Four rotational harvest cultch sites in the Pamlico Sound are to remain open until March 31, unless it’s deemed necessary to close these 10-acre sites sooner, the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Marine Fisheries announced Friday.

The sites are part of the N.C. Oyster Fishery Management Plan’s amendment 5, “which balances harvest opportunities with sustainability by allowing harvest on managed cultch planting sites while protecting oyster habitat in other areas of the Pamlico Sound,” the division said. Cultch sites are oyster reefs the planted in places with the right environmental conditions.

The division rotates which cultch sites are open to mechanical harvest to provide continued opportunities later in the season while supporting the division’s “extensive cultch planting program and long-term management goals for the resource.”

The following sites are open from sunrise to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday, in accordance with existing gear, tagging and size limit requirements, and are subject to daily harvest limits of adjacent areas as outlined in a proclamation:

• Up to 15 bushels a day in Turnagain Bay no. 1 in the Neuse River management area.
• Up to 10 bushels a day in Jones Bay No. 1 in the Neuse River management aArea.
• Up to 15 bushels in Crab Hole No. 2 in the Northern Dare management area.
• Up to 15 bushels a day in Swan Quarter No. 2 in the Pamlico River management area.

These sites are marked with buoys and orange flags. Coordinates for the sites are in the press release.

The division reminded commercial fishermen and the public that mechanical oyster harvest seasons were closed:

• Jan 9 in the bays of the Neuse River, Pamlico River and northern Hyde management areas.
• Jan. 16 in the open waters of the Pamlico River and Neuse River areas.
• Jan. 30 in the northern Hyde area.

For more information the state’s oyster management plan, visit the division’s website.

The mechanical oyster harvest season has been extended in portions of Pamlico Sound.

The extension, which began Monday, is a result of “adaptive management measures that included collaboration with stakeholders,” according to a North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries release.

“The Division’s annual mid-season sampling of the mechanical oyster harvest areas showed the numbers of legal sized oysters in several management areas of the Pamlico Sound met the management thresholds established in Amendment 5 to extend the season,” the release states.

That amendment in the North Carolina Eastern Oyster Fishery Management Plan includes a provision that links mechanical oyster harvest management in the Pamlico Sound to the state’s cultch planting efforts, where season length is based on pre- and mid-season sampling of oyster resources.

Commercial fishermen helped the division identify sampling sites.

The division is maintaining closures in Deep-Water Oyster Recovery Areas designated to protect sensitive habitat.

Select rotational harvest cultch sites identified in Amendment 5 remain open for the entirety of the mechanical harvest season through March 31, 2026.

Guest Commentary

To stimulate discussion and debate, Coastal Review welcomes differing viewpoints on topical coastal issues. Morty Gaskill is a member of the North Carolina Coastal Federation Board of Directors. The nonprofit advocacy organization publishes Coastal Review, which remains editorially independent.

In 1976, a North Carolina Sea Grant newsletter sounded the alarm: large-scale land drainage was wiping out wetlands that protect our coastal fisheries. Fishermen saw their livelihoods at risk and 3,000 of them pleaded for action.

“We, the undersigned, being commercial and sport fishermen who use the creeks, rivers, and bays adjacent to Pamlico Sound and the waters of Pamlico Sound, petition the Marine Fisheries Commission and state officials as follows: … to investigate the effect of changing salinity in said waters upon the economy of Pamlico Drainage areas and to initiate proper controls to insure the continued health of commercial and sport fishing in this area.”

They saw it coming. But there was hope — state and federal leaders acted. For decades, farming, forestry, development, and fisheries co-existed under federal and state wetland safeguards — rules that carefully balanced economic growth and environmental protection. These safeguards didn’t create unbearable hardships; they provided stability for all.

Yet here we are again, nearly 50 years later, facing the same crisis — not just for our fisheries, but for our homes, businesses, and communities. Given the changing economic and environmental conditions of many coastal communities across North Carolina, it could not come at a worse time.

This time, the rollback of wetland protections isn’t coming from local drainage operations. It’s happening due to recent federal and state government actions. The Supreme Court’s Sackett v. EPA decision has dramatically narrowed the definition of federally protected wetlands. The North Carolina General Assembly followed suit, choosing to adopt the weaker federal standard instead of maintaining the stronger state level protections that had been in place for years. And now, under new leadership, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is further diluting the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule, stripping even more protections from wetlands and streams that feed our coastal estuaries.

The consequences? More wetlands drained. More freshwater rushing unchecked into saltwater nurseries. More flooding. More property damage.

Costly gamble

History has already shown us what happens when we fail to protect our wetlands. In 1976, Rose Bay fisherman Troy W. Mayo spoke out as catches dwindled.

“Twenty-five years ago, I owned a 26-foot shad boat. We used to go out in Rose Bay, two people, for five or six hours and we’d catch 35 to 40 tubs of oysters—that was two men pulling by hand,” said Mayo. “Today you go out in this same area with a power winder and all modern equipment, and I’d be surprised if you catch 10 tubs of oysters.”

Scientists confirmed what fishermen already knew. “Salinity is a major ingredient for survival in the estuaries”; reported the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries. Preston Pate, who studied juvenile shrimp in Rose Bay, found that freshwater intrusion “definitely disrupted the salinity of small creeks in the area. The result was a smaller shrimp harvest by fishermen.”

But wetland loss isn’t just bad for fisheries. Wetlands absorb floodwaters, buffer storm surges, and keep pollution out of our waterways. Every acre lost means more homes and businesses at risk.

In North Carolina, our coastal communities have already been battered by hurricanes, rising insurance costs, rising property taxes, lack of affordable housing, and an aging drainage infrastructure that can’t keep up with heavier rains. Weakening wetland protections only adds fuel to the fire. It shifts costs onto property owners, local governments, and taxpayers — many of whom will be left paying for flood damage that could have been prevented.

Commonsense approach to conservation

Those lessons from the 1970s helped shape policies that kept North Carolina’s wetlands intact for decades. But now, history is repeating itself. The rollback of WOTUS protections and the state’s decision to weaken its own rules mean more wetlands will be drained, increasing flooding, pollution, and economic losses.

This shouldn’t be a divisive political issue. Wetland protections aren’t just about environmental policy — they’re about practical economics, public safety, and community well-being. They help prevent costly flood damage, safeguard private property, and support the resilience of coastal economies that depend on fisheries, tourism, and clean water.

Jim Brown of the Division of Marine Fisheries put it best nearly 50 years ago:

“We love beans and beef, and we have a serious need to extend agricultural operations. At the same time, we dearly love shrimp and oysters. There exists a very serious need for imposing compatibility between the two. Can it be done? That’s the question. Or do we just keep plodding along with our fingers crossed?”

If we ignore history, we aren’t just crossing our fingers — we are guaranteeing a grim future for our coastal communities. The fishermen of Rose Bay warned us decades ago. Will we listen this time? Or will we, once again, pay the price for failing to protect the wetlands that sustain our way of life?

Opinions expressed by the authors are not necessarily those of Coastal Review or our publisher, the North Carolina Coastal Federation. See our guidelines for submitting guest columns.

With the beginning of spring, state transportation officials have added ferry runs between Ocracoke and the mainland terminals at Cedar Island and Swan Quarter.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation Ferry Division will increase the number of daily trips across Pamlico Sound from four to six, beginning this week.

The following is the schedule Tuesday through May 19:

• Ocracoke to Cedar Island: 7:30 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4:30 p.m.
• Cedar Island to Ocracoke: 7:30 a.m., 10:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.
• Ocracoke to Swan Quarter: 7 a.m., 10 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.
• Swan Quarter to Ocracoke: 10 a.m., 1:30 p.m., and 4:30 p.m.

Reservations for Pamlico Sound ferry routes can be made up to 90 days in advance at ncferry.org or by calling 1-800-BY-FERRY.

For real-time text or email notifications on schedule adjustments and other ferry information, sign up for the Ferry Information Notification System at www.ncdot.gov/fins.

SWAN QUARTER — Turns out that those million big, invasive fish that were supposed to be swimming in Lake Mattamuskeet didn’t show up, as contractors conducting a mass removal project that began last year reevaluate the estimated population of common carp in the state’s largest natural freshwater lake.

“What we found is we’re not finding the carp numbers in the lake that we thought were there,” Kendall Smith, refuge manager at Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge, told the Lake Mattamuskeet Watershed Restoration Plan Core Stakeholder Team at a recent meeting.

“So far we have not detected any aggregations of fish. We are finding concentration, places where you find more fish than others, but nothing that would be considered an aggregation,” he said.

Smith explained that the refuge will continue to work with the contractor during the year to review other techniques, assess the issues with the carp’s habits and reproduction, and determine the next approach.

“We’re learning a lot about their movements, confirming whether or not they do activate in the wintertime or early spring,” Smith continued.

But reduction of carp, aggressive bottom feeders that are blamed for much of the lake’s turbidity, is just one of the multiple challenges being tackled. The team, made up of folks with local, state and federal expertise, including representatives from governments, nonprofits and landowners, is proving to be as resilient and adaptive as the lake itself.

“Like anything worthwhile, it’s the hard stuff you’ve got to pay attention to,” local farmer and former refuge biologist Kelly Davis told Coastal Review, “because the easy stuff works itself out, right?”

A member of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, Davis, along with her late husband Blythe, for decades farmed 2,000 acres of farmland in Hyde County, of which about 150 acres drain into Lake Mattamuskeet.

In her observation, the lake’s biggest issue in restoring the submerged aquatic vegetation, or SAV, is the haziness of the water, to which the carp contribute by churning up the lake bottom.

