Perhaps it was a idiom for "trapped". One of the few photographs of
native American fishing techniques on Long Island from Suffolk County
(one of its official historians I once met published an account of a
late Norse description of the overnight exploration of two Irish
"slaves" from their boat of perhaps the area of Port Jefferson to the
height of the moraine where Suffolk Community College today is where
they described the bay, barrier island and ocean beyond) show a large
rolled up net on a timber supporting structure on one of the bays
presumably where the "bay scallop" a smaller variety swims. Perhaps
the net was deployed and the scallop stirred up by waders and
"trapped". It might explain the 1-2 meter deep exclusively bay scallop
shell midden (with small dog burials) the Long Island Prehistory Field
school R. M. Gramly, Ph.D. had excavated in Mount Sinai Harbor, on the
north shore of Long Island, off the Pipe Stave Hollow Road, where the
scallops were "trapped" (versus a lobster "trap") where incidentally
the "Hopkins" house(?) had slaves or were involved in that.