Ride the Waves! Fight Pirates! In the Oyster Navy!

Virginia’s Tidewater region has long been associated with the U.S. Navy, but did you know that the Commonwealth also had an Oyster Navy? Better yet, did you know that a sitting Virginia governor led an Oyster Navy raid against oyster pirates of the Mosquito Fleet? No, ChatGPT did not generate that sentence–it really did happen.

As these situations often do, it began with a disagreement. In this case, a very, very long disagreement between the Commonwealth of Virginia and the State of Maryland over their borders. The argument began after the King granted each colony its royal charter in the early 1600s. Incidentally, this same dispute was still brewing in 2001 when the author, then a fresh-faced archivist, began at the Library of Virginia (see Virginia v. Maryland, 2003). But what, you ask, does any of this have to do with oysters?

Virginia and Maryland came to an agreement, known as the Compact of 1785, spelling out navigational access to the Potomac and Pocomoke Rivers and the Chesapeake Bay, as well as tolls, fishing rights, commerce, and debt collection. In these heady days of the early Republic, oysters were bountiful in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. Oyster tongers collected the mollusks on a relatively small scale for personal and commercial use. At the time, people considered oysters to be “poor people’s food” with a short shelf life, so the demand was not excessive, but two technological advancements would change that fact.

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Gov. Henry Lloyd of Maryland to Gov. Fitzhugh Lee of Virginia. Virginia. Governor (1886-1890 : Lee).

Executive Papers of Governor Fitzhugh Lee, 1886-1890. Accession 45055, State Government Records Collection, Library of Virginia.

In the early 1800s, oyster dredges were introduced in the Chesapeake making it possible to harvest many more oysters at once, however, dredging also damaged the oyster beds which impacted future harvests. By 1811, the Virginia General Assembly passed anti-dredging legislation to protect the livelihood of Tidewater and Eastern Shore oyster tongers from Maryland and New England dredgers.

The advent of canning technology also profoundly changed the oyster industry. The French discovery coincided with dredging but had its major impact after the Civil War when the reputation of oysters shifted from a poor man’s repast to a luxury fare for the newly prosperous. Suddenly, oyster canneries sprung up all along the Chesapeake Bay and formerly small specks on the map became wide-open boom towns. Oystermen, many of whom were formerly enslaved Black men, were suddenly very busy. Oysters were in high demand and many people wanted in on the commerce. Thus began The Oyster Wars, which would last for nearly a century.

Because of competing harvesting laws and the lingering boundary issues, skirmishes broke out between Virginia and Maryland watermen, as well as between oystermen from neighboring counties.

In 1868, Maryland established a State Fishery Force (also commonly called the Oyster Police or Oyster Navy) to regulate harvesting. In May 1870, Virginia’s General Assembly authorized funds to purchase armaments for Virginia’s state oyster boats to use in confrontations with oyster pirates. This bivalve war was getting serious.

By February 1882, newly elected Governor William E. Cameron of the Readjuster Party had had enough. He commandeered two ships, the Victoria J. Peed and the Louisa; loaded them with state militia from Norfolk and Richmond; and set out after the pirates himself. The swashbuckling governor managed to apprehend forty-six illegal dredgers and capture seven boats. The prosecutions and forfeitures did not hold up in court, however, and the chief executive’s next raid was even less successful, but awareness of the problem had reached the highest office in the Commonwealth.

In March of 1884, Virginia created the Board of the Chesapeake and its Tributaries, a body empowered to oversee the oyster industry. As part of that oversight, they were to purchase a steamer and three schooners to enforce the commonwealth’s oyster harvesting regulations. Virginia’s Oyster Navy was born.

The Commonwealth previously had three steam tugboats used by oyster tax collectors for collecting revenues, but those had been sold in 1874 by the cash-strapped state government, which was drowning in war debt. The new steamer, appropriately named Chesapeake, would be helmed by a Captain-in-Chief and outfitted with arms and cannon. The Board named Seth Foster of Mathews County the Chesapeake’s first captain.

Throughout the rest of the 19th and into the mid-20th centuries, oysters were a huge economic resource for Virginia, and the conflicts between watermen and governments continued. The last casualty of the so-called Oyster Wars fell in 1959 when Maryland Oyster Police shot Berkeley Muse for illegally dredging off Swan’s Point. However, by the late 1960s, the combination of overfishing, pollution, environmental degradation, and disease all but ended oyster production in the Chesapeake Bay anyway.

In the last 40 years, a concerted effort by citizens, scientists, environmentalists, state agencies, and legislators has helped turn the health of the Chesapeake Bay and the state’s oysters around. Agencies such as the Virginia Marine Resource Commission (VMRC), whose law enforcement branch is the successor to Virginia’s Oyster Navy, works with partners to monitor and keep the commonwealth’s fisheries, wetlands, and coastal areas in good health, and it’s working. In the 2022-2023 season, Virginia waters had the highest oyster yield in 35 years at 700,000 bushels.