I am the Oyster King!
Well, maybe not yet... I haven't found a nice (cheap) crown yet...
My daughters have a nice tiara, but it's a little too pretty for me...
Warning: Stop here to avoid possibly fatal boredom.
I still didn't find any more signs... Actually, I didn't go digging.
I briefly poked around with a steel bar and all I found was an old rusty coil spring and some lousy ruby encrusted golden amulet.
Stupid golden amulets.
The area is fairly shady and overgrown with thorny blackberries and annoyingly mosquito infested so I decided to look for the other signs I lost, instead...
until it is less humid out.
That should be around October...
In the meantime I decided to summon the spirit of Jacob Ockers in the meantime... He's the oyster king guy who was in charge of the oyster company back in 1914.
All I got was a minor demon who was looking for a bus stop in Hoboken NJ...
I apologized and he went on his way, acknowledging that summoning is a wonky method of communication and suggested I try the new app DeeMonz...
But you really need the spirit's cell number, so that's a whole other hassle.
Well, anyway... That didn't help much and now my wife is mad at me for burning a summoning circle into the living room carpet...
I suppose I could have done that outside, but it was humid out there.
So, I went back to the Internet and found the Sayville library's take on this deal...
Apparently, by the way, oysters were the high tech stocks of their time...
An ordinary man of ordinary means, if he were willing to work hard and risk his life fighting the seas, vicious oysters and giant sea monsters, could, if he managed to save a good amount of capital, eventually screw over as many people as possible and become an oyster monopoly.
Many burly bay men became fat oyster barons.
And by many I mean a few.
But it was a thing.
Up until the early 1800s the bay men would go out and collect oysters from little plots in the bay.
They couldn't ship them very far, so their demand was limited.
You could make a decent living though, and the bay men respected each other's claims.
But eventually new methods of transportation opened and with the railroads, they could ship oysters further and faster.
So some enterprising chaps started companies and staked out claims to larger areas.
Not unlike a slower, wetter gold rush, some got greedy and forgot their fellow bay men.
Leasing the bay bottom became a thing and in many cases there were no legal papers on who fished where... It was a gentleman's understanding that your markers indicated your area.
But lawyers like to scoff at verbal agreements.
So many bay men ended up paying someone for the land they had been fishing for years.
Some got by, others joined the companies that started to spring up.
Then ice making became a thing and by the late 1800s, you could ship oysters across the country if you were crazy enough.
Wealthy California madmen would brag about how they had east coast oysters for dinner.
Thats where Sealshipt comes in...
I found New York State tax records for Sealshipt which goes back as far as 1888.
Sealshipt invented a unique system of insulated, iced shipping containers and cold cases (Sealshiptors) as well as a network of specially authorized shipping agents.
Now oysters could be safely shipped to Europe too.
I guess if you were a French millionaire or an Austrian baron, European oysters were too boring and didn't have an interesting backstory.
I see a Disney cartoon in that...
Sealshipt also used an early version of the "infomercial" and would publish booklets espousing the virtues of "co-opertition", a nifty buzzword describing how to cooperate/in mutual competition against lesser dealers (apparently anyone else who sold oysters) for the good of the brand and the well being of the public, and for humanity's general benefit.
The world was gonna be a better more oysterie place, my friends.
This was the real deal, boys and girls... Though back then girls were second class citizens, so basically, this was the real deal, boys.
When you read their pitch, it's very reminiscent of the old Apple "think differently" campaign or those late night get rich quick commercials.
Some things never change.
Sealshipt had a good idea, but as with all good ideas it got out of hand... However it did it or who it managed to convince, by 1902 they managed to get the Department of Agriculture to mandate that their system or at least ones based on their methods was the de facto way to ship oysters.
Many shippers turned to them and their system, as it was just easier.
Now that they had the shipping all sewn up, they started taking over as many oyster companies on the east coast as possible.
Was the world really that oyster mad?
How did we miss and forget this?
I bet James Burke could "The Day the Universe Changed" this story into how oysters got us to the moon.
The funny thing is what little you do find indicates this oyster love was a big deal... And for a while.
But with all monopolies, I guess there is a tipping point...
Something most companies STILL don't and probably never will understand.
That's if you make something really popular, you are getting it cheap, you reduce your costs enough, keep charging a premium and corner the market completely, it becomes less special and the roof will eventually fall in on you.
That cave-in eventually happen around 1917, when oyster collecting was so effective it was decimating the oyster beds.
I guess when you control everything you can ignore common sense and nature will just show it's respect by endlessly rewarding your every whim.
Not.
Neither do drill worms and brown tide, which there were several bouts of too...
Then again treating people crappy too also effects your fortunes, and eventually their patience and good tidings wear away.
One business tactic was to turn bay men employees into "private contractors", which in the end turned them against the company when they organized.
By 1912 Sealshipt was in trouble in most regions.
Several former local company owners ended up buying out Sealshipt's concerns here in 1914 and formed "The Bluepoints Company" (I had the name wrong previously, Ocker's former business had a different name, The Bluepoints Company was actually "The Bluepoints Company-Sealshipt", playing off the Sealshipt name).
I'm imagining someone who was a former Sealshipt agent lived on or near my property and when the Sealshipt name was defunct, they dumped the signs on the property's junk pile (back then there were no garbage collection services as this was still rural).
By 1918 the Oyster King had died and the company was falling apart.
At least on Long Island.
I have no idea how long Sealshipt/Bluepoints lasted elsewhere if at all.
Eventually a few years later The Bluepoints Company fell apart too, turning into North Atlantic Oyster Farms which fell on hard times with more overfishing, bad weather, pollution and parasites.
Nowadays, the oysters are regulated and protected.
People complained (and still do) about regulations, but they eventually got instituted because, gee I guess when you are sucking up every last oyster with an industrial conveyor dredge, you may have overlooked reality and don't understand oysters don't magically reappear without mommy and daddy oysters just because you want them to.
But I guess that is the story behind most regulation stories...
Someone gets greedy or delusional and abuses the everything, and then when it's all in ruin and they either still want everyone else's share of the pie or magically want everything to go back to the old days and they bitch it's unfair.
It's sad for some people to lose a way of life, but it's sadder still to see other people convince those poor people that magically it doesn't have to be that way and they should fight the cruel regulations so those other people can suck the last breath out of that "way of life", screw over those that supported them, then cast away that broken "way of life" as they move on to their next venture.
I'm not gonna draw a modern context to that, but some things obviously never change.
Never-ever-ever.
When I get my crown, I'll be the new Oyster King and I promise I'll treat you all fairly and together we will change the world and make it a better place...
At least until I get bored and find something else that distracts me.
Well, I guess that's all... I'm sorry for the über boring history of oyster shipping.
I figured I started it, so I may as well finish it.
I also make no guarantee of historical accuracy, factual acuity nor clear understanding of oyster lore.
In fact much of this was so fragmented and riddled with documents that were OCR scanned, I'm now qualified to speak in tongues.
Well, now I'm off to read some more and better documented stories about our areas relationship to the America's Cup races and Captain Hank Haff, the yachts Defender, Mischief and Volunteer.
Yay!
