Northward from Old Point Comfort and Hampton Roads the great
Chesapeake Bay stretches for two hundred miles. It bisects Virginia
and Maryland, and receives the rivers of both States, extending within
fourteen miles of Pennsylvania, where it has as its head the greatest
river of all, the Susquehanna, which the Indians appropriately called
their "great island river." Its shores enclose many islands, and are
indented with innumerable bays and inlets, the alluvial soils being
readily adapted to fruit and vegetable growing, and its multitudes of
shallows being almost throughout a vast oyster bed. It has, all about,
the haunts of wild fowl and the nestling-places of delicious fish.
These shores were the home--first on the eastern side and afterwards
on the western--of the Nanticokes, or "tidewater Indians," who
ultimately migrated to New York to join the Iroquois or Five Nations,
making that Confederacy the "Six Nations." From Cape Charles, guarding
the northern entrance to the Bay, extends northward the well-known
peninsula of the "Eastern Shore," a land of market gardens,
strawberries and peaches, which feeds the Northern cities, and having
its railroad, a part of the Pennsylvania system, running for miles
over the level surface in a flat country, which enabled the builders
to lay a mathematically straight pair of rails for nearly ninety
miles, said to be the longest railway tangent in existence.
Chesapeake Bay is now patrolled by the oyster fleets of both Virginia
and Maryland, each State having an "oyster navy" to protect its beds
from predatory forays; and occasionally there arises an "oyster war"
which expands to the dignity of a newspaper sensation, and sometimes
results in bloodshed. The wasteful methods of oyster-dredging are said
to be destroying the beds, and they are much less valuable than
formerly, although measures are being projected for their protection
and restoration under Government auspices. We are told that a band of
famished colonists who went in the early days to beg corn from the
Indians first discovered the value of the oyster. The Indians were
roasting what looked like stones in their fire, and invited the hungry
colonists to partake. The opened shells disclosed the succulent
bivalve, and the white men found there was other good food besides
corn. All the sites of extinct Indian villages along the Chesapeake
were marked by piles of oyster shells, showing they had been eaten
from time immemorial.
The English colonists at Jamestown were told by the Indians of the
wonders of the "Mother of Waters," as they called Chesapeake Bay,
about the many great rivers pouring into it, the various tribes on its
shores, and the large fur trade that could be opened with them; so
that the colonists gradually came to the opinion that the upper region
of the great bay was the choicest part of their province. Smith
explored it and made a map in 1609, and others followed him, setting
up trading-stations upon the rivers as far as the Potomac and the
Patuxent. Soon this new country and its fur trade attracted the
cupidity of William Claiborne, who had been appointed Treasurer of
Virginia, and was sent out when King James I. made it a royal
province, the king telling them they would find Claiborne "a person of
qualitie and trust." He was also agent for a London Company the king
had chartered to make discoveries and engage in the fur trade.
Claiborne, in 1631, established a settlement on Kent Island, the
largest in the bay, about opposite Annapolis, and one hundred and
thirty miles north of the James, which thrived as a trading station
and next year sent its burgesses to the Assembly at Jamestown.