The Big Oyster

Chapter One

A Molluscular Life

Obviously, if you don’t love life, you can’t enjoy an oyster.
—Eleanor Clark, The Oysters of Locmariaquer, 1959

In 1609, when Henry Hudson, a British explorer employed by the Dutch, sailed into New York Harbor on his eighty-five-foot ship, Halve Maen, with a half-British, half-Dutch crew of sixteen, he found the same thing Mackay would two and a half centuries later—a local population with the habit of feasting on excellent New York Harbor oysters.

Hudson was a seventeenth-century man in search of a fifteenth-century dream. His employer, Holland, would soon be in its golden age, offering the world Rembrandt, the microscope, and the stock exchange, but not, as Hudson and his sponsors had hoped, a river through North America leading to China.

A water route to Chinese trade replacing the long, arduous Silk Road was a great dream of the Renaissance. The only alternative ever found was in 1499 when Vasco da Gama sailed from Portugal and went around Africa to the Indian Ocean. All of the westward voyages of exploration had ended in failure, with endless landmasses standing in the way betwe ... read full excerpt from The Big Oyster ebook