d three more struck but lost." The _Experiment_
continued its whaling career successfully for three years. When it
retired, no similar enterprise replaced it. Yet in a list of exports
from Virginia for the year ending September 30, 1791, 1263 gallons of
whale oil appears. Even today whales are occasionally represented in
Virginia fishery products, as when one is washed up on a beach and
removed by the Coast Guard to a processing plant to be turned into meal
and oil.

The overall value of Virginia's fisheries as an industrial resource was
glacially slow in reaching public consciousness. Here and there, like
dim lights along an uncertain voyage, bits of legislation or isolated
conservation procedures appeared. In due course it became evident that
natural fishways--to choose one example--were being obstructed to the
disadvantage of both the fish and navigation. Hening records the law
enacted to keep the rivers open:

1745. And whereas the making and raising of mill dams, and
stone-stops, or hedges for catching of fish, is a great obstruction
to the navigation of the said rivers [James and Appomattox]: Be it
further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That all mill dams,
stone-stops, and hedges, already made across either of the said
rivers, where they are navigable, shall be thrown down and
destroyed by the person or persons who made the same....

Like most hastily framed and passed laws this one proved unsatisfactory
and a second one, with more detailed provisions was passed. Hening
records it:

1762. Whereas the act of assembly made in the first year of his
present Majesty's reign [1761], entitled, an act to oblige the
owners of mills, hedges, or stone-stops, on sundry rivers therein
mentioned, to make openings or slopes therein for the passage of
fish, has been found defective, and not to answer the purposes for
which it was intended, and it is therefore necessary that the same
should be amended: Be it therefore enacted by the Lieutenant
Governor, Council and Burgesses, of this present General Assembly,
and it is hereby enacted by the authority of the same, That the
owner or proprietor of all and every mill, hedge, or stone-stop, on
either of the rivers Nottoway and Meherrin, shall in the space of
nine months from and after the passing of this act, make an opening
or slope in their respective mill-dams, hedges, or stops, in that
par