Cownose Rays in the Chesapeake Bay - History

John Smith's first encounter with rays shocking experience

Past is Prologue / By Dr. Kent Mountford - Bay Journal

John Smith had a couple of rough spots in his 1608 exploration of the Chesapeake Bay. On the first of two “discoveries” — or explorations — made of the Bay that summer, he and the dozen or so men who accompanied him would prove themselves to be pretty courageous.

The Jamestown they left on June 2, 1608 was in bad shape: poorly governed by fractious men intent on gold, not on sustaining a community. Studley and Todkill later wrote: “… We had sometime peace and war twice in a day, and very seldom a week but we had some treacherous villany or other.”

Plus, another load of raw, and sickly, colonists “and diverse others to the number of 120” had just arrived from England. Smith knew that, somehow, these new arrivals would need to be fed through the coming winter of 1608-09.

On her homeward voyage, the vessel, Phoenix, would carry no gold, only useless ores barreled and sent for trial to refiners in England. To complete her freight, her Master and John Smith loaded the Phoenix with beautiful aromatic Virginia cedar, the same evergreen seen today in old farm fields, along country driveways and sometimes, stately and ancient in churchyards. It was perhaps the first “commercial cargo” to leave the colony.

Smith and his exploration party sailed across the Bay with the Phoenix to Accomac, where they parted company, she bound for England, he and his explorers for the pages of history.

Coming from resource-stressed Jamestown, Smith’s crew was underprovisioned, and within two weeks they were disheartened and low on food. Much of their time was spent rowing their heavy craft, “an open barge near three tons burden” in the broiling Chesapeake sun with heavy European garb. They were battered by the unaccustomed violence of mid-Atlantic thundersqualls. Frequently, they were unpredictably assaulted by Native American “Salvages,” who were friendly one minute, then showering them with murderous arrows the next. Tired after a day in the unrelenting heat, they had to keep sufficient watch all night, and often slept in the barge beneath their rowing thwarts.

Smith was especially under the gun, politically, to find the “gold mines” that Christopher Newport (captain of the Susan Constant, the ship that had brought the Jamestown settlers) was convinced were there. About July 14, 1608, they emerged after exploring the great Potomac River. They had found a Native American “mine” all right. It “was a clay sand so mingled with yellow spangles as if it had been half pindust [brass filings].” that the Patawomeke Indians called “matchqueon.” Smith had traded with them for as much of it as they could carry from the mine up Aquia Creek. Smith was bound to deliver it for assay, although he already knew the bottom line. Today one can still visit these same mineral deposits of iron pyrite, a natural iron sulfide known as “fool’s gold.”

Although their “victual was near spent.” Smith wanted to visit the Rappahannock, where he had made Native American allies in 1607 during that imprisonment when little Pocohontas apparently saved his life. Maintaining friendships could mean corn to feed those potentially starving colonists.

Their exploration vessel went up into the Rappahannock. In the words of three of Smith’s crew members: “…But our boat, by reason of the ebb [tide] chancing to ground on a many shoals lying the entrances, we spied many fishes lurking in the reeds…”

What they saw was cownose rays (Rhinoptera bonasus), a fish that has for thousands of years returned each summer to the Bay from a winter’s long migration off the coast of Brazil. They return here to feed, bear their young and mate again before the end of summer. Their schools sometimes number in the thousands.

We still see many of these large, bat-shaped fishes today, sometimes weighing 25 pounds and measuring more than 21/2 feet across their stout “wings.” Their total length, including their long, whip-like tail, is reported to reach 7 feet.

Chesapeake Bay Fishing - Quotes

“Of fish we were best acquainted with sturgeon, grampus, porpoise, seals, stingrays whose tails are very dangerous, brits, mullets, white salmon, trouts, soles, plaice, herring, conyfish, rockfish, eels, lampreys, catfish, shad, perch of three sorts, crabs, shrimps, crevises, oysters, cockles, and mussels.” 


Captain John Smith, 1612 

Chesapeake Bay Quotes - Fish Aboundance

 

"A few Bevers, Otters, Beares, Martins and minkes we found, and in divers places that aboundance of fish, lying so thicke with their heads above the water, as for want of nets (our barge driving amongst them) we attempted to catch them with a frying pan: but we found it a bad instrument to catch fish with: neither better fish, more plenty, nor more variety for smal fish, had any of us ever seene in any place so swimming in the water, but they are not to be caught with frying pans."

Captain John Smith, 1608

Chesapeake Bay - Glimpses of Bay's Past Reveal Paradise Lost

History Lessons for the Future
Glimpses of Bay's Past Reveal Paradise Lost
Past is Prologue / By Dr. Kent Mountford - Bay Journal

"A faire Bay, compassed but at the mouth with fruitfull and delightsome land." - Capt. John Smith in his 1607 description of the Chesapeake Bay

The Discovery

In latitude 36 degrees north, the ships "Susan Constant," "Godspeed" and the pinnace, "Discovery," were several weeks at sea from the Caribbean. Fresh food was long gone; drinking water was stale in its casks. Bound for the Chesapeake, in the raw cold of an Atlantic spring, they had sailed three days beyond their reckoning and found no land.

Captain Ratcliffe on the "Discovery" voted to return to England. But that night, a storm set upon them and, as Thomas Studley wrote:

"God the guider of all good actions ... did drive them by his providence to their desired port, beyond all their expectations; for never any of them had seen that coast."

This was Virginia, the land they were to colonize for England.

The ships were brought to anchor "at the mouth of a very goodly bay, 18 or 20 miles broad. The cape on the south is called Cape Henry, in honour of our of our most noble Prince. The land, white hilly sands ... and all along the shores great plenty of pines and firs."

Dimly visible to the north was what they named Cape Charles. From there, the Chesapeake's Eastern Shore stretched about 200 miles. Beyond that, the vast watershed spread inland to mountains not yet seen. In all, it drained 64,000 square miles, and had been almost completely covered with a largely unbroken forest since the end of the ice age 10,000 years before.

