CLASSIC CHESAPEAKE

The Chesapeake Bay is hardly a secret. The country’s largest estuary has a lengthy history of human exploration. Before Europeans arrived, Powhatan, Piscataway, Nanticoke, Assateague, and Susquehannock villages dotted the Bay and its tangle of waterways. When a haggard John Smith reached the estuary in 1607, Spanish and Italian explorers had already encountered the vast Bay. Smith’s early maps of the inlet, charted using only a compass and an astrolabe, included more than 200 indigenous settlements—housing merely a fraction of the region’s inhabitants. Today, some of the country’s busiest ports punctuate the Chesapeake Bay. There’s even a dog breed named after the estuary—the hydrophilic Chesapeake Bay retriever—a breed descended from canines shipwrecked off Maryland’s coast in 1807.

I’ve been exploring the Chesapeake Bay and its conglomeration