Put In Creek off the East River of Mobjack Bay on the lower Chesapeake. 
 
There is a mist veiling our world today.  A gray, damp permeating mist, not fog, not rain, just a gray heavy mist it is.  We are anchored outside of Dee and Reed’s house on the creek in Mathews.  We will provision today for the first part of our exodus south, but not before we have one last Chesapeake thrill, our first official oyster roast.  There will be roasted oysters, fried oysters, fish and beer, well bred southern women with their strong handsome men.  It hasn’t always been so gentrified, but longer than one imagines.
 
The colonies began here in the early 1600’s, just a few miles down the bay and up the James River and almost at the same time across the bay up on one of those splendid rivers of the eastern shore, the Choptank.  It was near here where the Indians taught John Smith a thing or two about using fish for fertilizer.  It was a time of indentured men and women and of letter brides and women being bought and sold like slaves. That’s perhaps why it was so easy to become owners of black men when slavery began in earnest a few years later. A hoe, a plow, a gun to hunt game and a blanket meant survival if one didn’t contract a European disease.
 
It took a few years, but survival evolved into subsistence farming and it didn’t take long for tobacco to become the crop of choice. Though it ravaged the soil  tobacco became, if not a cash crop (there was no cash in the colonies and the British would only pay in trade goods), at least one worthy of trade for first the necessities and later the finer things of life as small farms became larger evolving into plantations and manors housing the gentry of the new world.  While starvation had been dispatched for most, an enemy had to be found to replace it and for the average British Colonist, it was easy enough to revert to the former enemy—the papist.  From this Church of England assault on The Holy Catholic Church, the new colony of Maryland was established.  But friends that is another email.  For today I must ready for the morrows festivities, one of the very last privately held oyster roasts in Mathews, Virginia.

Capt'n Lynnie and Skinwalker