gh to
build a coastal trade in furs, corn and fish:

Let me intreat that we may have both an admiral and hired mariners,
to be all times resident here. The benefit will quickly make good
the charge as well by a trade of furs to be obtained with the
savages in the northern rivers to be returned home as also to
furnish us here with corn and fish. The waste of such men all this
time whom we might trust with our pinnaces leaves us destitute this
season of so great a quantity of fish as not far from our own bay
would sufficiently satisfy the whole Colony for a whole year.

There were no boats available even for simple oystering. During the
term of the stringent Governor Dale some disaffected colonists tried to
escape in a shallop and a barge, which were "all the boats that were
then in the Colony."

Ironically punctuating the sagas of hardship were the marveling
descriptions publicized in England. Corroborating the mouth-watering
tales of Smith, William Strachey wrote in 1612:

To the natural commodities which the country has of fruit, beasts,
and fowl, we may also add the no mean commodity of fish, of which,
in March and April, are great shoals of herrings, sturgeon, great
store commonly in May if the year be forward. I have been at the
taking of some before Algernoone fort and in Southampton river in
the middle of March, and they remain with us June, July, and August
and in that plenty as before expressed.

Shad, great store, of a yard long and for sweetness and fatness a
reasonable food fish; he is only full of small bones, like our
barbels in England. There is the garfish, some of which are a yard
long, small and round like an eel and as big as a mare's leg,
having a long snout full of sharp teeth.

Oysters there be in whole banks and beds, and those of the best. I
have seen some thirteen inches long. The savages use to boil
oysters and mussels together and with the broth they make a good
spoon meat, thickened with the flour of their wheat and it is a
great thrift and husbandry with them to hang the oysters upon
strings ... and dried in the smoke, thereby to preserve them all
the year.

There be two sorts of sea crabs. One our people call a king crab
and they are taken in shoal waters from off the shore a dozen at a
time hanging one upon another's tail; they are of a foot in length
and half