Oyster pirate is a name given to persons who engage in the poaching of oysters. It was a term that became popular on both the west and east coasts of the United States in the nineteenth century.
The term "oyster pirate" appeared in several literary works by Jack London. London usually used the term without explanation. Writers about London also use the term without explanation, as if everyone knew the meaning of the term. In the context of Jack London's life, it refers to a specific set of conditions peculiar to the oyster industry in San Francisco Bay in the 1880s. While San Francisco Bay had a native oyster, it was never very abundant. By the early 1850s, entrepreneurs began importing oysters from Shoalwater Bay, Washington Territory. Native West coast oysters were much smaller and had a different flavor from those from the East coast. When the transcontinental railroad was completed, large fishery companies in the east sold juvenile oysters to San Francisco entrepreneurs who purchased submerged land from the State of California and grew oysters from transplanted Eastern stock. By the 1880s the handful of competing oyster companies began consolidating into a single monopoly. Their harvest of a private commodity from a public space, the San Francisco Bay, led to an opportunity for oyster pirates. Pirates raided the oyster beds at night and sold their take in the Oakland markets in the morning. The public disliked the Southern Pacific and the oyster growers, and liked cheap oysters. As a result, the oyster pirates had considerable public sympathy and police were reluctant to take action against them. Jack London described oyster piracy in his autobiographical "alcoholic memoirs", John Barleycorn, in the form of romanticized juvenile fiction in ', and from the opposing point of view of the California Fish Patrol in "A Raid on the Oyster Pirates," from '. Oyster pirating was also listed as one of London's first occupations, after leaving a cannery at the age of fifteen, by Abraham Rothberg in an Introduction to The Great Adventure Stories of Jack London and by Eric Hanson in A Book of Ages.
