that could be reached in the Bay. 
Look at the statistics for 1880, a hundred years ago. You 
might think that life has progressed on this planet in some 
beneficial way the last hundred years and the harvest in the 
Chesapeake Bay must be better now than it was then. Well, in 
1880 the oyster take was 123 million pounds of meat. But the 
National Marine Fisheries Service survey of 1968 reports that in 
1968 that there were only 25 million pounds, just a fifth or 
twenty percent of what the take had been in 1880. By 1968, we 
were beginning to worry. In 1968 we were beginning to recognize 
that something was wrong, so you would hope that 20 years later 
things would have gotten better. But by 1984 it had dropped 
fifty percent from the 1968 level to only twelve million pounds, 
that is ten percent of what it had been a hundred years ago. 
It doesn't take much imagination to translate that drop in 
the oyster take into jobs; into nutritional values that would 
have been available; into wealth as far as the State is con¬ 
cerned; and into all the different factors which can be derived 
from that decrease, considering what had once been a bountiful 
harvest. 
You can take similar figures for shad, for rockfish, striped 
bass, for almost any species that you want to look at. And they 
are all the same dismal, downward trend. 
7 