“Whatever’s killing the grass,’ she said, “it’s sedimentation. It’s cloudy waters.”

 Often referred to as a jewel of Hyde County, Lake Mattamuskeet, the centerpiece of the refuge, is 6 miles wide, 18 miles long and averages 2 feet deep.

The 40,000-acre lake, expansive and often shimmering, is famously photogenic. Serene cypress swamps along its border could be described convincingly as habitat for elves and gnomes.

But its beauty belies its environmental vulnerability. It is situated on low land, surrounded by pocosin forests and rich farmlands, intersected by gated canals that drain water, sediment and nutrients into the lake.

In addition to nearby rivers, the vast Pamlico Sound, to the lake ecosystem’s benefit and detriment, contributes some of its marine life and waters, whether pushed in by wind-driven tides or flooding. 

Since the 1990s, the submerged aquatic vegetation in the lake had gradually then suddenly disappeared, depriving the hundreds of thousands of waterfowl along the Atlantic Flyway that had stopped over for food and shelter.

Once Hyde County’s community hub, the lake, the refuge and the long-closed Mattamuskeet Lodge, which the county plans to restore and reopen, is still supporting hunting, fishing and farming activities. And ducks, swans and geese still alight at Mattamuskeet, but now mostly at the seasonal duck impoundments created around the lake.

Since 2017, the stakeholder team has been focused on solutions to the lake’s water quality problems, including loss of SAV and persistent algal blooms, as well as flooding and drainage of the surrounding land.

Guidance for the work has been provided by a watershed restoration plan facilitated by the North Carolina Coastal Federation, in partnership with Hyde County, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission. The Coastal Federation is the publisher of Coastal Review, an independent online newspaper that covers coastal issues in North Carolina.

Despite uncertainty with staffing and funding concerns related to recent cuts in the federal government, work at the lake and surrounding land is ongoing and planned for upcoming months, according to a discussion during the Jan. 30 team meeting in the Hyde County Government Complex.

Five projects, funded by a $16.86 million Regional Conservation Partnership Program grant awarded to the North Carolina Coastal Federation, are designed to enhance water quality within the Lake Mattamuskeet watershed.

Project planned are improvements in the Fairfield Drainage District including installing a pump station to reduce drainage into the lake and enhance crops, restoring 1,000 acres of wetlands on converted agricultural land, constructing a 4,506-linear foot living shoreline to protect a Natural Resources Conservation Service dike in Swan Quarter and other critical infrastructure, facilitating agricultural best management practices to mitigate discharge of agricultural runoff into the lake, and outreach to aquaculture producers in an effort to boost participation in oyster restoration.

The Coastal Federation is currently working to finalize a partnership agreement with the Conservation Service, according to the federation’s coastal advocate Alyson Flynn, the meeting’s moderator. She also said that the federation has contracted with consultant Jonathan Hinkle to assist in the design and modeling of the large-scale restoration projects.

Part of the work, which has a four-year timeline, with a potential 1-year extension, involves diverting, pumping and draining water on the land in a way that would avoid adding sediment or nutrients to the lake, a hydrology challenge to engineer and a problem when there may be divergent goals. Drainage improvements also include cleaning out major drainage canals.

 “We all agree that the lake is in poor health, and we want to help fix it, but what that looks like seem to change,” Flynn said in an interview, referring to the proposed Fairfield project. “And so, yes, by diverting that fresh water up into the north, we’re hoping that the lake water will naturally filter out through that designed wetland before it gets to the Intracoastal Waterway in the north, with the assistance of pumps.”

Davis, who attended the stakeholders meeting informally as an area landowner, said that water is affected by changes in sea level and by wind tide, and there’s no choice but to work with the conditions, whatever their whims.  

“There will be times where some of that water movement is hampered until the wind shifts and blows the sound back out, but that’s part of water management in Hyde County, or really on the peninsula,” Davis said. “Whether the water body is the Pungo River, the Intracoastal Waterway, the Pamlico Sound, or Lake Mattamuskeet, the whole idea is to try to get the sediment trapped somewhere before it hits that water. And as the water slowly move through wetlands, the slower you can move the water, the more time it has for the sediment to fall out, and the more what you’re sending to the water bodies is mostly just water.”

What is important, she added, is that all the projects’ stakeholders are engaged and involved — and patient.

“They’re big projects, but they’re also projects that should have decades of value. The projects don’t have to be perfect,” she said, adding that every challenge that is addressed at the time makes a difference. “Because the needs are now, and they will be in the near term and the long term, and the wind still blows the sound out.”

Transportation officials are adding more round trips to the Cedar Island-Ocracoke and Swan Quarter-Ocracoke ferry schedules.  

The North Carolina Department of Transportation announced Monday that the schedule will be the following starting Tuesday:   

• Cedar Island to Ocracoke: 7:30 a.m., 10:30 a.m., 4:30 p.m.
• Ocracoke to Cedar Island: 7:30 a.m., 1 p.m., 4:30 p.m.
• Swan Quarter to Ocracoke: 10 a.m., 1:30 p.m., 4:30 p.m.
• Ocracoke to Swan Quarter: 7 a.m., 10 a.m., 1:30 p.m.

The schedule for all of the North Carolina state ferries can be found on the NCDOT website.

Officials recommend making reservations during the spring. Travelers can make reservations online or on the phone at 1-800-BY-FERRY.  

For real-time text or email updates on weather or mechanical delays, sign up for the Ferry Information Notification System at www.ncdot.gov/fins.

Coastal Review features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast.

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Note from the author: I have written this as kind of an online history exhibit. The story starts with a short introduction, then features more than 40 annotated photographs and other images illustrating the last decades of an ancient swamp forest that was once located on the North Carolina coast. 

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For quite some time, I have been collecting historical photographs, maps, and manuscripts that document the lumber boomtowns and logging camps of the Pungo River and its hinterlands in the late 19th century and the early part of the 20th century.

After the Civil War, lumber companies bought thousands of square miles of forestlands on the North Carolina coast. As if out of nowhere, scores of lumber mill towns sprang up virtually overnight (only to vanish, most of them, when the forest was gone).

The lumber companies reshaped the land, our most important towns, and even some of our most remote islands.

Logging camps seemed to be everywhere. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles of railroads were built to move logging machinery into even the most remote swamp forests, to haul logs to mills, and to carry lumber after it was milled to northern seaports.

Canals were built to drain swamp forests. Lumber barges and schooners crowded local waterways.

For the sake of building America, coastal forests that had stood for centuries, and sometimes millennia, vanished.

I do not know to what I can compare that part of North Carolina’s coastal history. It was a frontier world, often almost lawless, dangerous, destructive, and, for some, liberating, all at once.

Thousands of people left farms and fishing boats and their old lives to make a go of it in the mills and logwoods.

And they came from all over, not just from local towns and villages, but Appalachian hollows, Great Lakes logging camps, and New York City tenement houses.

They included men and women with the scars of slavery still on their backs, Outer Banks fishing families, and immigrants fresh from Ellis Island, many of them speaking barely a word of English — all made their way to the lumber mill towns and logging camps.

In this collection of historical images today, I am focusing on the lumber boom in just one corner of the North Carolina coast, the Pungo and the forests within about 15 miles of its shores.

But I hope that by so doing, we can at least get a glimpse of the size and scale of the lumber boom throughout the North Carolina coast, what it was like for the people who lived through it, and how it transformed our communities, as well as our land and waters.

Rising in the central part of Washington County, in the remnants of what local people today often call the “Big Swamp,” the Pungo, an Algonquin Indian word, is only 35 miles long.

In its northernmost reaches, the river flows today through a canal that was dug in the 1950s to drain the farmlands west of Pungo Lake and what is now the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.

But then the river grows wild again. It meanders south, passing along breathtakingly beautiful cane brakes and marshlands until it opens up into a broad bay, an estuary really, that eventually folds itself into the Pamlico River and the Pamlico Sound.

Today it is a quiet, peaceful place. Belhaven, the only town on the river, has a population of less than 1,500. Pantego (another Algonquin name), the only town on any of the river’s tributaries, has maybe a few more than 200 residents.

It is a place of rural byways and little crossroads: when you leave Belhaven, you can go 25 miles in any direction — east, west, north, or south — and never hit a stoplight.

But as you will see here, the Pungo was once a very different place.

As you look through these old photographs and yellowed maps, please know that I am, as people sometimes say, a “lifetime learner.” I would always welcome hearing from anyone who might know more about any of these images.

In studying the Pungo’s lumber boom, one thing is very clear to me though: whatever other stories I tell, anything I write will also be an elegy. It just has to be.

The Pungo River was once the heart of one of America’s great natural wonders. When you left the river’s shores, you entered a vast wilderness, a swamp forest that covered hundreds of square miles and was so large and so foreboding that it had long been a refuge for the local Algonquin people, fugitive slaves, and other outcasts.

For those who care about our natural heritage, it was a marvel: the East Dismal Swamp, as I am going to call it,  was home to ancient and majestic groves of bald cypress, some of the country’s largest stands of Atlantic white cedar (juniper), and pocosin wetlands of a size and grandeur found in few other places on Earth.

But especially between 1880 and 1920, the logging companies and land developers did not just log the Pungo’s old-growth forests: they erased them.

Using railroads and new kinds of machinery, they logged even the most remote corners of the East Dismal. Then, especially in the pocosins, they dug great canals and vast networks of ditches to drain the land. When the peat soils dried out, they then burned what was left of the forest and the peat beds again and again.

They did that until the East Dismal Swamp — or whatever you want to call that great swamp wilderness — was gone.

If you visit the site of the East Dismal today, you will find only a broad, open plain and seeming endless farm fields, stretching, in many places almost treeless, as far as the eye can see.