This remarkable forest was stingy with its nutrients, allowing little nitrogen or phosphorus (the two chemicals most responsible for spurring the modern Bay's massive algae blooms) and sediment to escape. Count Zinzindorf, a traveling companion of explorer and botanist William Bartram in 1742 along the North Branch Susquehanna's thickly forested shores, described "beautifully transparent" water, so clear that swimming chin deep, they "might have seen a pin at the bottom."

In the words of these early explorers and settlers there is a Chesapeake not always recognized today - a Bay filled with grasses, oysters and canvasbacks, a watershed with elk and bison.

The Land

After weeks at sea, the Englishmen were drawn ashore by the scent of land and the promise of new spring vegetation. They rowed into what is today called Lynnhaven Inlet and explored Long Creek and Broad Bay. John Smith later recorded: "cypress near three fadome about at the foot (18 feet circumference), very straight and 50, 60, or 80 foot without a branch..." As late as the 18th century, visitors would find tulip poplars 20 feet around and 90 feet high.

John Smith also spoke of oak trees on the uplands that yielded timber: "two foote and a half square ... for 20 yards long." These were trees that had never seen a steel ax; a forest which had grown and matured into tall colonnades with straight trunks and a high canopy which shaded the primeval forest floor in a perpetual deep twilight. These trees grew so slowly that, in some years, they would add only 2 millimeters to their diameter. Such trees, hundreds of years old, could never be replaced yet the temptation to harvest them would be universal.

West, beyond the coastal plain of the piedmont, above the rocky fall lines of the Bay's rivers, lay a much more tangled forest than along the Bay. Colonist Anthony Bagnall said his Wighcocomoco Indian friend Mosco knew nothing of the land beyond the mountains "because the woods were not burnt" (to clear the understory) and this trackless forest was traveled with difficulty. To colonists, who were used to England's orderly fields and coppiced woodlands, the forest and its dampness were unhealthy and dark. It must have been daunting to a settler armed only with an ax.

While the great forest system seemed inexhaustible to Native American and European alike, game could be locally overharvested with primitive weapons. There was more game in the interior and parties would venture there, often at the risk of encountering hostile, inland tribes.

John Smith reported that intensive game drives could yield: "6, 8, 10 or 15 (whitetail deer) at a hunting".

At the same time, Smith accused the Native Americans of overhunting game on the partly landlocked river necks of Maryland and Virginia. His contemporary John Pory wrote that deer, turtles "and other Beasts and fowls will exceedingly increase" if the Indians were pushed out of the country for they hunted regardless of season and did not spare "Male nor Female, old nor young, egges nor birds, fat nor lean..."

Cyprian Thorogood, who came over with Lord Baltimore's colonists on the "Ark" and "Dove," voyaged to the head of the Bay in mid-April 1634, 26 years after Smith's exploration. His boat passed Poole's Island, where he determined the fresh water in the Bay began. He navigated up what is today the Elk River and observed "many deere, yelkes (elk) and turkies, but caught none."

Eastern woodland bison still roamed the hinterlands, inspiring the names for Virginia's Cow and Calf Pasture rivers. The animals were not inexhaustible, though. The last woodland bison was reportedly tracked in heavy snow and shot Jan. 1, 1800, after having foraged, unwelcome, around a farmer's barn. Wild elk, quickly shot out of Maryland, lingered longer along the Susquehanna, where in the 1730s, some elk had been tamed and came and went with farmers' cattle.

Insects were as much a feature of the colonial Chesapeake as today. Naturalist and explorer John White accurately drew a swallowtail butterfly in 1585. Colonists wondered at the emergence of the summer cicadas and their great noise in the forest. Insects were pests too, both the natives such as the salt marsh green head fly, and those species that arrived with the Europeans, such as the black stable fly, a plague of today's summer and autumn Chesapeake.

It's astounding to most of us, but the honeybee, so much a part of our cooking, agriculture and lore, was introduced by Europeans. The Native Americans called it the "white man's fly."

Up the Susquehanna, a Moravian missionary wrote:

"Muschgetters (mosquitoes) tormented us all night." John Smith was inaccurate in saying: "nor (are) their flies ... (in) any way pernicious, where in the south parts of America they are always pernicious, and often deadly," unaware that the Chesapeake marshlands permitted the spread of malarial fevers.

The Natives

But was this wonderful land really pristine, free from human disturbance? Native Americans had arrived 6,000 to 9,000 years earlier, as nomadic hunter-gatherers, and had developed a lifestyle that blended hunting, fishing and agriculture for more than 1,000 years before the Virginia colony was "planted."

How many Native Americans were here before the Europeans? Smith estimated that about 5,000 natives lived within 60 miles of Jamestown. Others suggest there were 30,000 people around the Bay's perimeter, and in the entire basin, perhaps only 100,000. Today, about 15 million people fill the Bay's watershed.

Though this land seemed untouched to the colonists, the Native Americans routinely set fires to drive game out of the woodlands and thus shaped forest ecology by thinning undergrowth, which ensured the growth of larger trees. That, coupled with the gathering of firewood from the forest floor, resulted in the woods being so open that a horse could be ridden anywhere, or even a coach driven without impediment, on the necks of land between the tidewater rivers of what would become Maryland and Virginia.

Native Americans seasonally congregated in villages on coastal plains bordering the Bay and rivers where they planted ecologically sensible crops of beans (which fix the fertilizer nitrogen from air), corn (a nitrogen user that also provides a natural trellis for the beans), squashes (which create a living mulch and groundcover against dehydration) and native tobacco. These fertile, floodplain soils would soon become prime agricultural land for the colonists' plantations.

The native tobacco, though, was not the plant that would become Virginia's "gold," but a harsh-smoking strain that was even too strong for northern Native American tribes like the Iroquois, to whom it was later offered - unsuccessfully - as trade goods. John Rolfe, who married Powhatan's daughter Pocahontas, later introduced a Central/South American strain called "Orinoco," with which the English colonists pursued their fortunes.

