Editor’s note: Historian and author Kevin Duffus is set to present a newly produced lecture, “The Battle at Ocracoke — What Really Happened,” at this year’s Blackbeard’s Pirate Jamboree Oct. 28-29 on Ocracoke Island. For more details visit the Facebook event.

OCRACOKE — It began within minutes after the notorious pirate Blackbeard was killed in the Battle at Ocracoke on Saturday morning, Nov. 22, 1718.

As soon as the wounded were attended to and the surviving pirates were placed under guard, the hunt was on, led by Royal Navy Lieutenant Robert Maynard. The first place they searched was Blackbeard’s cabin in the roundhouse of his 65-foot-long Jamaica-rigged sloop, Adventure. Surely the world’s best-known and most-feared pirate captain kept a chest of Spanish gold, silver and jewels hidden beneath his bunk, just for his walkin’ around money.

Rarely mentioned in the many books, articles and other accounts of the famous battle is that Maynard and the other volunteer sailors from the British king’s ships stationed in Virginia were persuaded to accept the potentially deadly assignment of apprehending or killing the North Carolina pirates by the prospect of acquiring pirate treasure. It could be said that the 60 men aboard the two, small, rented sloops under Maynard’s command were little more than pirates themselves.

Two weeks after the smoke cleared from the battle, Maynard and his men were still hoping to find a treasure on Ocracoke Island that would make them all rich. They were disappointed. In addition to casks of sugar, cocoa, indigo dye and a few bales of cotton, only a small amount of what is called gold dust, small nuggets of gold, were recovered from the pirates’ possessions. 

Maynard’s stay at Ocracoke may have been when an enduring Blackbeard myth was born. While nine captive pirates were held in the lower deck of the Adventure while anchored in the yet-to-be-named Teach’s Hole Channel, a guard may have asked them, So, where did the boss hide his treasure? Funny you should ask, a pirate replied, we posed that question to him just last night. 

The published version of the interrogation in a 1724 book, ”A General History of Pirates,” goes like this: “… one of his Men asked him, in Case any thing should happen to him in the Engagement with the Sloops, whether his Wife knew where he had buried his Money? He answered, That no Body but himself and the Devil, knew where it was, and the longest Liver should take it all.”

Among the many dubious aspects of the preceding quote, my research has proven that Blackbeard and his men had no idea on the night before the battle that they were under any threat at all. Having arrived from the inland waters of the colony and anchored alongside Beacon Island 3 miles away from the pirates’ moorings near today’s Springer’s Point, Maynard’s sloops had all the appearances of typical merchant vessels preparing to put to sea.

Nevertheless, ever since, writers and historians have assumed that because the quote was in print – like so many other popular but improbable Blackbeard legends – it must have been true.

At the end of the two weeks at Ocracoke, Maynard sailed Blackbeard’s Adventure across Pamlico Sound and up to Bath, but not with the pirate’s head hanging under the bowsprit as is so often told – it was too valuable, worth a bounty of 100 pounds sterling back in Virginia. In Maynard’s wake, however, has streamed, like the gold of marine phosphorescence, the hopes of the credulous that Blackbeard’s lost treasure might still be found.

Edward Thatch, aka Blackbeard, was far from a successful, wealthy pirate. When the value of the commodities recovered from the pirates’ possessions at Ocracoke were tallied up and sold at auction in Virginia, the proceeds amounted to 2,500 pounds sterling, not a treasure commensurate with the notorious pirate’s reputation, then or now. 

Compare Blackbeard’s final estate to Capt. William Kidd’s £14,000 worth of gold, silver, and jewels; or the East Indian pirate Henry Every’s much more impressive £350,000 haul; or Sam Bellamy’s estimated plunder of as much as a million pounds sterling. But that all ranks well below Sir Francis Drake’s massive piratical treasure of £1.5 million valued in 1582. Yes, Drake was the greatest pirate of them all.

But historical facts be damned, the world’s best-known pirate had to have had a massive treasure hidden somewhere, right? Seeking their own treasure of sorts in the form of royalties or writing fees, authors, journalists, and artists have perpetuated the notion of lost pirate treasure and enticed all sorts of believers to search for it. 

Robert Louis Stevenson really sparked the public’s imagination of instant wealth with his book, “Treasure Island,” first published as a weekly serial in a children’s magazine in 1881, and then as a more popular book in 1883. As many as five films have since been made based on the book.

The 19th century Delaware artist and writer Howard Pyle helped to paint the public’s perception of pirates and Blackbeard in particular with his illustrations like the one titled, “Blackbeard Buries His Treasure” that was published in Harper’s Magazine in 1887. It was also Pyle who conceived our modern ideas of pirate dress favored by Hollywood and pirate festival reenactors, fanciful things like sashes, bandanas, earrings and knee-high riding boots, all extremely impractical for men aboard a working vessel.

Most illustrations, such as those of Pyle, often depict sea rovers gathered around a hole in the sand on some unknown shore, and a sea chest nearby wrapped in chains and ready to be lowered into the ground. No one seems to question the practicalities of such a surreptitious mission. Even a small sea chest filled with gold, let’s say 2 feet by 2 feet by 2 feet, or 8 cubic feet, would weigh nearly 5,000 pounds. That’s a lot of weight for two pirates to lug about a sandy beach. No wonder the National Park Service claims that Blackbeard possessed “inhuman strength.”

The antiquarian writer John F. Watson in his 1830 book, ”Annals of Philadelphia, and Pennsylvania,” firmly planted the idea that pirates like Blackbeard provided security at the site of their hidden plunder by burying atop their treasure chests the gruesome remains of a prisoner or crew member who was chosen by lot to be sacrificed – murdered, to be precise – and left behind to rot, and to discourage would-be treasure seekers. “Hence it was not rare to hear of persons having seen a spooke or ghost, or of having dreamed of it a plurality of times, which became a strong incentive to dig there.”

The 1920s were heydays for promoters of pirate treasure with both the New York Times and the Raleigh News & Observer spinning tantalizing tales of Blackbeard’s vast fortune being found. 

According to the Times, Miss Florence E. Steward of Burlington, New Jersey, wanted to sell her house in 1926 near the Delaware River but according to family lore the old walnut tree in front, known as the “pirate tree,” was where Blackbeard had buried his treasure many years before. She didn’t want the treasure to be conveyed to the new owners so she hired some excavators to dig it up. For unspecified reasons, Miss Steward wasn’t present when the digging commenced. At the end of the day the excavators were gone but there was a large hole in the ground. The Times reported that the contractors had been observed by neighbors prying “a large, heavy object” from the earth and taking it with them when they departed. They were never seen again. 

Three years after Miss Steward’s walnut tree misadventure, Ben Dixon MacNeil, a correspondent for the Raleigh News & Observer, and later author of the much-beloved book ”The Hatterasman,” must have decided that Blackbeard’s home state of North Carolina would not be upstaged by New Jersey or the New York Times. MacNeil wrote a story for the Feb. 3, 1929, Sunday edition with a headline that was simultaneously buoyant and deflating: “Blackbeard’s Buried Treasure Found at Last; But Mystery of Pirate Gold Not Yet Solved.”

In MacNeil’s colorful two-page piece, he reported how, two days before Christmas in 1928, three men, believed to be duck hunters despite the fact that there were no eyewitnesses, visited by water Plum Point on Bath Creek in Beaufort County and found Blackbeard’s secret treasure vault, dug up a heavy chest, dragged it back to their boat and sailed away never to be seen again. Remember, there was no one who observed this, yet MacNeil reported it as fact. (Fictional news has been around a long time.) 

Legend says that Plum Point had long been the treasure hunter’s favored location of Blackbeard’s ill gotten gains. “For two hundred years,” MacNeil wrote, “the earth had been troubled by the digging of those who had been shown in dreams where the chest was hidden.”

We might speculate that the News & Observer journalist had been influenced by Watson’s ”Annals of Philadelphia” in which the author described dreams leading treasure hunters to the “X” that marked the spot. Ironically, previous dreamers and diggers had missed the location of the secret vault near Bath by just 3 feet, or so the story goes.

According to MacNeil: “… the next day, or the next — the stories are in some conflict here — other hunters making their way through the thick undergrowth that covers the Point, came upon the broken brick vault” out of which had been removed a “mysterious chest containing, according to legend, uncounted pieces of Spanish gold.” (It is worth noting that there is no record that Blackbeard ever robbed a Spanish vessel in his documented 23-month career as a pirate.)

The vault, 18 inches wide and 3 feet long, had been buried 8 feet under the sand in an area so pockmarked with craters from previous treasure seekers that the landscape looked like the far side of the moon. Suspicious markings in the original mortar of the brick vault, and some accumulation of rust, led the other hunters to surmise that an iron-clasped wooden chest once resided inside the vault. That tidbit leads one to wonder if the “other hunters” had been archaeologists.

Nevertheless, Blackbeard’s brick vault has neither been authenticated or even found again. The foundation ruins of a small 19th century house near Plum Point, however, were examined by the late archaeologist Stanley South in the 1960s.

MacNeil concluded his article by writing that Blackbeard must have been an exceptionally wealthy pirate, who buried his Spanish gold beneath the sand of numerous eastern North Carolina locations, “because otherwise he would have not been worth bothering the British navy, and successful pirates have chests of gold buried about in places. And where else should he bury the gold except in his own backyard.”

Despite the newspaperman’s reasoning that Blackbeard lived at Plum Point or buried his treasure in his backyard, property records and deeds in the Beaufort County courthouse affirm that Edward Thatch or Teach, or anyone else for that matter, did not live on that prominent point of land at the mouth of Bath Creek in 1718.

Bath’s Plum Point may be among the best known and most “earth-troubled” mythical locations of Blackbeard’s lost treasure but there are many more. There are those who believed the pirate buried his money at New Hampshire’s Isle of Shoals, others who think it’s somewhere on the subtly named Blackbeard Island off the coast of Georgia, or at the base of any number of trees along the Atlantic coast. Have you ever tried to dig a hole at the base of a tree?

There is no doubt that Robert Louis Stevenson and Howard Pyle have launched the treasure hunting hobbies of many wishful Americans, some of whom, to this day, hope that Blackbeard’s treasure may yet be found. 

So here’s a tip from someone who has spent decades researching the world’s best-known pirate.

If you wish to seek Blackbeard’s treasure, you might search the bank accounts of publishing companies, Hollywood studios, cable channel networks, museum stores, amusement parks, restaurants, and the importers of plastic pirate paraphernalia from Far East manufacturers. It’s there that “X” marks the spot, it’s there where the real pirate treasure can be found.

In 1759, a man named William Howard purchased North Carolina’s Ocracoke Island for the sum of 105 pounds sterling. Through genealogical records and oral histories, he is generally agreed to have been the wellspring of the many streams of Ocracoke’s esteemed Howard family. 

What has been less certain is whether the island owner was the same man as the notorious pirate who sailed with Blackbeard in 1718 and who was Capt. Benjamin Hornigold’s quartermaster in 1716, or whether there were two, even three men sharing the same name living at the same time on the coast of North Carolina.

Perhaps no one studied the enigmatic historical figure of William Howard more than his descendant and family genealogist, Dora A. Padgett of Washington, D.C. Padgett, a fourth-great-granddaughter, lovingly described Howard as her “picturesque ancestor.” Over the years, Padgett was intent on “solving the questions of the place of his origin, his parentage, and his early years prior to settlement in North Carolina.” She was never able to do so.

Padgett’s research, conducted between the 1940s until her death in the mid-1970s, nevertheless enriched the history of Ocracoke and helped to preserve the legacy of the Howard family progenitor. But as a former Regent of the Daughters of the American Revolution, she also seemed determined to cleanse her forebear of any disagreeable associations to piracy.

The genealogist was confident that the paper trail documenting William Howard’s life in North Carolina did not begin before 1750. Despite her best efforts, she wrote, “no documents yet found in any county establish beyond question his parentage and the facts of his early life.”

Yet, to the contrary, records in Beaufort County identify a property owner named Phillip Howard, whose son is proven by deeds to have been one William Howard. Phillip Howard had been an inhabitant of the Bath area since at least 1703, when a silversmith sold him a tract of land 8 miles east of the town. Additional records indirectly reveal that an earlier William Howard, likely the grandfather of Bath’s William Howard — regardless if he was the same William Howard as the pirate quartermaster — arrived in 1663 at what was then known as “ye countie of Albemarle.”

The most pivotal and, perhaps, the most disputed fact about the life and origins of William Howard concerns his remarkably long life. Just how long was it? His age at the time of his death, in fact, is of utmost importance to deducing, as Padgett put it, “the facts of his early life.” 

“The most valuable clue to his age,” she wrote, “is to be found in the ‘Description of Occacock Inlet,’ a book written about 1792 by Jonathan Price and published in 1795.” There were, however, other, more precise clues that the genealogist may have inadvertently missed or intentionally ignored.

Rather famously and often quoted, the surveyor Price wrote a cutting-edge tourism marketing endorsement for Ocracoke: “The healthy spot is in autumn the healthy resort of many of the inhabitants of the main. One of its original proprietors, who has attained his ninetieth year, still resides on it, and does not appear to feel any of the infirmities of age.” Who would not want to live on Ocracoke after reading that?

As Padgett observed, “The reference is undoubtedly to William Howard, who at the time of writing was the one person on Ocracoke who could be considered an original proprietor.”

But from there, Padgett goes on to make a categorical declaration: “Price’s valuable observations lead to the conclusion that William Howard was born about the year 1700.”

The first problem with Padgett’s assertion is that Price did not specifically note when the original proprietor, presumably Howard, had attained his 90th year. For reasons that are unclear, she made an assumption that Howard was born about 1700.

The second problem with Padgett’s statement is that Price did not write when Howard died — she simply supposed that he died between 1794 and 1795. No date of death based on reliable sources has been established for Howard, until now.

How determined was Padgett, the Daughters of the American Revolution Regent, to divorce the legendary pirate William Howard from her “picturesque ancestor,” the historical William Howard?

In her words: “And what of the old tales that William Howard, Blackbeard’s quartermaster, was the same person as William Howard, who in 1759, 40 years later, purchased the Island of Ocracoke? … In 1718, William Howard, who later lived on Ocracoke, was a youth of about 18 years of age, hardly the seasoned villain of wide experience who had been Blackbeard’s quartermaster!”

Despite Padgett’s assertion, according to the meticulously researched book, “The Wooden World,” British seamen went to sea at remarkably early ages, some as young as 5 or 6 and most by the ages of 10 or 12. Furthermore, her argument was based entirely on the unsupported claim that Howard was born around 1700. But what if Howard had been born 10 years earlier?

In 1790, no doubt with his advanced age and uncertainty as to how much longer he might live, William Howard deeded all of his earthly possessions to his son Wallace, including 300 acres, his house and all of his cattle, horses, sheep and hogs.

Padgett wrote with confidence that “William Howard (Sr.) died about 1794/5 while his son Wallace died, unmarried, in 1796.” Once again, however, the genealogist provided no direct, positive evidence that the father died in 1794 or 1795.

On June 25, 1799, an estate inventory for “William Howard, Sr., deceased,” was filed with the court of Hyde County. Among dozens of other items, Howard Sr.’s inventory listed 26 head of cattle, 15 head of sheep, 37 head of old hogs and some pigs. It therefore appears from the evidence that most of the property and livestock deeded to his son Wallace in 1790 must have reverted back to William Howard Sr., after his son’s death in 1796. This further implies that the father did not die in 1795 but, more likely, late in 1798 or early 1799.

Remarkably, there exists another corroborating item of evidence, albeit a secondary source but a reliable one, that addresses William Howard’s age. 

Dr. Hugh Williamson, a highly acclaimed “Renaissance man” who represented North Carolina in the Continental Congress and was later the state’s representative to the U.S. Congress, published in 1812, “The History of North Carolina.”

In an appendix titled “Proofs and Explanations,” Williamson shared his evidence on the health of the citizens of the Old North State writing that “Instances of longevity are not wanting in Carolina.”

Below a list of names and ages under the heading titled, “Persons living anno 1798,” is this extraordinary statement: “William Haward, of Acacoke island, aged one hundred and eight, had lived seventy-seven years on the banks.” Presumably, Williamson was a better historian and physician than he was a speller.

In judging the quality and veracity of this evidence of William Howard’s age, we must take into consideration Williamson’s reputation and his voluminous accomplishments in education, science, medicine and public service. We must ask why he would falsely or mistakenly report Howard’s age on a list featuring 12 other centenarians including a 114-year-old and a 112-year-old living in 1798. 

Additionally, no evidence has been found controverting Williamson’s claim of Howard’s astonishing age. In fact, William Howard’s estate inventory filed in June 1799 seems to buttress Williamson’s statement.

If we accept that Howard was 108 years old in 1798, then he was born around 1690, making him 28 years old in 1718 — potentially a man of seafaring experience and at an age perfectly capable of being a quartermaster leading a ship of hundreds of pirates. Perhaps he was, indeed, the Howard of legend.

Based on Williamson’s statement, Howard likely began living on the Outer Banks in 1721. And as Padgett pondered, what turning point in his life may have led Howard to have become an Outer Banker?

William Howard the pirate

Even behind iron bars with an appointment to meet the hangman the next morning at Hampton, Virginia, 28-year-old William Howard was not frightened. Did he have a premonition that somehow his life would be spared? How could he have ever imagined that he had, not just 12 hours to live but another 80 years to live?

Howard, who five months earlier had received a Royal pardon from North Carolina Gov. Charles Eden at Bath, was arrested at either Hampton or Norfolk after being overheard “conspiring with some sailors to run away with some vessel so to pirate again.” That, alone, was insufficient cause for his arrest. 

But Howard’s reputation preceded him. He was widely known around the wharfs and quays of the lower Chesapeake as one of the most experienced and successful pirate quartermasters there ever was. He freely admitted it — after all, he was a pardoned man.

Howard was, nevertheless, shackled and rowed out to the HMS Pearl anchored in the James River and thrown in the ship’s brig as a vagrant seaman. For the time being, Howard’s two piratically acquired slaves and 50 pounds sterling were confiscated pending the adjudication of his case.

The rest of the story has been repeated many times. Virginia Lt. Gov. Spotswood used Howard’s arrest as a pretext for dispatching an armed naval expedition into North Carolina to capture or kill his former boss, the notorious Blackbeard, and to set an example for any would-be pirates loitering about the port towns of Hampton Roads. 

Believing that he was indemnified by Eden’s pardon, Howard freely admitted during his interrogations that he had participated in at least 12 other acts of piracy after the king’s deadline of Jan. 5, 1718. Had he known that Eden’s pardon was worthless, he may have been more circumspect. 

Howard was convicted by a Virginia Court of Vice-Admiralty sometime in November and sentenced to death. Fortunately for him — and his innumerable descendants — the captains of the Royal Navy frigates HMS Lyme and HMS Pearl and their crews were preoccupied with the mission to apprehend Blackbeard. 

In mid-December 1718, when Capt. Ellis Brand of the Lyme, the senior officer of His Majesty’s ships on the James River, returned from his horseback ride to Bath to supervise the arrest of pirates there, Howard’s execution was scheduled. 

The night before he was to be hanged, a ship from London sailed into the river, dropped anchor, and a boat was launched and rowed over to the Pearl. A packet of mail and papers was brought on board including a wax-sealed parchment tied with a ribbon from the king’s Privy Council  — a second, newly amended and more generous Royal Proclamation of Mercy for pirates from George I.

The new proclamation was worded in a way to encourage more pirates to surrender and return to honest, productive lives, or to seek legal commissions to serve as privateers in the king’s latest war with Spain. There was no specific calendar date after which acts of piracies would no longer be eligible to be forgiven. In other words, every piracy committed before a pirate heard about the new pardon would be expunged from the records. 

And just like that, William Howard’s appointment with the hangman was canceled. It was his lucky day. And, he made the most of it, returning home to Bath.

Yes, home. A dozen or more men among those in Blackbeard’s inner circle of most trusted confidants and slaves were related to, or associated with, plantation owners at or near the town of Bath. They included a property owner named Phillip Howard, whose son is proven by deeds to have been one William Howard. Phillip Howard had been an inhabitant of the Bath area since at least 1703 when a silversmith sold him a tract of land 8 miles east of the town.

In 1707, Phillip Howard expanded his land holdings by patenting 320 acres on the north side of the Pamlico River. His name appeared again that year on another record along with Bath co-founder Joel Martin. Martin was the father of John Martin who would later serve as quartermaster under pirate Benjamin Hornigold and who would return to Bath with William Howard and Edward Thatch, also known as Blackbeard, in 1718.

Three years after he was released from custody aboard the HMS Pearl, retired pirate William Howard was at New Providence, Bahamas, in December 1721, testifying at a trial on behalf of the physician John Howell. Howell had been forced against his will to join the pirate company of Benjamin Hornigold and the doctor wished that his “person and character might be cleared from a certain calumny.”

Under oath, Howard testified “that he (had) known Howell about five years” when he, too, had served as quartermaster under Capt. Benjamin Hornigold in 1716. Howard led a boarding party near Cape Florida with nine others where he “forced said Howell with his medicines to serve on board said Hornigold.” At the trial, Howard was adamant that Howell never asked for, nor received a share from any prize piratically taken. Howell was exonerated, in part thanks to Howard’s efforts.

Because Dr. Howell’s trial occurred in 1721 at Nassau when Howard was said by Hugh Williamson in his book “The History of North Carolina” to have begun his 77 years of residency on the Outer Banks, we can presume that the former pirate was not interested in plantation life on the mainland and must have, in some capacity, continued his life as a mariner — or preferred life at the beach. 

Confirming this are deeds from Bath County (now Beaufort County) proving that William Howard divested himself of his late father’s land holdings in 1730, including the 320 acres Phillip Howard patented in 1707. The deeds were witnessed by William Martin, son of Joel Martin and brother of former pirate quartermaster John Martin.

Yet, one decade later, according to the genealogist Dora Padgett, her ancestor William Howard appeared for the first time in North Carolina, purportedly from Maryland. “The point is sometimes made that William Howard, quartermaster of the pirate Blackbeard, is the same person as

William Howard of Ocracoke,” wrote Dora Padgett. “This is a complete fallacy. William Howard, the pirate, operated in 1718. This was many years prior to the first record of William Howard of Ocracoke.”

Padgett reached her conclusion because, according to her, “no documents yet found in any county establish beyond question his parentage and the facts of his early life.” That does not appear to be true, unless one is willing to believe that there were multiple William Howards : (1) the pirate, (2) the son of the Bath County plantation owner, and (3) the once owner and inhabitant of Ocracoke Island. 

To determine whether or not the island owner was the same man as the notorious pirate, we must consider the following questions:

• Which hypothesis presents more comprehensive facts possessing the greater explanatory scope and strength?
• Which hypothesis is the most plausible?
• Which hypothesis was contrived for a particular purpose?

Padgett wrote that she could find no evidence of a William Howard living in North Carolina prior to the 1740s, yet Beaufort County deeds disconfirm that notion. There can be no disputing the fact that a William Howard lived in the colony prior to the 1740s.

It might be argued that it was possible for there to have been two or even three men with the same name living at the same time in coastal North Carolina in the 18th century. But in this case, the multiple William Howard hypothesis is based on an erroneous assumption that the 1759 owner of the island was too young to have been the pirate Howard. On that basis, that hypothesis is fatally flawed. The facts of Howard’s age established in Williamson’s “The History of North Carolina” and his approximate date of death inferred by his estate inventory are far superior to Padgett’s unsupported guess that he was born in 1700.

How improbable was it that Howard lived to be 108 years old? Williamson’s “The History of North Carolina” named 13 people living in the state during the 1790s who were over 100 years old with the oldest at 114. While there is disbelief among some Howard family descendants, the Ocracoke gravestone of William Howard’s daughter-in-law, Ann, claims that she died in 1841, “Aged 117 years.” Maybe Jonathan Price was correct and Ocracoke was truly a healthy place to live.

It remains a mystery as to why Dora Padgett, an experienced and well-respected genealogist, failed to find or ignored records that would have established William Howard’s lineage and the facts of his early life. We can only speculate that she did not want the pirate Howard to be her ancestor. 

Rarely in history can be found an unbroken chain of evidence providing a clear solution to a mystery, especially in studies of people who play minor roles hundreds of years ago. Further, it has been observed by scholars that while historical descriptions can never be proven to be infallible, they can be accepted as probable, even likely.

Have we met the burden of proof to accept the hypothesis that William Howard the Ocracoke Island owner was the same man as Blackbeard’s quartermaster? Does it merit our belief?

A preponderance of evidence certainly outweighs the lack of a well-supported counter argument to accept that there was just one William Howard who was “a seafaring man of wide experience,” the Colonial owner of Ocracoke Island, and the Golden Age of Piracy’s oldest surviving pirate in America.

Coastal Review Online is featuring the research, findings and commentary of author Kevin Duffus.

Crafted in France, admired by millions at a New York world’s fair, stolen from its lighthouse, buried during the Civil War, recaptured, returned and repaired at Paris, stolen again, and exhibited again: America’s most historic, most traveled, yet most disrespected lighthouse Fresnel lens has a story like no other.

On Friday evening, April 18, 1862, 2 ½ miles south of the Virginia border at the outlying Granville County village of Townsville, a shrill steam whistle heralded the arrival of a train transporting a clandestine and highly coveted prize of war.

Inside a ramshackle boxcar was an apparatus that Union authorities threatened to recapture “at all risks,” including the destruction of the Pamlico River town that once harbored it.

The object was a 6,000-pound, first-order Fresnel lens comprised of more than 1,000 crown-glass prisms and convex lenses. The various panels of faintly green-tinted glass had been dismantled and packed in 44 cotton-lined pine crates alongside 64 bronze precision castings.

When all the pieces were assembled by a skilled machinist using hundreds of delicate jeweler’s screws, the wondrous barrel-shaped optical instrument stood 12 feet high. At night, it magnified and projected 18 miles or more out to sea the light of an oil lamp, flashing a reassuring beam to passing ships once every 10 seconds. At midday, the lens looked like an immense diamond sparkling in the sun, the prisms refracting wavelengths of light splashing inside the lighthouse lantern room an artist’s palate of indigo blue, jade green, canary yellow and crimson red.

Many writers have described the Fresnel lens but none, perhaps, more credibly than the following from Alan Stevenson, the Scottish lighthouse engineer who perfected Augustin Fresnel’s original French design:

“Nothing can be more beautiful than an entire apparatus for a light of the first-order. I know of no work of art more beautiful or creditable to the boldness, ardor, intelligence, and zeal of the artist.”

The device described by Stevenson had just arrived at the railroad siding at Townsville. Few people could have imagined what it was, or its importance, or where it had been, or where destiny would take it.

Ten months earlier, to prevent it from aiding the enemy, the Confederate Lighthouse Bureau in Richmond ordered the illuminating apparatus to be dismantled and removed from the lighthouse at Cape Hatteras, which, a decade earlier, had been regarded by the shipping industry and the U.S. Navy as America’s most important aid to navigation.