You might think that you were in Kansas or Nebraska, if it were not for the miles and miles of canals and ditches.

History is for me, when all is said and done, about remembrance and recalling the ancestors.

And through them, coming to know ourselves.

But there are also times when I think that we should remember lost places, out of respect for them and maybe for our own good, too. I think that this is one of those times.

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Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

Ferries taking passengers between Cedar Island, Swan Quarter and Ocracoke are on an alternate schedule as of Monday due to critical shoaling issues in the ferry channel just outside of Ocracoke’s Silver Lake Harbor.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation’s Ferry Division announced Monday the following schedule change:

• Ocracoke to Cedar Island: 7:30 a.m., 1 p.m.
• Cedar Island to Ocracoke: 10:30 a.m., 4:30 p.m.
• Ocracoke to Swan Quarter: 7 a.m., 1:30 p.m.
• ​​​Swan Quarter to Ocracoke: 10 a.m., 4:30 p.m.

The Army Corps of Engineers’ contractor Cottrell Dredging is to use the Dredge Lexington in the Bigfoot Slough channel to clear the shoaling, but dredging operations are dependent on weather and tides.

Once water depths in the ferry channel return to acceptable levels, the Ferry Division plans to resume its regular schedule on both routes.

In Pamlico Sound early Tuesday afternoon, near Cedar Island National Wildlife Refuge in Down East Carteret County, two excavators at each end of a barge strategically placed the day’s load of 700 tons of limestone marl and crushed concrete into the water.

They are building the new Cedar Island Oyster Sanctuary. The three-phase project, currently in phase 2, is the most recent for the North Carolina Coastal Federation and the state Division of Marine Fisheries to build up the oyster population in Pamlico Sound. The Coastal Federation publishes Coastal Review. 

The nonprofit organization and the state agency, along with contractor Stevens Towing, which has an office in North Carolina, have partnered since 2009 to build about 110 acres of oyster sanctuaries, which are large-scale oyster restoration reefs that provide oyster larvae that reseed the wild population and cultch-planted areas.

A handful of division officials, federation staff, members of the media and Sen. Norm Sanderson, R-Pamlico, rode out Tuesday to the Cedar Island Oyster Sanctuary construction site to see how the material is deployed to create what looks like ridges underwater for oysters to grow on and spawn.

This was the first trip for Sanderson to see how the sanctuaries are built.

“It’s pretty awesome,” he told Coastal Review on the ride back to South River, “to be that close and see how simple it is but how affective it is.” 

He said initiatives like the oyster sanctuaries are important to him because he has a heart for commercial fishermen, and always has. 

“I know that they’re in a bad place right now, and I don’t see this industry as something that can save them, but we can help give them options,” he said, adding this work benefits not only the fishing industry, but also the environment and the state’s economy and tourism. “There’s just a lot of positives about it.”

Expected to be about 75 acres once complete, the Cedar Island sanctuary is the newest in the Sen. Jean Preston Oyster Sanctuary Network in Pamlico Sound.

Now in its fourth edition, the “Oyster Restoration and Protection Plan for North Carolina: A Blueprint for Action,” which details strategies for oyster protection, restoration, harvest and education, set a goal in 2008 for 500 acres of protected sanctuary by 2025 in the network named after the senator from Carteret County who died in 2013. To date, there are 15 sanctuaries, according to the division, with Cedar Island being the newest and will contribute to the 500-acre goal. 

The division’s sanctuary biologist, Bennett Paradis, told the group on the way to the site that division staff had been busy all summer checking progress. A crew dives the sanctuaries and brings material up to the boat. Then, they count and measure oyster density to get an idea of what the population structure looks like. The larger oysters are older, and if there’s a lot of larger oysters, then he said they know it’s a thriving population.

Erin Fleckenstein, coastal scientist with the Coastal Federation, said during the trip out to the site that researchers have found that the oyster sanctuaries are successful. The sanctuaries make up 6% of all the potential oyster reef in Pamlico Sound and contribute 20% of the population. “It’s only a 6% footprint, but it’s 20% of the whole population, and then they’re contributing 25% of all the oyster babies that are floating around in the sound.”

Federation Executive Director Todd Miller told Coastal Review that the science shows that the sanctuary plays a vital role in sustaining healthy oyster populations in the sound and the coastal economy.

“This large construction project employs local marine contractors, barge operators, truck drivers, boat crews, and rock miners — and is an important economic driver in eastern North Carolina both during construction but also in sustaining our marine fisheries and tourism economies,” Miller said, adding that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and the North Carolina General Assembly support the project. 

Jordan Byrum is the division’s artificial reef program coordinator who oversees the oyster sanctuary program.

He said during a brief presentation while heading to the sanctuary site that earlier this year, 18,000 tons of rock was stockpiled at the division’s South River site and about a third of it is left to be deployed for this phase. There have been between 20 and 25 deployments so far this year. 

