Chesapeake Life

In Skipjack, Christopher White spends a pivotal year with three memorable captains as they battle man and nature to control the fate of their island villages and oyster fleet. Through these lively characters, White paints a vivid picture of life on a skipjack, a wooden oystering sailboat.

This book portrays the steamboat era on the Chesapeake (1813-1963), which matched the glamour and excitement of the steamboats on the Mississippi. The book begins with the building of the first steamboat on the bay, in the shadow of a bitter struggle over a monopoly on the Delaware and the Chesapeake.

Tangier Island, Virginia, is a community unique on the American landscape. Mapped by John Smith in 1608, settled during the American Revolution, the tiny sliver of mud is home to 470 hardy people who live an isolated and challenging existence, with one foot in the 21st century and another in times long passed.

In the decades following the Civil War, the Chesapeake Bay became the scene of a life-and-death struggle to harvest the oyster, one of the most valuable commodities on the Atlantic coast. Nearly seven thousand men fought on the Bay for oysters until the resource was almost exhausted in the early twentieth century.

Chesapeake oysters are part of the legacy of the area, history on the half-shell. Read of their beginning (foot-long bivalves!) through cultivation today. The eastern oyster, the humble bivalve and delicous treat, are the living bones of the Chesapeake, as well as the ecological and historical lifeblood of the region.

It records the pictures and recollections of the homespun tales of the hardy men and women who have lived and worked along the shores of the nation's largest estuary.

In Deadrise and Cross-planked, author Larry S. Chowning takes readers on a journey into the history of wooden deadrise boat building, highlighting its role in Chesapeake Bay culture, and providing deeper insight into the builders who created these works of nautical ingenuity.

Whatever the future holds for Bay watermen, the thirteen chapters of Working the Chesapeake have captured a moment in their history.

Dailey life of the Chesapeake Watermen.

For three hundred years, generations of Tilghman Islanders have lived by harvesting the waters of Maryland's Chesapeake Bay. They are watermen, an old English term for commercial fishermen.