In the centuries before Europeans arrived, as soils became less productive, the Native Americans would burn or girdle the trees in an adjacent area, which killed them and allowed sunlight to reach the forest floor.

In spring, they would plant their crops in the rich and moist topsoils. These topsoils had accumulated on the forest floor - at an estimated rate of only an inch every 600 years - to a depth that one colonist reported as 12 inches in 1634.

It was for these substantial parcels of land, cleared of trees and eventually freed of roots and snags, that the Europeans would compete - or less commonly, bargain - with the Native Americans.

This alluvial land was productive. Smith found Powhatan's warehouses bulging with corn that some think was a tribute paid to him as the head of the tribal confederation.

In one of Smith's heavy-handed trading ventures with the Powhatans, 25 pounds of copper and 50 pounds of iron and beads were traded for 479 bushels of Indian corn that was delivered by barge to the Jamestown commissary. Had they been savvier traders that autumn, the colonists might have acquired 350 tons - almost 13,000 bushels - enough to feed 240 colonists for a year.

Bounty from the Bay

Just as the soils of its watershed were rich, so was the Bay itself. Smith and others made long lists and descriptions of fish familiar and foreign to English eyes. Smith talked about the Chesapeake's "fifth river... Pawtuxunt ... Here are infinite skulls (schools) of diverse kinds of fish more than elsewhere."

Still, some modern readers scoff at his observation: "and in diverse places that abundance of fish, lying so thick with their heads above the water, as for want of nets (our barge driving amongst them) we attempted to catch them with a frying pan: but we found it a bad instrument to catch fish with."

But for the English colonists, feeding themselves was a serious business and they actively fished the tremendous migrations of shad, herring and sturgeon that pulsed into the Bay each spring. Long before European intervention, Native Americans funneled these migratory fishes into baskets positioned at the juncture of a "vee" formed by stone weirs hand-built across the river channel. Some of these can still be seen in our nontidal rivers hundreds of years later.

Migratory fish went upstream past what would become the New York border and westward into the Appalachians. William Cooper, founder of Cooperstown and father of novelist James Fennimore Cooper, was an 18th century settler on Lake Otsego, the source of the Susquehanna. He reported on the harsh winter of 1789, during which the fledgling settlement of Cooperstown nearly starved:

"A singular event seemed sent by a good Providence to our relief; it was reported to me that unusual shoals of fish were seen moving in the clear water of the Susquehanna. I went and was surprised to find that they were herrings. We made something like a small net by the interweaving of twigs, and by this rude contrivance, we were able to take them in thousands."

In the 1800s, men who had fished in the previous century still remembered catching more than 1,000 shad per night in the Susquehanna near Wilkes Barre, Pa. But those days ended in the first decades of the century. In 1822, authorities reported: "The spring herring ... formerly visited this lake (Otsego) in immense multitudes for the purpose of spawning; now their ascent is arrested by the erection of dams."

The Indians captured huge, relatively slow-swimming sturgeon by lassoing their tails or wrestling them until the fish tired and could be landed. The colonists used nets of strong cord and Smith reported catching them in abundance during their upstream migration. Their flesh - not caviar - saved many colonists from starvation. Smith commented:

"We had more sturgeon, than could be devoured by dog or man, of which the industrious by drying and pounding, mingled with caviar, sorrel and other wholesome herbs would make bread and good meat; ... we lived very well in regard of such a diet."

Underwater beds of Bay grasses were extensive at the time of European contact, and seeds deep in the sediments indicate they had been a feature of the Chesapeake for thousands of years and probably covered hundreds of thousands of acres along the Bay's shallow margins, down to a maximum depth of 2-3 meters (10 feet). The earliest aerial photographs we have are from 1938 and show immense beds in the Patuxent River, in some places stretching 1,000 feet offshore, where virtually no grasses now grow. Only about 60,000 acres of grasses remain in the Bay today.

In colonial times, these vast underwater meadows offered a wonderful shelter for billions of juvenile fish and crabs. The grasses were foraged by millions of waterfowl, diamondback terrapins and visiting loggerhead sea turtles (which appear to have been the main dish at feasts in Jamestown). As in the last few summers, an occasional wandering manatee - one was recorded in the Rappahannock by Thomas Glover in 1676 - also grazed these grass beds.

Surprisingly few early writers mentioned, or recognized, the value of Bay grasses to the ecosystem, though Smith and three of his companions, wrote that they "spied many fishes lurking in the reeds" - presumably Bay grass beds - while exploring the mouth of the Rappahannock.

These fish were cownose rays, 30 inches across the wingtips, which bottom-feed in June across the Bay's shallows. Each has a serrated spine, slimed with toxic mucus at the base of its tail. John Smith, spearing one massive, flailing ray with his short-sword, was pierced an inch-and-a-half deep in his wrist by this "stinger. The torment was instantly so extreme, that in four hours time had so swollen his hand, arm and shoulder, we (expected) ... his funeral." His body, helped by a "precious oil" administered to the wound by his shipmate Dr. Russell, overcame the anaphylactic shock, and Smith ate some of the ray for supper. This adventure lead to the naming of Stingray Point and (reputedly) Antipoison Creek.

With clear water, grass beds thrived and provided reliable winter food from year to year. Later writers, especially those concerned about waterfowl, recognized the value of the extensive wild celery beds on the Susquehanna Flats for the immense populations of canvasback and redhead ducks.

Tales of waterfowl on the Chesapeake are legion. Native American hunters could barely make a serious harvest of these populations with their bows and arrows. One colonist recorded that the birds "arrive in millionous multitudes." Feeding abundantly on submerged grasses every winter, there was mutual benefit when the birds, upon digestion, returned nutrients to a Bay that was relatively underfertilized when compared with today's eutrophic conditions.

