The Oystermen Were In Season

Cap'n Jesse's Sea Gull, with her clipper bow, rakish loblolly pine mast and huge mainsail was, like many skipjacks, designed by what watermen call "rack of eye." As the expression suggests, her builder knocked her together from lines and dimensions stored in his head, instead of a set of fancy blueprints. Except for length, which may range from 36 to 60 feet, one skipjack looks much like another to landlubbers. But watermen recognize subtle differences. It is, for example, instantly apparent to them that the hull of the Rosie Parks could have come only from the eye and hand of Orville Parks' brother, a man called Bronza, who created a thing of swanlike beauty in the Rosie but was not so fortunate with all of his designs—or at least his customers. One disgruntled man pulled a gun on Bronza some years ago and shot him dead.

It should be noted that Orville Parks is 73 years old and no man to be trifled with on the banks or around the buoys. He is very keen on winning the race and does so regularly, in part because Rosie chews out to windward so well, but also because he permits no partying aboard in the style of Cap'n Jesse and most of the others.

While violence of weather and water remain close kinsmen to the watermen, who've changed about as much over the past 100 years as the oyster itself, they no longer practice shanghaiing or other unconventional labor practices. In the 1890s crewmen were often paid off "by the boom" in lieu of wages.

"Hey, honey," a skipper would call. "Hey honey, get up there and see what's wrong with the boom, it don't look right." As soon as the unsuspecting victim was well placed, the skipper would suddenly jibe the huge main, summarily sweeping the crewman overboard—where he rapidly perished in icy water. "I can recall bodies washing up ashore at home," said 90-year-old Captain Thomas A. Trott, an ex-marine policeman who also recalls vividly the oyster wars when more than one dredger was shot between the eyes for poaching on appetizing grounds belonging to someone else.

The cause of the old wars among the dredgers, the cops and the tongers—the latter men who take oysters by hand, using long, scissorlike rakes called tongs—was a conservation law setting aside separate areas for tonging and dredging. The dredgers bitterly resented the tongers, and when they weren't fighting battles with one another, they were taking on the law. The dredgers piously believed the police had no right to say who dredged what where, since obviously God had created oysters, oystermen, the wind and the bay.

Caught in the crossfire between dredger and tonger, the marine police, or oyster navy, as they once were known, were constantly being shot up. Harper's Weekly describes one such skirmish. In this case a crew of tough dredgers from Dorchester County "...boldly captured a police sloop, drove her crew ashore and threw her arms overboard." Still not satisfied, they took apart the police boat plank by plank. On a smaller scale, the oyster wars continued right up to the early 1950s.

As Saturday's fleet returned to Annapolis—peacefully, and with very little rheumatism about—they passed the Schaefer Brewing Company's shiny replica of the yacht America, the schooner which gave her name to the America's Cup. With her beautifully turned hull she symbolizes all that the oyster dredgers are not: she's a yacht, she glows with polish and her decks are lined with soft-soled sailors. But she's a copy. Hers is the appeal of a mummy in a museum. The skipjacks, even as they dwindle in numbers, still have the warmth of flesh and blood and spirit in their lovely old hulls.