About 20 acres of the Cedar Island sanctuary were completed last summer during the first phase. For Phase 2 this year, contractors have been moving material since spring from a division site in South River to the sanctuary. The same progress is expected this year, around 20 acres, totaling around 40 to 45 acres completed. He said that he expects the Cedar Island sanctuary to take another year or year and a half to be complete.

“We should wrap up year two at Cedar Island in a couple more weeks,” Byrum said in a follow-up email Friday. “That will bring us up to about 320 acres of habitat in oyster sanctuaries.”

All the limestone marl and granite for this project was purchased from North Carolina companies, Byrum said. The material is trucked to staging sites by a Vanceboro towing company, including the site in South River where Stevens Towing collects material for the Cedar Island sanctuary. 

Byrum explained to the group Tuesday that the Coastal Federation had applied for a NOAA grant that would help meet the goal of 500 acres of protected oyster sanctuary in Pamlico Sound. “We’ve put together a plan to basically create two new sanctuaries,” he said, as well as finish out some of the undeveloped areas on a handful of other sanctuaries, with the ultimate goal to meet the 500 acres of oyster sanctuary.

After next year, then three more years of construction, they’ll meet the 500 acres of sanctuary goal, Byrum said.

To put that in perspective, he said, this year 18,000 tons of rock was used. Over the next three years, the plan is to use about 60,000 tons each year, for a total of 180,000.

NOAA began supporting the Coastal Federation’s large-scale oyster sanctuary work in 2009 with a $5 million American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant and has provided more than $12 million since for oyster restoration efforts in the state, Christine Van Dyck, federation assistant director, told Coastal Review.

The federal agency also contributed funding to the North Carolina Oyster Blueprint, monitoring by N.C. State University’s Center for Marine Sciences and Technology, or CMAST, and adaptive management by the project team of the federation, Division of Marine Fisheries, the contractors and the researchers, Van Dyck said.

“We are currently on year two of our most recent NOAA partnership, and are applying to their Transformational Habitat Restoration and Coastal Resilience Grants this fall,“ in partnership with the division and CMAST for $15 million to complete the 500-acre Jean Preston Oyster Sanctuary in Pamlico Sound, Van Dyck said. 

The state has provided millions in matching funds through the partnership, she added. 

After several weeks of adjusted schedules and a dredge project just outside the Ocracoke-Silver Lake Terminal to alleviate shoaling, ferries that cross the Pamlico Sound to Ocracoke resumed full summer schedules Friday.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ dredge Merritt began work June 17 in Bigfoot Slough. Shoaling in that area made the ferry channel too shallow to safely operate the division’s largest vessels. The dredge project took about two weeks, state Department of Transportation’s Ferry Division officials said.

The following is the full summer schedule:

• Cedar Island-Ocracoke: 8 a.m., 10 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4:30 p.m.
• Ocracoke-Cedar Island: 7:30 a.m., 10 a.m., 1 p.m. and 5:30 p.m.
• Swan Quarter-Ocracoke: 7 a.m., 10 a.m., 2 p.m. and 4:30 p.m.
• Ocracoke-Swan Quarter: 7 a.m., 11 a.m., 12:45 p.m. and 3:45 p.m.

​Officials highly recommended travelers make reservations during the busy summer season either online at www.ncferry.org, or by phone at 1-800-BY-FERRY.

Real-time updates on weather or mechanical delays on the Cedar Island and Swan Quarter routes can be found on the Twitter feed @NCFerryPamSound.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation’s Ferry Division oversees the ferry system’s seven routes and 21 ferries.

Weather packing wind gusts up to 30 mph has made travel unsafe in the Pamlico Sound, forcing North Carolina Department of Transportation to cancel ferry departures on Friday to Ocracoke Island from Swan Quarter and Cedar Island.

In addition, state ferry schedules could change this weekend due to a strong storm with heavy rain and winds that is forecast for eastern North Carolina, NCDOT officials said Friday.

The following departures between Ocracoke and Swan Quarter and Ocracoke and Cedar Island have been canceled for Friday:

• Ocracoke-Swan Quarter: 10 a.m., 1:30 p.m., 4:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.
• Ocracoke-Cedar Island: 4 p.m. and 4:30 p.m.

Ferry schedules will resume when it’s safe to do so.

Travelers wishing to use a ferry should stay tuned to NCDOT on social media for updates.

Pamlico Sound ferry routes between the mainland and Ocracoke returned to a full schedule Wednesday after being reduced to two runs for most of this month because of shoaling in the ferry channel outside Ocracoke Harbor.

A test run with the M/V Swan Quarter Tuesday showed that the Army Corps of Engineers’ dredging efforts opened ferry channel depths and widths in Bigfoot Slough, allowing safe passage for all of the state’s ferries, officials with the N.C. Department of Transportation’s Ferry Division said Tuesday.