John Smith and two others, hunting from a small boat some distance from Jamestown, brought down 148 waterfowl. Colonist Robert Evelyn, exploring near the head of the Bay in the mid-1600s, saw a flight of ducks and estimated it at a mile across and 7 miles long. The taking to flight by such flocks was amazing. He recorded the "rushing and vibration" as sounding like a storm coming through trees, or like a whirlwind in the case of the geese they startled while canoeing into a small creek.

The clear water that colonists encountered in the Chesapeake Bay was not only husbanded by the basin's massive forests, but it was also maintained by the Bay's extraordinary "reefs" or "rocks" of oysters. In the James and Rappahannock, for example, these oyster reefs or rocks actually broke the surface at low tide, and sailing vessels sometimes grounded unexpectedly upon them.

As late as the Civil War, a crewman aboard the ironclad "USS Monitor," moored in the James, wrote home that they rowed out to the oyster banks daily to gather shellfish for their dinner.

Billions of oysters prospered naturally on grounds covering thousands of acres around the mouths of the Bay's tributaries and at spits or points in the rivers. Here, the ebb and flow of tidal currents swirled a perpetual, living soup of plankton around them. They had only to open their shells to eat, and in the process, they filtered out immense quantities of particulates, clarifying the water. Dr. Roger Newell, of the University of Maryland's Horn Point Environmental Lab, estimated that the Chesapeake's virgin oyster stock had the capacity to filter the entire Bay in several days, a feat that would take today's remnants more than a year to accomplish.

One could wade along many tidal tributary shorelines, as the Native Americans did, and gather abundant, large, rounded "cove" oysters growing on the subtidal sands. But expanding populations, such as those of St. Mary's City - Maryland's Colonial capital - quickly depleted these oyster populations. When Maryland's capitol - and lots of people - moved from St. Mary's to Annapolis in 1694, overharvesting stopped and the cove oysters began to appear again.

The advance warning in this simple observation went unheeded by future generations, and for the next three centuries, the Bay's great oyster resource was mercilessly harvested. The ancient oyster reef structure was dredged away, the meats consumed and the shell carried off for lime burning, road building and, at Solomons Island and Crisfield, filling in the shallows to create new land.

Shell mounds, or middens, characterize the archaeological remains of Native American habitations and demonstrate how dominant oysters were as food. On the lower Potomac's Yeocomico River, archaeologists have documented continuous human habitation reaching back 2,000 years. Middens along the Potomac at Douglas Point indicate that in ancient times, the water was salty enough for oyster growth miles farther upriver than today. Dr. Bob Biggs, a former Bay researcher, believes this was because the vast, ancient forests captured and held more rainfall, and transpired (evaporated into the atmosphere).

Ancient shell deposits, which lie 20 feet or more deep within Chesapeake sediments south of Poole's Island show that perhaps 4,000 years ago, conditions supported prodigious oyster growth much farther up the mainstem Bay than today. These fossil shells are now dredged commercially and thousands of tons are carried down into "the salts" to provide clean surfaces for the larvae of struggling, modern oysters to "strike," or settle, upon and grow.

Impetuous Torrents

Tropical storms have been a feature of the Chesapeake climate since prehistory. And when such storms penetrated into the interior and Appalachians, they caused floods.

In August 1667, there was a great "Hurry-Cane" that destroyed an estimated 10,000 homes in Virginia. Hail, large as turkey eggs, followed by torrential rains ruined two-thirds to four-fifths of the crops. This storm, unprecedented for the 17th century settlers, lasted for 24 hours with the wind beginning in the northeast, backing north and eventually southeast: the typical anticyclonic circulation of tropical storms.

Core samples taken from the floor of the Bay offer a faint picture of storms thousands of years into the past. These cores reveal that ancient and early colonial storms produced only small amounts of sediment compared with storms after deforestation and accelerated development.

The Bay's tributary rivers experience annual freshets, caused by snowmelt and spring rains. John Smith, exploring the James River in 1607, judged by marks on the trees that the river freshets flooded about 8 feet above the base flow level.

But, 78 years after colonization in 1685, the effects of colonization began to be felt and William Byrd I wrote that "a mighty fresh" had come down the James April 26 and 27, causing the river to rise 3 feet higher than ever before, destroying his fences, ruining his tobacco and flooding the first floor of "Belvidere," his house in what is today the heart of Richmond.

Over the next century, English settlers were busy cutting, girdling and burning away the forests for agriculture and timber. Hugh Jones, at the end of the 17th century, said he could not see his neighbors' house for the trees, but speculated that would soon change.

The loss of forest meant increased runoff to the streams and the reduction of evapotranspiration, that immense flow of water up through the billions of trees to the atmosphere. The propensity for flooding and the size of the spring freshets was greatly increased, and as more forest was cut and agriculture expanded onto the piedmont, both runoff and erosion of the land increased further. Dr. Biggs believes that both floods and droughts have increased in severity by 25 percent or more.

The genesis of today's problems in the Bay was in the mid-1700s. Dr. Grace Brush at Johns Hopkins, by studying the Bay's sediments, estimates that by 1760, about 30 percent of the basin's forests had been cut and the layers of sediment deposited on the Bay floor after storms thickened.

Indeed, after a strong freshet, settler Alexander Rose wrote, in 1768: "... the impetuous rains sweep away the whole vegetative Earth from the broken (plowed) grounds (of tidewater) unless they are tended in grain."

Rose's thinking thus anticipated by 230 years the agricultural cover crops that are a hallmark of nutrient management plans on modern Chesapeake farms.

Past as prologue

The words left us by colonists dead for hundreds of years allow us to imagine the extraordinary resources then offered by the Chesapeake. And this is just a sampler from the vast trove of information available.

As obscuring layers are peeled away by historian, archaeologist and natural scientist, more and more of the Chesapeake's past is being revealed.

Since these early colonists, the Bay has been abused for almost four centuries. We have eliminated all but a trace of the peoples who lived here for 9,000 years before us. This vast basin's forests have been removed - often several times over - its rivers have been blocked, its air and waters polluted, its lands incised with centuries of agriculture, allowing so much fertile soil to muddy the Bay. We have inundated the watershed with our locust swarm of population and development.

