Here in the Bronx, NY it is reported that "wampum" (not the escapee from the
dBase company's wonderful shareware database program, WAMPUM, Ward Mundy, of
Alabama) was "siwanoy" and a freighter or a Liberty ship was named after it
according to a ship registry.

There was a recent documentary up here in New York shown about the vanishing
baymen, it was pretty sad, we have lost an interesting resource hopefully
for just awhile and not forever. At one time, by the way (according to
Boyle) in the area from Staten Island to the Tappan Zee contained 95% of the
oysters of that type in the world. Always finding them in historical and
prehistoric contexts, it's a strange context that doesn't contain one around
NYC. Archaeologist Louis Brennon, working on prehistoric sites on the lower
Hudson River found a predecessor type, a "gigantic" oyster, perhaps with 1/2
pound + of oyster in them. Recent reports have spotted the oyster growing in
the lower Hudson River again.

It provided many a lunch in New York City from the old photographs. The
first official "dump" it is said is a huge pile of oyster shells in the
harbor. The current Ellis Island (according to the Halve Moon organization)
started out as the tidally awash, "Oyster Island".

Robert Schuyler's work at Sandy Ground, showed that the first New York's
"Free African-American settlement" had one foot in the sea and one foot on
land also as some of the residents worked the oyster boats in nearby
Prince's Bay, on the east side of Staten Island if my memory serves me.

Bt the way, the cross-sectioned hard shell profiles were once to be
available for $25.00 a shell at one time, at the Earth and Space Sciences
Department at Stony Brook University, where research is conducted at nearby
"Flax Pond" and whose faculty were perhaps, the ones who first found that
the Constitution Marsh, or "Foundry Cove," home of the West Point Foundry,
in Cold Spring, NY still polluted back when they were looking for a nearby
marsh to compare research, I think.
There is also a NYDEP regional office and NOAA office. The "Onrust" named
after the first ship built in New York is a research vessel, mostly for the
NY Bight, I think, that used to be docked in nearby Port Jefferson.

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