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A Long Time on the Chesapeake
The early Europeans in the Chesapeake, from the Jamestown settlers of 1607 onward, found an existing Indian economy and to a great degree fitted into it; the offshoot colonies further up the Bay, indeed, were welcomed as allies by resident Indians, in resisting the depredations of the warrior Susquahannocks who swarmed down their great river at the northern end of the Bay in annual raids of devastating force. But to maintain their ways of life the settlers had to find commercial exports that fitted into the North Atlantic trades: their books, musical instruments, china, plows and axes came from that trade, as did their fine clothes and their education (leading families sent their children across the ocean for that, for generations to come) and their whole sense of being in touch with the world they belonged too. The sheltered waterways led everywhere, and estates along the sluggish rivers (really tidal inlets) that wound their way into both shores were in direct touch with Europe by oceangoing ships that came to their doorsteps. No great seaport cities grew up in the first hundred years ashore; the seaport function was dispersed among settlements along the rivers, served by the Bay itself as its main street. In 1724 Hugh Jones remarked that "no country is better watered for the conveniency of which most Houses are built near some Landing Place; so that any Thing may be delivered to a Gentleman there from London, Bristol & C with less trouble and Cost, than to one living five miles in the Country in England." In the beginning it was hard to get the colonists to build ships; carpenters sent over for the purpose tended to knock a boat together and go fishing or oystering themselves. Indeed
everyone built his own boats in this watery world, and invented or borrowed from the Indians new ways to do it. The bugeye, with her bottom of logs pegged together, derived from Indian log canoes; the racing log canoes sailed for a sport today are a direct Indian inheritance. The beautiful and serviceable skipjack was invented in the later 19th century as a boat that could be built by a competent mechanic, familiar with the product he wanted; and in a day when hand skills were more widely diffused among the people, most were built that way. Major shipbuilding came into being to meet the shipping shortage caused by late 17th-century wars and commercial expansion. Under the "export or die" philosophy, Chesapeake merchants began to build ships to carry their tobacco to market, and went on to build for English owners as well as on their own account. Baltimore, at the head of the Bay, became a great seaport by 1760, superseding Annapolis, Oxford, and Chestertown. Escaping occupation during the Revolution, she sent to sea fast-sailing craft built at Fells Point, which made a killing as privateers. Such ships also evaded British blockaders to keep communications open with sympathetic neutrals in the Caribbean; that underestimated trade, financed largely by cargoes captured at sea and sold in the West Indies or Europe, literally kept Washington's starving army marching and shooting. The 19th century brought massive change to the Chesapeake. Baltimore developed new ocean and coastal trades, and grew to its present status as a leading New World seaport. Norfolk, strategically located at the Bay's mouth, became a naval center, as it remains today. Newport News Shipbuilding & Drydock, exploiting the new technology of iron and steam and steel at the century's end, became a center of modern shipbuilding, and recently launched the largest ship built in this hemisphere. As early as the 1790s, observers had noted grass growing in the streets of former market centers like Oxford. The old towns, losing their role in the forefront of world commerce, fell back to fishing, oystering, crabbing. Today Chesapeake Bay people are rallying to conserve the natural assets of the Bay, having long ago learned to keep oystering under sail to avoid killing all oysters, and remarkable new growth is springing up from the equally valuable assets of Bay history. The founding ships of Virginia's and Maryland's first capitals exist in replica today, and in the Pride of Baltimore, Baltimore has sent "another in the series" of a uniquely American product, the Baltimore clipper, to sea; she sails for PS Baltimore, but also for a heritage priceless to us all.
Drawings by Louis Feuchter, 1925. Courtesy of Robert H. Burgess.
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SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1979
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