Yet, there are still substantial remnants of the Bay's great heritage: the autumn flight of geese, a great circle of swimming menhaden, the slash of feeding bluefish, the roil of feeding rockfish. There are the rare, single trees, and even rarer stands of trees that have escaped logging and storms. There is the savor of a Chesapeake oyster, glistening on its half-shell.

Revel in any of these you encounter, and neither despair of making progress against our losses nor become complacent about what remains. All of the Bay's resources are threatened, and they can each vanish if we do not reverse the damages done ... if we do not redouble our efforts to move the Chesapeake toward that dateline of long ago.

Dr. Kent Mountford is a senior scientist with the USEPA Chesapeake Bay Program. His "Capsule History of Chesapeake Bay," from geological origin to modern times, is available on the Chesapeake Bay Program Homepage at: http://www.epa.gov/r3chesapeake

Landing

Descendants of cypress recorded by Capt. John Smith can be seen at First Landing State Park near Virginia Beach. Although many cypress grow along the James and Pocomoke rivers, there are only a few, gnarled specimens of very old trees. Only Maryland's "Champion" cypress at Battle Creek, 17 1/2 feet around and 132 feet high remains of the 17th century's great trees. Trees in a virgin forest are not often distinguished by their diameter, but by their height as they strive upward competing for light.

Goodly Pines

There are a few places left where it is still possible to get a sense of what the colonists might have experienced.

Visit a 300-year-old stand of hemlock, 200 miles from the Bay, at Western Maryland's Swallow Falls. Experience the mood of what an ancient forest must have been like: deeply shaded and cool, with morning mist rising from rich moulds and a lush understory. In the summer, temperatures in the forest are 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than nearby open country. Some believe that Native Americans never experienced forest temperatures in the 90s.

Of all the streams that Smith and his explorers passed along Maryland's Calvert Cliff shoreline, only uninhabited Parker's Creek, with its otters and eagles, remains somewhat as it might have been in that summer of 1608. This land has been preserved by the American Chestnut Land Trust. Visit Parker's Creek in Port Republic, Md. and join the Trust to protect more wild lands.

Harvesting Corn

Corn is a "New World" crop, unknown in Europe before Columbus' discovery. John Smith's haul of Indian corn was gleaned from many, tiny hand-tilled fields, maybe 3/4 acre per man. By 1609, colonists had planted 30 or 40 acres of their own. By 1614, they had 500 acres and by 1631, with perhaps a 100-bushel-per-acre yield on the best lands, they exported surplus corn. Modern, mechanized farming on Chesapeake soils with hybrid varieties and fertilizer yields 80 to 125 bushels of corn per acre and an average around 110. The U.S. corn crop for 1996 was estimated at a "disappointing" 8.7 billion bushels.

Rays

The cownose ray's serrated spine is slimed with a toxic mucus at the end of the tail, as John Smith painfully discovered. Weighing 20-30 lbs. apiece, these rays are powerful and difficult to land when hooked, but produce substantial and tasty meat from their muscular "wings." They school in thousands up the Bay each spring, when females give live-birth to dinner-plate-size juveniles. The adult females are believed to be pregnant again by the time they leave the Bay in late summer to overwinter off South America. Rays feed on bottom-dwelling clams and worms. Because rays disrupt the bottom while feeding, they're considered destructive to grass beds.


Dr. Kent Mountford is an environmental historian and estuarine ecologist.




History Lessons for the Future
Article from Bay Journal - March 1997

Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary - Near Washington D.C. and Annapolis

Jug Bay Sanctuary's walk on the wild side only a few miles from major cities
Buoys and Byways / By Scott Faber - Bay Journal

Nestled along the Patuxent River in Anne Arundel County, Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary provides habitat for variety of species - especially people.

The shallow embayment bordered by wetlands and forests is less than 20 miles as the crow flies from two capitals - Washington and Annapolis. I and my two sons had the run of the refuge on two recent days in December, despite spring-like weather.

After exploring the hands-on displays and interactive exhibits at the McCann Wetlands Study Center, we headed north past a toad garden to a trail that promised access to the marsh.

We could see the Patuxent in front of us as we threaded a wooded trail to the boardwalk. In the summer months, the boys run the boardwalk through a towering gantlet of arrow arum, spatterdock and tear thumb. Wild rice, once dominant but under assault from resident Canada geese, is slowly being coaxed back to prominence by sanctuary staff (with help from hunters). The emergent plants dominate this part of the Patuxent, providing spawning habitat for striped bass and plenty of food for 30 pairs of osprey.

Jug Bay is the northernmost of a series of shallow embayments - wide, shallow areas of the river that are sort of shaped like a jug - that dot the tidal, winding Patuxent before it discharges into the Chesapeake. Because the sanctuary is the near the head of tide, Jug Bay enjoys enormous biological productivity - about 290 species use the refuge, which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Estuarine Research Reserve System.

In December, the marsh is dormant and is typically a tangled mat of decaying vegetation. But on our visit, new life was sprouting through the river's surface, thanks to temperatures that topped 60 degrees. Tiny fish created a flurry of activity near the river's banks. Fishermen were angling for perch. Overall, about 40 fish species are known to use this part of the river, including American shad.

The refuge's winter residents - bald eagles, gulls and ducks - were abundant on and around the river. While the diversity of species may decrease during the winter months, December and January host the largest number of waterbirds: more than 1,000 birds representing more than 40 species.

Overall, Jug Bay hosts more about 270 different birds, including the elusive sora rail. Thousands of the robin-sized birds pass through Jug Bay each fall on their way from Newfoundland to the Gulf of Mexico and South America, devouring wild rice and tearthumb seeds. The birds are built for life in the marsh - long toes help to support their narrow bodies as they pass through the muddy canyons of emergent plants and their triangular yellow bills are the perfect tool to snare insects and seeds.

