This was April 27 of that year. Oyster roasts have been a Virginia institution ever since. He continued: Upon this plot of ground [Lynnhaven Bay] we got good store of mussels and oysters, which lay on the ground as thick as stones. We opened some and found in many of them pearls. The pearls would probably not have been worth mentioning, except as a novelty, if they had come from oysters alone. The Virginia oyster pearl lacks luster. But the mussel, particularly the one found in the James river, yields an iridescent pearl of some little value. A month later more oysters, in a form unknown in Virginia today, were obtained from Indians by Captain Christopher Newport in return for ornaments, according to Gabriel Archer in 1607: He notwithstanding with two women and another fellow of his own consort followed us some six miles with baskets full of dried oysters and met us at a point, where calling to us, we went ashore and bartered with them for most of their victuals. A letter from the Council in Virginia to the Council in England in 1607 stated: We are set down eighty miles within a river, for breadth, sweetness of water, length navigable up into the country, deep and bold channel, so stored with sturgeon and other sweet fish as no man's fortune has ever possessed the like. And, as we think, if more may be wished in a river it will be found. After various vicissitudes John Smith confessed: Though there be fish in the sea, fowls in the air, and beasts in the woods, their bounds are so large, they so wild, and we so weak and ignorant, we cannot much trouble them. George Percy introduced a happier note: It pleased God, after a while, to send those people which were our mortal enemies [Indians] to relieve us with victuals, as bread, corn, fish, and flesh in great plenty, which was the setting up of our feeble men, otherwise we had all perished. John Smith tells about another crisis: Our victuals being within eighteen days spent and the Indians' trade decreasing, I was sent to the mouth of the river, to Kecoughtan [Hampton], an Indian town, to trade for corn and try the river for fish, but our fishing we could not effect by reason of the stormy weather.... Only of sturgeon we had great store, whereon our men would so greedily surfeit, as it cost many their lives. And still another: From May to September, those that escaped lived upon sturgeon and sea crabs. And this: So it happened that neither we nor they had anything to eat but what the country afforded naturally. Yet of eighty who lived upon oysters in June or July, with a pint of corn a week for a man lying under trees, and one hundred twenty for the most part living upon sturgeon, which are dried till we pounded it to powder for meal, yet in ten weeks but seven died. For once he paints a brighter picture: