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PREFACE
At latitude 35 north, longitude 76 west, twenty-five miles off the coast of North Carolina, a slender ribbon of sand bisects sky and sea. On its leeward side is a great salt marsh of rippling black needlerush and spartina grass, interspersed with tidal creeks and hummocks of salt cedar. Here snowy egrets, fiddler crabs, and diamondback terrapins flourish. The island’s eastward shore is bounded by the Atlantic Ocean. Here waves crash on long empty beaches, bottlenose dolphins leap and dive near the shore, and on the horizon humpback whales migrate. Hidden beneath the water’s surface lie treacherous shoals and the skeletons of ships which wrecked upon them. Sailors know this stretch as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Eastern Woodland Indians once roamed the island, fishing and collecting clams and crabs. Notorious pirates anchored off her banks and came ashore to camp during the 1700s, and English settlers built Pilot Town to oversee the busy inlet to the south. Now, in 1990, it is home to 700 fishermen and their families, living in a small village at the southwest end called Ocracoke. Teach’s Hole lies just west of the island. Here Blackbeard lost his ship and his head to Lt. Robert Maynard of the British Royal Navy in 1718. Here, in 1984, a tiny unpublicized drama unfolded on a sailboat anchored there. A woman’s voice was heard radioing for help from a small sailing sloop, and the call was answered by the U.S. Coast Guard. They found the captain, a stash of drugs, and signs of a struggle, but the young woman had disappeared. The captain of the boat was arrested, but based on lack of evidence, released. The case was never solved, and it was forgotten on the little island.    |
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