Tens of thousands of cars, back and forth, every day, all night long, without cease: the Garden State Parkway bridge over Great Egg Harbor is as busy as it is dramatic. Whoosh. Whoosh. On to Cape May. On to Atlantic City. On to Philadelphia and New York.
Of the human hordes crossing the bridge, only a vanishingly few look out at the vastness of the salt marsh to ask where this place got its name; I even know birders who have never thought about it, too absorbed in the Great Black-backed Gulls and the occasional Peregrine Falcon perched atop the light poles whizzing past at 65 mph.
A moment’s consideration, or a quick glance at google, answers the question: this is one of the many sites worldwide whose wild birds — ducks, gulls, terns, shorebirds — once supplied eggs to nearby urban markets, often in astonishing numbers.
The locus classicus for such activities is Audubon’s description of the eggers of Labrador:
At every step each ruffian picks up an egg so beautiful that any man with a feeling heart would pause…. But nothing of this sort occurs to the Egger, who gathers and gathers, until he has swept the rock bare. The dollars alone chink in his sordid mind…. With a bark nearly half filled with fresh eggs they proceed….
The year before, Audubon’s party had encountered a similar scene two thousand miles to the south, beneath the glare of a Dry Tortugas sky:
At Bird Key we found a party of Spanish Eggers from Havannah. They had already laid in a cargo of about eight tons of the eggs of [the Sooty] Tern and the Noddy. On asking them how many they supposed they had, they answered that they never counted them, even while selling them, but disposed of them at seventy-five cents per gallon; and that one turn to market sometimes produced upwards of two hundred dollars….
A hundred twenty years later, James Fisher did the math for us, determining that eight tons was about 250,000 tern eggs.
I’d always assumed that all those eggs were for eating. But then I read this, in the prose notes to James Jennings’s Ornithologia:
The Torda, Razor-bill, Auk, Common-Auk, or Murre …. lays one very large egg, size of a turkey’s of a dirty white colour, blotched with brown and dusky, on the projecting shelves of the highest rocks…. The eggs of this bird, and of the foolish guillemot, are an article of trade in several of the Scottish isles; they are used for refining sugar.
Though I wouldn’t call Jennings the most reliable source on the shelf, he turns out to be right. David A. Wells, in his Principles and Applications of Chemistry, informed a no doubt eager public that crude sugar is refined
by dissolving the brown sugars in water, adding albumen (whites of eggs, or bullocks’ blood), and sometimes a little lime-water, and heating the whole to the boiling point. The albumen, under the influence of heat, coagulates, and forms a kind of network of fibers, which inclose and separate from the liquid all the mechanically suspended impurities.
I assume that the process today does without auks’ eggs and cow blood, presumably substituting manufactured chemicals for those earthy ingredients.
