Exit the Oyster Pungy; Enter the Ugly Bugeye

Salisbury, Md., July 20 - If every ship has, like Kipling's, a voice, the Chesapeake hears many a melancholy story as the pungies - those gallant little schooners so many years one of the bay's features - confide to each other the stories of their battles with the gales, their labors on the oyster beds and man's ingratitude.

Their day has passed. Always they were boats for sailors, and not for owners. "No pungy," say the old watermen, "was ever lost except by bad management." But the men who look for profit answer: "A pungy is all keel and no hold. She can't carry much more than a common freight car. Her after body is cut away until there is nothing of it. It's all right for a vessel to be seaworthy and clever and smart to look at, but she must earn her living."

So pungies are built no more. Those which are still in service need frequent repairs. Over them comes the look of age. New paint will not conceal the wrinkles and scars.

For light work on the oyster beds the substitutes and successful rivals are the skipjacks and the bugeyes. For heavy freighting the plain, everyday schooner and the steamer take the business. The oyster tongers use the small "canoe," with little or no deck, as they always did. It is the dredgers who have gone to the flat-bottomed bateau, or skipjack, a cheap and cheaply handled craft, and the bugeye, a large canoe, of which the latest development is fully decked, carefully built and rigged, from 15 to 20 tons register, drawing 5 or 6 feet, and, though a wet boat in rough weather, capable of venturing into the coasting trade.

THE ROMANCE OF THE BAY.

For a sailing man the best of the exhibits at Jamestown is the collection of Chesapeake craft which happen along ever day. If he will visit the oyster grounds he can see 150 canoes a day, tonging on one shoal. If he merely cruises about the lower bay he can note the variations which different localities put into their boats and make some useful studies in the utilities of minor naval architecture. If his fancy is taken with tales of the water, he can collect a bunch of legends running the gamut of adventure, humor and pathos, like tales of the Scots.

Many of these Chesapeake baymen come of families which have lived by means of the water, enlivening their work near home with deep-sea voyages, without a break from early colonial days. Before the coming of steam the bay was a busy home of great square-rigged ships. Many of the masters and mates came from these families. It is all more commonplace now, and the water has relatively not a tenth of the old importance to the tidewater counties of Maryland and Virginia. One can only say that there remain the charm and an interest to people who like to see in America something different and profoundly eternal and human - from moneymaking and theatre-going and the wearing of clothes.

IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS.

"Forty years ago," the master of a yard said, as he sat on a pile of two-inch boards and gossiped, "we shipbuilders on this side of the bay made money, but weren't proud. We built nothing bigger than a pungy or a topmast schooner. Now we think more of ourselves, but all we make is out of repair work.

"There ain't any more shipbuilders except us few old ones. I haven't seen a keel for a pungy laid in 25 years. She's too long-legged for the way they run the oyster business. It's all canoes, bugeyes and bateaux.

"I don't deny that there's some art about a bugeye, but it ain't shipbuilding. I never tried to learn it much. A bateau - any jackleg carpenter can build one. Them oystermen can all use tools a little and many of them can knock together a skipjack in their front yards. It's got no model, no lines, no nothin', except a few boards and a cheap lot of riggin'."

"For a business boat a pungy is the sweetest model ever invented. She is something like the fishing schooners in the cod trade. She sits in the water saucy as you please. She can go anywhere and be safe, except in a shoal river, and that's what's killed her.

"Here's the Adelia Moore, a smart a boat as ever carried a dredge. Her draft is ten feet and she registers 80 tons. A 130-ton pungy is about as big as they used to build, and she would draw 12 feet. That draft won't do for a shallow river or for shoal water on the oyster rocks. In these times oysters are scarce and they have to get 'em where they can.

LIGHT-DRAFT POACHERS.

"And, then, you can't steal oysters unless you can cut into shallow water at night to dodge the police boats.

"Steal oysters? That's getting' 'em when the law says you can't. Nobody along the bay believes that it's wrong. When a man's father and grandfather took oysters where they pleased, the man ain't goin' to think he's committin' any crime when he follows the water the same way.

"So, he can't get around in a pungy, and he gets a bugeye or a skiff. It's cheaper and handier, as well as more suitable. It used to cost something to own a pungy.

"Is a pungy a fast boat? Well, that's accordin' to the weather. You see, a deep model, what I call long-legged, with only one topsail, no jibboom and nothin' but a standin' jib, is surely goin' to be a little lazy in a calm. But the more it blows the faster a pungy is. In oyster weather, fall and winter, she's a goer. She's got the stern to be fast.

"Lots of people that have seen boats think that speed is in the sharp, fine, bow. But it's no use to shove the bow through if the stern won't let go. The pungy is cut away clean behind and she don't drag the water.

"These d-d skipjacks can go faster than they ought to. They don't draw any water at all, so to speak. They go over the water, I guess, and that's the idea nowadays.

