Before New York City was the Big Apple, it could have been called the Big Oyster. Now award-winning author Mark Kurlansky tells the remarkable story of New York by following the trajectory of one of its most fascinating inhabitants–the oyster, whose influence on the great metropolis remains unparalleled.

For centuries New York was famous for its oysters, which until the early 1900s played such a dominant a role in the city’s economy, gastronomy, and ecology that the abundant bivalves were Gotham’s most celebrated export, a staple food for the wealthy, the poor, and tourists alike, and the primary natural defense against pollution for the city’s congested waterways.

Filled with cultural, historical, and culinary insight–along with historic recipes, maps, drawings, and photos–this dynamic narrative sweeps readers from the island hunting ground of the Lenape Indians to the death of the oyster beds and the rise of America’s environmentalist movement, from the oyster cellars of the rough-and-tumble Five Points slums to Manhattan’s Gilded Age dining chambers.

Kurlansky brings characters vividly to life while recounting dramatic incidents that changed the course of New York history. Here are the stories behind Peter Stuyvesant’s peg leg and Robert Fulton’s "Folly"; the oyster merchant and pioneering African American leader Thomas Downing; the birth of the business lunch at Delmonico’s; early feminist Fanny Fern, one of the highest-paid newspaper writers in the city; even "Diamond" Jim Brady, who we discover was not the gourmand of popular legend.

With THE BIG OYSTER, Mark Kurlansky serves up history at its most engrossing, entertaining, and delicious.

A Molluscular Life

Obviously, if you don't love life, you can't enjoy an oyster.
--Eleanor Clark, The Oysters of Locmariaquer, 1959

In 1609, when Henry Hudson, a British explorer employed by the Dutch, sailed into New York Harbor on his eighty-five-foot ship, Halve Maen, with a half-British, half-Dutch crew of sixteen, he found the same thing Mackay would two and a half centuries later--a local population with the habit of feasting on excellent New York Harbor oysters.

Hudson was a seventeenth-century man in search of a fifteenth-century dream. His employer, Holland, would soon be in its golden age, offering the world Rembrandt, the microscope, and the stock exchange, but not, as Hudson and his sponsors had hoped, a river through North America leading to China.

A water route to Chinese trade replacing the long, arduous Silk Road was a great dream of the Renaissance. The only alternative ever found was in 1499 when Vasco da Gama sailed from Portugal and went around Africa to the Indian Ocean. All of the westward voyages of exploration had ended in failure, with endless landmasses standing in the way between Europe and China. Cabot was stopped by Canada in the north, Verrazano was stopped by the United States farther south, Columbus by Central America in the middle, and Magellan showed that it was a hopelessly long way around South America to the south. Only one idea still held any possibility and that was a passage through arctic waters.

And so Hudson was essentially an arctic explorer. In fact, he was a failed arctic explorer. On his first voyage for the British he sailed straight north, attempting to travel beyond the ice and down the other side of the globe. The plan was geographically astute but meteorologically absurd and he was stopped by ice. At the point he could go no farther, his seventy-foot wooden vessel was only six hundred miles short of Robert E. Peary's 1909 achievement, reaching the North Pole. His second voyage, heading northeast over Russia, was also stopped by ice. At this point his British sponsor, the Muscovy Company, dropped him.

A new idea came along. In the early seventeenth century, Captain John Smith, the ruggedly handsome legendary adventurer famous for his conquests both military and sexual, was the great promoter of European settlement in North America. He charted the coastline, reported on his findings, and pitched North America to any Englishman who would listen. He was to play a role in the promoting of Britain's two leading North American colonies, Virginia and Massachusetts. Hudson knew Smith and they corresponded in 1608, by which time four-fifths of Smith's 1607 Virginia settlers had already died. There was a growing belief that North America was uninhabitable in the winter. But Smith's contagious enthusiasm never faltered. Not only did he believe in North American settlement--this entire debate taking place as if no one was already living there--but his maps and letters to Hudson promoted an alternative to the theory that a water route to China could be found north of Canada--the so-called Northwest Passage. Smith's theory was that somewhere north of Virginia a major river connected the Atlantic to the Sea of Cathay.

This is a case of people hearing only what they want to hear. Smith's Chinese sea was presumably the Pacific Ocean, but rivers are not known to flow from one sea to another. Smith's theory was based on statements from northern tribes who trapped for fur. They talked of an ocean that could be reached from a river. They probably said nothing about Cathay,...