Ferries between the mainland and Ocracoke will continue to run on a reduced schedule until Monday.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation’s Ferry Division extended the altered schedule on Pamlico Sound between Cedar Island, Swan Quarter and Ocracoke through Monday while the Army Corps of Engineers continues 24-hour dredging to combat shoaling issues in the ferry channel just outside Ocracoke’s Silver Lake Harbor.

Shoaling occurs when sand and sediment fill into a ferry channel, making water depths too shallow and the channel too narrow for safe operation of the ferry system’s largest vessels.

The Corps has two dredges, Murden and Merritt, working together in Bigfoot Slough channel to perform 24-hour dredging. On Monday, the Ferry Division will make a test run in the channel with its largest vessel, the M/V Swan Quarter. If water depths and channel widths are at acceptable levels, the ferry division will resume its regular schedule on both routes Tuesday, according to NCDOT.

The schedule was first reduced from three to two ferry runs per day March 26 and again April 1, then April 5. The ferry was suspended completely from April 8 to April 12, all due to shoaling in the ferry channel just outside of Ocracoke’s Silver Lake Harbor. Two ferry runs resumed April 13.

For up-to-the-minute information on schedule changes on the Cedar Island and Swan Quarter routes, please follow @NCFerryPamSound​ on Twitter.

With the return of the M/V Silver Lake from its required dry dock period, the North Carolina Ferry Division was able to resume Sunday a two-boat schedule on its routes between Cedar Island, Ocracoke and Swan Quarter.

Because of shoaling issues in the ferry channel outside of Ocracoke’s Silver Lake Harbor, daily service will be reduced by one trip each way on the Pamlico Sound between Ocracoke and both Cedar Island and Swan Quarter until further notice.

The state Department of Transportation’s Ferry Division announced Wednesday the following schedule that will start Thursday:

• Cedar Island to Ocracoke: 10:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.
• Ocracoke to Cedar Island:  7:30 a.m. and 1 p.m.
• Swan Quarter to Ocracoke:  10 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.
• Ocracoke to Swan Quarter:  7 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.

Reservation holders whose trips are affected by the change will be notified by email or phone.

The latest survey by the Army Corps of Engineers shows water depths in Bigfoot Slough near Ocracoke as low as 8 feet, which means the ferry system’s two largest sound-class vessels, the Swan Quarter and the Sea Level, cannot cross the area safely.

The ferry channel in Bigfoot Slough is a federally maintained channel, meaning that any dredging that occurs must be performed by the Army Corps of Engineers. The Ferry Division has notified the Corps of the critical need for dredging in the area, according to NCDOT.

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

OCRACOKE – The North Carolina Department of Transportation Ferry Division announced Sunday an alternate schedule for the Pamlico Sound Ferry due to the current emergency restrictions in place for visiting for Ocracoke Island.

The alternate schedule for its Cedar Island-Ocracoke and Swan Quarter-Ocracoke routes began Monday.

The schedule will be as follows:

• Swan Quarter to Ocracoke: 7 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.
• Ocracoke to Swan Quarter: 7 a.m. and 3:30 p.m.
• Cedar Island to Ocracoke: 7 a.m. and 4 p.m.
• Ocracoke to Cedar Island: 7:30 a.m. and 4 p.m.

Visitors are reminded that Hyde County’s mandatory evacuation order for visitors remains in effect. Only residents, property owners, emergency workers, vendors and critical infrastructure personnel with Ocracoke re-entry documentation will be allowed onto Ocracoke-bound ferries. Law enforcement officers will be on hand at ferry terminals to enforce the re-entry restrictions.

The routes will resume their regular summer schedules when the emergency orders are lifted.

Photo of the Week: Feb. 23 – March 1, 2015

Photograph by Randi Machovec of Waves, N.C.

Outer Banks artist Randi Machovec’s hands were frozen as she snapped this shot last week of her pier on the Pamlico Sound in Waves, a small town on Hatteras Island. “A rare sight for us islanders,” Machovec wrote. “I think I’ll stay inside.”

First of two parts

ENGELHARD — This summer ground will be broken in northeast Hyde County for a restoration project conceived by unlikely partners—a farmer and environmentalists.

The farmer hails from a community of avid outdoorsmen and women in one of the most conservative areas of the country, a group that doesn’t generally cotton to environmentalists.

Working alongside him will be restoration staff members from the N.C. Coastal Federation. They all hope to put a whole landscape back in order.

When the last shovelfuls of dense black peat are put into modified dikes and sloughs on Lux Farms, much of the agricultural drainage from 1,400 acres will be removed from Pamlico Sound and redirected into its natural flow through wetlands toward the north.

As future phases move forward, the farmer will be able to store drainage water in irrigation ponds for use in dry times. The installation of flood gates will help protect farm soils from poisonous salt water as the world’s seas rise.

And improvements in water quality in Pamlico Sound will enable conservationists to build low-profile oyster reefs offshore, enhancing local fisheries and helping provide a buffer from storm surges.

