a was, as the century closed, on the verge
of the stability it had sorely lacked. Its reliance on Indians for
knowledge and skill, as in the first of the 17th century, was as dead
as its reliance on England for manufactures in the last of the 18th.
Just around the corner were railroads and steamboats with their
comparatively swift transportation. Teeming cities needed to be fed,
and after nearly two centuries of education in the ways of the
Chesapeake Bay and its marine life, Virginia fishermen knew how to keep
the markets stocked. In 1794 a French visitor, Moreau de Saint Mery,
wrote:

Fish is the commodity that sells for a ridiculously low price in
Norfolk. One can purchase weakfish weighing more than twenty pounds
for 4 or 5 francs and sometimes one that weighs three times more
for a gourde, 5 francs, 10 sous. Drum is also very cheap. Sturgeon,
weighing up to 60 pounds, can be bought for 6 French sous a pound,
about the same price paid for little codfish that are brought in
alive and are delicious to eat. Shad is also plentiful there. In
addition, one can get perch, porpoise, eels, leatherjackets, summer
flounder, turbot, mullet, trout, blackfish, herring, sole, garfish,
etc. In short, fish is so abundant in Norfolk that sometimes the
police find it necessary to throw back into the water those that
are not bought.

Herring fishing began to be abandoned by the planters, many of whom
were up to their necks in a variety of enterprises, in favor of
business men intending to specialize. Letters from a Virginia
speculator, John F. Mercer, to Richard Sprigg, sketch the situation:

April 19, 1779. To cure fish properly requires two days in the
brine before packing and they can only lie packed with safety in
dry weather. These circumstances joined with the heading and
drawing almost all the fish (a very tedious operation) will show
that no time was lost--only 9 days elapsed from his arrival here to
his completing his load of 15,000 herrings, a time beyond which
many wagons have waited on these shores for 4,000 uncured fish and
many have been obliged to return without one, after coming 40 and
50 miles and offering 2 and 5 dollars a thousand. Several indeed
from my own shore and six who want 36,000 herring will, I believe,
quit this night without a fish, after waiting all this storm on the
shore five days.

Mr. Clarke has ha