The Indians well knew the riches of their great Bay. They caught the fat fish in weirs, with nets and lines for their angles made by their women from thread spun from "the barkes of trees, Deeres Sinews, or a Kind of Grass." They ate the sea-crabs that were said to be so large that four Englishmen could feast on one of them. They roasted the oysters reported to have been thirteen inches long at the time of the coming of the white man. The shells were not wasted by the Indians--they were used for medicine, ornaments, and wampum was made from the purple edges of the clams. Even the lowly periwinkle was eaten. As the first English ships entered Chesapeake Bay the crews were startled to see whales and schools of tumbling porpoises. The early colonists were soon to learn that there were so many porpoises in the Bay that canoes were sometimes overturned by them. When the Jamestown colony was starving they lived on the bounties of the Bay--they caught the sea-crabs and sturgeons and sheepshead; the latter they likened to the broth of their English mutton. And these same strangers "groped in the deep for oysters which lay in places thick as stones," according to an early writer. There were many oddities in the Bay which intrigued the Europeans--a small fish that resembled St. George's Dragon, with legs and wings omitted, the stinging nettle, and "the Todefish which will swell till it be like to brust, when it commeth into the aire." As Captain John Smith and his crew proceeded down the Bay in the barge they passed the end of the Northern Neck and came to the mouth of the Rappahannock River. It was the intention of Smith to explore this river and visit the acquaintances he had made "upon the river of Toppahannock" during his captivity the preceding winter. But they were stopped by the ebb-tide. The following account of what happened at the mouth of the Rappahannock was written by members of the company, Dr. Walter Russell and Anas Todkill. "But our boate (by reason of the ebbe) chansing to ground upon many shoules lying in the entrance, we spied many fishes lurking amongst the weedes on the sands. Our captaine sporting himselfe to catch them by nailing them to the ground with his sword, set us all a fishing in that manner. By this devise, we tooke more in an houre then we all could eat.