For nine months, the stolen Fresnel lens had been secretly hidden in the warehouse of John Myers and Sons on the Washington, North Carolina, waterfront. When news from Confederate informants reached the town in March 1862 that Union general Ambrose Burnside had dispatched four Union vessels and troops from New Bern to sail to Washington to recapture the lens, it was hastily loaded onto a shoal draft steamboat and transported up the Tar River to Tarboro.

Upon the Yankees’ arrival at Washington, town authorities informed them that what they were searching for had disappeared up the river the night before. Now on its way to a secret destination in the interior of the state, the recovery of the lighthouse apparatus had become considerably more difficult. Burnside shared the disappointing news in a letter to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton:

“The light belonging to the Hatteras light-house, which had been in Washington for some time, was removed up the Tar River in a very light-draught steamer, owned by one of the citizens, who was a large property-owner there. Notice has been given him that he must return the light or his property will be seized or destroyed.”

The “large property-owner” and owner of the steamer was John Myers. At Tarboro, Myers wrote his own letter to the Confederate secretary of the Treasury. At the National Archives, I held and transcribed Myers’s original letter:

“We took the responsibility of removing (the lens crates) from Washington to this place. We suggest that you send a special messenger to care for them as they are not secure here. The Federals landed in Washington yesterday, took possession and declared that if the Lighthouse fixtures were not returned “Myers” property would be held responsible. The property will not be returned.” For added emphasis, Myers underscored “will not.”

The Yankees did not torch Washington — at least not then — but Myers’ steamboat was eventually captured and sunk near Tarboro.

The high-stakes game of cat and mouse had become an embarrassment at the highest levels of the federal government, including for President Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward. They were determined to reestablish the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, not only for humanitarian reasons, but more importantly, as a symbolic proclamation proving that the Union, like the lighthouse, would prevail.

The power-obsessed Seward, who was said to have fancied himself more a prime minister, once boasted that he could “ring a little bell and cause the arrest of a citizen.” Seward’s law firm in lower Manhattan opened an investigation of the keeper of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, who participated in the theft of the lens. Luckily for the Trent Woods (now Frisco) resident and former lighthouse keeper, Seward’s little bell never tolled for Benjamin Fulcher, who had already escaped with his family to Hyde County.

The northern press, too, expressed their disdain for the inhumane behavior of the Southern states’ Richmond lighthouse office, whose sole function seemed to be disabling lighthouses and hiding Fresnel lenses. This opinion was published by “Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News” in November 1861:

“Soon after the bombardment of Fort Sumter the Confederate Government, with that murderous indifference to human life which has distinguished them from the first, extinguished all the lights they could reach, and among others the lighthouse erected at Cape Hatteras.”

But the Cape Hatteras apparatus, important as it was to navigators, was not just an ordinary lens — it was already a nationally significant historic artifact. In 1852, it was one of the first two, “first-order” lenses purchased by the U.S. government from the Henry-Lepaute Co. of Paris.

First-order lenses were the most expensive, largest and brightest designed to serve in seacoast lights that had to be seen at the greatest possible distance by mariners. By 1915, there were 57 first-order Fresnel lenses in U.S. lighthouses out of a total of 766 lenses, the greatest number being those of the fourth-order serving harbor and river lights like the tower at Ocracoke or the Roanoke River screwpile lighthouse.

But before it was shipped to the Outer Banks, the Cape Hatteras lens was first assigned the temporary duty of guiding attendees through the south nave of New York City’s Crystal Palace on East 40th Street for the 1853 world’s fair known as The Exhibition of Industry of All Nations.

There, the lens was seen by more than 1 million visitors, including then-17-year-old Sam Clemens of Hannibal, Missouri, later known by his pseudonym, Mark Twain. My 10-year-old great-great-grandfather, Edward I. Horsman saw it too.

Up until 11 years ago, history seemed to have forgotten the fact — or didn’t consider it remarkable — that the lens had been the centerpiece of the newly established U.S. Lighthouse Board’s exhibit in 1853, until I rediscovered the occurrence for the first time and found the lens in a lithograph commissioned by P.T. Barnum in order to promote the exhibition.

The lens’ early brush with fame was not limited to the famous showman and the American humorist. The first man to supervise the assembly of the apparatus was a 38-year-old captain in the U.S. Topographical Engineers who, 10 years later to the day, was seated on horseback supervising the Army of the Potomac’s victory over Lee’s army at Gettysburg: Gen. George. G. Meade.

This was the lens that was ignominiously stacked in crates inside a newly arrived boxcar at Townsville on Easter weekend in 1862.

The man who volunteered to take the lens to a place of safety on behalf of the Confederate Lighthouse Bureau was 36-year-old Beaufort County physician, Dr. David T. Tayloe. Tayloe, the son of a former Pamlico district lighthouse superintendent, had previously evacuated his family from Washington to Hibernia, a property owned by his wife’s uncle, John Hargrove.

Today a state park on Kerr Lake, Hibernia was about 3 miles northeast of the train station, and it was there that the Cape Hatteras lens was removed to a secret “storehouse,” as Tayloe described in a letter. For 140 years, Townsville and Hibernia were assumed to be the last known location of the lens, its disappearance called “one of the great-unsolved mysteries of American lighthouse history” by the editor of Lighthouse Digest magazine.

In 1999, I began a search for the missing Fresnel lens, acclaimed by some as the “holy grail” of American lighthouses. Where would Tayloe and Hargrove have hidden the lens? Surely, they kept it close by as they were responsible for its safekeeping.

My exploration beneath railroad trestles, tobacco barns, and abandoned houses proved fruitless. However, a large and deep hole in the ground that once served as the icehouse for the estate seemed to be an intriguing and likely hiding place. But Hibernia turned out to be not as remote and invulnerable from the war’s depredations as was anticipated.

My research revealed that in early May 1865, 28,000 troops from Sherman’s army on their victory march from Raleigh to Washington, D.C., passed right through Townsville and Hibernia in a column stretching 25 miles long.

Wherever Tayloe and Hargrove had hidden the lens, Sherman’s soldiers did not find it, even though not a single Granville County chicken survived the army’s tornado-like swath of foraging.

Left behind in the clouds of dust, in my best estimation, and buried beneath piles of sawdust and blocks of melting ice was the “holy grail” of lighthouses — the Cape Hatteras lens.

It is hard to imagine that the same imposing, shimmering object that awed more than a million spectators at New York’s Crystal Palace had been buried at a remote farm 200 miles from the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, but many more desperate measures were taken during the nation’s darkest time.

Five months later in September, at the peak of tobacco-harvesting season, the 44 pine crates and 64 bronze precision castings were found by a Union patrol neatly stacked on the train station platform in Henderson, 20 miles south of Townsville.

No one knew how the Cape Hatteras lens got there or who delivered it. But if I had to guess, Tayloe and Hargrove were involved, and the pine crates likely emitted a pungent smell, having been hidden under piles of golden leaf for the 20-mile wagon trip south from Townsville to the Henderson tobacco markets.

But where did the historic lens go from there? After many trips to the National Archives I followed the trail to the Lighthouse Service’s depot at Staten Island, then to Paris in 1867 where the lens was repaired and refocused, then back to Staten Island a year later to be held in storage pending the construction of a new lighthouse along one of the nation’s three coasts.

Finding that lighthouse, and the lens’ ultimate destination, proved to be the most painstaking piece of research I sought. There were at least a dozen possibilities but when I finally found the one document that had eluded untold numbers of fellow researchers at the archives, I was not entirely surprised. The 1853 Cape Hatteras Lighthouse lens was sent back home to the Outer Banks, not to the original tower built in 1803, but the new lighthouse completed in 1870.

For the next 66 years, the Henry-Lepaute Fresnel lens performed admirably, despite enduring a lightning strike and an earthquake. In 1933, the lens was famously photographed for National Geographic magazine proudly being polished by principal keeper Unaka Jennette, great-grandson of Benjamin Fulcher, the keeper who helped remove the same lens for the Confederates in 1861.

Throughout the years, the ocean crept ever closer to the base of the lighthouse and at sunrise on Wednesday, May 13, 1936, the light was extinguished, and the travel-weary lens flashed for its final time. The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was, for the next 14 years, abandoned by the federal government.

All the while, the Cape Hatteras tower stood extinguished, its Henry-Lepaute lens remained at the top, but without the daily attention and loving care of its keepers and without the doors secured. The bronze and brass gears of the clockwork machinery that rotated the light were tarnished from neglect. Drifts of sand covered the once shiny, black-and-white marble tile floors of the landings. Windows were cracked or missing. Rainwater and salt spray seeped into the tower. Paint peeled from the walls. Guano stained the railings of the galleries and rust had begun its destructive process. Worst of all, the prisms and convex lenses of first-order illuminating apparatus — the pride of Paris and the former U.S. Lighthouse Service — began to disappear.

By 1944, two of the center flash panels had been jimmied loose from their bronze frames, and soon after, more disappeared. Years later, it was suggested that visitors to the lighthouse had been encouraged by unnamed Coast Guardsmen to take pieces of the lens, since the government did not expect the lighthouse to survive the waves that were clawing at its foundation. Whether souvenir hunters went about their business with the government’s permission is unproven, but it is without question that once word spread the prisms of the lens were there for the taking, the taking began in earnest.

By 1950, erosion had temporarily abated, and the Coast Guard wanted to reestablish the light, but by then the great lens was destroyed. Even though he likely knew little about its incomparable and eventful past, a National Park Service official called what happened to the lens “a disgrace.”

All 24 of the central dioptric flash panels were missing and two-thirds of the 1,008 crown-glass prisms had been taken. The beautiful brass incandescent oil vapor lamp was gone. Ironically, what Union authorities accused the Confederates of doing, had come to pass 89 years later. What was left of the historic lens was removed and replaced with an electric beacon made by Corning Glass Works.

From there, the remains of the historic Fresnel lens were shuttled around to various National Park Service storage facilities, including Little Kinnakeet Life-saving Station, where a couple of the surviving 170-pound prism-filled panels were stolen but eventually and disgracefully dumped in a ditch north of Avon.

Soon after I solved the mystery of the lost light in 2002 and positively identified the remains of the lens stored in the government’s Roanoke Island warehouse as the original 1853 Cape Hatteras Lighthouse Henry-Lepaute lens, the National Park Service agreed to loan to the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras village the surviving pieces so that the artifact could be conserved, publicly displayed and interpreted.

The first phase of the project was completed in 2005 and the lens was exhibited just as it was 152 years earlier at New York City’s Crystal Palace, albeit not as complete or awe-inspiring. One year later, on Oct. 27, 2006, the lens and its restored 1870 cast-iron pedestal were reunited at the museum. The total cost to the museum for the restoration and exhibit exceeded $100,000.

The location of the original Henry-Lepaute clockwork mechanism and pedestal displayed at the Crystal Palace in 1853 — the oldest surviving device in America — remained unknown until I located it in 2015 in the watch room of the Pigeon Point Lighthouse on California’s San Mateo coast.

The long and tempestuous odyssey of America’s oldest surviving first-order lighthouse lens had seemed to have reached an end. The historic artifact — indisputably a national treasure and an iconic symbol of Hatteras Island’s storied traditions of lighthouse keeping and lifesaving — will never be as it once was. Yet, a new chapter in the story had begun, hopefully what was expected to be a long and stable period of recognition, respect and admiration, viewed by 85,000 people annually at the museum.

There have been discussions during the past year that the National Park Service, in a future phase of its major repair and restoration project for the aging Cape Hatteras Lighthouse tower, may reclaim the fragile and incomplete Fresnel lens from the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum and return it to the top of the lighthouse. It is not known if a final decision has been made.

At the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum, however, the nation’s oldest surviving first-order Fresnel lens is safer and more accessible to the public, especially for those who are physically unable to ascend the 256 steps of the 20-story building to catch a partial glimpse of the lens through the narrow gap in the lantern room floor.

Instead, as it stands today and hopefully forever at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum, the lens serves as a far more powerful light, an educational beacon, a uniquely American symbol of our maritime history.

On that point, we might imagine that Benjamin Fulcher, John Myers, Dr. David T. Tayloe, General Ambrose Burnside, Phineas T. Barnum, Gen. George Meade, Mark Twain, Unaka Jennette, Alan Stevenson, Abraham Lincoln, and Augustin Michel Henry-Lepaute would all agree.

Coastal Review Online is featuring the research, findings and commentary of author Kevin Duffus.

In 1942, more than 65 German U-boats waged a withering campaign along the nation’s eastern seaboard against Allied merchant vessels and their military defenders to disrupt or entirely sever transatlantic supply lines fueling the war effort in Europe.

In just half a year, 397 ships were sunk. Nearly 5,000 people, including many civilians, were burned to death, crushed, drowned or vanished into the sea. But in a remarkable twist of fate that helped in a small way to alter the course of the war, a child was born in a lifeboat east of Cape Hatteras.

________________________

On Palm Sunday, March 29, 1942, a blond, blue-eyed Yugoslavian woman traveling from South Africa had been counting down the days until she would reunite with her husband, a diplomat in exile at New York — only one day to go. Months earlier, the family escaped from their homeland amid the chaos unleashed by Hitler’s invading army but they became separated along the way.

She was 28 and had her 2-year-old daughter by her side. She was also eight-and-a-half months pregnant. And she suddenly began to go into labor.

If the world was not challenging enough for Desanka Mohorovicic, she was also surrounded by 19 strangers in a lifeboat in near total darkness in the middle of the night, 40 miles east of Cape Hatteras, pitching and plunging in 15-foot seas, soaking wet and chilled to the bone by 25-knot winds and 50-degree temperatures. Sharks patiently circled their lifeboat. And they were in the Gulf Stream, helplessly being swept out into the lonely abyss of the deep Atlantic.

One thing buoyed her spirits, that she would somehow survive her ordeal: her faith in God.

Twelve hours earlier, Desanka had been warm and dry aboard the 452-foot-long passenger-freighter, the City of New York, inbound to the United States from Cape Town via Port-of-Spain, Trinidad.

They had traveled 7,600 nautical miles since Cape Town and had 330 miles to go — just 24 hours. But the ship had yet to run the U-boat gauntlet off Cape Hatteras, a heavily traveled ocean passage described by the U.S. Navy in the spring of 1942 as “the most dangerous place for merchant shipping in the world.”

Capt. George T. Sullivan nervously paced the bridge wings as the City of New York knifed her way through choppy seas and a chilly Force 6 wind out of the northwest. His mind was filled with worry for the well-being of his ship’s 47 civilian passengers, 88 crewmembers and nine sailors of the U.S. Navy Armed Guard. He knew that they were entering a deadly war zone of the Second World War.

Approaching North Carolina waters, the ship’s shortwave radio crackled constantly with plaintive Morse code distress calls: “di-di-dit, dah-dah-dah, di-di-dit (SOS);” or, “di-di-dit, di-di-dit, di-di-dit, di-di-dit” (SSSS—attacked by submarine).

During the preceding two weeks in March, such signals were broadcast two to three times a day or more along the approaches to Cape Fear, Cape Lookout and Cape Hatteras, as Allied ships were being sunk by German U-boats. Off the North Carolina coast, 31 ships and 683 people perished in just 16 days.

The period was the darkest, most desperate and most heart-rending for the U.S. government — Washington military and political leaders faced a dire lack of anti-submarine patrol vessels and vast disagreements as to how merchant sailors should best be protected.

None of that mattered to Desanka Mohorovicic. She just wanted to be in her husband’s embrace.

As the City of New York approached Cape Hatteras at midday March 29, Desanka and her daughter attended Palm Sunday services on the foredeck of the ship. Not far away, Capt. Sullivan whispered something in the ear of the ship’s physician while pointing at the pregnant woman. The doctor nodded.

Meanwhile, passengers returned to their cabins while others strolled about the main deck awaiting the clanging of the lunch bell. A few children played a game of chase as their parents enjoyed the warmth of the sun. High above, a crewman in the crow’s nest on the forward mast vigilantly scanned the horizon. On the aft deck, two sleep-deprived sailors of the U.S. Navy Armed Guard stood near the ship’s 4-inch gun.

At 12:45 p.m., the lookout in the crow’s nest screamed, “Torpedo! Port side!”

One second later, the waterborne missile tore into the No. 3 hold directly beneath the bridge, blasting a gaping hole below the waterline. All electronic communications aboard the ship were disrupted, and the captain was unable to receive damage reports or to dispatch emergency orders.

Instinctively, and as a result of weeks of training, the helmsman rounded the ship into the northwest wind, the engineer shut down the engines, and crew members raced to their lifeboat stations. The telegraphist in the radio room frantically tapped out SSSS, SSSS, SSSS.

Within a frightfully fast 10 minutes, the entire ship, bow first, slipped beneath the waves and sank to the bottom of the ocean 6,000 feet below.

Lowering a lifeboat was typically a dangerous and delicate operation in the best of conditions but doing so from a steeply listing ship in strong winds and choppy seas was an enormous test of skill and composure.

As American passenger Sarah King’s lifeboat, descended on the falls, a second torpedo slammed into the ship just 20 feet away. The lifeboat fell rapidly downward as a 30-foot “great geyser of water” rained down upon King and the other occupants of the lifeboat.

“We braced ourselves as it came,” King said. “We were driven down into the water. As I went down, I wondered if this was really the end.”

Desanka and her daughter grabbed some woolen blankets from their cabin and were climbing the companionway leading to the upper deck when the second torpedo struck. Mohorovicic slipped and tumbled down the stairs. She got up off the deck and pulled herself up the stairway, her legs badly scraped and bruised.

Soon after emerging onto the lifeboat deck, she was greeted by the ship’s doctor, Leonard Conly, who previously had been asked by the captain to be sure to locate and stay with the pregnant woman if they would have to abandon ship. Sullivan had clearly planned ahead and expected the worst.

Conly rushed Mohorovicic and her daughter to lifeboat No. 4, which they boarded along with 19 others. By now, as the ship was slipping ever faster to her watery grave, composure gave way to disorder and chaos.

As Conly hurried to board the descending lifeboat swaying wildly alongside the stricken ship, he slipped and fell, breaking two of his ribs. Now it was the doctor who needed medical attention, but aboard the lifeboat there was only a basic emergency first-aid kit: some bandages, gauze and disinfectant, but no instruments and no anesthesia.

Charles Van Gorden had been a junior officer aboard his ship; now he commanded his own vessel, Lifeboat No. 4. Aboard his boat were a Jewish couple who months earlier abandoned their German home for the safety of America. They were now probably thinking that escaping the Nazis was becoming exceedingly difficult.

Near them sat 14 others from various nations, including the expectant mother. Not all were fluent in English. Desanka spoke Serbian and some French but little English. Most of the survivors were too stunned or scared to say anything anyway.

Van Gorden organized the merchant crewmen aboard the lifeboat, and pairs began taking turns pulling on the oars. Their first objective was to get themselves away from the sinking ship and its dangerous debris field.

Van Gorden also hoped to reach those survivors not in lifeboats and soon encountered an overcrowded raft containing Sarah King. She had, so far, survived the calamity. King, and a father with his 8-year-old daughter were transferred to the lifeboat.

When the ship disappeared into the depths, bobbing on the surface amidst wreckage and oil were four crowded lifeboats and a half dozen or so rafts,126 people in all. Eighteen souls went down with the ship.

Due to the variability of the wind and waves and the eddies of the Gulf Stream, the City of New York’s lifeboats and life rafts soon drifted apart and went their separate ways.

Most everyone clung to the hope that they would soon be rescued. After all, the telegraphist had broadcast the ship’s coordinates at the moment it had been torpedoed. Hours later, however, the survivors were scattered across a wide swath of ocean many miles to the northeast. Back at the site of the attack, not a single vestige of the disaster remained for would-be rescuers to find.

Aboard Lifeboat No. 4, the barefoot Desanka and her daughter Vesna huddled together on a portside bench near the middle of the little boat, shivering in the cold. The City of New York’s crew members glanced at one another and silently communicated their concern about the young mother.

Then, the unimaginable happened. Desanka felt her first contractions. Quietly, she whispered prayers in Serbian for her baby to wait but it seemed determined to be born. She did her best to hide her discomfort.

By 8 p.m., as the wind strengthened and the spindrift of breaking waves whipped through the air, it was no longer possible for her to hide that fact that she was having her baby. It came as little surprise to Dr. Conly, who fully expected the violent motion of the lifeboat to induce the woman’s labor.

A crewman helped Conly arrange a section of canvas sail to help provide a little privacy for the shy young mother as she was about to give birth in the presence of 19 strangers in close quarters.

“The sea was rough,” the crewman later said. “By the time her labor pains began, the boat was practically full of water. The woman had no shoes. She did not complain and did everything she could to make it as easy as possible for the doctor and those who attended.”

Neither did Conly complain, although he winced in pain on almost every lurch of the lifeboat. The physician wished he had more to work with aboard his waterlogged maternity ward than what was in the basic emergency lifeboat kit: hemostats, scissors, gauze, iodine, aspirin, all drenched in salt water.

The delivery would have been no easier if conducted on a roller coaster on a rainy dark night. On his knees, it was impossible for the doctor to see beneath the canvas sail; he could hardly keep from being tossed out of the lifeboat. The best he could hope for was to be ready to receive the newborn at the moment of delivery, which happened at about 2:30 a.m. on Monday when Desanka Mohorovicic gave birth to a healthy, 8-pound baby boy.

Now there were 22 souls in the lifeboat. They were 40 miles from Hatteras Island and getting farther from land by the hour. Many times in the war zone off the Outer Banks survivors in lifeboats or rafts from torpedoed ships were never seen again.

Meanwhile, the World War I-era Wickes-class naval destroyer USS Jesse Roper had been patrolling the waters off the Outer Banks on anti-submarine patrol. During the preceding weeks in March, the warship had been constantly responding to distress calls but only finding oil slicks, debris and empty lifeboats. Depth charges were dropped on sonar contacts day and night depriving the destroyer’s officers and crew much needed sleep.

“We would see partial wrecks, the debris floating everywhere, the oil slicks …,” recalled Boatswain’s Mate 2nd Class radioman Rhodes Chamberlin when I interviewed him at his home in El Paso in 2001. “We were on this ‘finding a needle in a haystack’ situation, looking for submarines by ourselves, and, considering the number of square miles that are out there in the ocean, (the U-boats) really were a needle in the haystack.”

“Ping … Ping … Ping …,” bleated the destroyer’s sonar transmitter as it searched for solid underwater objects and the reflected sound that would be bounced back to the ship’s sonar receiver, much like a lonely songbird calling for companionship.

The sonar operator would suddenly hear a response: “Ping-ping, Ping-ping, Ping-ping!” The klaxon wailed, “ah-wooga, ah-wooga,” calling general quarters.

The ship’s intercom barked commands, men flew into action and a pattern of depth charges were dropped. “Boom, boom, boom.”

Nothing appeared on the surface, no oil nor debris were observed which would have indicated that the Roper had successfully sunk a U-boat. The sonar echoes fell silent. The contact was lost. The off-duty sailors climbed back in their bunks, unable to go back to sleep.

Morale aboard the destroyer was about as low as it could get.

During the early morning hours of Tuesday, March 31, the Roper was patrolling in water 11,000 feet deep, east-northeast of Cape Hatteras, near the axis of the Gulf Stream. Visibility was 20 miles, although, as was typical, a shallow, intermittent cloud of fog hovered over the warm Gulf Stream waters.

The waxing gibbous moon occasionally shone brightly above, illuminating tatters of stratus clouds streaming in from the west. Occasional flashes of lightening appeared from the direction of the mainland. It seemed an idyllic night to be at sea — unless you were in a lifeboat.

At 4:28 a.m., a brilliant light shot into the night sky, about 8 miles due north of the Roper’s position. The officer of the deck ordered the destroyer to rush to the signal flare’s source. There they found a lifeboat with 21 survivors from the City of New York, plus one additional person who had joined the others in the lifeboat, Desanka Mohorovicic’s 26-hour-old son.

A cargo net was draped over the gunwale of the Roper, and men began to leap out of the lifeboat, timing their jumps as the lifeboat was lifted on the waves.

“Send the baby up next,” someone in the lifeboat shouted. The mother, however, was not so eager to hand her newborn to strangers on a strange ship in total darkness. Making matters more worrisome, the lifeboat pitched and yawed, and the gap to the destroyer’s hull rapidly widened, then narrowed. “What if they drop him?” she must have thought. But her moment of indecision was brief.

“Then they took the baby up, it had no clothes, and I was afraid they would drop it,” said Sarah King.

Many years later, when she told her amazing story, Desanka Mohorovicic’s most vivid memory was the look on the young sailor’s face when he realized he had been handed a newborn. The baby was immediately rushed to the Roper’s sickbay. Even before he arrived there, word of his rescue began to quickly make its way through the ship.

“It was a big deal,” remembered Chamberlin. “Just talking about the fact that it was a newborn baby — everybody wanted to see it.”

Sailors who previously had been sullen and fatigued from fruitless hours of patrolling “Torpedo Junction,” from the incessant wailing of the klaxon punctuated by exploding depth charges, from days of feeling impotent and vulnerable, were suddenly inspired by the unmistakable looks of gratitude on the faces of the survivors.

According to the New York World-Telegram, after learning of the name of the American warship that had rescued her young family, Desanka proudly announced with a few words of English that her baby would thenceforth be named Jesse Roper Mohorovicic.

At 10:55 p.m., the destroyer tied up to the south side of Pier No. 5 at Norfolk Naval Operating Base. A large crowd had been awaiting the arrival of the destroyer, and Naval officers, reservists, Red Cross nurses and military photographers cheerily greeted the disembarking passengers. Flash bulbs popped one after another. A blue-eyed nurse was photographed holding baby Jesse Roper, warmly swaddled in a blanket, his head barely visible in the photo.

Two weeks later, with their morale and fighting spirit bolstered by the rescue of the survivors from the City of New York and the baby named for their destroyer, the crew of the USS Jesse Roper sank the U-85 southeast of Nags Head, the first U-boat to be destroyed in U.S. waters in the war. The Roper’s victory marked the beginning of the end of what became known as “Torpedo Junction.”

In January 2001, I located and contacted Jesse Roper Mohorovic — the family dropped the “ic” at the end of their surname to make it easier to pronounce — and asked him if I could interview him for a documentary film that I was producing titled, “War Zone—World War II Off North Carolina’s Outer Banks.”

Initially, Jesse declined, saying that there wasn’t much he could say since he obviously didn’t remember his birth in the lifeboat. “Well, I had really hoped to learn a little bit more about your mother, what was she like?” I asked, just before Mohorovic was about to say goodbye. “Okay,” he said, “Come to my office in Richmond, and I’ll chat with you.”

We agreed that he would answer in the third person, as someone who knew Desanka Mohorovicic. He did not want to necessarily identify himself as her son, “the lifeboat baby,” “the son of Neptune,” or “the baby Hitler couldn’t get,” as the national press referred to him in 1942. There were more important things, other than himself, that he wished to share.

“She was a woman of very strong faith, very, very strong faith,” Mohorovic said, after describing the events leading up to the baby’s birth. “And a courageous woman, obviously. And a woman who had great trust that her daughter, her newborn son, would somehow come out of it. She really put her trust in God —maybe not so commonly heard today, but that was her view.”