It Began With an Oyster

A researcher in 1907 drops a buoy on an experimental oyster reef in Pamlico Sound. Photo: Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, Washington University Libraries.

The story of the landscape-scale restoration work in Hyde County begins, as many tales do, with a remarkably small player: the humble oyster.

In 2004, the federation received a grant from the N.C. Clean Water Management Trust Fund to write a coast-wide blueprint for resuscitating the state’s badly depleted oyster population. The federation targeted oysters for a reason: These energetic filter feeders remove copious amounts of pollution from estuaries. In a few hours a single oyster can clean a 10-gallon tank of muddy water.

But the state’s once-great oyster reefs have been decimated by a combination of overfishing, disease and habitat destruction. The grant required the federation to convene a group of experts to figure out how the oyster population could be brought back.

The federation established work groups on the north, central and southern coasts. The northern group’s assignment was complicated by the sheer size of the region’s waters, including Pamlico Sound.

Picture a dozen scientists, conservationists and fisheries biologists in a room, all talking about the research they’ve done on oysters and trying to figure out what more is needed. This writer was there and was impressed by the brain power. Trouble was, no one seemed to have a game plan for moving forward.

Previous work by researchers, the Nature Conservancy and the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries had found that oyster larvae, or spat, would attach to chunks of limestone stacked in underwater piles. Limestone reefs were being built to replace historic oyster rocks that had been covered by sediment or destroyed by oyster dredges.

Building rock piles in the sound was expensive, and oyster spat must depend on currents to carry them to suitable habitat. Unless new reefs were built in places where currents would deposit spat, the work would be wasted.

But how could the group figure out the seasonal track of subsurface currents in Pamlico Sound? Such detailed flow studies had never been done.

An answer came not from the academic brain trust but from an Ocracoke waterman named Gene Ballance, who had painstakingly reconstructed maps of oyster reefs drawn in the 1880s drawn by Navy researcher Francis Winslow. Ballance is an Ocracoke native with thick glasses, a wide, friendly grin and an abiding love for oysters. He views the fate of the oyster and the commercial fishing industry as intertwined, and he is not willing to let go of either one.

His reconstruction of the Winslow maps showed a necklace of oyster reefs off the Hyde County mainland. If currents had carried oyster spat to those locations in the 1880s, it was likely they would still do so.

Gene Ballance

What’s more, the historic reefs lay in a region that had been shown by a Nature Conservancy study to have some of the highest biodiversity in southeast U.S. waters. New oyster reefs would provide habitat for other estuarine creatures—as well as knocking down storm waves that were causing severe erosion along the Hyde mainland.

There was just one problem. Stormwater from agricultural fields carried sediment, bacteria and plumes of tannic, overly fresh water into the sound just off Hyde County, ruining the waters for oysters.

A ‘Natural Partnership’

Wilson Daughtry and his wife, Debby, own Alligator River Growers. He is known in Hyde County as the go-to man for onions. In a county of soybean, corn and cotton fields, the Daughtries have made a name for themselves growing high-value crops like broccoli and the sweet onions that thrive in the black peat soils. Besides farming his own land, Wilson manages the adjacent Lux Farms property for several partners.

The federation in 2005 convened a group to look for wetland restoration projects that could help clean up the local waters for oyster restoration. Daughtry was one of the farmers invited to attend. The goal of the group was to find sites where water from ditches and canals could be diverted into wetlands, removing some of the runoff that poured into Pamlico Sound.

Daughtry and Mac Gibbs, director of the county’s agricultural extension service, had been collaborating on ideas for what were called tail water projects, in which drainage could be held in low-lying farm fields instead of being pumped to the sound.  The water could be used for irrigation, saving money on pumping expense. “When we heard that the Coastal Federation was interested in holding back water to improve the sound for oysters,” Gibbs said, “it seemed like a natural partnership.”

The federation had something the farmers lacked: a working knowledge of how to write grants and experience with hydrologic restoration at North River Farms in Carteret County.

Daughtry is a respected farmer with a sense of humor. One afternoon when the federation staff stopped by his farm office to chat (a folksy custom that’s become an art form in Hyde County), he casually pulled out an infrared satellite image of Lux Farms. “Take a look at that,” he said.

The image showed a wide swath of red running through the middle of the farm—low, wet land, most of it grown up in the unusual bog known as pocosin. An excited expression spread across the face of Christine Miller, an assistant director at the federation. “Is that—is that an old slough going through the middle of the farm?” she asked.

Wilson rubbed his chin. “Some people say it is.”

The image showed that water from the western end of Lux Farms had historically drained north toward what is now the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. If the slough could be restored, much of Lux Farm’s drainage could be removed from Pamlico Sound.

They were looking at a project the size of which had seldom been done—and that, they knew, had the potential to become a national model for restoration.

Tuesday: A plan takes shape