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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 (the same species found elsewhere on the Pacific Coast), it was never very abundant. By the early 1850s, entrepreneurs began importing oysters from Shoalwater Bay (now Willapa Bay), Washington Territory. Native West coast oysters were much smaller and had a different flavor than 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.<ref>{{cite book|last=Barrett|first=Elinore|title=The California Oyster Industry|year=1963|publisher=California Department of Fish and Game|location=Sacramento}}</ref>
By the 1880s the handful of competing oyster companies began consolidating into a single [[
Jack London described oyster piracy in his autobiographical "alcoholic memoirs", ''[[John Barleycorn (novel)|John Barleycorn]]'', in the form of romanticized juvenile fiction in ''[[wikisource:The Cruise of the Dazzler|The Cruise of the Dazzler]]'', and from the opposing point of view of the California Fish Patrol in "A Raid on the Oyster Pirates," from ''[[wikisource:Tales of the Fish Patrol|Tales of the Fish Patrol]]''. 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'' (1967) and by Eric Hanson in ''A Book of Ages'' (2008).
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