Mohorovic took a deep breath and sighed. He seemed to want to say something more. He seemed momentarily uncomfortable telling the story in the third person, unwilling to be disassociated from the remarkable woman, Desanka Mohorovicic. Then, he looked directly into the lens of the TV camera and said, “Well, Mrs. Mohorovicic was my mother. And she passed on in 1993, and I loved her like every son loves their mother.”

Kevin Duffus is the author of six books spanning 500 years North Carolina’s incomparable maritime history, including :War Zone—World War II Off the North Carolina Coast.” He was named “2014 North Carolina Historian of the Year” by the North Carolina Society of Historians.

Coastal Review Online is featuring the research, findings and commentary of author Kevin Duffus.

Last of three parts

“Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.”

Who knows how many of General Ambrose Burnside’s more than 10,000 officers, soldiers and sailors could recite the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epic 1798 poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?” No doubt, they appreciated the sentiment.

At the beginning of their second week at Hatteras Inlet in January 1862, the winter weather slackened, meaning, in local terms, that the wind dropped to the 20 to 30 knot range, but intermittent periods of dense fog and pelting rain persisted, forcing the fleet to remain anchored in place.

“Our quarters on board the Kitty Simpson were extremely disagreeable,” wrote one junior officer “The place was dark and stifling, and a few ship lanterns were all the lights we had. … it was impossible to step without placing one’s foot on a comrade’s head or some portion of the body.”

While the cold wind whistled topside and the vessels swayed and creaked, many men tried to scribble out letters to their loved ones in the dim, murky light; others “played chess and whist (a card game) to while away many otherwise tedious hours.”

A correspondent aboard Burnside’s command ship described the scene: “Here comes a boat from the Cossack, covered with feathery spray. She comes alongside of the Admiral (the side-wheel steamer George Peabody), and the officer hands General Burnside a message. It is a cry for water. Six hundred troops of the Fifty-first Pennsylvania Regiment on board, six reporters, and no water — no whiskey. The General reads the letter with moistened eyes, and frankly informs the messenger that their only resource is to go to the Southfield for it.” The Southfield was a double-ended, side-wheel steam gunboat that later became well-known for having been rammed and sunk by the Confederate ironclad CSS Albemarle.

Most of the steam-powered troop ships left the Chesapeake Bay with a week’s worth of fresh water. Some of that water was reserved for the ship’s boilers to produce steam but nearly all of those steam engines had the ability to produce distilled water using an apparatus that included a condenser, an evaporator and a cooling system.

A few of Burnside’s steamers could produce as much as 3,000 gallons of distilled water per day but much of that water had to be distributed to many of the sailing vessels that had no ability to make water. Water production also relied on coal but coal bunkers were rapidly depleted.

There was also a water-production facility using a steam condenser of Normandy’s design in two small buildings on shore near Fort Hatteras depicted in an illustration published in Harper’s Weekly. A cast-iron pipe draws seawater from the inlet to cool the condensers inside. The machine was operated around the clock and made 1,000 gallons of water each day but expressly for the troops stationed on shore.

When gale force winds, the ebbing or flowing of tides, or dense fog prevented travel between ships, coal could not be easily resupplied and water production fell well below the expedition’s needs.

“At one moment flags would appear with Union down on a number of vessels, indicating want of water, coal, and provisions, and then would be lost from view.”

Distilled water was described by the regiments as “almost nauseating.” It also was devoid of minerals and had a tendency to leech minerals from the soldier’s bodies, including their teeth. Likewise, distilled water assimilated flavors from the containers in which it was stored. Oak casks formerly used to store whiskey improved the flavor of the distilled water but many other casks that previously contained camphine (purified turpentine for lamp oil) or kerosene, did not.

The water shortage on board dozens of vessels caused concern among the commanders of the expedition. While the senior officers had expected to spend their time in ward rooms poring over maps and planning their amphibious landing and capture of Roanoke Island, they were instead wondering if they would ever get there.

Burnside later wrote: “On one of these dreary days I for a time gave up all hope, and walked to the bow of the vessel that I might be alone. Soon after, a small black cloud appeared in the angry gray sky, just above the horizon, and very soon spread so as to cover the entire canopy, and in a few moments a most copious fall of rain came to our relief. Signals were given to spread sails to catch the water, and in a short time an abundance was secured for the entire fleet. I was at once cheered up, but was very much ashamed of the distrust which I had allowed to get the mastery of me.”

If only whiskey would fall from the sky, at least one soldier — if not thousands — must have cried out.

According to the Times, for two hours on Tuesday the weather was like a fine summer’s day. “The sun shown out warmly, bringing smiles and gladness to all human faces. ‘Now we shall have some settled weather, I think,’ said Capt. Dack. Deceived and deluded man! In ten minutes more it was piping from the northeast, the sky was overcast, and we had a gale in the afternoon, which has continued ever since.”

The brief interlude of gales at Hatteras Inlet allowed a few regiment’s commanders to disembark their troops at Fort Hatteras and establish temporary camps on the sandy wastelands of Hatteras Island, among them, the 24^th Massachusetts Volunteers. Landing on terra firma for the first time since leaving Annapolis, the Bay State boys trying to march in formation must have been an amusing sight to the fort’s garrison as they wobbled and weaved and stumbled on their sea legs in the soft sand.

The troops became temporary tourists and inspected the two former Confederate forts which did not impress them. Before setting up camp and erecting their tents, they instead did what so many people do, even today, when visiting Outer Banks beaches for the first time.

“They found the fortifications small affairs, in charge of a small detachment of regular soldiers, but the shells upon the beach were more lovely than any the men had seen before. One admirer wished he might pick up a ton of them, but he realized how impracticable shell gathering was to a soldier with a knapsack.”

The fun was short-lived.

At midday on Wednesday, Jan.22, after 24 hours of moderate winds, the wind clocked to the southeast and by the hour increased in strength.

A reporter for the New York Times wrote: “… by 2 o’clock P.M. we thought the gale had culminated. Mistaken mortals! We had not been ‘raised hereabout,’ and this accounts for our inexperience. During the night the gale increased, knocking up an ugly chopping sea, and obliging all the vessels to let go both anchors and pay out all their chain.”

At nightfall, rain fell in torrents. The wind increased to Force 9 or greater reaching 50 knots, and seas offshore crested to 30 feet or more. Burnside and his senior staff aboard the George Peabody could hear “the doleful sound of signal guns of distress” booming all around in the darkness. There was nothing they could do but wait.

Through the half light of the squally dawn and rents in the curtains of fog and spray, the casualties of the previous night could sometimes be seen. “Affairs in the harbor are in a deplorable state,” wrote the Times reporter.

The diarist of the 5^th Regiment Rhode Island Heavy Artillery wrote: “The hospital bark (Guerrilla) had broken from her moorings and had gone smashing around among the other vessels, and she was now seen flying signals of distress, but no assistance could be rendered to her so great was the force of the gale. It is impossible to recount the various incidents that occurred or note the damage inflicted on the fleet by this gale.”

Yet again, the steamers began running out of coal and water, including Burnside’s headquarters ship George Peabody. “The severity of the gale prevents all communication between the vessels of the fleet,” reported Harper’s Weekly. “The Admiral is nearly out of water; her coal is exhausted, and no coal means no water. A vessel with 300 troops (the steamer Vidette) on board, within as many hundred yards of us, has her colors set in the rigging, Union down.”

Below decks, the one quart of water per day ration for the soldiers was cut back to ounces. An officer of a regiment lamented: “I was obliged to put everybody on short allowance, which produced much discomfort and some grumbling among the men; quite natural this when it is remembered that the food of the same consisted chiefly of salt beef, salt pork, hard bread, potatoes, rice and hominy, all calculated to excite thirst.”

By noon Thursday, instead of abating, the gale became worse, increasing to Force 10. Described by the Beaufort Scale — foam in great patches blown in dense white streaks along the direction of the wind; on the whole the surface of the sea takes on a white appearance.

Harper’s Weekly confirmed the estimated wind speed: “As far as the eye can discern through the drifting mist the bay is one broad sheet of white foam, resembling a plain of newly-fallen snow.” The view must not have been as enchanting for Burnside as the snow had been at Annapolis two weeks earlier.

Around the inlet were haunting scenes of the worn down Union army nearly ready to surrender to the forces of nature. “A single person here and there appears on some vessel’s deck, holding on by the rail or rigging, and a few scattering groups are seen pacing the beach, as if in search of shelter from the fury of the blast.”

The soldiers of the 24^th Massachusetts, who just the day before were collecting Scotch bonnets on the beach, lost their entire camp of tents overnight and their “straggling forms” were seen wandering the beach in a daze. “Beyond … the billows of old ocean break along the shore, tossing the spray from their snowy crests high into the air. It is a spectacle truly grand.” And terrifying.

Gen. Burnside, too, seemed stunned by his unrelenting foe. He “watches the careering storm from the deck of the Admiral, and seems weighed down with these accumulating misfortunes. … But he is not the Almighty, to say to the winds, ‘Be still.’ Nor a Moses, with power to smite the rock, and bid the waters to gush forth to supply their wants. They must wait on Providence.”

The Almighty was not yet done testing Burnside’s faith and the endurance of his Coastal Division. A measles outbreak afflicted a number of the soldiers and many were transferred to the hospital ship, which, by then, had discontinued its unmoored collisions with the fleet in the anchorage. Typhoid had also afflicted the soldiers billeted on shore. Scores of men died.

A soldier of the 9^th New York Volunteers observed: “Funerals were of so frequent occurrence that it was said by a jocular spirit that the mockingbirds have learned to whistle the ‘Dead March.’”

Then, an even more insidious enemy invaded the fleet — “vermin, in army vernacular known as ‘graybacks,’ disreputably as ‘body lice.’ Disregarding rank or station they invaded cabin and hold, and proved a most difficult foe to contend with, the most skillful skirmishing failing to dislodge them.”

As the weather began to improve at the end of the second week, Burnside’s soldiers retreated from this new adversary to the topsides of their transports and began throwing their uniforms overboard. This too, must have been an incredible scene beyond the imagination of those riding the Hatteras-Ocracoke ferries today:

“During sunny hours, the decks were covered with men … en déshabille, with clothes turned wrong side out, and each one busily skirmishing with the marauders. Undress was substituted for ‘dress parade’ and many a guffaw (was) elicited. … Thus situated we were disgusted with our filthiness, and anxiously awaited deliverance.”

Finally, the January march of extratropical cyclones seemed to have reached an end, or at least offered a truce. Thoughts and efforts turned to getting the armada out of Oliver’s Channel and into the sound. But how?

After the war, Burnside wrote that his greatest disappointment at Hatteras Inlet was that he had been deceived about the depth of the channel leading from Oliver’s Channel into the Pamlico Sound over what was called “the Swash.”

He had every right to be angry about the erroneous intelligence. Union forces had control of the inlet for four and a half months. Surely an accurate survey of the channel could have been made during that time. Even Hannibal had good information about the best mountain passes to cross during his expedition over the Alps.

Burnside’s staff had been told that there was at least 8 feet of water over the swash. Not until they arrived at the inlet did they find out that there was but 6 feet of water in which to navigate. Some of Flag Officer Goldsborough’s naval vessels that were to escort Burnside’s troop transports, gunboats and landing scows, drew as much as 15 feet of water. Ballast was tossed overboard and troops were transferred ashore to lighten the transports, but the effect was still insufficient.

Like Moses standing on the banks of the Red Sea, Burnside needed a miracle; not one to part the seas but to make them rise.

Over the many days of their confinement, Burnside’s engineers devised an ingenious plan to deepen the channel without the use of steam dredges, which they did not bring along.

They knew that the ebbing current running out of the sound twice a day was very fast, estimated between 4 and 5 knots. In an experiment, a few of the expedition’s large steam vessels were sent up the channel toward the swash, striking the bar under full steam. Then, anchors were carried ahead by small boats to hold the steamers in place. As the tide ran out, sand was scoured beneath the vessels, deepening the channel. The process was repeated over and over for days. The result — a wider channel deepened to 8 feet.

Still, the channel was not deep enough to permit the deepest-draft vessels to get through. Then, Burnside’s miracle happened.

As the last low-pressure system moved northward, powerful winds blew out of the northwest, driving water out of Albemarle Sound and the Pamlico River. The seas rose, and 60 vessels of Burnside’s fleet were able to get over the Swash and into the sound. On Wednesday, Feb. 5, the expedition weighed anchor and sailed for Roanoke Island and on to their destiny.

With the inlet fading behind them, untold numbers of Yankee troops were relieved that their Hatteras “vacation” was over. Many years later, one soldier who had been among those encamped temporarily on the beach, put his memories to writing:

“During that week on the barrens of Hatteras one of the most serious discomforts arose from the presence of sand in whatever the men had to eat or drink. Everybody expects to eat his peck of dirt before he dies, but no one thinks to get it all in one short (week). … The cooks, when they made coffee for the companies, would find two or three inches of sand in the bottom of their kettles, blown there while the water was boiling. Baked beans could not be chewed, they were swallowed as they entered the mouth, too gritty for chewing. No one of that battalion ever thought himself lacking in ‘sand’ after that week of Hatteras experience.”

And so, these are the things I think about while riding the Hatteras Inlet ferry across that grand stage of maritime history. Frankly, I’m grateful that the journey takes a little longer these days.

Coastal Review Online is featuring the research, findings and commentary of author Kevin Duffus.

Second of three parts

“Never has any expedition in the history of the world had to pass through a severer ordeal; everything seemed to conspire against it —Nature with her storms, and human nature with her villainy.”

So reported a correspondent for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper about the nearly four-week Burnside Expedition’s voyage to, and through, Hatteras Inlet in January 1862, 159 years ago this month.

The effusive writer, however, must have forgotten his childhood lessons on classical military history featuring the exploits of Alexander the Great, Hannibal Barca and Khalid ibn Walid.

Comparable, in a lesser degree, to Hannibal’s march across the Alps in 218 B.C. in terms of enormous logistical obstacles, the achievements of the Union general, Ambrose Burnside, in the face of horrendous weather, erroneous intelligence, malfeasance by New York agents, incompetent or drunk captains, substandard vessels and extreme deprivation caused by a shortage of food and water, was nonetheless notable.

Never sufficiently researched or explored in the annals of the Civil War was the press’ indictment of the New York City agents who purchased or chartered ships under contract to the Army. Of them, Frank Leslie’s opined: “In addition to the warring elements, the subtle treachery of Northern traitors who deliberately periled the lives of thousands for the sake of gain. Compared to such men as the New York contractors … even Judas Iscariot becomes human.”

The New York Tribune implied that the shipping agents should have been summarily hanged.

Published accounts of the Burnside Expedition too often make short shrift of Burnside’s three and a half weeks mired in the maelstrom of Hatteras Inlet, focusing instead on the military victories at Roanoke Island, New Bern and Fort Macon.

Had Shakespeare been around in 1862, he might have been tempted to write a play about it — a sequel to his “The Tempest,” perhaps, with Burnside as the bard’s Prospero.

To his credit, in the face of unimaginable adversity, Burnside was undaunted. As the first of his armada’s vessels began to approach Hatteras Inlet, the implacable Picket, the 125-foot-long dispatch boat, and the army general led the way through the ill-defined entrance of the outer bar as huge waves curled and crashed on the shoals to either side.

Burnside, soaking wet, chilled to the bone, and his sideburns and mustache no doubt plastered to his face, climbed the starboard shrouds of the Picket, just as if he were still on horseback in the southwestern frontier, much to the worry of his aides.

From his perch, he bravely waved his water-borne cavalry into the relatively safer waters of the harbor. The word eventually passed throughout the more than 10,000 men of the expedition’s three brigades that their leader was a general they could follow anywhere.

Meanwhile, Confederate officials were well aware that a massive fleet of ships and soldiers sailed out of the Chesapeake just before the storm. Where they were headed they did not know.

Newspapers reported that the Yankees seemed to have been swallowed up by the insatiable clutches of the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Wilmington’s The Daily Journal guessed that the armada was headed south, perhaps to Cape Fear. “If near enough our coast to be seen at all, they would most probably be first discovered by the sentinel at Cape Lookout Light-house, but we have not heard that any have been so seen.”

A Norfolk newspaper speculated that many of Burnside’s ships were lost at sea while others were so badly disabled from the first storm “as to be worthless to the expedition.” A New Bern editor ran a headline optimistically claiming “The Burnside Expedition — A Failure.” At the moment, they were nearly right.

At Hatteras Inlet during the afternoon of Monday, Jan. 13, 1862, mayhem ensued. Burnside, seeing the harbor for the first time, said this: “Vessel after vessel followed us in, until we were ready to wish that the fleet were not so large.”

The anchorage inside the inlet next to a small sandy islet called Fishing Shoal was really nothing more than a wider segment of the channel winding its way like a reversed S—“Ƨ”—to Pamlico Sound. For the more than 100 vessels that were to moor there, they had to set anchors more closely together than would ordinarily be considered safe.

“At one time it seemed as if our little boat (Picket) would be crushed between two of the larger vessels which had dragged their anchors and were coming down upon her,” Burnside wrote. “Fortunately, the commanders of the vessels succeeded in checking them just as they came in contact with us.”

Unknown to the general, the worst was yet to come.

As the spectacle of a menagerie of warships rising from the horizon and surfing into the inlet unfolded, troops of the 9th New York Volunteer Regiment (my 18-year-old Irish great-great-grandfather among them) watched in awe while battered by the wind and rain atop the ramparts of Fort Clark and Fort Hatteras.

The sight brought tears to the eyes of the soldiers whose regiment was organized at cosmopolitan Manhattan near Washington Square Park only to endure months of primitive camping at the sandy, windswept southwest end of Hatteras Island. “Brooklyn and Staten Island ferryboats, the sight of which caused the New York boys a pang of homesickness, as thoughts swiftly flew to scenes of home. … each was secretly conscious of his own longing for home and loved ones.”

Offshore, arriving steamers anchored off the entrance to the inlet to anxiously await pilots but in the high winds, surf and running tides, their anchors dragged. The steamer Vidette transporting the 24th Massachusetts was crowded by the sail-rigged, propeller-driven steam ship, City of New York, that was twice its size.

“At every turn of the tide (the City of New York) threshed against us as if to beat us to pieces, and succeeded in twisting its chain cable so completely around ours that it baffled all our efforts to clear them for two days, until the weather moderated. At one time, when the New York was beating us on one side, a gunboat of about our own size came into us on the other and when at last she managed to haul away, another promptly took her place until we believed that we were destined to be crushed flat before they were done with us.”

Having had enough, the captain of the steamer Vidette decided to hoist anchor and go in, although he did not like his odds. Huge incoming swells drastically varied the perceived depth of the channel.

In the same position in a matter of moments, whether a vessel was on the crest of a wave or in its trough, the sounding lead might show a depth of 10 feet or 30 feet — an alarming prospect for the navigator. But the option of anchoring offshore had far less appeal.

Following a pilot boat, Vidette surfed the deadly gauntlet of white water and hidden sand bars and hastily anchored off Fort Hatteras in the early afternoon.

Next, it was the steamer Ranger’s turn. “The sea, now lashed to intense fury, was breaking heavily over the decks, the roar of the breakers and howling of the tempest warning us of danger in either attempting to thread the fickle channel by which the inlet was reached, or of anchoring there until its fury had subsided. The Ranger was pitching and tumbling like a porpoise, and there was no choice for them; they must enter or be lost. The captain was thoroughly incompetent for his position, and more frightened than his crew.”

A senior officer of the 27th Massachusetts took command of Ranger and with the assistance of the steamer’s engineer they safely guided the beleaguered vessel over the bar, although, along the way, they lost the barge they were towing containing all of the regiment’s camp equipment and hospital supplies.

“Other vessels arrived in rapid succession till the little harbor was thoroughly choked up,” recalled a soldier aboard the Vidette. “That would have done no harm had there been no wind and no tide, but the wind was a gale and the tide a mill-sluice.”

Soon, the tide turned, racing at 5 knots. The vessels all swung 180 degrees, anchor chains became wrapped around one another, and the steamers began smashing into each other. Boaters today who anchor in tight, crowded harbors influenced by tides might be all too familiar with this predicament.

For the next week, ships continued to arrive at the anchorage after having been scattered all over the ocean. As a writer for Harper’s Weekly wrote, “There are three times as many vessels in this harbor as ever ought to be.”

Then, on Monday evening, Jan. 13, 1862, a gale lasting more than 48 hours laid siege to the Burnside Expedition. Many late arriving ships were still anchored outside of the inlet awaiting their turn, and favorable conditions, to cross the bar.

Sailing vessels carrying the expedition’s surplus water, coal and provisions, meanwhile, tacked and headed east to the relative safety of deeper water. The river and bay steamers, on the other hand, had to conserve fuel and had no choice but to anchor along the lee shore. It was a mariner’s most frightening nightmare.

The fury of the storm increased on Tuesday morning. Dozens of steam ships dragged their double anchors, ran low on coal and water for their boilers, and worse, had no whiskey for the terrified and seasick men aboard. Soon, signals of distress — the upside down Union flag –appeared in the rigging of numerous vessels.

“This is terrible!” Burnside was heard to exclaim. “When will the storm abate? The poor men, what will they do?” The Picket sprinted about the harbor with the general “doing his best to bring order out of chaos.”

With the wind “blowing fearfully” and the ocean seething and white with foam, the City of New York weighed anchor and maneuvered toward the inlet with a signal flag aloft snapping in the winds requesting a pilot. A naval steam tug came out but could not communicate with the City of New York’s captain due to the deafening din of the storm. “Follow us in,” she signaled, not knowing the draft of the huge vessel.

It had been estimated that only ships drawing less than 13 feet could cross the bar at high tide without the guidance of the most skillful pilot. The 570-ton City of New York drew 14 feet. With her fire box fully stoked with coal and high-pressure steam pumping the cylinders, the ship charged into the inlet, then lurched upward, throwing her crew to the deck, and grounded to an abrupt halt on the bar.

No doubt panicked, the captain hailed the tug, pleading for a tow. The tug answered that it would head in and report their predicament, leaving the City of New York in the breakers on the west side of the inlet. The tug never returned, nor did any other vessel come to help.

The captain and crew paid a terrible price for their impatience. The hull was breached with a torrent of seawater as the ship pounded on the sandy bottom. As is the tradition of the shipwrecked mariner, they lashed themselves to the rigging and waited. The scene was heart-rending to those ashore or in the anchorage who were prevented by the conditions to help. Darkness fell and all hope for the victims seemed lost.

When daylight came the next morning, they were still there, but at the very end of their endurance. After 40 hours of desperation, they were finally rescued on Wednesday morning. The ship, loaded with a substantial cargo valued at $200,000 of ordnance, including 400 barrels of gunpowder, 1,500 rifles, 800 shells, and other supplies, was a total loss. Coincidentally, 80 years later, another City of New York was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat just 40 miles to the east.

“In a grand chorus of thunder and rain,” the second gale began to subside late Tuesday night. “The waters were strewn with wreck, and wild rumors were rife as to the extent of our disaster,” observed a member of the 27th Massachusetts. But not until Wednesday night did the sea settle down long enough to distribute assistance to the ships in distress. That day, another sad and preventable tragedy befell the expedition.

A quarter boat from the sailing vessel Ann E. Thompson anchored offshore below the cape made its way into the inlet to Burnside’s command ship, the side-wheel steamer George Peabody.

Aboard the overloaded boat were men of the 9th New Jersey Infantry Regiment, including its commander Col. Joseph W. Allen, Surgeon F. S. Weller, and 10 other men. Their ill-advised sortie was to personally appeal to their brigade commander Gen. Jesse Reno to send a tugboat out to tow their ship into harbor.

Before returning to the Ann E. Thompson they went ashore to become briefly reacquainted with stable ground, tour the forts, and to collect shells. When returning to their ship through the tumbling breakers of the inlet, they capsized, dumping all of the men into the turbulent waters. The castaways were far from any vessel and could not be seen from shore.

For more than a half hour in freezing water they clung to the boat before they were found by lookouts aboard the schooner Highlander as it was being towed into the inlet. Nine men were saved. Allen and Weller both drowned and could not be resuscitated despite applying “every expedient known to medical science … without intermission for two hours.” The third victim was never found.

Thursday and Friday the winds backed to the northwest and dropped to Force 6-7, but a new nor-easter was not far behind, one much more powerful.

Twelve miles north of Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, the 33-year-old Chesapeake Bay steamer Pocahontas was run ashore on Friday, one of the many decrepit vessels that should have never gone to sea. During the previous gale, its boiler failed, its steering gear gave way, the smoke-pipe blew down, and the vessel sprung a leak. Sadly, when it wrecked, only 24 of 113 horses aboard survived.

“The sending to sea of this worthless old hulk, after it was known how utterly unsafe she was, with a full deck load of valuable horses and a crew of men, was most inexcusable. There was drunkenness and disorder on board.”

On Saturday, during the brief lull in the weather, a steamer went out to fetch the three-mast, 14-foot-draft, troop transport Kitty Simpson, which was crammed with seasick soldiers of the 5th Regiment Rhode Island Heavy Artillery. On the ship’s way into the inlet, it struck bottom. “The hawser parted, and away the steamer went and left us there, pounding away at every sea enough to smash anything but the staunchest of ships to pieces. We got up sail and tried every means to get off.”

In a sometimes comical maneuver familiar to modern day small boat sailors who find themselves aground, the men aboard were ordered to run backward and forward, to port and to starboard, to rock the ship in order to wiggle her off the bottom. It didn’t work.

Time was of the essence as the ebbing tide was rushing by. “The situation began to look ‘solemn’ for us, as the wreck of the steamer New York, which was lost a few days before, while trying to go in, was lying but a hundred yards from us. ‘It seemed,’ as one of the boys said, ‘like being deathly sick with a graveyard right under the window.’”

With daylight waning and winds strengthening, another steamer came to the aid of the Kitty Simpson with orders to take off the troops. A couple of soldiers jumped across to the transport but “this method of transfer was fraught with danger to both life and limb.” A tremendous argument ensued between the regiment’s officers and the captains of the ships with swearing “more vigorous than respectful.”

Finally, a hawser was heaved over to the Kitty Simpson and she was towed into the harbor to the welcoming cheers and huzzahs of troops aboard and from dozens of other vessels surrounding them.

At the end of the first week without yet engaging the enemy, the Burnside Expedition lost five vessels including the gunboat Zouave, three schooners, numerous barges, significant numbers of heavy artillery and ordnance, valuable horses, provisions and camp equipment. In the coming days, thousands of men would face deadly outbreaks of sickness, starvation and severe dehydration as coal, fresh water and provisions rapidly dwindled.

Between the fleet anchored in Oliver’s Channel, close to where ferries today regularly pass with thousands of unaware passengers, and the Pamlico Sound, there remained two and a half miles of narrow, shallow, serpentine channel known as the swash, and yet another “bulkhead” of sand to cross. The irrepressible Burnside and his army staff next had to figure out how to get ships drawing up to 15 feet of water over a sandbar just 6 feet deep.

The future prospects for Burnside’s grand armada looked bleak, just was the weather, unimaginably, was about to get worse.