The bird's secretive lifestyle - visitors will be lucky to hear the sora rail's high-pitched call - made the bird a target for hunters in the early 1900s. The short-lived Chesapeake Beach Railroad connecting the District of Columbia with the resort town cut through the heart of Jug Bay (One of the trails is the old rail bed.), opening the area's wild rice marshes to hunting. Riding the "Honeysuckle Route"; to hunt sora rail was so popular at the time that it drew Teddy Roosevelt, Babe Ruth and Harry Truman. Men would hire local farmers to push small skiffs, called "rail boats," into the marsh with a 14-foot pole to surprise the puffin-like birds.

The sora rails were enjoying Gulf waters when we visited the refuge, but the distinctive whistle of the bald eagle alerted us that the nation's symbol was nearby.

We headed into the dense forests that border Jug Bay to explore the trails that crisscross the 1,400-acre sanctuary. The trails are bordered by mature stands of tulip, red oak, white oak, sweet gum, hickory and Virginia pine, although the sanctuary's staff is taking steps to manually stall forest succession in some places to preserve some of the sanctuary's meadows. Bird-viewing blinds dot the trails along the river.

In the spring and summer, Jug Bay's tidal wetlands provide a wide variety of habitats - broad-leaved plants in the low marsh, tall plants like wild rice in the high marsh, mixed woody shrubs in the scrub-shrub marsh, as well as forested wetlands - that serve a variety of bird species, including most of the warblers that migrate along the Eastern seaboard.

At least 90 species of water birds use the marsh to feed, rest, nest or hide from predators. The American black duck, which is increasingly rare, breeds at Jug Bay and is often sighted.

On a recent trip to the sanctuary, northern harriers flew low over the marsh in search of dinner. Crowds of green-winged teals gathered on the open water. Bonaparte's gulls grace the river for two weeks in April (Most of the common gulls can be found at Jug Bay.) and double-crested cormorants are seen during their spring and fall migrations.

Heading away from the river and toward a small, clear creek, we found ample evidence of beaver and other furbearers. Beavers have dammed up many of the small creeks that drain from the refuge into the Patuxent. Muskrat and river otter are also found in the sanctuary.

A "turtle crossing" sign on the trail is the only evidence on this December day that Jug Bay is home to hundreds of box turtle - which hibernate underground during the winter.

(The boys had helped to "rescue" a box turtle on the main road leading to the refuge last fall. Road mortality - as well as habitat loss - is one of the biggest threats facing the colorful reptile.)

The red-bellied turtle, the larger cousin of the eastern painted turtle, is found in the deeper waters of Jug Bay. In June and July, females travel to sandy areas along the Patuxent to dig a nest and deposit 10 to 15 eggs. Studies by Jug Bay staff show that the females return to the same sandy spots year after year. After 75 days, the eggs open and the hatchlings - the size of a quarter - head to the marsh.

Jug Bay was created as a stand against sprawl. A proposal to turn farm and forestland into a trailer park in the 1970s was opposed by the local civic association, environmental groups and some political leaders, including Rep. Virginia Clagett. When the owner of the land refused to sell, state officials took an unusual step - they used the state's power of condemnation and forced a sale for fair market value - and handed the parcel to Anne Arundel County to manage.

Since then, the county has purchased five neighboring parcels to expand the sanctuary's footprint to about 1,400 acres. In 2002, funds from the state's "greenprint" program were used to acquire a 620-acre tract renamed the Glendening Nature Preserve, the most significant recent addition. Visitors can see restoration up close in the Glendening Preserve - grazed lands are quickly becoming lush meadows and stands of Virginia pine signal the first stage of forest succession.

Most of the farm and forest land bordering the refuge is subject to easements that restrict development, and the sanctuary's director, Chris Swarth, is grateful for their "good neighbors."

"Jug Bay is a great example of local government stepping up at the fork in the road and making a bold move to protect a critical area," said Swarth, who has worked at the refuge for 17 years and is an expert on box turtles.

People have enjoyed Jug Bay for at least 11,000 years. When Capt. John Smith sailed up the Patuxent River in 1608, he found the Piscataway Indians, who built longhouses - arch-shaped structures made of young saplings bent and covered with animal skins - on the bluffs overlooking the Patuxent. They used the gullies around Jug Bay as natural ramps to the river.

Much of the land that is now Jug Bay was cleared at different times for agriculture, and a small portion of the sanctuary is still used as a community garden. Pig Point, located just upstream of Jug Bay, was once a thriving seaport and the site of a river battle during the War of 1812. Steamboats appeared on the river soon after, and Pig Point served as the head of commercial navigation for nearly a century.

People still enjoy Jug Bay - as visitors and as volunteers. The sanctuary's "citizen scientists" are involved in everything from bird banding to box turtle counts, Swarth said. The sanctuary has several ongoing research projects, including bird counts, fish studies, and stream and wetland monitoring. Every fall, volunteers monitor the migration of the marbled salamander, which emerges from beneath leaves and logs on rainy nights in search of low-lying areas that will become vernal pools when filled with spring rains.

Groups of local students and scout troops regularly explore the sanctuary, and Jug Bay offers a summer camp program.

Walking the sanctuary's trail, it's easy to assume that Jug Bay is permanently protected. But development near the sanctuary still poses a threat. Most recently, a developer has proposed to clear a forest to build a shopping center at the headwaters of Galloway Creek, which runs through the sanctuary and discharges into the Patuxent. The river is already clogged with too much sediment, according to experts, and preliminary plans for the shopping center were rejected by county officials for failing to address stormwater runoff.

The fact that Jug Bay is an estuarine research reserve - and that the county has pledged to protect it as part of its deal with the state - complicates local decisions about development near the sanctuary. Other threats include invasive plant species, a growing deer population and too many resident Canada geese. (Goose hunting is now permitted in a park on the other side of the river.) Swarth bemoaned "the army of invasives" that is sweeping across the sanctuary. He has also seen signs of sea level rise, such as caving banks and deeper waters.

