This humble and industrious waterman can claim the distinction of revolutionizing an industry forever.
Patent Medal. Photo courtesy of Essex County Museum and Historical Society.
Generations of watermen have plied the depths of the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, making their livelihoods harvesting the famous Atlantic blue crab, Callinectes sapidus, or “beautiful swimmer.” It’s always been difficult work, with a day beginning before sunrise and ending up in the crab shack after sundown. The work ethic is fairly simple: Work hard, work fast and follow the crabs.
Blue Crabs
Once the first European explorers reached the shores of Virginia, as early as the 1520s, according to the Virginia Department of Education, native Americans showed them how to find the best places and employ the best practices to catch crabs. Even early treaties between the settlers and natives included provisions for the rights of “Hunting, Crabbing, Fowling, and Fishing.”
For centuries, the standard method for crabbing was the trotline, preferred until about 1929. A trotline is a heavy fishing line with bait attached at intervals, usually anchored on the bottom and attached to anchored buoys at the waterline. The baits are attached to the main line or by simple slipknots or by shorter lines called dropper lines (known as trots or snoods). Once the line is set, it’s left for a time and the waterman later pulls it up, hopefully with crabs biting the bait. Crab trotlines are usually baited with chicken necks, chicken livers, bull lips, eels or other inexpensive baits.
When crabs are caught by trotlines, the line is set and the workboat moves slowly end to end, bringing the line to the surface where the waterman catches the crabs. Crabs on a trotline are not hooked, they are simply netted by the waterman at the surface, with the workboat moving slowly enough through the water that the crab does not discern movement as it eats the bait. Once the crabs have been netted at the surface, the trotline is lowered back to or toward the bottom with the same bait intact to attract another crab. Depending on the length of the trotline (usually from at least 100 yards and up to a mile), a commercial waterman can catch anywhere from four bushels to 20 bushels of crabs daily, but it’s backbreaking work.
Early morning ... checking the crab pots.
Watermen experimented with other methods of trapping crabs, but with little success, until one enterprising local native found a better way and forever transformed the harvesting of blue crabs in and around the Chesapeake.
The late Benjamin Franklin Lewis (1858-1950), of Harryhogan near Callao in Northumberland County, was the designer and patentee of the modern-day crab pot, or crab trap. According to a 1989 article by Larry Chowning in The Rappahannock Record, it was on the Yeocomico River, at Lewis’s home in Harryhogan, that Lewis, a waterman most of his life, first started experimenting with the pot. One of his first designs in the 1920s was made from two flat pieces of wire mesh that were laced together. Since the early pot had no sides, the bait pocket in the bottom was used to separate the two sheets of wire and keep them spread apart so crabs could move around, but once the crab grabbed the bait, it would swim to the top and usually find its way out.
Lewis’s next attempt resulted in a 1928 patent on a simple, four-sided wire cage that worked better. Yet he continued to tinker with improvements to the design, and in 1938, he was issued a second patent on a trap that was identical to the present-day crab pot, which has an upper chamber that traps crabs once they are inside.
Crab pots use the crabs’ escape instincts to trap them. The bait box is typically filled with pieces of eel, herring or menhaden to lure the crabs. Early on, crabbers used salted bait, it took some time for watermen to realize that fresh bait was the best way to catch crabs in a pot. Smelling the bait, crabs enter the “downstairs” of the pot through one of two or four entrance funnels, known as “throats,” which allow the crabs to easily enter, but not exit.
Once downstairs, the crabs are unable to reach the bait through the mesh box. When a crab feels frustrated or threatened, its instinct is to swim toward the surface to escape. In this case, it swims into the “upstairs” or “parlor,” a holding chamber from which it can’t escape.
Crab season typically runs from April to November but is regulated state by state. A waterman usually works hundreds of pots to catch hard shell crabs. Licenses in Virginia are issued for between 85 to 425 pots. Working hours are heavily regulated, as well as maximum harvests. Hard shell crabs must be at least five inches across to qualify as keepers and crab pots must be hauled up by hand without the benefit of a mechanical winch. Pots weigh about 18 pounds empty, but their weight can more than double with a full catch.