Next: Relief Ahead for the Burnside Expedition

Coastal Review Online is featuring the research, findings and commentary of author Kevin Duffus.

First of three parts

It was not Shakespeare but Pythagoras who likely first imagined the world as a stage “whereon many play their parts.”

No more often am I reminded of this proverb than when I am traveling across the inlet between Hatteras and Ocracoke islands — one of many grand stages of North Carolina’s maritime history.

The ferry I am on meanders its way along the narrow, serpentine channels, across boiling pools of wavelets and at times rolling on the incoming swells of the Atlantic as salt spray breaks over the bow. Before long, I spot the tell-tale behavior of excited tourists making the passage for their first time. They gingerly stagger about the pitching deck, taking selfies, feeding seagulls, or waving at passing fishing boats.

What might they know about the perilous, shallow waters that they are crossing? Who takes a moment to consider the watery stage upon which a “grand armada” and more than 10,000 men — the “first major amphibious force in U.S. history” — acted out a harrowing Civil War opera, battling in the inlet not Confederates but Mother Nature, 159 years ago this month?

To whet your imagination, picture this spectacle at Hatteras Inlet, described by a soldier from Massachusetts: “As night was closing upon the scene, as far as the eye could reach the waves were rolling at dizzy height, and capped with spray and foam. Black, angry clouds swept by, dipping their edges in the surging waves, and the masts creaked and groaned as the vessels careened before the gale.”

Thus was described but one frightening night of many during the Burnside Expedition as it attempted to transit Hatteras Inlet over three and a half weeks in January 1862 on its way to a pivotal engagement at Roanoke Island.

This is a story, not of the Civil War, but of the age-old battle of man versus the sea.

Commissioned by President Lincoln to the rank of brigadier general in August 1861, 37-year-old Ambrose Everett Burnside’s initial posting in Washington, D.C., was to supervise from a desk the formation, training and assignments of soldiers recruited for the formation of the Army of the Potomac. He wished for a more exciting assignment.

A couple of months later, perhaps over cocktails and cigars with his friend and soon-to-become U.S. general-in-chief, Gen. George McClellan, Burnside shared his idea of creating a new division made up of men from northeast maritime states, supported by “a fleet of light-draught steamers, sailing vessels, and barges, large enough to transport the division, its armament, and supplies,” for the purpose of establishing “lodgments on the Southern coast.” It sounded like a good idea to McClellan, and soon after, to Lincoln’s Secretary of War.

Burnside got his wish — and more.

He was described as “a man of fine appearance, with a lofty forehead, expressive of deep penetration. His manners are very winning and pleasing, while at the same time … a strict disciplinarian, a most implacable enemy to military irregularity, and yet a popular man with everyone.” Burnside was also unforgettable for his eponymous, extravagant, swooping sideburns and mustache, a fashion we hope that is never revived.

Even though he was an Indiana native, a West Point graduate, a veteran of the Mexican War, and a railroad executive, Burnside proved to be quite at home on the sea. And fearless.

The army general’s first challenge was to build his own navy. He and his staff, with the sometimes-dubious recommendations of broker/agents, set out to procure sufficient shallow-draft vessels capable of entering many of the South’s harbors and sounds, including his Coastal Division’s yet-to-be-determined opening objective.

Six months into the Civil War, however, few seaworthy ships were to be had.

At New York in autumn 1861, the general’s staff hastily gathered what Burnside admitted was “a motley fleet.” It was hardly an overstatement. Anything that floated — or mostly floated — and capable of transporting troops and matériel, qualified to join the Burnside Expedition.

Among the vessels either commandeered, purchased or chartered were 11 stern- or side-wheel bay steamers, nine armed propeller gunboats, 20 troop and supply coasting schooners and sloops, ancient square-rigged barks and brigs, old barges, New York harbor tugboats, Brooklyn and Staten Island ferryboats, and dozens of gigs, longboats and skiffs.

One ship assigned to deliver a portion of the 27th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment offered the Union expedition the prospect of poetic justice. The square-rigged bark was the former slaver Mary Jane Kimball. The regiment’s other transport was the worn-out steam propeller Ranger.

“Like many others of its kind in the fleet (Ranger) was totally unfit for the service intended and should have been sent to sea with the guilty party who purchased it for the government,” wrote a disgusted member of the 27th Massachusetts. Another soldier from New York shared his opinion of Burnside’s transports: “May it be safe to say that some of the craft would date back nearly to the days of Noah’s ark.”

The U.S. Navy, under the command of Flag Officer Louis M. Goldsborough of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, provided its own warships as escorts, rounding out the fleet at more than 120 vessels. The “Grand Armada,” as the newspapers styled it, or Burnside’s motley fleet, faced a ferocious foe: the Graveyard of the Atlantic off Cape Hatteras in the tempestuous month of January.

Burnside’s forces were organized and embarked at Annapolis where, three days before their scheduled departure on Jan. 9, snow fell, blanketing the various regimental camps and piers. The general was enchanted; his soldiers were not.

“(The snow) gave to the camp and surrounding country … a most picturesque appearance,” wrote Burnside. “Regiment after regiment struck their tents and marched to the point of embarkation, with bands playing, colors flying, and the men cheering and singing from lightness of heart. As they passed through the quaint old town of Annapolis, the lines of troops, with their dark uniforms and glittering bayonets, contrasted markedly with the snow-clad fields and trees.”

From a soldier’s perspective: “The weather was pinching cold, with snow … one of those sticky, wet, uncomfortable snows so common at the South, and which makes one long for one of New England’s “regular nor’easters,” wrote Private William P. Derby. The troops standing in formation most of the night waiting for their turn to board their ships suffered greatly in “the freezing slush and cutting winds of the evening.”

Before the expedition departed, a tragic accident occurred and served as a portent of forthcoming needless misfortunes in Hatteras Inlet. In the dark of night, as a small launch was taking officers and soldiers of the 27th Massachusetts from the Annapolis docks out to the Guerrilla, they were run down by the stern-wheel steamer Union, “plunging all into the icy waters of the Chesapeake.” Two men drowned and the others who were rescued were pulled out of the water insensible.

The expedition’s army and naval forces rendezvoused and organized in the waters off Fortress Monroe at Hampton, Virginia, and began to put to sea at 11 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 11. Departures were staggered with the intent that all the ships would not arrive at their destination at the same time. Some vessels did not get underway until Sunday.

At that same time, a dense low-pressure system that had been sweeping across the nation was making a hard left turn over the Georgia-South Carolina coast. (As I am writing this, a developing nor-easter is following a similar track and another is on the way). The Burnside Expedition and the storms were soon to collide at Cape Hatteras.

“As the fleet proceeds to sea … still wondering what chapter of history is to be written by the men thus borne away from their homes,” wrote a soldier of the 24th Massachusetts. “Even on shipboard, officers are still querying as to where they are to go, and still are guessing wildly,” wrote another.

During late autumn, the national press published rumors that the mission’s objectives included the Confederate batteries on the Potomac River, or establishing footholds at Yorktown, or Swansboro below Fort Macon on the North Carolina coast. No doubt some of the troops hoped for the warmer climes of Charleston, Savannah or the Florida coast.

For secrecy’s sake, the captain of each vessel and the commander of the troops aboard were handed sealed orders revealing their destination that were not to be opened until they entered the ocean at Cape Henry. It was to be Hatteras! “When off Cape Hatteras, throw overboard ballast, and run into the inlet,” the orders read. Simple enough for a single vessel on a calm summer’s day.

Sunday, Jan. 12, a pleasant day to start, with light winds out of the southwest, belied the troubles that were to come. As the propeller steamer Vidette followed southward the gentle sweep of the Outer Banks, an officer of the 24th Massachusetts described the day in a letter to his family back home: “We amused ourselves by watching the barren shores of North Carolina, and striving to discover some signs of life, but without success. Nothing but a view of a waste of sand, relieved occasionally by a background of pine barrens, with now and then a tumbledown, deserted house or cattle-shed rewarded our efforts.”

Leaving Cape Henry, the three-masted ship Kitty Simpson with the 5th Regiment Rhode Island Heavy Artillery stood off on a course well offshore: “Our course that night lay directly out to sea to clear Hatteras shoals, and a bucket of water was drawn every half hour and tested with the thermometer. Bye and bye a rise of ten degrees showed we had reached the gulf stream and consequently were clear of the shoals, and the course was changed to the southwest, direct for Hatteras Inlet.”

As the vessels of the expedition slogged their way south, the weather worsened. At nightfall on Sunday, captains of steamers like the Vidette chose to not dare round Diamond Shoals in the dark and dropped anchor north of the cape. Sailing vessels towed by steamers, without their own engines to avoid being driven onto the lee shore, cast off their towlines and headed out to sea. The fleet was scattered all over the ocean.

Making navigation more difficult, lighthouses along the Outer Banks had either been extinguished or destroyed. The second Bodie Island Lighthouse was lying in a heap of stones, brick and iron on the south side of Oregon Inlet after it had been blown up by Confederates in September.

The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse had been extinguished since April and its magnificent Fresnel lens was presently packed in cotton-lined pine crates in a warehouse on the Pamlico River at Washington. Many of the navy’s captains and navigators knew the waters off Cape Hatteras well, however, having passed there countless times.

Burnside’s headquarters were to be aboard the U.S. Army Transport side-wheel steamer George Peabody, but to demonstrate to his troops his confidence that they would all successfully elude the wrath of Neptune off Cape Hatteras, he chose to make the journey aboard the 125-foot-long dispatch boat Picket, said by the general to be the smallest boat in the fleet. “I was moved to do this because of the great criticism which had been made as to the unseaworthiness of the vessels of the fleet, and because of a desire to show my faith in their adaptability to the service.”

The Picket was a remarkably stout and nimble propeller steamer but was not really designed as an ocean-going warship. In a previous incarnation, she was, purportedly, an iron barge, and was lengthened with a new hull of black walnut and had a steam engine installed for service in the war. Some sources wrongly claim that Picket was just 45 feet long, and an illustration featured on one internet resource  misidentifies the vessel.

Burnside, the balding veteran of dry, dusty battles on horseback out west, was in for a wet, wild ride on the Picket.

“On rounding Cape Hatteras we met a very strong breeze, and the little vessel got into the trough of the sea,” he recalled for a speech many years later. “It seemed for a time as if she would surely be swamped; but by skillful management the captain brought her head-to, after which she behaved better. We passed a most uncomfortable night. Everything on the deck that was not lashed was swept overboard; and the men, furniture, and crockery below decks were thrown about in a most promiscuous manner.”

Despite the well-known fact that Cape Hatteras was frequently lashed by January nor-easters, Burnside claimed to be taken surprise by the weather. “At that time we had no weather signal reports; but, in any event, the sailing would not have been delayed, because the orders to proceed to our work were imperative.” With Confederate forces each day strengthening defenses at Roanoke Island, time was of the essence.

By midnight on Sunday, the wind began to subside, a heavy fog briefly set in, yet the ocean’s swells remained mountainous. Burnside: “We discovered a large steamer upon our port bow. We fired a shot astern of her, which she answered by approaching us. It was the Eastern Queen; but we dared not go near her, for fear of being crushed. She seemed to us enormous, and we were all delighted when she answered the signal to lay by us until daylight, but to keep off.”

The brief lull and fog heralded the passage northward of the first extratropical cyclone and an impending violent shift in the wind. Mother Nature was just catching her breath. As the vessels of the expedition began to round Diamond Shoals on Monday, a “dark murky line appeared along the northern horizon,” sweeping down on the fleet like a howling banshee.

The sailing bark, Guerrilla, was being towed by the top-heavy steamer Ranger with a paltry 7-foot draft and loaded to the gills with troops of the 27th Massachusetts and heavy guns — picture a modern, multi-deck tour boat. When the next gale struck, Guerrilla reefed its sails just as the thick hawser to the Ranger snapped. The two consorts went their separate ways.

Burnside and the Picket plowed onward over tumultuous liquid mountains. “Toward night the wind arose, and within a short time it increased to a terrible gale, and we experienced more discomfort and dread, if possible, than on the proceeding night,” the general recalled. “At times, it seemed as if the waves, which appeared to us mountain high, would ingulf us, but then the little vessel would ride them and stagger forward in her course.”

The entrance to Hatteras Inlet drew near, but the Burnside Expedition’s ordeals had only just begun.

Next: Maelstrom of Hatteras Inlet

Dec. 16, 2020, marks the 150^th anniversary of the first lighting of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. Coastal Review Online is featuring the research, findings and commentary of author Kevin Duffus, including his findings pertaining to the lighthouse and its history.

America’s celebrated historic structures may not be as ancient as many of the world’s classic architectural masterpieces, but our iconic buildings are no less venerable. Among our best-loved, the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse has, since 1870, stood majestically as a sublime symbol and standard-bearer of our nation’s lighthouse heritage.

For a century and a half, the nation’s tallest brick sentinel has watched over the dynamic place we call the Outer Banks of North Carolina — a place of unlikely historical paradoxes, a small area where great moments of American history have taken place.

The Outer Banks are narrow, fragile, restless, yet, improbably, they have for eons resisted the relentless assaults of the insatiable Atlantic.

These sandy, windswept islands were once one of the most remote and least populated places in eastern America, yet for 500 years, legions of explorers, seafarers and invincible navies have attempted to pass within just a few miles of its shores through one of the world’s busiest and most dangerous ocean passages.

In the days of sail, not all mariners were lucky enough to escape the Graveyard of the Atlantic and the clutches of that gauntlet of chaotic waves marking Cape Hatteras and Diamond Shoals — Neptune’s toll gate, where fares were steep and men’s lives were cheap.

Throughout its history, Cape Hatteras’ magnificent lighthouse has endured catastrophic storms, witnessed unparalleled lifesaving rescues and stood as a silent sentry over deadly military conflicts.

Twice, world wars have stained these shores with oil and blood.

In 1918, within the reach of the lighthouse’s guiding light about 14 miles to the southeast, the Diamond Shoals Light Vessel No. 71 was sunk by gunfire from Imperial Germany’s U-boat U-140. All 12 crewmembers of the lightship escaped in their lifeboat and six hours later landed on the beach not far from the lighthouse and their homes.

Twenty-four years later, more than 65 German U-boats returned, this time with a vengeance, and with the objective to sever vital supply lines supporting the planned Allied invasion of Europe by sinking merchant ships, many within just a few miles of Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. In North Carolina waters alone, 93 ships were sunk or damaged and more than 1,700 people were killed, including many civilians.

Using the lighthouse to guide them, fearless German U-boat skippers stalked their prey with impunity. “Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is in sight — our old acquaintance from our last patrol,” U-123’s Kapitänleutnant Reinhard Hardegen wrote in his war diary in March 1942, although at that time he was seeing the light flashing atop a temporary steel tower along Buxton’s Back Road while the brick tower continued to serve mariners as a daymark and the Coast Guard as a lookout post.

In a surprisingly brief period of just a few months, scores of merchant sailors drowned or burned to death near Cape Hatteras during torpedo attacks on the ships City of Atlanta, Venore, Empire Gem, Dixie Arrow and numerous others.

Ill-fated sailors jumped from their ships into flaming waves of oil while Coast Guard rescuers watched, powerless to save them. Visible from 75 miles away, towering columns of black smoke from burning oil served as the victims’ ephemeral headstones above their watery graves. In the poignant words of Byron: “Un-knelled, un-coffined, and unknown.”

Some survivors made it ashore, including a group of terrified Norwegian sailors who were found at dawn sheltering under the lookout tower near the lighthouse after landing at the cape unseen by sleepy “sand pounders” patrolling the beaches.

And on March 30, 1942, about 40 miles due east of the lighthouse, a baby was miraculously born in a lifeboat after his mother escaped from the torpedoed passenger freighter City of New York. The infant’s rescue 27 hours later by a U.S. Navy destroyer improved morale aboard the warship; two weeks later its emboldened and resolute sailors sank the first German U-boat in U.S. waters about 30 miles northeast of Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. Their victory signaled the beginning of the end of the battle of “Torpedo Junction.”

Shipwrecks and heroic, gold medal rescues were simply an ordinary part of life around Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. In 1884, Benjamin B. Dailey, Patrick Etheridge and other lifesavers who dwelled “upon the lonely shores of Hatteras,” bravely strapped on their cork lifebelts and put to sea in frightening and tumultuous surf exceeding the worst conditions the islanders had ever seen. Over a period of hours in frigid seas they succeeded in rescuing nine victims, minutes from death, from the foundering barkentine Ephraim Williams 5 miles east of Haulover Beach.

No less courageous were the women of the islands. At times when Cape Hatteras lifesavers launched their wooden surfboats and vanished into the open ocean through thundering waves and billows of spindrift, their families would establish a camp at the base of the lighthouse to await their loved ones’ fate. They knew that’s where the lifesavers would return — if they returned.

“When my mother was 6 years old,” remembered the late Beatrice McArthur of Buxton, “she and her brothers and sisters were moved out to the lighthouse for one or two nights in 1906 (for the rescue of the schooner Robert H. Stevenson). Other families were there too, and all the children played together. And at night they slept in the base of the lighthouse. They thought it was fun.” Worried that they might become widows before the next dawn, the wives of the lifesavers offshore surely did not share in their children’s good times.

Like their beloved, barber-pole-striped lighthouse, the inhabitants of Hatteras were steadfast, dependable, all-seeing and caring. Most resolute were the lighthouse’s long line of distinguished keepers. It has been said that lighthouse keepers feared not the devil nor his henchmen. These were men who placed their hand on the Bible and took a solemn oath to never leave their station regardless of weather or other acts of God.

Augustus C. Thompson comes to mind, the principal keeper who, perched in the watchroom 180 feet above the ground atop the unreinforced masonry tower, rode out the 1886 Charleston earthquake that rocked Cape Hatteras Lighthouse “backward and forward like a tree shaken by the wind.” Thompson reported to the U.S. Light House Board that “the shock was so strong that we could not keep our backs against the parapet wall, it would throw us right from it.” Thompson bravely held his post. Those were the days when men were men.

But the combined forces of weather and the Atlantic Ocean have been the lighthouse’s and its surrounding villages’ most formidable and relentless adversaries. Like a thief in the night, each time a storm moved out to sea it took a piece of Hatteras Island with it, and a piece of the hearts of the generations who had lived there.

The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse’s longest serving and last principal keeper, Unaka Benjamin Jennette, was a man seasoned by salt spray, unrelenting storms and hard times. Along with his neighbors, Jennette experienced the Outer Banks’ version of the Great Depression, although, with a wink and a wry smile the proud islanders were quick to say, “It didn’t bother us at all. We were already depressed — how are you going to get any worse than that?”

From the top of the lighthouse on the morning of Jan. 31, 1921, Jennette peered through his spyglass at a five-masted schooner fetched-up hard on the middle shoal. When lifesavers were finally able to board the wreck after many failed attempts there was not a soul aboard and forevermore the Carroll A. Deering of Bath, Maine, has been remembered as the Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals.

Jennette served as keeper through nor’easters and hurricanes too numerous to list but includes the back-to-back storms of 1933, which forced him to permanently relocate his family to the relative safety of Buxton village.

Jennette was a young man when the Wright brothers first took to the air in their flying machine and when Reginald Fessenden transmitted the world’s first musical notes broadcast from a tower at Buxton, less than a mile from the lighthouse. The keeper was newly married when a wireless operator on Hatteras Island was the first to hear a distress call from RMS Titanic. These were just some of the notable moments of our nation’s history made on these quaint Outer Banks.

Not much could trouble Cap’n ’Naka, as he was fondly called, except for the steadily encroaching Atlantic Ocean, plainly observed by generations of Cape Hatteras residents.

In 1832, according to U.S. Treasury Department reports published in “The American Pharos, Or Light-house Guide,” the lighthouse was, at that time, 1 mile from the ocean. Fewer than two decades later, when Cap’n ’Naka’s great-grandfather Benjamin Fulcher was keeper at Cape Hatteras in the late-1840s, the high-tide line had receded to just a half a mile away. On the day in 1919 when Cap’n ’Naka became the principal keeper at the lighthouse, the ocean’s waves were crashing just 300 feet from the base of the tower.

In 1936, the government abandoned the seemingly doomed tower for the next 14 years until a transitory accretion of the beach encouraged the Coast Guard to reestablish the light at the top of the preeminent landmark.

Happy days returned to the light station and islanders will always remember the Pirates Jamboree with its parade past the lighthouse featuring the nation’s only mounted Boy Scout troop from Ocracoke.

As time passed, license plates from all 50 states would be seen on cars parked at the Cape Hatteras Light Station, and many tourists would time their arrival to occur at sunrise.

The 1870 tower’s image became ubiquitous and represented the pride of its community on signs that welcomed visitors into the safe harbors of motels, restaurants and churches. Fishermen caught fish in its shadow, painters and photographers came to capture its image, and surfers and kiteboarders from across the country arrived to ride the waves at a mecca of East Coast beaches.

Storms never abated, however, and always seemed to come most often during holidays and religious observances — among them the Christmas Storm of 1884, the Ash Wednesday Storm, the Lincoln Day Storm, and the Halloween nor’easter of 1992 that stirred even the ghosts of the Graveyard of the Atlantic with its 34-foot-high waves lasting for 114 hours.

In 1980, during a rare March blizzard and under the cloak of swirling snow and piles of foam from spindrift, the covetous ocean claimed the blue-gray foundation stones of the 1803 Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.

Through it all, the mighty Cape Hatteras Lighthouse held her ground, yet over time, there was less ground to hold. During the worst storms, waves were seen crashing against the tower’s red brick base and rose-colored granite quoins and above the lighthouse’s massive gray cast-iron door. Would the grand old lighthouse sooner or later suffer the same fate as the foundation of the 1803 lighthouse?

After decades of concern and indecision, a commitment was made to save the lighthouse. With the stewardship and courage of the National Park Service, the genius of scientists and fearless structure movers, the unwavering support of the Outer Banks Lighthouse Society, and the good graces of the U.S. Congress and the American taxpayers, the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse got a new lease on life.

In 1999, the nation’s tallest, unreinforced brick lighthouse was lifted vertically 5.3 feet onto steel rails and was relocated 2,900 feet to the southwest, placing the lighthouse at the same relative distance from the ocean as when it was first built. It was an historic achievement, no less remarkable in its day than man’s first powered flight. The project was fondly called, the “Move of the Century.”

This story would be incomplete without adding that perhaps one of the most remarkable moments in the lighthouse’s history is the day in 1870 it received the first-order Henry-Lepaute Fresnel lens that was originally installed in the tower’s older sibling, the 1803 Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, prior to the Civil War. That lens, beautifully depicted in National Geographic’s 1933 Clifton Adams photo being proudly polished by Unaka Jennette, is arguably the most historically significant Fresnel lens in America.

This writer was the first to discover and report that, in 1853, that same lens was prominently displayed in the south nave of New York City’s Crystal Palace by the U.S. Lighthouse Board during the landmark Exhibition of Industry of All Nations — our nation’s first world’s fair.

The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse Fresnel lens was the second, first-order lens purchased by the government to systematically upgrade all the nation’s lighthouses in the 1850s – the whereabouts of the first, first-order lens originally installed in Florida’s Sand Key Lighthouse is, at this time, undetermined.

Removed from the lighthouse in 1861 by Unaka Jennette’s great-grandfather Benjamin Fulcher, of all people, and hidden throughout the Civil War, the lens was recovered, returned to France for repairs and stored at the Lighthouse Service’s Staten Island depot until the 1870 tower was completed.

For many years, at the top of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, the lens appeared as a diamond in the sky until it was replaced by a modern rotating aerobeacon in 1950. Today, what remains of the lens atop its enormous 1870 cast iron pedestal and clockwork mechanism can be viewed at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras.

And that, in a nutshell of sorts, is the story of America’s lighthouse.

Happy 150th birthday, Cape Hatteras Lighthouse!

Coastal Review Online is featuring the research, findings and commentary of author Kevin Duffus.

Second of two parts — read Part 1

Popular culture’s embrace of the adventure and romance of piracy has hidden the true reasons for Blackbeard’s demise at Ocracoke.

After many years of research and study, my analysis is that Blackbeard was merely a pawn in the midst of a failed political coup and his wrongful death — but not murder — was the result of an illegal incursion into the proprietary colony of North Carolina by her disdainful neighbor, the royal colony of Virginia.

Etched in stone by centuries of myth and folklore, the conventional story goes that the ruthless Blackbeard intended to create a new “Nassau,” or pirate republic, at the southwest end of Ocracoke Island so that he and his fellow freebooters could conveniently prey on merchant ships passing the Outer Banks.

This notion came from the words of Virginia’s Lt. Gov. Alexander Spotswood, who wrote to the Board of Trade and Plantations in London: “It has, I hope, prevented a design of the most pernicious consequence to the trade of these Plantations, wch. was that of the pyrats fortifying an Island at Ouacock Inlett and making that a general rendevouze of such robbers.”

Spotswood’s clerk was not a great speller.

Accepting Spotswood’s words, many published accounts and institutions say that the pirates routinely robbed ships off the North Carolina coast and that only Virginia’s lieutenant governor had the will and temerity to put a stop to the pirate’s plans on behalf of the cowardly North Carolina government.

Among the believers is the author of “Under the Black Flag,” revered British historian David Cordingly, who wrote: “Spotswood had received numerous complaints from the traders of North Carolina of the pirates’ activities. … and he was particularly concerned that the pirates planned to fortify an island at Ocracoke Inlet making it into a general rendezvous for all the pirate ships in the region.”

The primary sources, when consulted, do not agree. Spotswood had received just one complaint from a North Carolina trader. Blackbeard did not prey on a single ship in the waters off the Outer Banks during his surprisingly brief 23-month career as a pirate. And, as previously stated, his pitiful camp at Ocracoke and pirate company of 15 men were hardly a threat to anyone.

When Blackbeard and his downsized crew consisting mostly of sons and slaves of Bath plantation owners returned to the Pamlico River in late-June 1718 after scuttling the Queen Anne’s Revenge in Beaufort Inlet and shedding themselves of hundreds of undesirable shipmates, Gov. Charles Eden granted them pardons on behalf of George I. The parchments, unfortunately, were worthless.

The Bath pirates under Blackbeard’s command had committed numerous acts of piracy in the Caribbean and off the South Carolina coast after the pardon’s Jan. 5 deadline in order to keep hundreds of their shipmates and slaves fed and liquored up until they could reach Beaufort Inlet and carry out their well-conceived deception to break up the company. The pardons provided no protection for the Bath mariners and endangered Eden’s job and potentially his life.

Pardoning pirates who were ineligible for the king’s forgiveness made Eden an accessory to acts of piracy — a hanging offense, even for a proprietary governor.

Section IX of William III’s 1699 “Act for the more effectuall Suppressions of Piracy” stipulated: “…every such Person or Persons whatsoever soe as aforesaid setting forth any Pirate or aiding assisting maintaining procuring commanding counselling or adviseing the same either on the Land or upon the Sea shall be and are hereby declared and shall be deemed and adjudged to be accessary to such Piracy and Robbery.” Governors too.

