HISTORY OF MARYLAND.

CHAPTER XVIII.

“A GEOGRAPHICAL description of the country I shall not attempt (as having little skill in the mathematicks), enough of that hath been formerly written; nor is it a place now to learn to discover. I shall abhor to spirit over any; but go along with such as are voluntarily desirous to go thither, and lead them with my blunt relation (for truth knows little of eloquence) aboard the Ships thither bound, and carrying you into the Country, shew you the courtesies of the place, the disposition of the Inhabitants, the commodities, and give all sorts of people advice how and where to set down for their present benefit and future accommodation."1

Such is the language of one of the earliest writers upon Maryland, employed, probably by Governor Stone, to set forth, in proper phrase, the advantages which the province held out to colonists; and no better introduction than the above paragraph could be found for a chapter upon the country and the people of Maryland, their manners and customs, character and pursuits, as they were at this period of 1770 circa, when the once infant and feeble colony had almost attained the full proportions of a State, and, whether arrived at its majority or not, was at least preparing to assert its manhood by throwing off the oppressive and obstructive dominion of the parent country.

Without going deeper into the details of the geography of the country than Hammond thought proper to go, it is still expedient to imitate him by entering the State through the Chesapeake Bay, that noble arm of the sea which had so much to do with determining the character and pursuits of the early colonists. This bay constituted their strength and their weakness; it afforded them their highway and their market-house; it was the main source. of their wealth, and the cause of much of that careless husbandry which is still a reproach to the kindly soils of Maryland. The people owed to the bay many of their amphibious habits; while the exceeding facility of social intercourse which it allowed them in a country without roads, and in an age when it still took the court of Great Britain five days to go from London to Bath, did much to shape and to ameliorate their manners. The bay was, to the early colonists of Maryland, much more than the railroad ist

1

1 Hammond's Leah and Rachel, p. 10; London, 1656.

to the present settler in the Western wilderness; and from the first they regarded it as the most valuable private possession of the province. They traded and travelled on it, fought and frolicked on it, and its inlets and estuaries were so numerous and so accommodating that nearly every planter had navigable salt water within a rifle's shot of his front door. Thus, from the first, the "backwoods" was the wilderness, and the backwoods was simply the unsettled region, removed from navigable water. The earlier colonists took up no land but what bordered on the water; and both shores of the bay and its estuaries were settled up to the mouth of the Susquehannah, before the interior of even Charles and St. Mary's, Talbot and Kent counties had ceased to be called the "backwoods."1

The bay and its estuaries, in fact, gave the tide-water Marylander a facility of communication with one another and with the outside world not possessed by any other colony on the continent. It had long afforded the Indians their war-path, and the Susquehannoughs used to make regular raids in their canoes upon the outlying settlers on the Patuxent and Severn, on Kent Island and the Gunpowder, until Colonel Utie blocked their way with his fort on Spesutia Island, inside the mouth of the Susquehannah River. The navigable rivers of Maryland, excepting the Upper Potomac and the Susquehannah, are rivers without perceptible current, and they seldom require the use of oars. The tide does not ebb or flow with strength enough to impede the course of a boat under good sail; and it was in appreciation of this that, from the first, the Marylanders adopted the Indian mode of travelling, the Indian canoe and the Indian "pungy," or two-masted pinnace, decked over, and sailed or paddled from place to place. Some luxurious landholders imitated the lordly Virginian style, and had barges propelled by oars in the hands of their slaves, just as Washington had at Mount Vernon, but these were the exception. Neither on the James River nor the Hudson, Long Island Sound, nor at Port Royal, did the waters offer any such thoroughfare, nor were they anywhere so much made use of. Later in the colonial history, the packet-boat was always preferred to the stage-coach and the freightwagon in all the bay counties of Maryland; and it was this free, open, safe, and pleasant navigation of the Chesapeake Bay and its many inlets, which not only gave to our people a freedom and facility of intercourse with one another not enjoyed by any other agricultural community on the face of the globe, but shaped their manners and regulated their customs to an extent which it is difficult to exaggerate.

1 Bacon, Laws, etc., ch. xii., 1725, says of a statute "to encourage the taking up of runaway slaves that shall be taken up by any person and brought in from the backwoods," that "the backwoods being now inhabited, a new county erected therein, and no commission issuing whereon the execution of this act wholly depends, it is in effect become obsolete." This was written in 1765, when the backwoods had

passed westward beyond the South Mountain; but in 1725, it meant all the interior of the country west of the navigable parts of the Patuxent, and included the upper hundreds of Baltimore county.

