Legacy Magazine

by Andy Bystrom

Courtesy Sultana Projects

For 120 days last summer, 11 crewmembers and I experienced the Chesapeake Bay and its major tributaries in a way that hasn’t been attempted in 400 years. By rowing and sailing 1,500 miles in a slow, silent, 17th-century-style, 28-foot open boat, or shallop, we had the fortune of seeing the bay in a very intimate way. We explored roughly half of the trail’s 3,000 miles while inaugurating the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail, the nation’s first all-water national trail.

In the summer of 1608, Captain John Smith and his crew of 14 stepped off the edge of their maps, becoming the first Europeans to explore this estuary. They searched for gold, silver, and the elusive North-West Passage to China, and sought to better understand the complex Native American civilization, a culture that had been in place for thousands of years prior to the Europeans’ arrival.  And while they found no trace of precious metals or the apocryphal waterway to China, Smith’s writings give us an unprecedented insight into the bay’s unspoiled natural and cultural environment.

The water trail marks a bold new path for conservation, and it rekindles excitement for the history of the Chesapeake. It’s a tool that encourages people to take pride in their environment and to get out and explore and protect the water and shorelines that ultimately improve the quality of life in this region.

While it’s unlikely the watershed will ever regain the unspoiled equilibrium that Smith experienced, we found that opportunities abound to lose oneself in the history of this body of water.

Though modern development has claimed much of the watershed, we were amazed by the beautiful, underdeveloped places that the water trail passes through. Along the Potomac River, a setting I assumed would be choked from its mouth to the fall line by Washington D.C.’s sprawling suburbs, we experienced portions of unspoiled shorelines. Birds hunted and fed their young with fish caught from the surrounding waters. Deer wandered out of the forested shorelines for a cool drink along the river’s edge. At the Potomac’s mouth, cow nose rays glided beside us in small schools, their fin tips cutting the water’s surface. Further south at the mouth of the Rappahannock River in Virginia, schools of curious dolphins swam beside our small wooden boat.  Their intelligence was palpable.

Along these same tributaries we drifted by sewage treatment plants and sailed under highway bridges.  The contrast between rolling, green shorelines and exploding development was a constant reminder to us of how the watershed is changing.

Our 120-day exploration of the Chesapeake Bay along the trail took us from Jamestown, the first permanent settlement in this country, through patches of pristine underwater grass beds and fish habitat, into Baltimore’s bustling Inner Harbor, to out-of-the-way fishing villages, through schools of marine life, into Native American villages, and back to the slippery banks where we began. The trail is poised to create recreational opportunities and encourage bay stewardship and education. It’s waiting to be explored in whatever way one chooses—by kayak, by car, in an air-conditioned yacht, or whatever rhythm fits the modern day explorer in you. There is something for everyone along this trail, a trail that marks the true beginnings of our culture in this New World.

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Andy Bystrom works for Pretoma, a sustainable fishing nonprofit in Costa Rica, and is pursuing a master’s degree in natural resource management. Not a day goes by he doesn’t relive last summer’s expedition. For more information about the water trail visit www.nps.gov/cajo.