Yet the stakes were higher than a governor’s life — the future ownership and control of North Carolina was the ultimate prize.

Eden’s imprudent patronage of Blackbeard and his Bath pirates provided the grounds needed by the anti-proprietary political faction led by North Carolina General Assembly speaker Edward Moseley, with the backing of Virginia’s Lt. Gov. Spotswood, to depose the governor, ultimately causing the revocation of the colony’s charter so that ownership of North Carolina would revert to the king.

William III’s act further stated: “That if any of the Governours in the said Plantations or any Person or Persons in Authority there shall refuse to yield Obedience to this Act such Refusall is hereby declared to be a Forfeiture of all and every the Charters granted for the Government or Propriety of such Plantation.”

Political provocateurs in both Carolinas had sought the Crown’s protection ever since the Lords Proprietors failed to provide military assistance to their colony’s taxpayers during North Carolina’s Tuscarora War in 1711 and South Carolina’s Yamasee War in 1715. In 1719, South Carolina succeeded in severing ties with their aristocratic real estate developers in what was described as a “bloodless yet effectual revolution.” North Carolina, ever plodding in her ways, took another 10 years to become a royal colony.

Capturing or killing Blackbeard and the few remaining members of his pirate crew at Ocracoke was simply a pretext for the seizure of written evidence from Blackbeard’s possessions that would prove that the colony’s proprietary government had been colluding with pirates.

Regardless, Spotswood’s extraordinary invasion of his neighboring colony was unlawful. According to his instructions issued by George I’s secretary of state dated April 15, 1715, Spotswood had no authorization to send assistance or armed forces into a neighboring colony unless he received a request from the colony’s governor. Records are clear that Eden did not send an application for assistance to Spotswood or otherwise ask for Virginia’s help to suppress or eliminate Blackbeard.

As part of Spotswood’s scheme — he despised Jacobites, by the way — a second prong of his operation had Capt. Brand march by land from the James River to Bath in the event that the pirates were in town.

Often overlooked by historians is the fact that a Royal Navy captain was beyond his jurisdiction above the astronomically influenced tidal waters of a privately owned colony in British America. Bath was well outside that line of demarcation, as was Brant Island Shoals for Royal Navy Lt. Robert Maynard.

Here again, an egregious falsehood appeared in “Black Beard: America’s Most Notorious Pirate”: “Capt. Brand commanded the main force of the expedition. … The captain’s force consisted of around 200 men, half sailors and the rest a company of Virginia militia.”

To the contrary, the truth is found in a letter from Brand’s fellow officer, Capt. Gordon of the HMS Pearl: “(Brand) went by land a single gentleman, and a servant, to apprehend Thatch (aka Blackbeard) with the assistance of the Gentlemen of that country who were weary of that Rogue’s insolence.” A main invasion force of one and a servant rather than 200? Not an easy mistake to make.

The “Gentlemen of that country” were Speaker of the House Moseley and the man he had hoped to have named royal governor for the king, his friend and brother-in-law, Col. Maurice Moore, first suggested by 19th century North Carolina historian Francis L. Hawks. The only problem with the plan was that Maynard had not recovered sufficient evidence among Blackbeard’s possessions to prove that Eden had been colluding with pirates. There must have been incriminating documents somewhere.

In a fascinating coda to the political intrigue swirling in the aftermath of the Battle at Ocracoke, on the day after Christmas co-conspirators Moseley and Moore conducted a daylight burglary of the house that contained North Carolina’s official seal, council journals, correspondence and the governor’s papers.

They forcibly evicted the occupant of the house who happened to be the deputy secretary of the governor’s council. Moseley then nailed the doors shut from the inside and proceeded to plunder the government’s records. Nearly 24 hours later, Moseley and his fellow burglars pried the nails out of the doors and returned possession of the colony’s records to its rightful owner.

As it happened, Moseley’s gambit failed. What he was looking for, he did not find. There was not a single shred of paper that could be found that linked Eden to Blackbeard. All of the copies of two Vice Admiralty Court proceedings, receipts for Eden’s casks of sugar given to the governor by the pirates, and the government’s copies of the pirate’s royal pardons were probably, by then, smoldering ashes in Eden’s fireplace.

Even to this day, the state’s archives are devoid of direct, documentary evidence of Blackbeard’s numerous interactions with Eden’s government in 1718.

The day after “Moseley-gate,” Gov. Eden had Moseley and Moore arrested and charged with committing high crimes and misdemeanors. In the grips of a magistrate, Moseley shouted before a crowd of gawkers that the governor could “easily procure armed men to (arrest him) but could not raise them to destroy (Blackbeard). But instead of that he was Suffered to go on in his villanies.”

With that, additional charges of sedition, slander and inciting discord were promptly added to Moseley’s bill of indictment. Moseley was subsequently convicted, fined and was barred from practicing law for three years. Before long, all was forgiven and forgotten.

This is the important fact that has eluded many pirate historians: Blackbeard and his friends from Bath, many of whom were killed, were unwitting pawns caught in the middle of what turned out to be a failed political coup.

Furthermore, Lt. Maynard’s 60 Royal Navy sailors acted as little more than pirates themselves. They had been privately hired by the government of Virginia, enticed to volunteer for the expedition by the prospect of acquiring pirate treasure. The expedition was not expressly authorized by the Lords of Admiralty nor did it have the approval of the Lords Proprietors. Maynard’s victory over the pirates was not the career boost he had hoped for.

Indeed, for a number of years after the battle, Maynard was accused by his own captain of improperly sharing the pirate’s treasure among his crew members: “Lt. Maynard took upon himself to make a distribution of moneys and goods which he called plunder … and he took upon himself the title of Captain and Commander-in-Chief and so of rights (he Says) reserved three eighths to himself.” Maynard did not receive a promotion for another 21 years.

When the dust of the battle settled, even Spotswood was harshly censured by a Virginia grand jury that published in 1719 the following statement in a Philadelphia paper: “As to the destroying of Thache and his Crew that Story had better be kept in silence than told for if all the Circumstances of it were known they would make little for his Reputation. Spotswood being informed of some rude Actions (Thatch) and his Crew were guilty of in that Government, instead of Acquainting the Governour of that Country therewith, or Offering to assist him to reduce Thache & his Crew, Understanding that there was a good deale of money in the case, he persuades the Kings Men of War to Surprise and kill the men within the Country of Carolina, and to Seize the goods and to bring them away to Virginia.”

As for why Blackbeard and his small inner circle of compatriots were still loitering around Ocracoke as winter set in when other groups of pardoned pirates were seeking employment as legal privateers as Britain was about to declare war on Spain again, they were waiting for the arrival of a new pardon from the king, a revised Act of Mercy with more generous terms that would have forgiven Blackbeard and his Bath pirates for any and all acts of piracy committed right up until the arrival of the pardon.

As the furious Battle at Ocracoke raged and filled the air with acrid smoke of gunpowder and stained the waters red with blood, Blackbeard’s salvation — the king’s new pardon — was aboard a ship slogging its way toward Virginia against contrary winter winds and waves.

The pardon arrived on the James River in mid-December, just in time to save Blackbeard’s convicted quartermaster William Howard, the future owner of Ocracoke Island, from his scheduled hanging the next day.

Unfortunately for Blackbeard, the pardon came too late.

Coastal Review Online is featuring the research, findings and commentary of author Kevin Duffus.

First of two parts

The Battle at Ocracoke between the notorious pirate Blackbeard and Royal Navy Lt. Robert Maynard is among the best-known events of North Carolina maritime history. It may also be one of its most inaccurately interpreted stories.

One modern historian wrote that the battle was “one of the most pivotal naval engagements in American history,” a lofty recognition it does not deserve to attain. In North Carolina waters, the Civil War bombardment and amphibious assault of Fort Fisher in 1865, and the World War II sinking of the German U-85 by the destroyer USS Jesse Roper southeast of Nags Head in 1942, were two far more impactful naval engagements.

Writers also often state that Blackbeard’s demise at Ocracoke was a turning point that signaled the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of Piracy, yet they forget that eight weeks earlier, the eight-hour-long Battle of the Sandbars in the Cape Fear River between the pirate Stede Bonnet and Col. William Rhett of Charleston more rightly deserves that distinction. Blackbeard may not have been pursued in North Carolina waters by Virginia’s Lt. Gov. Alexander Spotswood had South Carolina not succeeded in apprehending Bonnet.

Despite this relegation of Blackbeard’s bloody last stand, a reexamination of the records may reveal for readers an intriguing glimpse into what truly happened on that fateful day, and why it happened.

The battle took place on Saturday morning, Nov. 22, 1718, on the Julian calendar. The well-known date, however, actually correlates to Dec. 3 on our modern Gregorian calendar, even deeper into the season of unrelenting early winter nor’easters. Rivers in the Mid-Atlantic Colonies that year were already beginning to turn to ice.

On the day of the battle, the shoreline along today’s Springer’s Point was littered with the pirates’ smoldering cook fires, sailcloth awnings, and what remained of their treasure: two dozen hogsheads of sugar, 11 casks of cocoa, a barrel of indigo dye and a bale of cotton. Blackbeard and his crew seemed to be in no hurry to go anywhere, even though traditional historical accounts claim that they intended to sail to St. Thomas to seek a privateering Letter of Marque from the Dutch governor.

Why was Blackbeard lingering at Ocracoke when most fair-weather pirates were already plying, and enjoying, the warm, azure waters of the West Indies? A potential explanation not shared in the history books will be offered in due time.

An even more relevant question: Why did the invincible Blackbeard allow himself and his comrades aboard their well-armed sloop Adventure to be cornered in waters they presumably knew well? The simple answer is that, initially, they had no idea who the strangers were in the two sloops that arrived at Ocracoke the evening before.

Perhaps the greatest error Blackbeard biographers have made about the battle is reporting that Lt. Maynard’s armed naval force from Virginia arrived off the bar of Ocracoke Inlet and anchored offshore for the night after spying beyond the sand hills the masthead of the Adventure moored in what has ever since been called “Teach’s Hole Channel.”

A note about his name: Teach is the popularized version of Thatch, the most frequently used spelling in original documents by people who knew him. To early-18th century ears, however, both Teach and Thatch would have sounded similarly as “Tetch” and either of the two spellings were used variously according to a writer’s preference.

“It is not known for certain whether Captain Teach understood on the evening of November 21 that armed sloops lay outside the bar of Ocracoke Inlet waiting to capture him,” wrote former Wake Forest University law school dean Robert Lee in 1974. Like a good pirate historian, Angus Konstam, 32 years later, parroted Lee’s interpretation: “With his ships riding at anchor off the seaward side of the island, Maynard ordered lookouts to keep a watch for any movement from the pirates.”

That is not what happened, and the truth makes all the difference in understanding both the prelude to the battle and its outcome.

According to original Royal Navy records that I have examined and transcribed at the British Archives, Maynard encountered early on Thursday, Nov. 20, a trading sloop sailing out of Roanoke Inlet, where the causeway to Nags Head is now. He learned from the sloop’s master that the Adventure had been seen three days earlier aground on Brant Island Shoals in Pamlico Sound, between the Bay River and Pamlico River.

Hearing this, Maynard’s two sloops then entered the inland waters of North Carolina through Roanoke Inlet and not Ocracoke Inlet, as published accounts have long attested.

After rounding the north end of Roanoke Island and sailing south through Croatan Sound (I picture this every time I cross the Virginia Dare Memorial Bridge on U.S. 64), they set a course directly for Brant Island Shoals. When they arrived there on Friday morning, the Adventure was nowhere to be seen. Local pilots hired for the expedition then guided Maynard eastward toward Ocracoke, where Blackbeard was known to have established a camp since early September.

As I revealed for the first time in my book, “The Last Days of Blackbeard the Pirate,” Maynard’s privately hired sloops, Jane and Ranger, next cautiously navigated the labyrinthine tidal delta northwest of Ocracoke Inlet. They rounded Royal Shoal, crossed “the Swash,” and entered Ship Channel, where they anchored for the night along the sand bank called the Bulkhead on the east side of Beacon Island.

From their perspective anchored near Springer’s Point about two and a half miles to the east, Blackbeard and his men observed two small merchant sloops seemingly headed for the sea after arriving from Pamlico Sound. The Jane measured about 45 feet on deck while the Ranger was about 10 feet shorter in length, based on their estimated tonnage. Neither had guns mounted, which suggested that they were probably just local trading vessels.

Maynard, no doubt, kept nearly all his 60 men crammed below decks until well after dark. Even though the two sloops appeared unfamiliar to the pirates, they easily could have come from one of the numerous plantation docks on Albemarle or Currituck sounds perhaps bound for Charleston or Hampton Roads. The strangers were certainly not suspected to be Royal Navy sailors arriving from Virginia.

Aboard Blackbeard’s Adventure, the 19 men, three of whom were guests, probably paid little heed to the late arriving sloops.

Most writers, like Lee, describe Maynard weighing anchor “during the early gray light before sunrise.” However, the official after-action report written by Capt. Ellis Brand of the HMS Lyme to the Lords of Admiralty in London stated that Maynard departed his anchorage around 9 a.m., about two hours after sunrise.

There was little or no wind. Maynard ordered his crews to deploy the sloops’ sweeps, or oars, as they rode the tide out of Ship Channel toward the inlet and the open sea.

At the junction of the inlet and Teach’s Hole Channel, the Jane and Ranger made a sudden hard turn to port and began slowly making their way against the ebbing tide toward Blackbeard’s anchorage. It was here when Maynard revealed his objective.

Blackbeard, however, was still unsure of the strangers’ identities or their intentions. Since 1585, vessels routinely visited the shores of Springer’s Point and the nearby creek known as Old Slough in order to fill their ships’ water casks at the old well that was clearly marked on maps as early as 1733.

But the sudden appearance of muskets and cutlasses glinting in the morning sun and dozens of men swarming atop the decks of the two small sloops raised the alarm aboard the Adventure. The strangers were clearly not traders.

Were they pirates? Or more importantly, Blackbeard surely wondered, were they the reconstituted former members of the Queen Anne’s Revenge crew, whom he had double-crossed and abandoned five months earlier at Beaufort Inlet, seeking their own revenge?

According to an account published three months later in the Boston News-Letter, which cannot be confirmed as fact as the two sloops came within hailing distance, Blackbeard lied to the strangers about his political affiliation by shouting that he was for King George. But the pirate captain who had chosen to name his flagship Queen Anne’s Revenge was clearly not for King George. He was a Jacobite.

Jacobites were loyal supporters of James Francis Edward Stuart or James III, the son of King James II and half-brother of Queen Anne. James III was derided as “the Old Pretender” by his political adversaries, the ruling Whig party. Many pirates were Jacobites, most infamously Charles Vane, Blackbeard’s recent guest at his Ocracoke camp.

Vane was volatile, recalcitrant, audacious and prone to drink to the damnation of George I. Other pirates fired guns on June 10, the birthday of the “Old Pretender,” and it was no accident that Blackbeard symbolically wrecked Queen Anne’s Revenge at Beaufort Inlet on that date.

The failed effort to restore James III to the throne of the United Kingdom in 1715 is underappreciated by historians as a principal inspiration for the Golden Age of Piracy. And Blackbeard’s widely advertised Jacobite support may have been partly to blame for his untimely death.

As the sloops Jane and Ranger closed the distance to the pirates, Blackbeard quickly assessed his chances, should hostilities occur. Adventure had nine mounted guns, likely four, 6-inch guns along each the port and starboard sides, and perhaps a smaller swivel gun mounted at the bow. But Blackbeard’s crew of 16 was severely shorthanded, especially if they had to get underway and maneuver using oars, leaving insufficient crewmen to reload the big guns. His potential attackers outnumbered the pirates more than three to one. Consequently, Blackbeard first attempted to negotiate his way out of their predicament.

“If you shall let us alone, we shall not meddle with you,” the imposing pirate purportedly called out. Thirty-four-year-old Maynard hailed in return, “It is you we want and we will have you dead or alive.” The gauntlet was thrown.

Even then, the pirates did not know that they were about to engage the Royal Navy. Maynard did not identify himself.

Here, another key revelation to this factual version of the story helps to explain the pirate’s indecisiveness and the long-overlooked legal technicality that caused a few of the pirates to be later hanged.

Contrary to popular artistic renderings like American artist Howard Pyle’s “Blackbeard’s Last Fight” or Jean Leon Gerome Ferris’s frequently published 1920 painting of the battle, Royal Navy officers and sailors in 1718 did not wear uniforms. From a distance, Maynard’s men were dressed just like pirates, who in turn, dressed just like merchant sailors of the day. By their attire, they all mostly looked alike, although pirates had bigger wardrobes as most of it was stolen.

“You can tell by our colors that we are not pirates,” Maynard is reported to have shouted. The colors he referred to were those of the British White Naval Ensign. Seen from a distance hanging limply in the rigging of his sloop, St. George’s Cross with the Union flag in the upper canton appeared mostly white. Even if he recognized the flag, Blackbeard may have still doubted its authenticity. Pirates, and even honest mariners, were known to carry quite a collection of national flags to confuse their prey or their potential adversaries.

Cornered in shallow water with no wind to power his escape, Blackbeard made a hasty tactical decision. Fearing the possibility that he might be killed by vengeful former shipmates or hanged by the imperious Royal Navy, the pirate captain ordered his gunners to fire at his attackers a lethal broadside of “swan shot, spick nails and pieces of old iron,” which reportedly killed 11 and wounded nine of Maynard’s men aboard the Ranger.

It was a desperate effort to stand their ground, but, unfortunately, as it happened, also an act of treason for bearing arms against the king’s navy.

Blackbeard’s men who actively participated in the battle and who survived would be hanged for treason, not because they were pirates. There were six — two Whites and four Blacks — all hanged in 1719 at Hampton, Virginia, according to Royal Navy records. Despite the absence of proof, most published sources, museums, and even Colonial Williamsburg, continue to tell the public that 13 of Blackbeard’s pirates were hanged along Capitol Landing Road in Williamsburg.

Had the pirates surrendered without firing the first shots, however, they would have all been spared the noose and pardoned by the king with a forthcoming Act of Grace, although Blackbeard could not be certain of that.

At the end of an hourlong, slow-motion series of sailing maneuvers and gunfire amidst dense billows of smoke followed by six minutes of furious hand-to-hand combat, 10 pirates, including Blackbeard, lay dead on the deck of the sloop Jane while Maynard and 11 of his Royal Navy sailors, all wounded and out of breath, stood over the bodies.

So it was that on that Saturday during the hand-to-hand phase of the fight, Navy beat the Pirates by four field goals — 12 to nothing. ECU fans dislike hearing that. So does the National Park Service, which contends that “Blackbeard, in battle, was a savage opponent with a reputation for inhuman strength.” If so, his inhuman strength failed him.

The fabrications and exaggerations of the famous battle don’t end there.

The official after-action report on the engagement at Ocracoke was written by Capt. Brand in one long paragraph: 26 lines. But Addison “Cal” Whipple, once the executive editor for Time-Life Books and author of the swashbuckling 1957 book, “Pirate: Rascals of the Spanish Main,” succeeded in embellishing Brand’s pithy, primary source into 17 exciting pages.

Fans of Blackbeard may have read a popular 2006 book that features an interesting anecdote of how the maniacal pirate master seized the helm of the Adventure and began steering it for a nearby sandbar. When his quartermaster saw the mistake, he tried to warn his captain.

Blackbeard brutally knocked the man to the deck. Purportedly, he was hoping to lure Maynard’s sloops onto an adjacent sandbar where he would be in range of the Adventure’s guns. (Perhaps Blackbeard got the idea from Stede Bonnet.)

I found this tidbit interesting, so I attempted to find the source. The author cited his source of the anecdote as coming from Charles Johnson’s 1724 “A General History of Pirates,” but nowhere in Johnson’s account can the anecdote be found, nor is it found in the official statements of Brand and Maynard, nor in any of the few newspaper reports of the time.

It does appear, however, as part of Robert Lee’s version of the battle in his 1974 book, “Blackbeard the Pirate—A Reappraisal of His Life and Times.” But Lee cites the source as none other than Addison Whipple, who invented the entire fanciful episode. That is how some authors can wring 17 pages of history out of one official paragraph. And that is how fiction becomes accepted as fact. Today some call it “fake news.”

Can the truth of history be found beneath the shiny veneer of pop culture? Why was Blackbeard vanquished? Was he murdered as at least one misguided historian has argued? And why was he and his remaining crew members lingering at Ocracoke so late in the season?

The answers to these questions in Part II.

Coastal Review Online is featuring the research, findings and commentary of author Kevin Duffus.

The second of a two-part series begins with the Cape Fear Lifesavers making their way to the wreckage of the Charles C. Dame on Oct. 13, 1893, on Frying Pan Shoals off Cape Fear. Read Part 1.

The stricken vessel, Charles C. Dame, was just 8 miles away, rapidly breaking apart on Frying Pan Shoals. But the unremitting waves and wind from the south slowed the Cape Fear lifesavers’ progress to less than one mile per hour.

For more than eight hours, the intrepid men of Cape Fear station suffered a “toilsome and dangerous struggle against adverse and violent seas” in order to reach the shipwreck. As they got closer, keeper John L. Watts could see the vessel had once been a three-masted schooner, but was no more. Only the lower portion of the foremast remained standing. The ship’s back was broken and the decks washed away.

Watts’s surfboat finally reached the scene of the disaster at 3 p.m. In his official report, the keeper wrote that “every sea was washing over her. The crew members were huddled together on the jib boom, the only place they could get clear of the sea.”

Watts shouted above the roar of the storm, “Who are you, from where do you hail?” The schooner’s master Samuel S. Grove hoarsely replied, “The Charles C. Dame, from Newburyport by way of Baltimore!”

The lifesavers learned that the schooner’s crew had been clinging to the jib boom for more than 12 hours and they were nearly at the end of their endurance. Grove told Watts later that “he had given up to be lost until the surf boat was seen.”

Watts knew that if he and his men did not act quickly, it would soon get dark and they might be forced to stay out most or all of the night, and by morning there likely would not have been anyone left to save. U.S. Life-Saving Service crews were never known to abandon shipwreck victims at sea.

Due to the Cape Fear lifesavers’ skills, in less than 10 minutes they were able to get a line over to the wreckage and they plucked all eight crew members from the Charles C. Dame. The captain, mate and steward were white, five deck hands were black. All were barely alive.

Now there were 16 men crowded in the 27-foot-long surfboat. The boat’s gunwales were hardly above the level of the sea. Crowded as they were, Watts and his oarsmen did their utmost to control their overloaded boat, which wallowed and leapt and slewed as it surfed the waves of the shoals on its homeward bound Carolina sleigh ride. They nearly capsized more than once. A drogue, similar to a small parachute, was deployed, which slowed their progress but made the boat more manageable.

In an 1889 presentation at an international marine conference, U.S. Life-saving Service Superintendent Sumner Kimball described the art of an American station keeper steering his lifeboat in heavy seas: “His practiced hand immediately perceives any excess of weight thrown against either bow and instantly counteracts its force with his oar as instinctively and unerringly as the skilled musician presses the proper key of his instrument. He thus keeps his boat from broaching-to and avoids a threatened capsize.”

At every moment, keeper Watts’s little boat filled with water, which was eliminated by the indispensable self-bailing system although not as fast as the boat’s occupants would have preferred.

Even though they were headed downwind, the return trip still took more than four hours. Chasing them like a fiendish pack of wolves, the waves became hard to see as daylight dimmed. Sunset, even though the sun was not visible, occurred at 5:38 p.m.

The Cape Fear surfboat charged hard through the surf and in near total darkness with only the oil lamps in the station windows to guide them, they abruptly pitched up onto the beach. They were home. The time was 7:30 p.m.

Exhausted, soaked, cold, thirsty and famished, the Cape Fear crew still had to ignore their own needs in order to become hospitable hosts to the relieved but helpless and nearly naked men of the Charles C. Dame. The station’s stove was stoked, food was prepared, and clothing was provided to the destitute shipwreck survivors furnished by the Woman’s National Relief Association.

Over the next two days, all of the men rested and recuperated. Forty meals were served to the survivors, according to the station log. And on Oct. 16, the Charles C. Dame crew were taken over to Southport from where they began their long landward journey home by train.

Three days later at Baltimore, the schooner’s captain, Samuel S. Grove, sent a letter to John Watts, expressing his gratitude to the Cape Fear keeper and his surfmen for their unselfish and meritorious service: “Your heroic fight of twelve hours to reach the vessel was a super-human effort that deserves a record in the annals of the Life-Saving Service, which I, as a mariner, always regard as a sailor’s hope when shipwreck stares him in the face in storm-ridden seas along our coast. Your rescue of every man, and the safe landing of your own and my crews, was a piece of work that it delights me to pay tribute to, and the kind treatment of us while under your care requires me to double my thanks, and extend the same from my officers and crew.”

The day after “Hurricane Nine” ravaged the Carolina coast, it moved into the Great Lakes where it became known as “The Great Storm of 1893.” The storm maintained tropical force winds and rain, sinking or stranding 39 ships, and taking 54 lives.

At the end of each fiscal year, the U.S. Life-Saving Service awarded gold and silver medals for lifesaving to both the service’s employees and private citizens who performed exceptional feats of heroism in attempts to save human life.

The standards set by the service for its own men were exceedingly high. In fact, rarely and reluctantly did the U.S. Life-Saving Service bestow medals on its employees. Rarely, because it did so only when surfmen clearly risked their own lives to save those in peril on the sea; reluctantly, because even risking one’s life was considered part of the job.

In the service’s published Annual Reports, statements accompanying the names of those who were honored with medals often included the phrases: “extreme bravery,” “unflinching heroism,” “at imminent risk,” “under grave difficulties,” “great hazards” and “heroic services.”

All of these descriptions would seem to describe what keeper John Watts and his crew achieved, yet they received no medals for their rescue of the men of the Charles C. Dame during the waning hours of what today would be considered a Category 3 hurricane on Oct. 14, 1893.

Why the Cape Fear lifesavers were not recognized for their extraordinary heroism is a question that will probably always remain a mystery. One possibility may be that their Sixth District Inspector, Lt. George H. Gooding of the Revenue Cutter Service based at Elizabeth City, failed to recognize or appreciate their accomplishment.

Watts and his crew launched their surfboat in storm conditions in which no one else could. The U.S. Life-Saving Service administrators were well aware that the Oak Island crew, in responding to the same shipwreck, had failed to gain the open sea in their surfboat after two attempts.

During the same massive hurricane, the lifesaving crew at Cape Lookout, in attempting to reach the stranded British steamer Daylight had also tried but failed to launch their surfboat “on account of the violence of the sea.”

The same happened during the same storm at Chicamacomico Life-Saving Station on Hatteras Island where initial efforts to launch a boat to reach the barkentine Ravenswood were reported to be “impossible.”

Despite these well-documented failed attempts to launch surfboats, the Cape Fear crew succeeded in doing so, solely by their own daring, strength of character, and remarkable endurance.

Of course, they did not perform their unparalleled and unselfish feat of courage for recognition or rewards; they did it because it was their job. Yet, by doing so they achieved the same benchmarks by which other lifesaving crews were honored with medals.

