feet long were caught in New York Bay.
The traveller, Van der Donck, says "those a foot long are better for
serving at table." Truly a lobster six feet long would seem a little
awkward to serve on a dinner table. Eddis, in his _Letters from
America_, written in 1792, says these vast lobsters were caught in New
York waters until Revolutionary days, when "since the incessant
cannonading, they have entirely forsaken the coast; not one having been
taken or seen since the commencement of hostilities." Beside these great
shell-fish the giant lobster confined in our New York Aquarium in 1897
seems but a dwarf. In Virginia waters lobsters were caught, and vast
crabs, often a foot in length and six inches broad, with a long tail and
many legs. One of these crabs furnished a sufficient meal for four men.

From the gossiping pages of the Labadist missionaries who came to
America in 1697 we find hints of good fare in oysters in Brooklyn.

"Then was thrown upon the fire, to be roasted, a pail full of
Gowanes oysters which are the best in the country. They are fully
as good as those of England, better than those we eat at Falmouth.
I had to try some of them raw. They are large and full, some of
them not less than a foot long. Others are young and small. In
consequence of the great quantities of them everybody keeps the
shells for the burning of lime. They pickle the oysters in small
casks and send them to Barbados."

Van der Donck corroborates the foot-long oysters seen by the Labadist
travellers. He says the "large oysters roasted or stewed make a good
bite,"--a very good bite, it would seem to us.

Strachey, in his _Historie of Travaile into Virginia_, says he saw
oysters in Virginia that were thirteen inches long. Fortunately for the
starving Virginians, oyster banks rose above the surface at ebb-tide at
the mouth of the Elizabeth River, and in 1609 a large number of these
famished Virginia colonists found in these oyster banks a means of
preservation of life.

As might be expected of any country so intersected with arms of the sea
and fresh-water streams, Virginia at the time of settlement teemed with
fish. The Indians killed them in the brooks by striking them with
sticks, and it is said the colonists scooped them up in frying-pans.
Horses ridden into the rivers stepped on the fish and killed them. In
one cast of a seine the governor, Sir Thomas Dale, caught five thousand
sturgeon as