See Eddis' account of his visit, in company with Governor Eden, to John Beale Bordley's plantation on Wye Island.

WATER-FOWL AND FISH.

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The total area of Maryland includes 13,959 square miles, but of this only 9,674 is land. Previous to the settlement of the "backwoods," the 4,285 square miles of the Chesapeake and its estuaries must have been much the larger half of the State. Through this bay our people had a water front of over five hundred miles; and its fifty navigable streams, cutting into the tidewater sections in every direction, like the legs of a centipede, made Lord Baltimore's Province appear like a larger Venice. The facilities for easy transportation thus afforded the inhabitants are difficult to overstate. Even to-day, grain can be delivered in Baltimore from the Pocomoke more cheaply and easily than over twelve miles of country road in Baltimore county; and the farmer at Oxford or St. Michael's, gets his crops to market in one-half the time and at about one-fourth the cost for freight that is incurred by the farmer at Reisterstown. In the colonial times, the planter had the still further advantage that the ships which brought out his supplies from Bristol · and London and took his tobacco in exchange, anchored, so to speak, within sight of his tobacco houses, and the same barges and lighters which carried his tobacco hogsheads to the ship, returned freighted with his groceries and osnaburgs, with the things which were needed to supply his cellar and pantry and his wife's kitchen and work-basket.

This noble bay and all its branches was alive with water-fowl and shellfish. Every point that jutted out into it was an oyster bar, where the most delicious bivalves known to the epicure might be had for the taking. Every cove, and every mat of seaweed in all the channels, abounded in crabs, which, "shedding" five months in every year, yielded the delicate soft crab, and at any point on salt water, it was only necessary to dig along shore in order to bring forth as many mananosays, or soft shell clams, as one needed. It is a grave reflection upon the taste of our ancestors that there is no evidence earlier than the beginning of the present century that the diamond-back terrapin was known and appreciated, but the more famous canvas-back duck certainly was known, and its qualities appreciated at a much earlier date.

At the time of which we write, and, indeed, up to the general employment of steam navigation in our waters, the Chesapeake and its estuaries abounded in an almost incalculable number and variety of water fowl, from the lordly swan and the heavy goose to the wee fat "dipper." In the very valuable "Journal" of Dankers and Sluyter,' the authors, writing from a point not far probably from Fairlee or Worton Creek, in Kent county, say: "I have nowhere seen so many ducks together as were in the creek in front of this house. The water was so black with them that it seemed when you looked from the land below upon the water, as if it were a mass of filth or turf, and when they flew up there was a rushing and vibration of the air like a great storm coming through the trees, and even like the rumbling of distant thunder,

1 Journal of a voyage to New York and a tour in several of the American colonies, in 1679-80, by Jaspar Dankers and Peter Sluyter, of Wiewerd, in Friesland; translated from the

original manuscript in Dutch for the Long Island Historical Society, and edited by Henry C. Murphy, Brooklyn, 1867. Alsop also speaks of the "millionous multitudes" of water-fowl.

while the sky over the whole creek was filled with them like a cloud, or like the starlings fly at harvest time in Fatherland. There was a boy about twelve years old who took aim at them from the shore, not being able to get within good shooting distance of them, but nevertheless shot loosely before they got away, and hit only three or four, complained of his shot, as they are accustomed to shoot from six to twelve, and even eighteen and more at one shot." [p. 204]. In another place, speaking of Mr. Frisby's plantation, Sluyter says [p. 208]: "I must not forget to mention the great number of wild geese we saw here on the river. They rose not in flocks of ten, or twelve, or twenty, or thirty, but continuously, wherever we pushed our way; and, as they maderoom for us, there was such an incessant clattering made with their wings upon the water when they rose, and such a noise of those flying higher up, that it was all the time as if we were surrounded by a whirlwind or a storm. This proceeded not only from geese, but from ducks and other water-fowl; and it is not peculiar to this place alone, but it occurred on all the creeks and rivers we crossed, though they were most numerous in the morning and evening, when they are most easily shot."