In saving the eight men of the Charles C. Dame, John Watts and his men clearly exhibited “extreme bravery” and “unflinching heroism” at their “imminent risk” and under “grave difficulties,” facing “great hazards” while performing “heroic services.”

And for Watts and his number one surfman John E. Price, their efforts were not simply a one-time fluke. Six weeks earlier, both men had also significantly contributed to the success of Oak Island keeper Dunbar Davis’s 60-hour marathon lifesaving effort. Neither Watts, Price, nor Davis were bestowed medals for that achievement either.

There are heroes in every walk of life, even the humblest, and who well deserve the plaudits of the world, but whose names do not appear upon the scroll of fame, but whose lives are an example for others, and who have benefited the world by acts of heroism unknown beyond the limits of their own contracted surroundings.” James Sprunt, “Men of the Past,” Tales and Traditions of the Lower Cape Fear, 1896

Thirty-three North Carolina U.S. Life-Saving Service employees prior to 1920 are known to have received gold or silver life-saving medals, all of whom served on the Outer Banks.

In 1918, six lifesavers from Chicamacomico were awarded gold medals under the recently reorganized U.S. Coast Guard. In 1996, the U.S. Coast Guard awarded the Gold Life-Saving Medal posthumously to the keeper and all African-American crew of the Pea Island station for the rescue of the survivors of the wreck of the E.S. Newman on Oct. 11, 1896.

That the Cape Fear Life-Saving Station crew of 1893 and their families were denied such recognition was an unfortunate oversight on the part of the U.S. government.

Coastal Review Online is featuring the research, findings and commentary of author Kevin Duffus.

First of two parts

Sailors have long believed that it was bad luck to leave port on a Friday, and worse should it be Friday the 13th.

For Samuel S. Grove, master of the three-masted schooner, Charles C. Dame, attempting to arrive in port on Friday the 13th turned out to be just as unlucky.

Grove’s elegant, dark-hulled 567-ton schooner was built in 1882 at a prolific shipbuilding yard on the Merrimack River and named for a prominent civic and Masonic leader of Newburyport, Massachusetts.

The ship’s name itself may have brought bad luck. The original Charles C. Dame was lost in “a terrible gale” off North Cape Breton Island in 1873. The ship’s entire crew of 18 men perished.

Two years after the schooner was launched, the second Charles C. Dame stranded on the beach off Metedeconk River, New Jersey, in 1884. It took 11 months to get the ship refloated.

In October 1893, the same ill-fated schooner was off the North Carolina coast racing toward Charleston from Baltimore with the cargo hold filled with coal.

The vessel, after rounding Cape Lookout, scudded along on a broad reach before a strengthening east-southeast breeze, making good time toward its destination.

The friendly wind was a siren’s call, however, beckoning the Charles C. Dame toward an awful fate. Within hours, immense swells rising from the southwest grew ever larger and the sky beyond became ominously darker. What Grove and his crew of seven men did not know but may have surmised — they were heading directly into the turbulent gyre of a tropical tempest.

Grove gambled that with haste and luck they might reach the relative safety of Charleston harbor before the worst of the storm reached them. He should have known not to wager against Mother Nature.

At that moment on Friday, Oct. 13, 1893, the ninth tropical cyclone of the year, a fast-moving hurricane with sustained winds topping 120 mph, which today would be considered a Category 3 storm, arrived off the South Carolina coast from the Bahamas. Around daylight the eye was passing east of Charleston at about the same time as the Charles C. Dame was preparing to enter the port.

The schooner’s sails were blown to tatters and was ejected out of the storm’s eye wall like a toy, propelled uncontrollably under bare poles to the northeast. Ahead lay Frying Pan Shoals.

The Atlantic storm season of 1893 was not forgotten for many years. It caused unprecedented destruction to life and property.

“The memory of the oldest inhabitant fails him when he tries to recall such another year of storms,” wrote Joel Chandler Harris in Scribner’s Magazine the following year. “The records show no parallel to it.”

The deadliest of the hurricanes was the sixth storm, better known as the Sea Islands Hurricane, which made landfall late in the evening of Aug. 27, 1893, north of Savannah. Two thousand people, mostly poor families living on the low-lying barrier islands of Georgia and South Carolina drowned. More than 30,000 were left homeless and destitute.

On Aug. 28, 1893, the hurricane entered the Tar Heel State. Off the Brunswick coast, eight ships and their crews and passengers were later determined to have vanished without a trace. When the curtain of darkness, driving rain and wind-blown fog finally lifted as the hurricane passed to the west of Cape Fear, numerous disabled vessels were revealed.

Over a period of nearly 60 hours, without sleep, food or even drinking water, the keepers and volunteer crews of the Oak Island and Cape Fear U.S. Life-saving Stations valiantly rescued, provided first-aid, food and clothing to shipwrecked survivors of the storm. In David Stick’s seminal book, “The Graveyard of the Atlantic,” the story of the rescues and super-human effort of the keeper of the Oak Island station were immortalized in a chapter titled, “The Long Day of Dunbar Davis.”

But Dunbar Davis, no doubt an exceptional hero, was just one of a dozen or more Cape Fear area lifesavers who came to the aid of shipwreck victims during that horrible hurricane year. John Watts and his crew of Cape Fear Station had their own long day.

The Cape Fear station, built in 1883 on the island’s east beach, was among the first to feature a fully enclosed watch tower atop the roof. While it was still dark on the morning of Oct. 14, 1893, 29-year-old Sam Newton of Southport wearily climbed the narrow stairway leading into the precariously perched watch room.

It had been a sleepless night for the station crew as the men were certain that their services would be needed in the morning. All night the stoutly built building trembled and the window panes vibrated in the violent gale-force gusts of the passing storm.

In the tower the windows were blurred by streaks of rain. The sky begrudgingly began to barely brighten. Newton began sweeping the horizon with the station’s marine field glasses but visibility could not have been worse. Then, at 6 a.m. he saw it, on the very edge of the horizon frequently occulted by billows of spindrift, the barely distinguishable dark hulk of a vessel to the south-southeast on Frying Pan Shoals. It was not moving!

Newton tumbled down the steep stairs into the bunk room below. The alarm was sounded and the remaining crew members roused from their fitful sleep. Above the roar of the storm, 38-year-old station keeper John L. Watts shouted the assignments and then went outside to raise signal flags to alert Dunbar Davis and the Oak Island Station about 5½ miles to the west across the Cape Fear River that there was a ship ashore — “Cape Fear Station requires assistance,” the flags spelled out. There was no time for coffee or breakfast, not while lives were at stake in the offing.

Records have not preserved what Watts told his men that cold autumn morning but, no doubt, he reminded them that they had chosen their line of work and it was no time for timidity. Under similar circumstances at another North Carolina life-saving station, the keeper ordered each of his men before setting out on a similar ocean rescue to sit down and quickly write their last will and testament. Life-saving was not a job for the weak of heart.

One Cape Fear crew member, D. W. Manson, was absent due to sickness. The other full-time men are believed to have included number one surfman John C. Price, Samuel D. Newton, John W. Moore, J. W. (Wesley) Smith, Robert W. Davis and James Alexander Pinner.

Life-saving service regulations allowed station keepers to choose the most experienced able-bodied watermen in their communities. However, they were not permitted to employ their immediate relatives in order to “countervail the quite natural inclination of keepers to provide situations for their near kinsmen, even to the serious detriment of the strength and morale of the station force.”

Watts and his close friend, keeper Dunbar Davis, circumvented that regulation by hiring each other’s’ brothers. Robert, on Watts’s crew was Dunbar Davis’s brother, while Davis had Watts’s brother, Crawford, serving at Oak Island.

Watts was worried that he needed a full crew of eight due to the severity of the conditions. He turned to Moses Stepney, possibly the station’s African American cook who had participated in a surfboat rescue to the schooner Three Sisters during the August storm, and offered him the standard U.S. Life-Saving Service wage of $3 per day to join the crew. Stepney bravely accepted but there was no guarantee he would ever make it back to claim his reward.

The heavy wooden doors at the seaward end of the Cape Fear station were rolled back and the 27-foot-long, 1,000-pound Beebe-type, self-bailing surfboat emerged from the boat room atop its wagon. The men, hitched to the wagon like mules, dragged the boat and wagon down its wooden ramp and onto the soft wet sand of the beach.

Aboard the boat were cork life preservers, a heaving line, bailing buckets, signal rockets, six rowing oars and one 20-foot-long steering oar with which the station keeper, now called “Captain Watts,” would operate using every ounce of his strength. Typically, crews would put to sea so quickly they did not have time to gather and stow fresh water or food.

For the men of life-saving stations, the most dangerous of any method of rescue was an open water surfboat rescue during storm conditions. The risks even greater when rescues were attempted in and around North Carolina’s three tempestuous shoals at Cape Hatteras, Cape Lookout, and Cape Fear.

Ships that grounded on these shoals, often miles from shore, were typically surrounded by a field of dangerous jetsam — spars, timbers, wooden casks, and deck cargoes all tangled in a nightmarish web of tarred rigging, tossing about on the waves and able to ensnare or put a hole in the bottom of a surfboat.

In such conditions, captains of lifesaving crews faced their ultimate challenge, having to maneuver their boat through the lethal debris field to get close enough to a disintegrating ship before its crew all washed away into the merciless sea.

Huge, rolling waves would heave the ship and lifeboat in wild, disparate arcs, up and down, canting at opposite angles. Amidst the deafening roar of the storm, lifesavers and shipwreck victims shouted as they attempted to coordinate their desperate efforts, as wind-driven rain or sleet, like airborne nails, blinded the lifesavers who were soaked and chilled to the bone.

Upon the approach of the surfboat, the captain of a shipwrecked vessel was required to yield all authority to the captain of the lifesaving crew. The U.S. Life-Saving Service provided all American merchant vessels with small booklets with strict instructions in the event that they foundered at sea: “Any headlong rushing and crowding should be prevented, and the captain of the vessel should remain on board, to preserve order, until every other person has left. Women, children, helpless persons, and passengers should be passed into the boat first.”

At an opportune moment, the lifesavers would heave a line aboard the wreck, all the while working their oars with their bloody, callused hands to keep their little craft from being crushed by the wounded, lurching leviathan.

These were the mental images, and of their loved ones back home, that occupied the Cape Fear station lifesavers’ minds as they helped their comrades trudge through soft sand, dragging the surfboat down to the beach to go to sea.

Official U.S. Coast Guard photos of surfboat launchings posed during pleasant weather –when such photography was conducive –utterly fail to convey the lifesaver’s formidable and intimidating mission.

Often facing a turbulent bulwark of breaking waves crashing before the beach through which they reluctantly had to launch their stalwart little craft, lifesavers had no choice whether or not to attempt a rescue.

According to the regulations of the U.S. Life-Saving Service, “The statement of the keeper that he did not try to use the boat will not be acceptable unless attempts to launch it were actually made and failed…”

Across the Cape Fear River, the heretofore indomitable Dunbar Davis and his crew attempted to launch their surfboat into the raging seas and failed. Twice. They implored the captain of a local tugboat to tow their surfboat beyond the bar of the inlet.

The tugboat captain refused — “the weather was too tempestuous,” he said. It seemed that no one could possibly breach the mountainous seas. As this was happening, the Oak Island range lighthouse was utterly obliterated by the storm.

Back at East Beach, standing amid clouds of sea foam, the undaunted Cape Fear crew slid their surfboat off of its wagon as waves knocked them sideways and undermined their footing in the swirling sands. They shoved the boat into the turbulent water, and quickly jumped aboard. The time was 7 a.m.

No doubt, the lifesavers’ hearts were filled with anticipation, apprehension, and nervousness. Beyond lay the outer bar and mountainous combers, curling and crashing with a full-throated thump, and wave crests whipped into blinding plumes of spray.

The oarsmen faced their captain or helmsman, their backs to the wall of water through which they had to penetrate. They could only imagine what horrors lurked behind them. Meanwhile, Capt. Watts maintained his expressionless countenance lest he convey the slightest anxiety to his crew. “Steady, boys, steady. Now! Stroke! Stroke! Stroke!” the captain may have shouted as he spotted a momentary weakness in Neptune’s defenses. They were off.

The Cape Fear surfboat rose up the incoming wave, which lesser men would hardly call a weakness, ever steeper, higher and higher, until the bow of the boat was nearly 20 feet above its stern, and in a spectacular explosion of spray and foam, the sturdy craft broke through to the wave’s other side and fell onto a trough and the open ocean. The Cape Fear Life-Saving Station crew’s ordeal had only just begun.

Next: A daring rescue

In the summer of 1753, a ship transporting German immigrants set sail from Portsmouth, England, bound for the New World. Among the many who were aboard was 10-year-old Henrich Caspar Lange. Full of wonder like many his age, the boy no doubt spent as much time topside as he was allowed as the ship lurched its way out of the Solent and into the heaving gray seas and billowy mists of the English Channel.

As the night passed and a crimson sky heralded their first dawn at sea, a last vestige of the Old World rose from the horizon off the ship’s starboard beam — the shape of a lighthouse standing precariously atop the wave-lashed Eddystone Rocks. At the summit of the 69-foot-tall lighthouse, a pale yellow light from 24 tallow candles glowed through the smoke smudged storm panes of the lantern. The light keepers were about to end their long, lonely watch.

From the deck of his ship young Lange may have pondered, how brave must a man be to serve at such a forlorn and tempestuous place? We can only imagine the impression the distant lighthouse instilled upon the heart and mind of the young boy with his life’s choices appearing ahead of him like the multitude of whitecaps on the sea.

Lange and his family — his father was a schoolmaster — settled for a time on the coast of Maine but broken promises, lack of arable land, conflicts with Native Americans, brutal winters and poverty led many of the Germans to seek a better life at the Moravian settlement in North Carolina called Bethabara, near today’s Winston-Salem. At least two migrations by ship were made from Maine’s Broad Bay to the Cape Fear River from where the families embarked on the arduous overland journey to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

We can deduce that Lange, by then 28 years old, chose to go no farther than the Lower Cape Fear region. The native of Germany’s Westerwald hills must have found a liking for the sands, salt marshes and healthy breezes of Cape Fear. He assumed the anglicized version of his name, Henry Long, took a wife named Rebecca, and began a new occupation as a river pilot.

Circumstantial evidence leads us to conclude that Long had become a trusted friend of the increasingly influential Hooper family led by Harvard graduate and Wilmington attorney William Hooper. Hooper was later one of North Carolina’s three representatives to the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

A few months after American Patriots and British troops clashed at Lexington and Concord in 1775, Henry and Rebecca Long welcomed their first of five children, a daughter they named Rebecca. The births of his other children suggest that during the war Long must have remained close to his home near Smithville, now Southport. Precisely how Long served his new country in rebellion against British oppression we do not know.

A few clues tell us that Long must have served his young nation honorably. Foremost was that in June 1794, Long was nominated by Commissioner for Navigation George Hooper, brother of William Hooper, to be the first keeper of North Carolina’s first lighthouse. It was a coveted federal position generally bestowed upon deserving war veterans.

Long was described by Hooper in Treasury Department records as the oldest pilot working the Cape Fear River but not too old to serve as a lighthouse keeper –he was just 55. George Washington approved Long’s appointment at an annual salary of $300. The amount was less than the proposed $350 but the new keeper was offered the valuable bonus of “a good house, well situated for taking fish and piloting.” As Long soon found out, however, it was not enough.

To serve as lighthouse keeper, the “not too old” pilot had to leave his mainland home with its established garden and livestock and live with his family on the isolated Bald Head Island as the only year-round residents. Strict limits on the use of the island’s resources demanded by the owner Benjamin Smith in exchange for his donation of 10 acres to establish the lighthouse there put a severe crimp in Long’s finances. Less than a year on the job, North Carolina’s only lighthouse keeper appealed to his Wilmington superintendent for more money, complaining that he was quickly accumulating “debt upon debt.”

The promise that he would be able to continue his work as a pilot to supplement his government salary was impractical. The island had no deep-water harbor where he could moor his decked sailing vessel, and the demands of lighthouse keeping afforded no time for much anything else. Even if he were able to keep his boat nearby, Long wrote, “he could not officiate as a Pilot, when the light house claims the whole of his attention.”

“All these advantages are now entirely lost to your (petitioner) by his living on an island where he has not the privilege of raising stock of any kind nor even vegetables from the proprietor of the island (Benjamin Smith) if the soil would admit thereof,” Long wrote in October 1795. “Fish and oysters are at too great a distance from the island for him to attempt to procure.” Even firewood to heat the keeper’s dwelling Long had to purchase from the mainland, even though Smith’s island was heavily timbered.

Long buttressed his appeal for a pay raise with this reminder: “Your (petitioner) therefore solicits you will consider his … services to his Country for twenty five years past and make such a representation thereof to the Commissioner of the Revenue … and counterbalance in some measure the aforesaid difficulties he labors under.” Long’s salary was raised to $333.33 and no more was heard of his financial struggles, at least in writing.

At Smithville on Feb. 3, 1800, Henry and Rebecca Long served as distinguished mourners at ceremonial funeral rites for President Washington, who had died six weeks earlier. In a noontime procession led by honorary pallbearers that began at Fort Johnston, Henry Long walked immediately behind Joshua Potts, founder of the town, as muffled drums beat a cadence and guns boomed from a revenue cutter moored in the river. Clearly, Long’s position of honor indicated that he was an esteemed citizen of the Lower Cape Fear.

When Henry Long first illuminated Cape Fear Lighthouse on Dec. 23, 1794, there were only 16 other lighthouses and not many more keepers operating in America spread along more than a thousand miles of coastline. During those early years of federal management of America’s lighthouses, keepers in remote locations like Cape Fear had no training, no instructions nor manuals to follow, and no government standards to meet other than to keep the light burning.

Countless times each day and night at a place nearly as lonely and tempestuous as Eddystone Rocks, Long climbed the wooden stairway carrying containers of oil, stopping to catch his breath at each of the tower’s five landings. Sixteen windows brought in abundant light, sea breezes and mosquitoes.

At dusk, inside the 10-foot-tall “birdcage” lantern at the top of the lighthouse, Long tended to a pair of oil-filled pan lamps hanging precariously by chains from the dome of the lantern. The pan lamps with 48 wicks produced a considerable amount of smoke and acrid fumes, which smudged the glass storm panes and requiring nearly constant cleaning by the keeper.

Long was expected to fulfill his nightly duty of keeping his lighthouse operating 365 days a year regardless of the weather, which was frequently frightful. On July 24, 1806, ink-black clouds presaged a nightmarish swarm of 11 waterspouts that churned the mouth of the river, barely missing the lighthouse. A few months later, a hurricane struck the Cape Fear coast that was described by the editor of the Wilmington Gazette as the “most violent and destructive storm of wind and rain ever known here.”

But even after that frightening day of waterspouts and a hurricane of utmost violence, a more horrifying tragedy struck the Cape Fear light station later that autumn.

Two years earlier, Henry and Rebecca’s daughter Elizabeth suffered an untimely death, leaving her husband, Southport pilot Joseph Swain, with two young children. Swain, for reasons not known, became unable to support his family and he moved over to Bald Head to be sheltered and fed at his father-in-law’s keeper’s house. Perhaps to do his part to put food on the table, on Thursday, Oct. 16, Swain went out to hunt deer and wild hogs from a blind in the thick forest of the island.

At dusk, after spending most of the day waiting for his prey to pass his location without success, Swain was about to return home when he heard a rustling sound in bushes about 25 yards away. Fearful that he might miss an opportunity to return home to his family with something to eat, he hastily cocked his musket and fired. But instead of shooting a deer or a hog, Swain was sickened to discover that he had shot his father-in-law in the abdomen.

Henry Long died almost instantly. A notice published in the Wilmington Gazette five days later reported the tragedy: “The circumstances attending the demise of this respectable old gentleman are truly distressing.” Thus was ended the life of North Carolina’s first lighthouse keeper. Yet, his light was kept alive.

Despite the horrific tragedy, on that Thursday evening of Keeper Long’s death, and at every sundown to follow, someone continued to diligently light the lamps of the lighthouse. Each day, someone continued to lug heavy containers of oil up the six flights of steep wooden stairs to the lantern room. Throughout fair weather and foul, each and every night, someone stood the lonely watch at the top of the all-important sentinel, maintaining the wicks of the lamps and periodically wiping clear the oily haze from the window panes of the lantern.

In those days, there was no assistant keeper hired by the government to share the arduous duties of keeping a lighthouse. In those days, in the absence of the keeper, his wife did the job. And after the death of her husband, Rebecca Long heroically took over as unofficial keeper of the Cape Fear Lighthouse for the next three months.

Eleven days after Keeper Long was killed and after Rebecca assumed his duties, Timothy Bloodworth, customs collector of the Wilmington port, sent a letter to the Albert Gallatin, secretary of the Treasury, proposing that the keeper’s wife be officially appointed as Cape Fear’s lighthouse keeper. Two weeks later, Gallatin replied that he was not sure that it was possible for Rebecca to replace her husband and asked Bloodworth to transmit “other recommendations with your opinion thereon, in order that he may select the most proper person.”

Bloodworth waited two months to respond to Gallatin’s request, submitting the name of Revolutionary War veteran Sedgwick Springs as his nomination in the event that the widow of the late Henry Long is deemed “inadequate to the safe keeping (of the lighthouse).”

Despite the alternative nomination of Springs for keeper, Gallatin submitted Rebecca Long’s name up the chain of command, which happened to be a very short chain — it went next to the desk of President Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s reply was categorical even if it has been misapplied by historians.

After an impressive effort of historical sleuthing, historian David E. Paterson in 2015 solved the longstanding mystery of what precipitated one of Jefferson’s better-known and often-repeated quotations that clearly revealed the Founding Father’s bias against women in public service. Jefferson’s provocative remark, made in a note from “Th. J” to Secretary Gallatin on Jan. 13, 1807, was: “The appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.”

Contrary to the commonly held assumption that Jefferson was remarking on Gallatin’s difficulty in finding qualified males to fill positions in the Treasury Department, Jefferson was responding directly to the nomination of Rebecca Long to become keeper of the Cape Fear Lighthouse, a job for which she had proved to be more than adequate and had been doing unfailingly for three long months.

Two days after receiving Jefferson’s note, Gallatin wrote to Bloodworth at Wilmington: “The President of the United States has appointed Sedgwick Springs to be the Keeper of the Cape Fear Light House, of which you will be pleased to give him notice.”

As Paterson observed, “In 1826, almost 20 years after Jefferson had rejected Rebecca Long’s nomination, President John Quincy Adams appointed the first federally employed female light-keeper.”

Ever since, dozens of women served as keepers or assistant keepers of the nation’s lighthouses. During the Early Republic period, women were estimated to comprise 5% of principal lighthouse keepers. Some performed feats of heroism.

Ida Lewis, keeper of the Lime Rock Lighthouse in Rhode Island, was awarded a gold medal in 1881 “for saving lives at her imminent peril.” Had Thomas Jefferson been as enlightened as popular culture sometimes likes to remember him, Cape Fear’s Rebecca Long might have become America’s first woman lighthouse keeper.

Rebecca moved her family across the river to Smithville. One can imagine that she might have occasionally glanced across the river at the Cape Fear Lighthouse at sundown to make sure that it was lighted on time. Or, perhaps, she never looked back there again. She died on May 2, 1815. By then, the lighthouse was gone, too.

Coastal Review Online is featuring the research, findings and commentary of author Kevin Duffus.

Last of three parts

Like a solar eclipse, a dark shadow crept over the towns of the Pamlico a few weeks after they had been visited by Sir Richard Grenville’s 1585 expedition. Expedition scientist, ethnographer and Algonquian translator Thomas Harriot wrote this general observation in his “Brief and True Report:”

” … within a few dayes after our departure from everie such towne, the people began to die very fast, and many in short space; in some townes about twentie, in some fourtie, in some sixtie, & in one sixe score, which in trueth was very manie in respect of their numbers … The disease also was so strange, that they neither knew what it was, nor how to cure it.”

Harriot observed that the mysterious sickness devastating some Algonquian towns had not occurred where they had not visited. The Native Americans wondered if the English were able to kill them without weapons. Rumors spread amongst the towns and even between neighboring nations of Iroquoian and Siouan language groups, that the strangers from across the sea with their invisible weapons were to be avoided or killed on sight.

On the Pamlico River on Friday, July 16, 1585, after departing from Secotan, Grenville’s expedition made its way back down to the sound following the same compass heading and passing the same creeks, points and bays as Beaufort County boaters do today. Along the way, their survey continued of the mainland, even if it was not as detailed as the Hyde County shoreline. South Dividing Creek, with its distinctive southwestward course, is plainly shown on White’s watercolor map.

Down river of Bath Creek, according to the anonymous sketch map, they also recorded the only soundings of the entire expedition — further evidence that Secotan was not on Pungo River. It was, in fact, the only water depth shown on any of the three maps made during the entire four-year span of the Roanoke Voyages, even though they had taken soundings everywhere they went. They measured 18 feet of water in the middle of the Pamlico River. This depth compares to an average of 15 to 16 feet today.

One might think that with sea level rise over 435 years, the river would be deeper today than it was in 1585. However, centuries of farming and mining along the Tar-Pamlico estuary has filled the river with silt. Similarly, when Bath Creek was surveyed in 1979 by a team of professors and students from East Carolina University, it was determined that as much as 6 to 15 vertical feet of viscous sediment covered the once pristine sandy bottom of the creek.

At some point during their time at Secotan, one of Grenville’s men noticed that they were missing a silver cup, perhaps a communion chalice, that was last seen when they were at the Algonquian town of Aquascogoc earlier that week.

Before exiting the river, Grenville sent Capt. Philip Amadas, likely with Manteo, the Croatoan, to return to the Pantego Creek town to ask that the cup be returned.

Upon his arrival, with Manteo interpreting, Amadas made his demand. The records don’t tell us what evidence the Elizabethans had that convinced them that the silver cup was stolen. Could it have been misplaced or lost overboard? It didn’t seem to matter. Despite their objective to win the Algonquians from paganism “with all humanitie,” Amadas and his men exacted their retribution.

The journal from Grenville’s flagship Tiger reported that, “… not receiving (the cup) according to Amadas’s promise, we burnt, and spoyled their corne, and Towne, all the people beeing fledde.” We are left to wonder what Manteo must of thought of the treatment of his fellow countrymen, and if the destruction of the town is why expedition surveyor and artist John White preserved no illustrations of it.

Our analysis of the expedition’s day-to-day journal suggests that Grenville must have waited for Amadas to return from his mission for it still took two days before they all returned to Wococon Inlet. Of course, Grenville would have needed Manteo’s guidance to show them the way during the remainder of their exploration.

White’s “La Virginea Pars” map of the western and southern portions of Pamlico Sound lack the finer detail and more accurate proportions of the shoreline west of Pomeiooc, suggesting either that weather, haste or fatigue prevented the surveyors from taking bearings and making measurements.