The waterman’s workday has been limited to eight hours of crabbing a day, from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. Depending on the weather, that time easily can be spent in hard labor on the water, collecting crabs and re-baiting pots. Most crabbers begin their day hours earlier in the crab shack, tending floats (holding tanks), checking gear and preparing bait. “Peeler” crabs that have molted overnight will be sent to market as soon as possible. If a waterman catches a crab nearing the end of its molting cycle, he places it in a “shedding float,” After molting, the shell begins to ossify, or harden. To keep the shell soft, the crab must be removed from water. As a result, floats must be checked every six hours around the clock. Many crabbers have turned to catching soft shell crabs because they are more profitable, but it’s slow, backbreaking work.
Experienced watermen learn to check the crab’s stage of molting by the markings on its swimming legs. That’s where the faint outline of the second exoskeleton can be seen forming underneath the old shell as the molting process approaches. A white line around the swimming leg means the crab will molt in about two weeks; pink means molting will happen within a week; and red means molting within two days. After a long day of crabbing, watermen return to their crab shacks to ice down their catches for market, check the floats and prepare pots for the next day’s outing.
Crab pots, or crab traps, are the number one method of crabbing worldwide, although styles vary depending on the type of crab being caught, geographic location and personal preference — there are ring crab traps, pyramid crab traps and box crab traps. However, for catching the Chesapeake Bay blue crab, Benjamin F. Lewis’s crab pot set the standard. Once Lewis successfully patented his second crab trap, he faced a challenge of a different sort — trying to collect royalties on his invention was another matter entirely. Once watermen learned of the success of Lewis’s crab pot, its use spread rapidly.
According to Chowning’s 1989 article, Lewis tried to collect a $4 royalty on every 50 pots sold, but it was an impossible task. He even purchased one of the first automobiles in Harryhogan, a Model A Ford, so his son could travel around the area to collect fees. Sadly, he wasn’t able to collect even a fraction of what was due him for his inventions, although in 1941, he won a patent infringement lawsuit. A little searching will unearth a few paragraphs about Lewis and his crab pot invention, but in most history books he is largely unheralded. But for those who care to know, this humble and industrious waterman can claim the distinction of revolutionizing an industry forever.
GET TO KNOW YOUR CRABS
The Atlantic blue crab, regionally known as the Chesapeake blue crab, is officially Callinectes sapidus, literally meaning “beautiful swimmer.” It is a hardy, bottom-dwelling predator with formidable claws. Crabs have gills that filter oxygen from the water, much like fish. They have articulating plates around their gills that help seal in moisture, allowing them to survive for long periods out of the water. They have five pairs of legs with 70 segmented joints that enable them to move quickly. Their compound stalk eyes give crabs almost 360-degree color vision. Female crabs “paint their fingernails,” meaning they have bright red claw tips. Male crab claws are a bluish-gray color.
The crab’s exoskeleton, largely made of chitin (a substance also found in fingernails), has no growth cells. Crabs have to shed, or molt, to grow. During the process, the shell cracks between the carapace and abdomen and the crab (now a “buster”) backs out of its old shell. The crab is now a “soft shell” until its new shell hardens. A crab can increase in size by one-third when it molts. Females molt 18 to 20 times during their two-year life cycles; males molt up to 23 times during their three-year life cycles. The older a crab gets, the longer it takes to molt. A four- to five-inch crab takes up to three hours to shed its shell.
Paper shell: Within 12 hours, the soft shell feels like leather.
Buckram: Within 24 hours, the shell starts to harden but is still pliable.
Hard shell: Shells become hard after 72 hours, but the crab’s meat content is low. As days pass, the meat content increases.
Jimmies: Male crabs, with abdominal aprons shaped like the Washington Monument.
She-crabs: Immature females, with V-shaped aprons.
Sooks: Adult females, with abdominal aprons shaped like the U.S. Capitol dome.
Sponge crab: A female crab carrying an egg mass. One female can lay up to a million eggs, but only two of those will become adults.
Doublers: A pair of mating crabs swimming as a unit, with the male above the female.
Sources: Maryland Department of Natural Resources, Virginia Marine Resources Commission, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, blue-crab.org.