The waters of the bay abounded also in fish, and these, as was the case with both the flora and fauna of the State generally, embraced northern and southern species at once. The bass and the blue-fish did not exclude the pompano and the bonito; the shad and the sturgeon, on their journey to fresh water met the cat-fish and the perch; and the cost of a weir, or the trouble of staking out a net, was repaid to planters all the year round in a full supply of the most delicate sorts of table fish. The quantity of these in the bay in the early times must have been simply enormous. Now and then, in early numbers of the Annapolis Gazette, we find records of large hauls of fish, by seine, in water which now the fisherman might search in vain.1

As for game, the peculiarly mild cimate and the dense forests made it very abundant. Hammond, in his Leah and Rachel, says: "Deer are all over the country, and in places so many that venison is accounted a tiresome meat; wild turkeys are frequent, and so large that I have seen some weigh near three-score pounds." Alsop, who was a redemptioner, and spent several years on a plantation near the Patuxent, describes the deer as being in his time "as plenty as cuckolds in London." implying thereby an innumerable quantity, and also says that they were so tame that they would almost let you touch them. He further mentions that wild turkeys were frequently found in flocks of hundreds. Eddis, writing just about the outbreak of the Revolu

1 Thus, to give only one instance, (a hundred could be given easily,) under date of November, 1763, the Maryland Gazette notes the fact that, in one day, at Kent Island narrows, there were caught, at one haul of a seine, 173 bushels of fish (chiefly perch), which were sold at two shillings and six-pence per bushel.

2 The person to whom Alsop was apprenticed had no meat but venison nine months in the

year, but that in such abundance that at one time, for a family of seven persons, he had hanging up the carcases of "four-score deer." Wolves, bears and panthers are said by this author to have abounded in the backwoods, and he gives in a very exuberant style the impression made upon him by the natural resources of Maryland: "For within her doth dwell so much of variety, so much of natural

BALTIMORE AS AN ENTREPOT.

5

tionary War, says: "Deer, a few years since, were very numerous in the interior settlements; but from the unfair methods adopted by the hunter, their numbers are exceedingly diminished." Squirrels were so abundant and so destructive, that all the counties were authorized by the legislature to pay rewards for their scalps. The bison now and then crossed the Alleghanies and probably the Blue Ridge, but he was seldom seen, and rarely, if ever, hunted. Bears soon retired before the colonies into the mountains, though some were still shot in the swamps of Dorchester as late as 1770. Quail, pheasants, ortolans, snipe, woodcock, raccoons, opossums, wild pigeons, and hares were everywhere to be shot; and, as every man and boy carried a gun habitually, the supply of game upon all tables must have been exceedingly abundant.

It is the peculiarity of Maryland that, small and narrow as the State is, it unites as great a variety of soil, climate, geological structure, and flora and fauna as any other State in the country. The North and the South meet upon its soil, and the East and West also. There may be snow in the mountains of Alleghany at the same time that fuchsias are blooming and figs ripening in the open air in Somerset. It is said that the agaries of Maryland include more varieties than may be found anywhere else within the same narrow limits; and Maryland is perhaps the only State in which the magnolia family of trees meets and grows alongside of the northern pine and hemlock. The Chesapeake Bay itself draws tribute from an extraordinary range of country and climate. While one of its arms touches the feet of the Catskills, and almost reaches to the Adirondacks, another pierces to the heart of the Alleghanies due westward, and a third flows with a turbulent stream through the Blue Ridge, hard by the Peak of Otter. It penetrates the continent at such an angle and so deeply, that Baltimore, very early in its commercial history, became at one and the same time the entrepot of the settlements on the Ohio and on the lakes; Rochester sent to Baltimore for its groceries at the same time that Pittsburg and Cincinnati did so, and it supplied Harrisburg and Williamsport, in Pennsylvania, at the same time that it supplied Knoxville, in Tennessee.

A geological section of the State from Sinepuxent Bay or Point Lookout to Baltimore, and thence by the line of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to the top

plenty, that there is not anything that is or may be rare, but it inhabits within this plentious soyle: So that those parts of the creation that have borne the bell away (for many ages,) for a vegetable plentiousness, must now in silence strike and vayle all, and whisper softly in the auditual parts of Maryland, that none but she in this dwells singular, etc." Eddis, more temperately, but more convincingly, writes to his English correspondent, that, after making all allowances for a rather bitter and variable climate, and a population unconscious of the duties of loyalty, he was persuaded that, "by prudent management a respectable appearance may be supported in Maryland on terms infl

nitely more reasonable than in most parts of the mother-country; and that greater opportunities are offered to the industrious and enterprising to lay the foundations of comfortable provision for a succeeding generation."

1 Eddis' Letters, p. 50.

2 The law with regard to servants required that every apprentice and redemptioner should receive, on attaining his freedom, two hoes, an axe and a gun, costing not less than twenty shillings, and measuring three and one-half feet in the barrel, which he must keep, under a penalty, for not less than twelve months.Bacon's Laws, ch. xliv., 1715.