The Bay River, however, is recognizable, and on its north shore is Secotaoc. Secotaoc may have been located on high ground north of today’s Petty Point, although most other writers for unknown reasons are inclined to put it near the swampier Hobucken. Algonquian language expert the Rev. James A. Geary suggested that Secotaoc meant, “they who dwell at the bend of the river,” which would certainly fit this writer’s hypothesis.

Secotaoc and Bay River marked the southern frontier of the Secotan Nation, so the expedition likely overnighted near there that Saturday. From there, their counterclockwise circumnavigation of the sound took them into the waters of the Neusioks, a nation of uncertain linguistic affiliations but possibly Iroquoian, meaning that Manteo’s influence would have had no advantage. The inclusion of the towns Newasiwac and Marasanico on the south shore of the Neuse River was likely the result of White being advised by Manteo of their locations rather than an actual visit.

Likewise, in contrast to his nearly perfect depiction of the Hyde County shoreline, White’s concept of Core Sound and the lower Core Banks does not resemble the geography except in the broadest sense. Of this, Roanoke Voyages historian David Quinn wrote: “White’s coastline for this part of the coast has very little authority as it is very unlikely that he had a chance to survey it even in the most cursory fashion.”

Here we might add that by the time the Elizabethans reached the southern waters of Pamlico Sound they were not only venturing into unfriendly territory but their rigorous tour schedule in mostly open vessels in the heat and squalls of mid-summer must have had them thoroughly exhausted.

The journal for Sunday, July 18: “The 18. we returned from the discovery of Secotan, and the same day came aboord our fleete ryding at Wocokon.” The 43-year-old Grenville, especially, after sleeping rough for seven nights on the water, must have been thrilled to return to his own bed and washbasin in his private cabin high in the aftercastle of the previously damaged Tiger that had been fully repaired.

Three days later, on July 21, Grenville’s fleet weighed anchor at Wococon Inlet and set sail for the north end of Hatteras Island to begin the monthlong process of offloading and establishing Ralph Lane’s colony on Roanoke Island.

Grenville’s exploration of the Native American towns of the Pamlico was over, but ours continues.

There are a few ironies to consider. Even as White the artist and Thomas Harriot the ethnographer preserved for eternity the coastal North Carolina Algonquian people and their culture in pictures and words, the viral diseases brought by the English in 1585, and later by others in the 17th century, eventually led to their near extinction.

It may be no less paradoxical that conservators at the British Museum can tell you more about the paper and pigments used by White to create his “La Virginea Pars” map than most historians and archaeologists know about the locations of the Indian towns depicted on it.

What does it say that Aquascogoc, which was not illustrated by White but instead destroyed by Amadas, is remembered by a historical marker in Belhaven, while Pomeiooc and Secotan, the only two Native American towns in eastern America during the contact period preserved in paintings, have no historical marker near Engelhard or Bath?

At the State Historic Site in Beaufort County, near where Secotan was likely located and where White produced the majority of his illustrations, there is absolutely no interpretation or acknowledgement of it. According to the historic site, Bath’s history did not begin until 1690. Meanwhile, White’s 1585 paintings are displayed at the Jamestown Archaearium in Virginia but not at the place where they were almost certainly created.

Bath is a town of many proud firsts in state history, but it seems to have forgotten its first first. It wasn’t always so.

In 1966, William Shires, a correspondent for the Robesonian newspaper, reported that White’s watercolor map, “La Virginea Pars,” on loan from the British Museum to the State Department of Archives and History, showed Secotan “at approximately the site of Bath, N.C., oldest town in the state.” The revelation inspired the idea of reconstructing the Algonquian town near Bath, similar to Oconaluftee, the popular and economically vital Cherokee village in western North Carolina.

“In a separate drawing,” Shires wrote, “a feature is the central burial house in which White depicted the fallen tribesmen lying in funeral state.” The correspondent was alluding to a painting by White believed to have been made at Secotan depicting the Algonquians almost Egyptian-like veneration of the bones of their dead werowances, or kings.

More than a century earlier, in fact, Bath residents recognized that the eroding shores of their creek were gradually exposing the mortal remains of a long-lost world. In 1857, Joseph Bonner wrote a letter to a friend stating: “Many relics of Indians have been discovered in this place and vicinity at four different localities on the bank of the Creek and within the limits of Town, where excavations have been made, immense quantities of Indian bones and other remains have been found. Indeed the whole bank would seem to be a cemetery.”

Thus, the bones of the kings of Secotan and their people have long since washed away or been plowed under, perhaps under the very corn field that once fed their town and the Elizabethans who visited them 435 years ago.

According to the Robesonian, when state and county leaders in 1966, along with the chairman of the history department at the then East Carolina Teachers College, considered the economic opportunities of reconstructing Secotan, the Historic Bath Commission led by Edmund Harding of Washington gave the project the highest priority. But nothing ever happened and Secotan was soon forgotten again.

From time to time, archaeologists have shown some interest in the locations of the Pamlico towns of the Algonquians. In a 1956 report of his survey of cultural sites in the Outer Banks region, Louisiana State University’s William Haag described an extensive midden on a 15-foot-high bluff along the west bank of Bath Creek. Hundreds of feet inland, shell fragments and potsherds were also found.

Four years later, archaeology pioneer Stanley South made the first of two visits to the west bank of Bath Creek. At the time, someone diverted South’s attention from Native American artifacts to investigating evidence of the pirate Blackbeard’s connection to Bath, possibly hoping to find buried treasure at Plum Point. South left empty-handed.

Other searchers, less professionally qualified but with more curiosity, have had better success.

For many years, a farmer named Warren Harris cultivated the fields along Bath Creek and turned up vast numbers of Native American artifacts. He located a chipping station where stone implements were produced and oyster shell middens.

Fishermen and family boaters with young aspiring “Indiana Joneses” have also frequently recovered prehistoric artifacts from the shallow waters off the creek’s west bank, including large fragments of fabric-impressed ceramic jars.

In 1980, East Carolina University archaeologist David Phelps showed up for a time and recovered numerous samples of precontact period Colington phase ceramics — pottery typically fabric impressed, simple stamped or plain — but that was the extent of his survey.

In the mid-1980s a more extensive, two-phase archaeological survey was conducted at the site on Bath Creek in advance of an extensive bulkhead to be built along the shoreline.

The Delaware firm contracted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to perform the survey reported that a Late Woodland, or A.D. 800 to 1600, village had been established there and maintained for many years.

“The large area of artifact distribution, high frequency of subsurface features, high percentage of Colington and Cashie wares, and the indication of multiple intrasite processes suggest (a) substantial village. The presence of at least three partially reconstructible ceramic vessels of Colington ware in a single feature (Feature 31) attest to a semi-sedentary occupation. … Synthesized, this data can be interpreted to suggest that the site was inhabited for an extended period of time, either as a multi-seasonal or a permanent settlement.”

A historian with the Department of Cultural Resources wrote the following supporting statement in a 1987 report titled, “A Brief History of the Bath Creek Site:”

“Archaeologists have recently concluded that an undeveloped tract of land on the west side of Bath Creek in Beaufort County may hold a rich potential for more thorough investigations in the future. The presence of ceramic fragments, projectile points, and other artifacts of the late Woodland period indicate that a major Algonquian Indian village may long have existed on the land … There is further possibility that it was one of the several villages visited by the Roanoke colonists and depicted in the drawings of John White.”

The Delaware archaeologists cautioned that the culturally significant prehistoric and historic components of the site could be adversely impacted by the bulkhead project and urged that the site be nominated for placement on the National Register of Historic Places. The bulkhead was built anyway and an early 18th century brick structure was destroyed in the process. The site, arguably one of the most historically important properties in North Carolina, was never nominated. Soon after, interest in it eroded away.

In 2010, the Economic Development Commission of Beaufort County attempted to reinvigorate interest in the Native American town as a way to boost the county’s sagging economic outlook. In a letter from the First Colony Foundation to the Beaufort County EDC executive director, an archaeologist wrote: “This section of land on the western side of Bath Creek is considered by many as the most likely location of the village of Secotan. … Over the years, archaeologists from Haag to Phelps have eliminated most other locations along the northern and southern banks of the Pamlico and its tributaries.”

For a brief time, it looked promising that Secotan might finally be investigated. However, while there was enthusiasm among some people for restarting archaeological work on the west bank of Bath Creek, substantial resistance from other powerful groups led to an abrupt shutdown of the initiative. Secotan, today, remains a cornfield.

As for the only other town painted by John White, North Carolina’s 400th Anniversary between 1984 and 1987 celebrating the Roanoke Voyages sparked a conscientious archaeological effort to find Pomeiooc’s location in Hyde County.

Site tests and excavations by ECU archaeologists at a previously identified cultural site in a field near U.S. 264 in 1985 and 1987 found post holes and artifacts indicating a small, palisaded Native American farmstead dating to the mid-1600s. The site was determined to have been occupied by Machepungo or Mattamuskeet Indians, possible descendants of the Carolina Algonquians.

The report concluded that evidence of the walled town’s location may yet be found in an unexamined forested section of the ridge surrounding Lake Mattamuskeet near where White’s map indicated it would be. But to date, no other efforts to locate Pomeiooc are known to have been made.

In a 2011 publication titled, “The Archaeology of North Carolina: Three Archaeological Symposia,” archaeologist David Phelps was quoted as stating in 1983 “‘somewhat plaintively that, (the) North Carolina Coastal Plain has been the least known archaeological region of the state, received less professional attention, and had until recently witnessed fewer archaeological projects’ than either the Piedmont or Appalachian physiographic region.”

The archaeologists contributing to the publication admitted that not one of the 27 Algonquian villages either painted by White or described by Harriot, most near Albemarle Sound or Chowan River, had been “definitively relocated and investigated archaeologically, though several have been postulated as being contemporary with villages depicted on the 1585 John White map.”

Over the years it seems nearly all of the coastal archaeological efforts, resources, state and private funding and media attention have been directed at finding the “Lost Colony,” which was never painted by John White and likely will never be definitively found, at the detriment of locating evidence of Secotan and Pomeiooc, no less significant sites so masterfully illustrated by the artist. It may even be possible that Aquascogoc could someday be found near Pantego.

What is needed is commitment and courage on the part of the state’s archaeologists to search for these historic and prehistoric North Carolina towns before their locations are inevitably destroyed by development. Not doing so may be as injurious to the Pamlico Algonquians as Amadas’ unfortunate torching of Aquascogoc, or their near extinction caused by European viruses.

Just as the Algonquian towns of Pamlico Sound were unknown lands at the start of Grenville’s circumnavigation in 1585, in some ways, 435 years later, they remain “terra incognita.”

Coastal Review Online is featuring the research, findings and commentary of author Kevin Duffus.

Second of three parts

It happened about 10 weeks before the second of Walter Raleigh’s three expeditions to establish an English colony on the North American continent arrived at Ocracoke Inlet in 1585. The expedition of seven ships was led by Raleigh’s cousin, 43-year-old Sir Richard Grenville aboard his flagship Tiger.

In the middle of the afternoon on April 19 in the Algonquian towns along the Pamlico, the sky grew dark, birds and beasts became eerily silent, and people trembled in fear. A rare hybrid solar eclipse was spreading across North America. The 25-year-old mathematician, expedition scientist, ethnographer and Algonquian translator Thomas Harriot was later told by the Native Americans that the eclipse “unto them appeared very terrible.” The event seemed to portend an ominous sign.

———

Describing the next leg of the exploration of Pamlico Sound after visiting Pomeiooc the journal of the flagship Tiger was succinct: “The 13. (July 13) we passed by water to Aquascogoc.” More than that surely transpired.

The Algonquian town of Aquascogoc, according to the map “La Virginea Pars” by expedition surveyor and artist John White, was located on the east bank of today’s Pungo Creek, a few miles north of Belhaven. The distance from Pomeiooc to Aquascogoc was roughly 50 miles, a lengthy trip in small boats that likely took two days to travel.

As the motley Elizabethan flotilla of Grenville’s London ferry boat, future governor of the Roanoke Island colony Ralph Lane’s Puerto Rican pinnace and the two ships’ boats were rowed or sailed westward, White, Harriot and their assistants began constantly taking soundings and bearings, estimating distances and noting the locations of points of land, bays and islands, and carefully converting the data to sectional sheets or small maps even while the boats pitched and rolled on gentle swells.

It was imperative that the surveyors maintain a constant proportion or scale — not a simple task while underway using 16th century technology. Keeping the paper dry was another challenge and periodic rain showers may have prevented some parts of the shoreline to be accurately recorded. But White’s watercolor rendering of the southern shoreline of today’s Hyde County reflects his best work.

We are able to recognize nearly all of the prominent geographic features the Elizabethans observed 435 years ago. The shape of Long Point appears as the first prominent peninsula passed by the explorers after weighing anchor in Far Creek and rounding Gibbs Shoal.

Wysocking Bay is likely the next major geographic feature they passed and White’s map matches well with today’s charts of the bay framed on the northeast and southwest by Long Point and Benson’s Point. Continuing their southwestward journey, the next prominent feature is Bluff Point. South of the point on White’s map is what seems to be a large island or peninsula connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus.

This is where we encounter what was once a mystery—what lay beneath a small patch of similarly made paper and color palette fixed onto the final “La Virginea Pars” map, presumably by White. The reason for the patch had escaped the scrutiny of the greatest Roanoke Voyages scholars until eight years ago.

This writer had something to do with the discovery when his initial discussions with members of the First Colony Foundation regarding the accuracy of White’s map and its positions of Algonquian towns along the Pamlico eventually led them to contact experts at the British Museum. By examining the map using noninvasive infrared radiation, scientific conservators and curators in London were able to peer beneath the patch and see White’s initial graphite line drawing.

At the time, the greatest public interest (bordering on near hysteria) concerned a second patch that appeared to cover the symbol of a fort and potentially the destination and resettlement of the Lost Colony at the western end of Albemarle Sound. That is not our interest here; ours is why White’s painted patch depicted Bluff Point as a large island—larger, for example, than Great Island to the west that survives to this day.

The British Museum’s infrared reflectogram appears to answer the question. White’s graphite underdrawing seems to show, rather than a large island, an indistinct shape of either a small island or shoal off a more well-defined Bluff Point. The artist, after he had returned to England, may have been confused by data provided by Harriot or a missing sectional chart and then altered the original painting. Nevertheless, what caused White to paint the nonexistent island over the patch will remain a mystery.

The next familiar landmark appearing on White’s map as we and the Elizabethan explorers make our way westward is Great Island, just as it exists today southeast of Swan Quarter.

By the time Grenville’s party reached the lower part of Swan Quarter Bay, they had traveled approximately 25 miles — a full and tiring day in open boats, especially if they were being rowed. It was time for them to find an anchorage for the night. Few places are better for that at the mouth of the Pamlico River than Deep Cove below Judith Island.

For anyone who rides the Swan Quarter ferry to Ocracoke, Judith Island lies just off the ferry’s starboard side soon after departing the terminal.

The similarity between White’s 1585 map of the boot-like shape of land west of Swan Quarter Bay and the present-day complex of Judith Marsh, Judith Island and Swan Quarter Island is unmistakable. Deep Cove would have made an excellent protected anchorage (from waves, not mosquitoes) for the Elizabethans, just as it has on numerous occasions for this writer.

We can speculate that most of the following day, Wednesday, July 14, the explorers encountered poor weather. There was no journal entry for that day and White’s rendering of the Pungo River is badly distorted, indicating that it must have been difficult to take accurate bearings or to even see the shape of the river. White’s Pungo River is too wide and almost looks like a large bay of the Pamlico Sound rather than a southward flowing tributary of the Pamlico River.

Although it is angled northward and not eastward as it should be, the right-hand bend of the upper Pungo appears as an extension of the river pointing toward Lake Mattamuskeet. Other geographic features are more easily recognized. Both Broad Creek and Pantego Creek are depicted on White’s map, as is today’s Jordan Creek in its relative location about halfway down Pungo River on the west bank.

Manteo’s participation at this point is evermore assured because the Englishmen probably would have never found Aquascogoc without him. Neither would have the Roanoke Voyages historian David Quinn, whose analysis of the town’s location places it in the far eastern end of the Pungo River near present-day Scranton.

Comparing White’s underdrawing beneath the watercolor patch, it appears that the artist may have moved the symbol for Aquascogoc farther north on Pantego Creek, although this is only conjecture. The highest elevation of land along the creek, where the town would have been most likely located, is about 0.8 miles east of the present-day town of Pantego or 3.5 miles north of Belhaven.

White seems to have made no drawings or paintings of the town of Aquascogoc or its people unless the images were lost during the Lane colony’s hasty departure from Roanoke Island in June 1586. There are differing opinions as to whether White remained on Roanoke Island with Harriot or returned to England with Grenville in September 1585. Nor do we know how many families lived at Aquascogoc or whether it was palisaded or an open plan. But we do know for certain that they visited the enigmatic town because of what happened two days later.

On June 15, 1585, Grenville’s expedition traveled farther up the Pamlico River to the town of Secotan, the primary objective of their trip. The town was considered the chief settlement of the Secotan nation, which likely included a confederation with the “kings” of Aquascogoc and Pomeiooc. The Secotans may have considered Wococon, or Ocracoke, to be part of their territory, too.

Secotan is historically significant because it is widely accepted that White created at least eight of his most iconic images there. For lack of their own original, site-specific illustrations, many of White’s Secotan paintings and their reproductions today are used in visitor’s centers and museums from Jamestown to Plymouth Rock, and elsewhere, to represent Atlantic coast Native American culture during the contact period.

What is far less agreed upon and far more controversial is where Secotan was located. This is an unsolved mystery that is, arguably, as important as the fate of the Lost Colony because of White’s paintings.

It should not be a mystery at all. Numerous sources of information, as well as physical evidence, point to the west bank of today’s Bath Creek as the probable location of Secotan and not on Pungo River or south of the Pamlico River, as some scholars have suggested.

John White is partly to blame for the confusion. The badly distorted shape of the Pungo River on his “La Virginea Pars” map has caused some historians not personally familiar with the waters to lose their way. Significantly confounding the issue, on the same map White labeled “Secotan” on the south side of the Pamlico River and “Seco” directly across the river on the north side.

First, irrespective of archaeological surveys, let’s rule out Pungo River as the home of Secotan. In 1584 at Roanoke Island, the Native Americans briefed captains Arthur Barlowe and Philip Amadas, who led Raleigh’s first expedition in 1584, of the region’s geography and towns, including the various “kings” who ruled them. “Towards the Sunne set, foure daies journey, is situate a Town called Sequotan,” they explained.

We can deduce that the direction, towards the sunset, was southwest by west along the north shore of Pamlico Sound. A four-day journey by canoe would have been roughly 80 miles, just as it is today. Bath Creek is almost exactly 80 miles from the north end of Roanoke Island.

For the index listing of Secotan village in the book, “A New World,” by British Curator of Drawings Kim Sloan, in parentheses is written, “near Winsteadville, NC?” Winsteadville is a small community at the head of Jordan Creek on the west bank of the Pungo River. This obscure and unexplained reference by Sloan has confused more than one archaeologist. If it took Grenville’s flotilla a full day to travel from Aquascogoc to Secotan, it is unlikely that the latter was located just 8 miles away on the Pungo River.

A more decisive item of evidence is found on a crudely drawn but pivotal sketch map of “Raleigh’s Virginia” believed to have been dispatched in September 1585 with four letters from Ralph Lane at Roanoke Island to Sir Francis Walsingham and his son-in-law in England. Quinn wrote: “These five items (including the sketch map) are all of the greatest interest since they represent original correspondence from the first English settlement in North America.” That ought to be a milestone in the history of the Royal Mail.

The maker of the map is unknown. The technique is not White’s, nor is the handwriting Harriot’s. Since Lane mailed it, it may have been sketched by him or one of his assistants. Quinn calls it the “earliest English map of North America made from direct observation,” and there is no doubt that it was made in the summer of 1585.

The map’s westward orientation and its geography suggests that it was copied by Theodore DeBry for his widely published 1590 engraved map, “Americae Pars.” Quinn observed that the sketch map’s value is that “it contributes several pieces of detail both to the narrative and to the nomenclature and topography of the general (‘La Virginea Pars’) map.”

Of particular interest among those items of detail is that the map locates Secotan on the north side of Pamlico River and on the west bank of a major southward flowing tributary of that river west of Pungo River. No other tributary better fits that description other than Bath Creek. “If the sketch-map of 1585 is taken as the best authority, (Secotan) was near the north bank of the Pamlico River, at, or not far, from the site of Bath,” wrote Quinn in 1955. Other authorities agree.

William Haag, an archaeologist who was contracted by the National Park Service in 1954 to complete a comprehensive cultural survey of the Outer Banks and its neighboring sounds observed that the knowledgeable Native Americans would have located their primary, summer residences on the north side of the river. “The prevailing summer breeze is from the south; thus the north shore is blown free of mosquitoes and the south shore is quieter, more humid, and insect ridden,” Haag wrote in his report.

Unlike Pomeiooc, which is marked on the sketch map as a palisaded town by a series of dots surrounded by a circle, Secotan is shown on the sketch map as an unenclosed town. White’s captivating painting of the town, a half bird’s-eye view of the streetscape, concurs. The artist must have spent quite a few hours composing the image, depicting numerous activities going on at the same time.

At Secotan, the Elizabethans encountered what was essentially a prototypical small American town with close knit family units, a local government, a place of worship, and a cemetery where their beloved ancestors were buried. There were picket-like fences around small garden plots, well-constructed houses with natural air conditioning, and sophisticated agricultural processes featuring rows of sweet corn, kidney beans, squash, peas, melons, pumpkins, sunflowers, and the broad leaves of young tobacco swaying in the summer breeze. The residents had festivals, cookouts, sports, dances, and occasional recitations of their history by village elders (their version of The History Channel).

Given that some measure of White’s and Harriot’s work was propaganda intended to entice future settlers to Raleigh’s Virginia, we can still accept that Secotan was a town of surprising gentility and vibrancy.

In her book, “Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America,” New York University professor Karen Kupperman wrote: “White and Harriot together argued in the most forceful and effective way that the American natives were social beings, possessing all the characteristics necessary to civility; community life and the family structure … all informed by a religious sensibility that honored the human dependence on supernatural forces in the universe.” Kupperman’s characterization is certainly reflected in White’s painting of Secotan.

Unlike the Tiger’s matter-of-fact journal entries for Monday and Tuesday of that week, the visit to Secotan must have been more memorable: “The 15. we came to Secotan and were well intertayned there of the (residents).”

The Elizabethans may have arrived just in time for the Algonquian’s midsummer corn festival. A banquet was likely served to their guests from across the sea featuring smoked fish —“the best in the world,” wrote Barlowe in 1584 — and oysters, perhaps crab, venison, rabbit, toasted hickory nuts, bread from ground sunflower seeds, and, of course, sweet corn cooked in a broth or baked as bread.

The visit to Secotan on Bath Creek also included the wondrous benefits of eastern North Carolina “uppowac” or tobacco. In his 1588 paper, “A Briefe and True Report of the new found land of Virginia,” Harriot wrote: “The uppowoc is of so precious estimation amongst them, that they thinke their gods are marvelously delighted therwith.”

Contrary to popular belief, Raleigh’s Roanoke voyages did not introduce tobacco to England, where it was already in use, but according to Quinn, it was the Algonquian’s smoking pipe that changed English habits. Numerous whole or fragments of late-woodland era smoking pipes have been found along the west bank of Bath Creek over the years.

Wine may have also been featured at the banquet, either provided by the Secotans who served it “nouveau” for lack of means to preserve it, or the Elizabethans who kept it stored in casks. Surely, the party lasted well into the night with the air filled with the smells of woodsmoke, roasting meat and sweet-smelling tobacco.

The numerous fires throughout the town kept burning 24 hours a day were, no doubt, to keep the insects at bay. The Elizabethans were well acquainted with mosquitoes, having spent time in the West Indies before arriving at Ocracoke, but on the Pamlico they might have encountered their first voracious flies. White painted one, describing it as “A dangerous byting flye.” We know what he meant.

When the festivities were over and everyone was exhausted, the English returned to their boats and anchored some distance away in the creek, again not wanting to trust their hosts entirely, who probably offered sleeping accommodations off the ground inside their well-built, bark-covered houses.

On Friday morning, Grenville’s men hoisted their anchors, raised their sails (or deployed their oars) and waved their goodbyes to their gracious hosts in order to continue their tour of the Pamlico.

There was never another meeting of the Elizabethans and the Secotans. One hundred years would pass before Europeans again ventured up the Pamlico River and by then, many of the families of the once hospitable town had long since been lost to measles, smallpox or even the common cold left behind by their English guests. The portentous sign that appeared so very terrible to the Algonquians in the spring of 1585 had come to pass.

Next: North Carolina’s least-known archaeological region 

Coastal Review Online is featuring the research, findings and commentary of author Kevin Duffus.

First of three parts

Pamlico Sound is traversed each day by innumerable people aboard ferries, fishing boats and sailboats.

Most, however, probably don’t consider or are even aware of the intrepid explorers who first circumnavigated the vast estuary for the purposes of creating a map of the region and a visual record of the people who lived there.

It happened this month, 435 years ago, the second of Walter Raleigh’s three expeditions to establish an English colony on the North American continent.

At Ocracoke Inlet on Sunday, July 11, 1585, July 21 on our modern calendar, 60 men aboard four small boats “victualled for eight dayes” cast their lines from their mother ships and headed north to the mainland of today’s Hyde County. What lay ahead for the expedition was mostly unknown, terra incognita, both cartographically and historically. But upon their return from their portentous journey seven days later, cartography and history would be forever changed.

The general facts of the reconnaissance mission may be known to some readers while lesser known but consequential details within this article may come as a surprise to others. Among the more noteworthy achievements of the 1585 expedition is that it produced, according to the leading authority on the subject, “the most careful detailed piece of cartography for any part of North America to be made in the sixteenth century.”

Indeed, there was not another accurate map made of the shoreline of today’s Hyde County between the Pungo River and the Long Shoal River until the charts of the U.S. Coast Survey nearly 265 years later.

Of all the historians and writers who have told this story — mostly as a prelude to the alluring tale of The Lost Colony — none match the monumental academic achievements of the late David Beers Quinn, an Irish historian of “immense industry and erudition” who devoted his scholarly life to the subject of early English trans-Atlantic explorations. This writer had the good fortune to interview Quinn in 1984.

The praise of Quinn may be hardly sufficient. The comprehensive collection of contemporary records and historical analyses of those documents contained in his two volume colossal masterwork, “The Roanoke Voyages 1584-1590,” is extraordinary and unequaled. That is where we safely find the waypoints to retrace the 1585 circumnavigation of Pamlico Sound.

But Quinn, like all historians, was human, and although his mistakes were rare, one concerns his analysis of the location of the major Outer Banks passage through which the 1585 expedition entered Pamlico Sound and commenced their journey, then named Wococon Inlet.

Quinn and other notable historians following his trail have suggested that Wococon was a “now vanished inlet through Portsmouth Island.” However, two maps created in 1585, the “Virginea la Pars” and a more crudely drawn sketch map, depict Wococon Inlet with a conspicuous hook on the island’s southwestern extremity, which compares well with Jonathan Price’s rendering of Ocracoke Island and its inlet in 1795, 210 years later.