The osprey's return to Jug Bay from South America in March is considered a harbinger of spring. Not long after the first pair nests, Jug Bay offers a range of activities, including canoe tours, bird watching, full moon hikes, storytelling and lots of opportunities to participate in research.

"Getting involved in our research provides a much deeper understanding of our wildlife," Swarth said. "Measuring salamanders, weighing turtles and frogs, and visiting our sampling sites get our volunteers familiar with Jug Bay in ways that short-term visitors can't"

Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary

Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday, except for December through February when the sanctuary is closed on Sunday. The entrance fee is $3 for adults; $2 for seniors and ages 18 and younger.

Glendening Nature Preserve is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily except for December through February when the sanctuary is closed on Sunday. There is no entrance fee to the preserve. Parking and trail maps are located at the Wrighton Road entrance of the Preserve. The preserve's parking lot is on the right just before the sanctuary entrance.

For information about the sanctuary or the preserve, call 410-741-9330 or visit http://www.jugbay.org/

Directions: Jug Bay's website includes very detailed directions from Annapolis, Baltimore at the Baltimore Beltway, the District of Columbia and Calvert County, MD. Don't forget to watch out for turtles en route!


Scott Faber is a writer living in Washington, D.C.


Jug Bay Sanctuary's walk on the wild side only a few miles from major cities
Article from Bay Journal - Feb 2007

John Smith's Chesapeake Map - History

History of John Smith's Chesapeake map full of twists and turns
Past is Prologue / By Dr. Kent Mountford - Bay Journal

I first paid attention to John Smith's defining map of the Chesapeake about 30 years ago when I bought two reproductions during a trip to Williamsburg, VA. One was hung in my parents' home, the other, the Guilielmi Blaeuw version of 1660, still hangs in my library, where it is used as a reference. I had thought that I was looking at Smith's "original" work. How wrong I was!

Smith's first published cartographic effort and its successors were the most accurate images of Chesapeake Bay between their emergence from his field notes in 1608 and Augustine Herrmann's much improved 1673 map, which covers four folio pages.

That's a period of six and a half decades during which Smith's work held sway. It was reprinted as a working product beyond then, and has been reissued as a historical document, right up to the present.

(This may not have been the first map Smith created while in Virginia, though. Some maintain that John Smith's working sketch for part of the Chesapeake was traced by someone and given to Pedro de Zuniga, the Spanish ambassador to England. He had it smuggled out of the country for Spain's King Phillip III.)

I think of Smith's detailed but geographically odd map as a working product from his field notebooks, now lost. Smith wrote about having the use of his personal "Table book" during his winter captivity with Chief Powhatan's brother "Opechankanough, king of the Pamaunkee."

The papers therein had already survived his near-freezing death as he struggled against capture in a quicksand-bottom stream at the head of the Chickahominy River. Once in captivity, he took a few of the leaves and "writ his minde to them at the Fort what was intended, how they should ...without fail send him such things as he writ for. And an Inventory with them."

The note was carried by native runners "to Jamestowne, in as bitter weather as could be of frost and snow, and within three days returned with an answer." The native Americans had no written language and were amazed that the paper could "speak" efficiently to the Englishmen at Jamestown. Smith's release was ultimately negotiated but not before still greater adventures on which he duly took notes, all the while collecting data for his comprehensive map.

The exploration voyage in 1608 enabled Smith to gather the rest of what he needed. Imagine the detail in these notebooks, later greatly distilled in his writings: the compass bearings, annotations, the readings for latitude using a mariner's quadrant, the phonetic spelling of Indian river, place and settlement names. We would understand the weather and tides or how he interpreted the landscape and forest. The notebooks must have been small to be carried on his person, wrapped in oilcloth-linen, hemp or cotton treated with oil to make them waterproof.

He could not have managed ink in the field; did he use a pencil? Brinsley, in 1612, speaks about a "pensil of black lead" though it was 1683 before Pettus describes "Black lead...of late...is curiously formed into cases of Deal (the heartwood of fir or pine) or Cedar, and sold as dry Pencils."

Smith's original paperwork accompanied him back to England despite his being near death from gunpowder burns in 1609. They could easily have been lost, or maliciously destroyed by his detractors, yet survived.

Once in London, Smith gathered his materials together with William Hole, a London engraver, to make his map a public document.

This was no small feat. Hole had to transfer Smith's sketch to a copper plate for printing. Despite this meticulous work, Hole managed to engrave the wrong year, "1606," on a map that was not even drafted until 1608-09 and would not be published until 1612.

Dr. Stephen Potter, an archaeologist for the National Park Service, has made the study of Smith's map something of a life interest. He has noted that the copper plate had to first be beaten flat, then carefully honed and polished with smooth stones, pumice and finally a charcoal paste. When perfectly smooth and flat, the plate was coated with a protective wax and the actual engraving could begin.

Hole, and possibly his apprentices, worked from Smith's draft to create a mirror image on the plate. They engraved the image with sharp steel tools called gravers, made in a variety of shapes and sizes. "Burins" produced one quality of line, the "angle tint" tool with curved tip another, "Florentine liners" and "flat gravers" helped with repetitive hatching and shading. There were many others.

For plates like the Smith map, which would be used to make many impressions, metal was actually gouged from the surface of the copper, leaving no burr on the edge of each groove.

When ready to use, the plate was wiped with a sticky ink, which filled each groove. The excess was carefully wiped off, cleaning the smooth parts of the polished copper. Paper, in this case a sheet of laid fiber paper, not true parchment vellum, was placed under the press and the screws turned. The ink was transferred by absorption into the fibrous paper, making surprisingly fine, clean lines. The screws were then raised and a single copy of the Smith map peeled off the platen for proofing by the author.

If there were errors, the surface was rubbed with a steel burnisher, flattened again and the item re-engraved.

Potter suggests that about 300 copies of this first version or "state" of the Smith Map were made. Virginia scholar Coolie Verner, who died in 1974, was one of many people who researched the Smith map since its creation. He identified 12 "states" of the map, each new one containing revisions or alterations. The last one, state 12, had a conspicuous crack in the plate from long use.

