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At about seven o'clock we found ourselves at last surveying the oyster-banks on which the pearl-oysters are reproduced by millions. Captain Nemo pointed with his hand to the enormous heap of oysters; and I could well understand that this mine was inexhaustible, for Nature's creative power is far beyond man's instinct of destruction.
To avoid starvation, President Smith, like Lane at Roanoke Island, in May, 1609, dispersed the whole colony in three parties, sending one to live with the savages, another to Point Comfort to try for fish, and another, the largest party, twenty miles down the river to the oyster-banks, where at the end of nine weeks the oyster diet caused their skins "to peale off from head to foote as if they had been flead."
Geology, and all its wonders, makes known to us scarcely one more mysterious or inexplicable than the creation of oysters long before oyster-eaters and the formation of oyster-banks ages before dredgers! What a lamentable heap of good nourishment must have been wasted during the primeval epochs!
To obtain this income he fished up all the oysters, ruined the fishery in consequence; and from that day to the present time it has been unproductive. This is a serious loss of income to the colony, and great doubts are entertained as to the probability, of the oyster-banks ever recovering their fertility. Nothing can exceed the desolation of the coast in the neighborhood of the pearl-banks.
Once more we hauled our wind and stood back, steering, however, for the northern entrance to the harbour, as our skipper intended to touch at Hickory Bluff, near the mouth of Pease Creek, instead of Punta Rassa, as he at first proposed doing. On standing in, however, we ran on one of the many oyster-banks which exist between the islands.
After the Tree is moulded and dug, they saw them in two Pieces, and so put a Plank between, and a small Keel, to preserve them from the Oyster-Banks, which are innumerable in the Creeks and Bays betwixt the French Settlement and Charles-Town.
While she was getting it from his wardrobe, his mind wandered from supper to the pension, which he looked upon as secure now that Scatterbrain was returned; and oyster-banks gave place to the Bank of Ireland, which rose in a pleasing image before O'Grady's imagination.
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