Furthermore, it may have been the freshwater well surviving to this day at Ocraocke’s Springer’s Point marked on Edward Moseley’s 1733 map, that attracted the Elizabethans to the inlet in the first place.

The 1585 expedition of seven ships was led by Raleigh’s cousin, 43-year-old Sir Richard Grenville, whose flagship Tiger grounded on the perplexing shallows of Ocracoke Inlet while making its way to a safe anchorage inside the bar.

Even though the accident was termed a “wreck” due to fears that the keel had been irreparably fractured, the badly leaking 160-ton galleon was re-floated, patched up and eventually was returned to England. While the ship’s carpenters turned to their arduous task of careening the ship and making repairs, and other sailors replenished the fleet’s water casks at the old well, Grenville and his officers decided to go on a tour of the adjacent sound.

The record of their itinerary strongly suggests that they knew where they were going. The excursion was provisioned for eight days, indicating that they had a reasonably good idea how far they had to travel.

According to the expedition’s journal, a week earlier Master John Arundell and the Croatoan Manteo had sailed to the mainland on an unspecified mission, likely to inform one or more of the towns of the larger group to follow, but that is only inferred.

Quinn also speculated that it was possible that Raleigh’s first expedition in 1584 led by captains Arthur Barlowe and Philip Amadas, with Manteo’s guidance, had reconnoitered some of the same shoreline of Pamlico Sound based on a remarkable story they were told of a shipwreck, likely Spanish, estimated to have occurred 26 or so years earlier on Wococon.

Native Americans related that “some of the dwellers of Sequotan” who were on Wococon perhaps gathering shells to make wampum, aided the shipwreck survivors. Had the estimated date of 1558 by the Secotans been slightly off, the shipwreck may have been one of the two Spanish “fragattas” lost in a storm off Core Banks during the 1561 expedition of Spanish Florida governor Ángel de Villafañe.

When the four boats departed Ocracoke Inlet, they contained a veritable who’s who of prominent Elizabethan captains, soldiers, scientists and surveyors. Aboard the lead vessel, a London tilt boat or ferry, was the red-haired Grenville beneath an awning to keep him out of the blistering July sun.

Ralph Lane, who would serve as governor of the colony on Roanoke Island in the coming year, rode in a ship’s pinnace of probably 30 feet in length that had been built at Puerto Rico to replace one that sank off Portugal on their way to the New World. Crowded among 20 or so others accompanying Lane was 25-year-old mathematician Thomas Harriot, the expedition scientist, ethnographer and Algonquian translator. Manteo likely sat near Harriot, excited to be triumphantly touring his land after a year in England.

Two smaller ship’s boats rounded out the flotilla, one carrying Capt. Philip Amadas, “admiral of Virginia,” the other including John White, the expedition surveyor and artist. Other scientific members of the party may have included a physician, a miner, and specialists in metallurgy, husbandry, apothecary and alchemy.

Harriot’s and White’s presence had the most lasting impact. Their collaboration produced a vivid visual and narrative record of the journey that rose to the quintessence of Elizabethan culture and science. Amadas’s contribution by the end of the circumnavigation, contrary to the expedition’s explicit instructions to treat the indigenous people of the Pamlico “with all humanitie, courtesie, and freedom so as to win them from paganism,” was no less than a haunting lesson of the capacity of English cruelty and the caprice of 16th-century Christian virtues.

The record does not reveal the weather conditions on that Sunday in July but from our own experience sailing on the Pamlico for many years we know the range of possibilities.

It may have been one of those sweltering “slick cam” days as they still say down on Core Sound, in which case the oarsmen suffered greatly; or the departure may have been delayed to wait for a strengthening afternoon sea breeze out of the southeast that would have sped them along on a starboard reach; or, more often than not in July, a blast furnace of wind out of the southwest may have filled their sails and tossed them across the sound’s notoriously short choppy waves. Summer thunderstorms and black squalls over the course of the week were surely encountered, delaying their progress.

While underway on a steamy day, the officers and the common sailors may not have been distinguishable by their clothing. Most were dressed in baggy, knee-length breeches or canvas Dutch-type slops and a loose-fitting woolen shirt with a wool monmouth cap atop their shaved heads despite the heat, to protect them from the sun.

The familiar accoutrements of a well-dressed Elizabethan nobleman— linen cartwheel ruffs with lace, elaborate doublets, leather jerkins, hose or legging s— were likely left behind, except for maybe Grenville, Lane and Amadas, who dressed in their finest prior to meeting their Algonquian hosts, including donning light corselets and swords.

In the event that the Elizabethans were not cordially welcomed, they also carried aboard the boats weapons, which included light muskets, swords, round or oval shields, long bows, half pikes and battleaxes.

Their first destination was the isolated town of Pomeiooc at the southeastern end of Lake Mattamuskeet, then called the great lake Paquippe. The course there took them about 20 miles across open water to the mainland and then 10 more miles along north shore of the sound, which looked much different than it does now.

Sandy hills and ridgelines later named Pungo Bluffs, probably remnants of an ancient oceanfront, were crowned by towering old growth forests shimmering on the horizon like a mirage from many miles out. Because the expedition journal indicates that they did not arrive at  Pomeiooc until Monday, July 12, they must have spent their first night rafted together and anchored in a cove southwest of the village.

What must that have been like, 60 men crowded cheek by jowl in the small open boats on a relatively unknown shore at the mercy of the weather and fearsome creatures watching them in the dark? Surely they must have felt some apprehension, despite reassurances from Manteo that all would be well.

As they paralleled the mainland, it became Harriot’s and White’s task to triangulate the shoreline and adjacent islands as accurately as possible for a map, the map Quinn called “a landmark in the history of English cartography.”

Stowed aboard the four vessels were their tools of the trade: a cross staff, a sailing compass, an instrument for the variation of the compass, an instrument for the declination of the needle, watch-clocks “which dothe shewe & divide the howers by the minutes,” tables that calculated the trajectory of astronomical bodies, parchment for the production of “marckes” or sectional maps, and writing instruments of ink and lead.

As Quinn observed, when on shore the surveyors and their assistants were constantly attended by men carrying their writing materials, instruments, and plane tables on which Harriot and White drew bearings and distances on “paper royal” to compose their preliminary maps:

“The latitude of every ‘Notatious’ place was to be entered in the journal and on the map. A uniform scale was to be maintained at all costs. Distances of capes, headlands and hills, depth and breadth of inlets and rivers, elevations of land, with the variations in vegetation and land-use, location of springs, occurrence of shell-fish (especially those with pearls), and the various sorts of trees, were all to be entered both in the journal and on the map.”

In other words, the surveyors were thorough. We can closely scrutinize White’s watercolor map, “La Virginea Pars,” and find numerous geographic features that survive to this day, and by doing so we can go where they went 435 years ago.

We begin retracing their route to the town of Pomeiooc, which was located close to the lake and west of a distinctive “Y” shaped bay. That bay is likely the similarly shaped branches of Far Creek and Waupopin Creek near Engelhard. This analysis disagrees with Quinn who thought it was Wysocking Bay where they landed to visit the village.

One hundred and fifty years after White drew them, albeit somewhat exaggerated in size, the same “Y’ shape of the two creeks appears on both James Wimble’s manuscript map of 1733 and his 1738 chart, although he mistakenly places the two creeks north of Long Shoal even though no similarly shaped creeks exist there today.

It was up today’s Far Creek where the Elizabethans rowed or sailed to find the remarkable palisaded town and its people.

White wasted no time once they arrived, based on the product of his labors but unfortunately, we know nothing about the interaction and activities of Grenville, Lane, Amadas, Harriot and the other expedition officials, for the journal simply notes their arrival on July 12. Four illustrations were made by White in the span of a day including an extraordinary bird’s-eye view of 18 structures including individual homes, a temple and longhouses, one of which housed their “king” and his family.

The village was surrounded by a stockade fence, not to protect them from hostile enemies but to discourage the many large predators roaming the countryside including pumas, bears and wolves. Worth noting in the overhead view of the town was a man standing alongside a dog that was judged by Quinn as “the earliest appearance of this animal in an American drawing so far as is known.”

Manteo, no doubt, aided White in selecting and comforting his subjects about what the artist was doing. In addition to drawing a Pomeiooc woman carrying her child on her back, and a well-clothed village elder with hints of gray in his hair, White depicted the wife of the village chief with her 8- to 10-year old daughter, the “king’s” daughter, that reveals the only evidence of the presence or interaction between the English visitors and their host. The girl is holding a doll wearing Elizabethan clothing, perhaps representing Elizabeth I.

Without more information, we can only speculate how the tour of the village and surrounding land might have gone, partly based on similar instances of “foreigners” arriving for the first time at an indigenous village.

The children might have run from the strange-looking, wobbly-walking Elizabethans while the adults stood and stared. Manteo introduced the village “werowance” or chief to the sweaty, overdressed Grenville and his party, while Harriot and his assistants went off to view the great lake nearby. The guests were likely offered some food while both groups spoke pleasantries neither side could understand but nods and smiles were sufficient confirmation of friendship.

By the end of the day, Grenville and his party retired to their boats anchored on Far Creek, preferring to sleep on the water than experience the unknowns on shore. At the first blush of dawn the next morning, they headed west for the long journey to the towns of Aquascogoc and Secotan.

Next: Mapping Pamlico Sound: The Secotan Site

In spring 1942, the nation and its military leaders faced a dire disaster worse than Pearl Harbor.

German U-boats operating within the nation’s territorial waters were sinking Allied merchant vessels at an ever-increasing number and killing an appalling number of helpless noncombatants — more than 5,000 in fewer than six months, including some women and children. The largest concentration of losses to U-boat attacks occurred off the coast of North Carolina. Cape Hatteras was ground zero.

A late-March conference of naval officers formulating plans to implement protective convoys in U.S. waters determined that it would require 31 destroyers and 47 smaller patrol craft. On the day that their report was submitted to Adm. Ernest J. King, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Navy, there were but three destroyers on duty in the Eastern Sea Frontier and only eight other patrol craft.

Meanwhile, at any given time, there were as many as 140 unescorted ships headed northward between the Florida Keys and New York; an equal number of vessels were, at the same time, headed in the opposite direction. It has been estimated that, each day, there were 60 or more ships making their way north or south in the waters immediately off the North Carolina coast.

The protection of so many merchant ships from the onslaughts of what seemed to be phantom German U-boats was a daunting and nearly impossible task. But the inability of each ship’s cargo to reach its destination safely directly impacted the planning and preparations for an Allied invasion of Europe. A solution was imperative.

Lacking a sufficient number of warships to establish large coastal convoys in the first five months of the U-boat peril, naval authorities attempted to shuttle small groups of merchant ships up the coast during daylight in an operation called “Bucket Brigades.” Northbound ships were ordered to stop for the night at anchorages at Jacksonville, Florida, Charleston, South Carolina, the west side of Cape Fear, and the west side of Cape Lookout.

From Cape Lookout, tankers and freighters raced across the deadly 225-mile U-boat gauntlet in the Graveyard of the Atlantic before arriving at the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. Slower merchant ships unable to keep up with the Bucket Brigades were to stop for the night in an artificial offshore harbor established on the southwest side of Cape Hatteras and Diamond Shoals, encircled by a mined anchorage much like the British minefield guarding the Thames estuary.

In the month of May 1942, 2,635 Mark-6 Naval Contact Mines were anchored in place along a 35-mile-long semicircle extending from Diamond Shoals to a point off the beach about 4 miles east of Ocracoke village. Each mine was chained to ride a few feet below the ocean surface. The Mark-6 contained an explosive charge of 300 pounds of TNT that would be triggered by a contact pistol when the mine was bumped by a vessel. The problem was that a mine did not know the difference between an enemy U-boat or an Allied vessel.

On the western perimeter of the minefield, a few miles southeast of Ocracoke village, an opening wide enough for tankers to pass in and out of the protected anchorage led to a designated 36-square-mile box directly south and east of Hatteras Inlet where the ships were to drop anchor for the night.

When an inbound ship approached, a U.S. Coast Guard pilot boat guided the ship through the minefield opening and to the anchorage off Hatteras Inlet. At dawn on the following day, the routine would be repeated in reverse. On paper, the operation seemed simple enough, but plans on paper often don’t take into account the vagaries of weather.

Seventeen days after the Cape Hatteras protected anchorage opened for business, the Standard Oil tanker F.W. Abrams lost contact with its pilot boat while departing in poor visibility and struck a mine. The ship’s captain thought that they had been torpedoed. The anchor was lowered but the ship began to drift in the heavy rain and fog. In less than an hour, two more explosions rocked the ship, finally sinking it.

The captain and crew abandoned the tanker and made it safely to shore at Ocracoke Island. They were certain that they had been relentlessly attacked by a German U-boat. Instead, they had run into three, American-made, Mark-6 contact mines. The Cape Hatteras minefield had claimed its first victim. Two months later, the minefield sank two more Allied vessels and damaged another. The Navy’s minefield was doing the German’s work for them.

During World War I and after, Great Britain devised, tested and installed numerous technologies for anti-submarine detection at many of its strategic ports, harbors and outlying anchorages. One of the more intriguing and highly secret British technologies proved its effectiveness in 1918 — an underwater magnetic indicator loop.

Even when a U-boat’s magnetic field was degaussed, the steel hull continued to emit a small electric current that could be detected by electromagnetic induction via an underwater stationary loop of cable connected to sensing equipment on shore. By such a method in 1918 the British Navy detected the incursion of a German U-boat, UB-116, into the mined anchorage of the naval base at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands.

In support of the Cape Hatteras minefield, the U.S. Navy established in the summer of 1942 a magnetic indicator loop station on Ocracoke Island. The Navy chose a site atop an ancient sand ridge, about halfway between the village and the beach.

The ridge, 30 feet above sea level in places, overlooked a vast and barren tidal flat that separated the island’s beach and the village, but which has long since been covered by dunes and vegetation. The sand ridge provided a relatively high vantage point for the buildings and towers that would be built there; the setting also made the secret station plainly visible to the nearby island residents who were prohibited from venturing beyond the limits of the village during most of the war.

The well-guarded complex at Ocracoke was surrounded by a barbed wire fence and comprised an area of about 11 acres. As many as eight structures linked by wooden walkways and sandy paths were eventually built at the site, including odd-looking towers and peculiar rotating antennas. The Navy referred to the installation as a “loop receiving station.” Ocracokers called it “Loop Shack Hill.”

“They wouldn’t let nobody but a special certain people go into the enclosure out there,” former World War II Coastguardsman Ulysses “Mac” Womac told me in an interview in 2000. Womac was assigned to overnight beach patrols and often passed the station. “They had guards out to where nobody could get up to where they was at. They stood watch out there on the hill. In fact, they lived out there, a few of them did. And they stood watches and listened on earphones for what was offshore. Now, where they had the cable offshore I don’t know. But we saw it on the beach, or I did before they buried it.”

In late May and early June 1942, a Navy net tender from Norfolk laid at least two indicator loop arrays on the ocean bottom beneath the approaches to the entrance of the mined anchorage. The loop arrays were anchored to the bottom at a sufficient distance from the minefield to allow advance warning that a submerged U-boat was approaching the area. Each array consisted of a 1.3-inch-diameter, lead-sheathed, single-core cable that was configured in two rectangular-shaped loops.

At other U.S. Navy indicator loop installations, the average length of a single loop field was 2 to 3 miles; the longest could be up to 6 miles long . The cables forming the two loops were spliced to a tail cable, which connected the array to the receiving station on shore. Tail cables could be many miles long depending on the distance from the receiving station to the location of the indicator loops offshore.

When a vessel, either on the surface or submerged, crossed over the indicator loop array, an induced voltage was produced that was detected on an instrument called a fluxmeter at the receiving station, and the result was recorded on a paper chart. The watchstanders on duty would interpret the electronic signatures on the chart and then use a telescope to determine if a surface vessel was crossing the loop field. If no surface vessel could be seen, it would be assumed that a submarine was approaching, and appropriate action would be taken by patrolling vessels.

At Ocracoke’s loop receiving station, a concrete casemate housed the operations building that contained all the facility’s detection equipment including fluxmeters, chart recorders, communications gear, telescopes and furniture for four men. The Ocracoke station also was equipped with an early version of a microwave surface-search radar system, which was erected on top of the operations building.

Other cutting-edge detection technology included radio sonobuoys and high-frequency radio direction finding, also known as HF/DF or “Huff-Duff.” In addition to the “Huff-Duff” hut at Ocracoke’s loop receiving station, similar HF/DF receiving stations were located at Coast Guard Lifeboat Stations at Cape Lookout and Poyners Hill, which was south of the Currituck Beach Lighthouse.

When the Navy finally got done building, equipping and manning Ocracoke’s top-secret loop receiving station, it was one of the more complex, state-of-the-art defensive installations on the East Coast. But by the time the installation was operational, there were few, if any, U-boats operating off North Carolina’s coast for the station to detect.

The tide turned in the war zone in the western Atlantic when the first, fully escorted coastal convoys began transiting the middle-Atlantic states in mid-May. By then, the skies were patrolled by military and Civil Air Patrol aircraft. Small patrol vessels armed with two-way radios crisscrossed the sea lanes. Shorter periods of darkness also limited the time that German U-boat could safely recharge their batteries on the surface.

Between April and July, four U-boats were sunk by Navy and Coast Guard warships and an Army A-29 bomber off the Outer Banks. Germany began redeploying its U-boats to the North Atlantic and Mediterranean theaters in mid-July 1942. For the remainder of the year, 160 coastal convoys were conducted between Galveston and New York. During that time, only three Allied merchant vessels were sunk, and one was damaged by U-boats while the ships were shepherded in convoy.

Ocracoke’s Loop Shack made no contribution whatsoever to the effort to defeat German U-boats in the war zone off North Carolina’s coast. Not once at Loop Shack Hill did the fluxmeter’s paper plotter record the signature of an enemy U-boat, nor did the Navy’s surface search radar system register a U-boat’s blip. It succeeded, however, as a valuable experiment and training facility — the lessons learned were later applied to detection of Soviet submarines during the Cold War years.

A year after it was established, the Cape Hatteras minefield was swept by the Navy to remove the Mark-6 mines. Fewer than half of the mines moored in 1942 were recovered. Overall, it has been estimated that the U.S. Navy placed 20,000 mines in United States waters for defensive purposes during the war. Not a single German U-boat or Axis vessel was ever sunk by the mines, but three Allied vessels were destroyed by the Cape Hatteras minefield. And even to this day, a few of the rusty, barnacle encrusted contact mines wash up on a North Carolina beach.

North Carolina’s first lighthouse, established at Cape Fear on Dec. 23, 1794, was not always easy for mariners to see. The lighthouse has been elusive for historians, as well.

What were the lighthouse’s dimensions? Who was the builder? What was the source of its light?

Author of the seminal book, “North Carolina Lighthouses,” historian David Stick wrote that records fell short of providing many answers. But the 223-year-old document that lay before me at the National Archives contained many of the answers to Stick’s questions and it guided me toward many more revelations about one of America’s most unique lighthouses.

By the second half of the 18th century, the Cape Fear River had become North Carolina’s principal port of entry. Yet, while a dozen lighthouses were marking entrances to harbors on the American coast, none were in North Carolina. Consequently, the North Carolina General Assembly commissioned its first lighthouse in 1784 to be built under the authority of the Commissioners for the Regulation of Pilotage and Navigation of Cape Fear River.

The conventional style of the day, octagonal lighthouses built of stone or brick tapering from the ground like a pyramid, was based on the architectural design of New York harbor’s first lighthouse established in 1764 at Sandy Hook, New Jersey.

Design specifications for Sandy Hook were shared with other Colonial governments, including Delaware, which used the plans to build Cape Henlopen Lighthouse. As I read the document at the National Archives, however, I discovered that the 1794 Cape Fear Lighthouse was not built according to the Sandy Hook prototype but featured a distinctive design shared exclusively by only one other American sentinel.

The document was a handwritten advertisement sent in January 1793 to several customs collectors, mostly in Northeast states, seeking a qualified building superintendent to complete the unfinished lighthouse on “Cape Fear Island.”

Construction of the tower had begun a few years earlier. When the structure had reached an elevation of 46 feet, the unidentified builder died. By then, the responsibility for construction and management of the fledgling nation’s lighthouses had been transferred from the states to the Federal Treasury Department and its Commissioner of Revenue Tench Coxe.

Coxe’s five-page job posting was quite detailed regarding the Cape Fear Lighthouse’s design specifications and the necessary requirements for completing the tower and lantern, including a description of the work that had already been done:

“It may be well that you should be further informed that the building is an octagon of 32 feet diameter … that it is on a foundation four feet deep, that it is four feet six inches thick for 20 feet 3 inches from the earth, to which height the walls are perpendicular, and that it then assumes the form of a Pyramid, which it will retain through its remaining height of about 64 feet to the place whereon the lantern will be laid.”

A cursory reading of the document might overlook the remarkable statement that the lowest 20-foot-high section of the Cape Fear Lighthouse was “perpendicular,” or vertical, above which the tower’s pyramidal shape commenced. The uncommon form — a box-like base, or first story of 20 vertical feet — was shared by only one other octagonal American lighthouse at that time, the 1768 Charleston Lighthouse that was depicted in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in April 1861, a few months before it was destroyed by Confederate saboteurs.

For many years, historians believed that there was only one extant illustration of the state’s first lighthouse at Cape Fear, a woodcut derived from an original hand-drawn sketch, titled “A View of a Waterspout Seen at the Entrance of Cape Fear River July 24, 1806.” The woodcut was published in January 1812 in an early American weekly magazine titled, The Port Folio. Dominating the center of the sketch, beneath a darkly ominous sky, is a waterspout churning the waters of the river. A ship in full sail heading south appears to be escaping the watery vortex.

And on the left side of the illustration is North Carolina’s first lighthouse adjacent to a two-story keeper’s house. Detailed as it was, the drawing was unintentionally deceiving. From their precarious vantage point in the middle of the river with a waterspout bearing down on them, the artist could not see what lay behind the cedar trees and wax myrtle bushes that were hiding the unique first story of the lighthouse.

The artist’s original sketch has survived and is owned by Old Baldy Foundation.

There is a conspicuous difference between the original drawing and its published reproduction. The sculptor of the woodcut chose to include only four windows on a single side of the lighthouse when, in fact, there were four windows on four faces of the eight-sided building. According to Coxe’s advertisement, “eight windows of 24 panes” were still required to be framed by a carpenter after the eight lower windows on four sides of the unfinished 46-feet of tower were already installed.

This proved to be an important clue for my research into the architectural design and pedigree of the Cape Fear Lighthouse.

Most significantly, the window configuration on the original hand-drawn sketch of Cape Fear Lighthouse is identical to the windows appearing on the Charleston Lighthouse published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, hinting that it too must have had a total of 16 windows. Moreover, no octagonal lighthouse built during either the American colonial period (1716-1791) or the early Federal period (1792-1817) is known to have been built with columns of windows on four faces of the tower except for the Cape Fear Lighthouse and the Charleston Lighthouse depicted in 1861.

The architecturally proportional windows of the two towers were more aesthetic than utilitarian, more typical of a church steeple than a lighthouse.

Additional evidence supporting the uncharacteristic design of the Cape Fear Lighthouse and its similarity to Charleston’s lighthouse depicted in 1861 can be found on a map created in the late-1790s by surveyors Jonathan Price and John Strother titled, “A Map of Cape Fear and its Vicinity from the Frying Pan Shoals to Wilmington.” Praised for its high degree of accuracy, the map depicts the Cape Fear Lighthouse located on the extreme west point of Bald Head Island and standing atop its box-like first story.

All three items of evidence, the original “Waterspout” drawing, the Revenue Commissioner’s 1793 description, and the 1798 Price/Strother map, provide sufficient evidence to conclude that the Cape Fear Lighthouse completed in 1794, and the Charleston Lighthouse illustrated in 1861 were similar, if not identical in their designs. Further, the two structures, neighbors 116 nautical miles apart, were unlike any other American lighthouse of their time. This analysis leads to an obvious question: Were the two lighthouses designed by the same architect?

Perhaps they were not just neighbors, but sisters.

The Charleston Lighthouse, completed in 1768 was the South’s first lighthouse and, at 96 feet to the roof of the dome, America’s tallest tower at the time it was built. When the Cape Fear Lighthouse was topped with its 15-foot iron lantern and dome, it became the nation’s tallest.

Samuel Cardy, a builder from Dublin, Ireland, was the lighthouse’s architect and construction superintendent. Cardy was highly regarded for having built Charleston’s St. Michael’s Church, the plans of which were based on St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church in London.

The crowning glory of St. Michael’s Church, and Charleston too, is the church’s magnificent 185-foot-tall steeple, an octagonal tower built atop a massive square platform. As one gazes at the imposing steeple of St. Michael’s Church, it becomes apparent that Cardy naturally would have turned to the familiar architectural form for the Charleston Lighthouse, a design that stood apart from all other American lighthouses. It also seems logical that the Cape Fear River Commissioners would have sought the skills, experience and design plans of the builders of neighboring Charleston’s lighthouse.

Even though the identity of the initial builder of the Cape Fear Lighthouse remains a mystery, it is difficult to imagine that the first 46 feet of the sentinel, with its unusual square first story, would have been built by someone without firsthand knowledge of Samuel Cardy’s distinctive Charleston tower based on a famous church steeple. Nevertheless, North Carolina’s first lighthouse was doomed even before its construction began.

Perhaps for cost savings, the lighthouse was not built atop a stone foundation like its older sibling at Charleston. Instead, its square first story of 4 1/2-foot thick walls rested upon a shallow brick foundation 4 feet below grade. In comparison, the first Cape Hatteras Lighthouse’s granite foundation in 1798 was laid 13 feet below grade.

This unconventional footing worried the Commissioner of Revenue in Philadelphia who wrote, “The firmness of the ground on which the building stands does not appear to be sufficiently ascertained,” and “the shallowness of the foundation and thinness of the walls excites much doubt” about the tower’s stability. But despite these concerns—and the opinions of some historians—the lighthouse’s defects did not cause its demise. In fact, it stood and functioned quite proudly for 21 years.

Many writers have claimed that the lighthouse was built too close to the banks of the Cape Fear River, which ultimately undermined the tower. This is not true — Wilmington’s commissioners and the lighthouse’s builders would not have made such a careless error. Instead, it was a mostly imperceptible process that had been taking place over 30 years that eventually endangered the structure.

The opening of New Inlet to the north of Cape Fear, which was caused by a hurricane in 1761, had produced a dramatic and inexorable change to the hydrology of the mouth of the Cape Fear River. Erosion accelerated and began to rapidly wear away the shoreline in the direction of the Cape Fear Lighthouse’s shallow foundation. By the summer of 1813, the collector of customs at Wilmington reluctantly ordered the lighthouse dismantled so that its iron and glass “bird-cage” lantern and tower bricks — not just a few but as many as 600,000 bricks — could be recycled to build a new lighthouse in a more stable location.

That tower, completed four years later about a mile to the northeast, is the present day Bald Head Lighthouse.