"A 40-foot bateau can sail in two feet and a half of water, with her centerboard up. And such a thing oughtn't to sail to windward, but she does. With her centerboard down and her sails handled right she sails tolerably close to the wind. She can run up one of these little rivers to buy goods like a gasoline boat.

"A pungy or a big bugeye is mean in a river. She can't nip the points close, for it's always shoal in front of a point, and she has to crawl along right in the middle of the channel, or she'll be aground.

EXIT THE PUNGY.

"No, I don't look for any change. It's all business. I think there will always be schooners for cheap freights, for you can't build a bateau except so big: and a bugeye ain't profitable in freighting because she can't carry a deckload of any account. But for oysterin' and crabbin' it's goin' to be canoes, bugeyes and bateaux."

What the old shipbuilder calls bateaux, skipjacks and skiffs are the most notable development in Chesapeake water. They have all come within a few years, and have come with a rush. They are a growth from the common skiff, and they are built up to 60 feet long, though the favorite seems to be about 40 feet.

Hooper's Island has a reputation for sending out the best. They are as cheap as anything in the form of a boat could be. They are calculated for a six-inch dead rise in a 40-foot craft. The mast rakes so that the top is just over the after end of the centerboard well. They are seldom decked, and have but small cabin room. With a leg-o'-mutton sail and one jib, a boy can tend sail. An entire force of four men can take as many oysters as twelve men in a schooner or pungy.

In former years the pungy kept on earning a living during the summer in the freighting business - often to the West Indies. Today, in the Tangier Sound waters and similar oyster regions, the crab industry in summer is as important as the oysters in winter. The baymen use the shallow bateau and his oyster scrapes to take "peeler" crabs - that is, crabs just ready to shed - for the men who own a stock of "floats" and ship soft-shell crabs. Frequently a steamer will take on from 500 to 1,000 cases, each holding a gross of crabs at a single wharf, while Crisfield, a railroad point, sends out the crustaceans in the soft state by the carload. The bateau is useful for the social purpose of visiting around, and more so for running up the rivers to buy supplies and trade.

CONCERNING THE SKIPJACK!

The skipjack is not a bad pleasure craft. Often they are hired by stag parties who are after a fishing cruise or just a loaf on the water. Some men own them - men who cannot afford a yacht and like sailing better than the more commonplace traveling by gasoline.

The skipjack is a development of the little skiff, but did not grow gradually into the affections of the Chesapeake boatmen. The story goes that a man from Nova Scotia settled on Tangier Sound and told the people that they didn't understand what was good for them. He began to build a 40-foot bateau. Everybody laughed at him; said that the boat would not stand up, could not sail and would be useless. But he had not more than given her a trial run before the saw the utility of the little flat-bottomed trick.

Now there are numbers of women at Hooper's Island who can handle a bateau and take their children to visit neighboring water towns. Of course the weakness is that, although a "mutton" sail is naturally reefed and has no gaff to be in the way when handling, the boat cannot stand really heavy weather out in the bay, and won't do to risk much on long trips.

But there is a small craft among the Chesapeake fashionables which will stay out in the bay "as long as a gull can fly." That is the large-sized bugeye, decked all over. They are built as large as 85 tons, or, as laymen measure, large enough to carry 1,800 bushels of oysters under deck. The bugeye has been a gradual evolution of the canoe, as that was an evolution of the dugout.

DAUGHTER OF THE DUGOUT.

At Jamestown the canoe used by Joshua Thomas, the famous Parson of the Island, in the early part of the nineteenth century, is on exhibition. It shows the first stages after the dugout. In his day labor was scarce, and the canoe was built partly with fire. A log, or two logs, supplied the raw material, and a slow fire ate out the wood until the builder was ready to use the adze. First came a single "mutton" sail; then two sails, the larger always forward. Finally a jib was added.

Sharp at both ends, the canoe was always a fast and handy boat. As size began to be needed, the "brogan" was brought out. It was "chunk-built" - hollowed out of two logs - on the bottom and built up with planks on the sides. She had a cabin forward and small "body" or "poop" deck aft, the main length being undecked. Last came the bugeye, preserving the narrow, sharp-stern model and the rig, but with more deck and planked all through, The first all-plank bugeyes, they say, were built on the Pequosin river, across the bay in Virginia. The Pequosin bugeyes were famous for a number of years.

A canoe, and its cousin, the small bugeye, have wide washboards, and usually collar boards. Without them the narrow craft could not carry much sail. So provided, they work well enough in fitful weather to do their duty of economical service. They carry both cargo and sail well for their draft and cost.

But the bateau is the real poor man's boat. Forty feet long, ten feet beam, with cabin forward and decked all over, the best type is about the ultimate of economy and usefulness all around, for the mixed oystering, crabbing, fishing, visiting, shopping, hunting wild fowl and conveying farm products which compose the pursuits of the bay people in the lower Chesapeake.

It lends itself readily to the gasoline engine, and is often now seen with that equipment, either with the sails removed entirely or retained as auxiliary.