It’s a cold, windy morning, well before sunrise at Turner’s Creek Landing in Kent County, Md., but Capt. Owen Clark’s workboat Aluminator is already idling at the dock. He’s got a full day ahead of him and is ready to head out to check his pots, November bluster or not.
Clark works one of the Chesapeake’s most ancient, obscure fisheries—Anguilla rostrata, the American eel. Once an essential element of every working waterman’s repertoire, eeling has fallen off to just a few watermen in recent decades, a far cry from an era when chunks of salted eel baited every crabber’s trotline from Turkey Point to Cape Henry.
Eel have been a seasonal harvest for millennia. Across the centuries, Indigenous people created v-shaped weirs in tributaries throughout the Bay. As eels moved downstream, they were funneled by the weirs into a small point where they were trapped or speared. Smoked or dried, the eel harvest fed communities of Native Americans throughout the winter months.
Even today, remnants of our eeling past persist. Submerged weirs have been found throughout the Susquehanna River, and indigenous place names like Swarata (“where we feed on eel”) and Shamokin (“Eel Creek”) linger in our contemporary landscape, if not our memory.
The first colonists, always seeking familiar foods, were delighted to discover one of their favorite fish thriving in their new Chesapeake homeland. England, in particular, had a rich eel foodways culture, and freshly-caught Thames eel featured prominently in all sorts of dishes. Jellied, stewed and roasted eel, and the ever-present eel pie were all popular 17th-century dishes among the working classes.
Among colonists, American eel continued to be a favored dish. One of the earliest cookbooks to circulate in the colonies, Hannah Glasse’s 1747 The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, contains no less than three eel recipes, while Amelia Simmons’ 1796 American Cookery—the first cookbook published in America—provided housewives with helpful tips for selecting the freshest and tastiest eels when shopping at a fishmonger’s stall. Mary Randolph’s 1825 The Virginia Housewife shows the enduring popularity of eel well into the 19th century, with recipes for boiled and pitchcocked eel.
The culinary endurance of the American eel is matched by the physical endurance of eels themselves. A catadromous species, they spend the majority of their lives in the upper tributaries of North America’s East Coast. But at sexual maturity, they mysteriously embark on an epic one-way journey to the warm waters of the Sargasso Sea, traveling over 1,500 miles in 45 days. There, they reproduce in the Sea’s free floating sargassum seaweed and die, and their tiny, transparent larvae are then carried by the prevailing currents towards their future freshwater habitats.
Along the way, the clear, leaf-shaped juveniles develop into larger “glass” eels, and as they gain pigmentation, they are referred to as “elvers.” Finally, as they travel into the Chesapeake and head towards the freshwater headwaters where they’ll live their adult lives, they become muscular, snake-like, and take their familiar form as “yellow” eel.
In this stage, they may travel thousands of miles in search of a permanent home. Thanks to their thick, slimy coating, they are capable of moving over land, across dams or snags, or through dry environments until they reach their destination. There, they’ll live for up to 20 years, feeding at night and hibernating over the winter in frozen, shallow marshes or ponds.
The historic eel fishery capitalized on different parts of the eel life cycle. Large, sexually mature “silver” eels were harvested during their migration downstream in fall. Yellow eel, elvers and glass eel were harvested in the springtime, as their offspring returned to the Chesapeake’s waterways.
To catch the fish, an unusually universal language of fishing gear and traditions developed. The main tools, cylindrical woven pots and spears or eel forks, could be found with only fairly small deviations across history.
Native Americans from the Chesapeake used basket weaving techniques to shape oak splints around wooden forms, crafting tightly-woven eel pots that were baited and used with weirs or in open water to catch eels. At the same time on the other side of the world, Thames fisherman were weaving eel “bucks” or traps out of willow that looked and functioned in pretty much the same way.
Remarkably, the eel pot’s essential form remains fairly unchanged. Onboard Capt. Owen Clark’s Aluminator, the pots today are metal and cloth, but the shape and use is almost identical to what an 18th-century Bay fisherman would have utilized.
For several centuries, the eel harvest in the Chesapeake was ascendent. Eels, largely harvested in spring and fall, were easily preserved with smoke or salt for winter food stores.
Eel pots captured eels moving throughout the waterways, while eel forks allowed eelers to spear hibernating eel in frozen marshes or ponds. The thriving population of eel also made them frequent bycatch in other fisheries, and the surplus catch was salted, cut into chunks, and used as bait fish for large-scale commercial fisheries like blue crabs.
Ironically, the eel pot may prove more enduring than the American eel fishery itself. Since the 18th century, the relentless damming of American waterways for industry, energy, and mills has taken an enormous toll on eel populations.
Eel numbers began to decline in the late 20th century. The 1979 Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission estimated that fishermen spanning the coast landed 3.67 million pounds of eels. By 2002, the number had dropped to 700,000.
According to the USFWS, only 12 percent of Mid-Atlantic waterways are navigable before eels reach a dam. In the Chesapeake, keystone rivers like the Susquehanna were dammed numerous times, barricading eel from their natural habitat.
While American eel numbers are declining, the demand for eel has never been higher. Starting in the 1980s and intensifying in the 2000s, the export markets to Asia transformed the eel fishery from a mainly baitfish industry into an international juggernaut almost overnight.
Asian eel populations had long been prized as a food fish, especially in Japan. But the voracious demand for eel outstripped the dwindling Asian eel stocks. Exportation of American eel created a mini-boom for the Chesapeake eel fishery.
It also raised the price of eel out of reach as a bait fish, and watermen turned to more affordable alternatives like razor clams. For a short time, eelers like Clark enjoyed an eel renaissance, as wholesalers paid top dollar to export their yellow and silver eels to Japan.
The development of a Chinese aquaculture method to “finish” American glass eels to maturity in tanks spelled the end of the Chesapeake’s mini-boom. Just as quickly as it had started, the demand shifted away from Maryland, where only yellow eels of 9 inches or more are legal to harvest. Today, only 40% of Clark’s eel catch will be sold for consumption overseas, while the rest will be marketed as bait for local anglers catching rockfish.
Clark estimates he’s one of three or four working eelers left on the Upper Chesapeake. Though the eel fishery today is a shadow of what it once was, the traditions of eeling are being carefully revived.
In the Patawomeck Tribe of Northern Virginia, tribal member and archaeologist Dr. Brad Hatch has been hosting a series of eel pot workshops to keep his cultural tradition alive. Working with oak splints harvested from nearby forests, Hatch is passing the art weaving of eel pots down to the next generation. The Maryland State Arts Council’s Maryland Traditions program has also supported eel pot apprenticeships with eel pot craftsmen like Melvin Hickman of Cambridge, Md.
Back on the Bohemia, Clark is wrapping up his day. The wind has picked up, and the swells have started in earnest, but he and his crew have gotten in a good day’s harvest.
Working as a team of three in an easy rhythm, they pull up hundreds of pots full of thrashing, wriggling eels, dump them into Aluminator’s livewell, and re-bait and stack the pots.
Once back at the dock, Owen pumps the boat’s livewell into holding tanks in his truck for transport. The eels rush out, gleaming silver and yellow in the November sun. A tradition old as time and big as the world, eeling and the rich culture it created perseveres, enduring and enigmatic as the eels themselves.