From Out of the Past - Part VII

          It was the introduction of “pounds” along the New Jersey shore that greatly increased those harvests.  The pounds were a combination of netting, wire-covered poles, and wooden boards that extended out from the high-water line on the shore to the low-water level of low tides.  They were built in such a way that when the tide ebbed, the horseshoe crabs that had been spawning left the beach and were “guided” by an arrangement of wire and boards into a pen at the end of a pound.  The crabs entered the pound via a ramp, falling off at the end into a crib.  Fish were also caught in these pounds and, as the water ebbed, they were able to swim back through narrow, vertical bars that prevented the crabs from entering the last crib.  The pounds were emptied daily at low tide and the captured horseshoe crabs were loaded onto a skiff or a horse-drawn wagon and pulled onshore.  As in earlier days, they were piled inside large wooden containers on the shoreline and left to dry.
          There was also an assortment of horseshoe crab fertilizer plants scattered along the New Jersey and Delaware shorelines – although not all of them were operating during the same period of years.  In most cases, collected crabs were taken to large storage areas and neatly stacked along the shore.  In some instances, crabs were unceremoniously dumped behind sand dunes or, when large numbers were caught, they were tossed into enormous wooden pens.  There they would be left to decay and dry out; after which they were taken to a nearby fertilizer plant.  In the plant, the crabs were pulverized by a sophisticated grinding mechanism - similar to the electric blender in your kitchen - and then passed through heated passageways to further dry the meal.  The resulting product was then collected, bagged, and distributed both locally and nationally.
          Interestingly, the product these factories created was not called fertilizer, but rather “cancerine.”  Because horseshoe crabs were mistakenly thought to be crustaceans (a mis-concept we’ll deal with later), the product shipped out of these factories was called “cancerine” which, literally translated, means “derived from crabs.”