Signal among the changes was the addition, in John Smith's 1624 "Generall Historie," of an estimate of longitude where none existed on the original version of 1612. The first Virginia Company explorers had a hard time telling to what longitude west of England they had sailed. The inability to track time-there being no accurate clocks carried at sea for another century and a half-and poor estimates of speed through the water made it difficult to know one's position.

Latitude could be tracked with reasonable accuracy, using backstaffs to determine the sun's noon elevation and another instrument, the mariner's astrolabe, to take the height of Polaris, the North Star, at night. With certain corrections and tables of declination for the sun above or below the equator depending on season, (which had been worked out by the mid-1500s) latitude could be figured to within 30 miles.

Longitude was still more art or luck than science. When the three Virginia Company ships reached the Atlantic Coast of North America in 1607, they They had already sailed three days beyond where they had reckoned themselves to be and still found no land. Luck brought them during the next stormy night between the Virginia Capes.

It took several more voyages before mariners had enough estimates of distance westward to make an educated guess where the East Coast lay. Even these were still off by a significant distance when longitude was added to a subsequent "state" of the Smith Map.

I should note that the longitudes printed on Smith's 1624 version appear nonsensical to users of our modern Chesapeake charts. We sit, by today's reckoning, at 75-76 degrees longitude west of the prime meridian at Greenwich, England. Smith's map shows the lower Chesapeake at 309-310 degrees. At that time, longitude was counted only in an easterly direction (toward Jerusalem) not east and west, and enumeration started from a zero point (probably) on Hierro, an island in the Canaries archipelago off West Africa.

In addition to "states" or versions of the original engraving over the subsequent six decades, Verner also described nine derivative maps from the same or other copper plate engravings, which proliferated to the extent that publishers could market them.

My reproduction of the Guiljelmi Blaeuw map of 1660 was a first derivative generation. It has a story. From the Smith/Hole map, Jodocus Hondius reproduced the engraving in 1618 and published the map under his own name. He died in 1629, and his wife sold this and other copper plates to Willem (Guiljelmi) Blaeu (yes, two spellings) who replaced the Hondius imprint with his own. Hondius' brother Henricus was incensed that his sister-in-law would sell to a competitor, so he and his partner hired engravers and made a copy of the Smith map to include, with others, in an atlas.

The Blaeuw version of Smith, called "Nova Virginia Tabula" was first sold in 1630 and widely circulated with absolutely no benefit for Smith, who would die the following year at age 51. So much for 17th century copyright protection.

Potter points out that it's easy to tell "my" Blaeuw version was derived from a very early Smith/Hole plate because, even in 1660, it has no longitude shown.

Smith's map contains an extraordinary depth of information. It is the only comprehensive attempt at locating every Native American settlement he encountered, and includes a written estimate of warriors. This enables us to make inferences about the native Chesapeake population in 1608.

Smith, looking for minerals and watercourses leading west, paid attention to the Bay's middle Western Shore, wholly missing major Eastern Shore rivers such as the two Choptanks, the Chester and Eastern Bay.

One can fault him for this but he carefully left blank spaces behind each of the three major mapped islands he passed-probably what were later named Sharps, Tilghman and Kent Islands. He thus, in full disclosure, let readers know that he was unsure what was there, and that they might draw their own conclusions. The Tuscan crosses on his map, show the limit of his actual exploration, or at least the limit of what he believed to be unimpeachable information.

Edward Wright Haile transposed all of the Indian settlements and chief's houses to modern geography, so that archaeologists can associate them with previous-and future-Native American sites uncovered.

This has proved to be vital information for modern scholars like Potter, who tease out the sociopolitical environment of the Powhatans and their neighboring chiefdoms. Potter, for example, points out that the overbearing Powhatans seem to have driven settlements along the south bank of the Rappahannock northward. There are only seven villages on the south and a significant 35 on the north.

Smith's wide cross-cultural experiences in Europe and the Middle East before coming to Virginia seem to have given him an unusual perspicacity in recording these subtleties. He was, Potter suggests, far less Anglocentric than his contemporaries at Jamestown.

Haile's work was invaluable as he, archaeologist Wayne E. Clark and I carefully reconstructed Smith's voyage route for the National Park Service a few years back. Clark, for his part, pored over every segment of the voyage with Smith's Map and modern topography next to each other, matching turn for turn the stream bends that Smith sketched. This work was built into our book "John Smith's Chesapeake Voyages 1607-1609," written with our senior author and anthropologist Helen Rountree.

As an ecologist, I look again and again at the map, with new insights emerging every time. Tiny Indians, bows drawn, pursue deer just south of the chief's village of Paspahegh.

One can actually identify some of the trees Hole sketched into blank spots, surely with Smith looking over his shoulder. One can easily pick out conifers of various sorts, likely Virginia red cedar and what I believe is Atlantic white cedar, as well as bald cypress hung with Spanish moss. There are also several deciduous hardwoods. I believe that I can distinguish oaks, and perhaps tulip poplar, although there are other species not as easily identified.

One image, labeled "Democrites tree," appears at least seven times, and is possibly a joke on us by Smith or Hole. (Democrites, known as the "laughing philosopher," recounted fantastical tales about nature. There was an English play in this vein in 1617, seven years before the 1624 "Generall Historie" version of Smith's map.)

This label appears in the sixth "state" of the map, near the labeled "Burton's Mount," a likely reference to Robert Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy" in which Democrites was described as sitting under a tree, in which are hung anatomical specimens of dogs, cats, etc.

This book is described as a one of the most erudite medical texts ever written. It was published in 1624 and ran a phenomenal 1,400 pages. Nobody ever suggested that the versatile Capt. John Smith was either unlettered or lacked a sense of humor.

Dr. Kent Mountford is an environmental historian and estuarine ecologist.



History of John Smith's Chesapeake map full of twists and turns
Article from Bay Journal - Jan 2008