The Watermen: A Way of Life Built on the Bay

The word waterman does not mean sailor. On the Chesapeake, it means something specific: a person, usually a man born into a tidewater family, who makes a living from the bay by harvesting whatever it produces in each season. Oysters in the fall and winter, worked from a skipjack or a patent-tonging boat. Blue crab in the spring and summer, pulled from crab pots strung across familiar grounds. Soft-shell crabs in the molting season, caught and held in floats until they shed. Rockfish in the runs. Menhaden for the fertilizer mills. The calendar of the waterman's year was the calendar of the bay's seasonal offerings.

This way of life is old. It predates the English colonies. The Piscataway and Nanticoke and Susquehannock peoples were harvesting the bay's shellfish and finfish for thousands of years before the Ark and the Dove arrived, and many of the techniques that European settlers adopted, including weir fishing, certain netting methods, and the knowledge of which tidal creek held crabs on a flooding tide, came from indigenous practice.

What the Europeans added was scale and commerce. By the eighteenth century the bay's fish and shellfish were feeding people who had never seen the Chesapeake. By the nineteenth century the skipjack fleet was a commercial enterprise of regional importance. By the early twentieth century, canneries along the Western Shore were packing crab and oyster for national distribution.

The watermen who remain today are the inheritors of a craft knowledge that runs deep. They can read the tide, the wind, the bottom, and the water color in ways that no instrument fully replicates. They are also the people who have watched the bay change most intimately and most painfully. The crabs are still there. The oysters are recovering slowly. The rockfish population has rebounded from a collapse in the nineteen eighties after a moratorium on harvest. The bay the watermen work today is not the bay their grandparents worked. But it is still the bay.