Shifting Sands of Outer Bank Life : Islanders Trace Ancestry Back to Shipwrecked Colonists

“I love this island so much. I start getting homesick the minute the ferryboat leaves the dock and heads toward the mainland,” sighed Annie Lou Gaskins, 53.

She stood on the stern of the North Carolina state ferry with her husband Earl, 55, as the boat began its voyage across Pamlico Sound. Both their families have lived on 16-mile-long, 1/2- to 2-mile-wide Ocracoke Island since the 1700s.

They are descendants of British immigrants on their way to the Colonies who shipwrecked on Ocracoke and never left. Their speech, mannerisms and customs are a throwback to 18th-Century Britain.

Annie Lou and Earl Gaskins boarded the ferry with other Ocracokers for the two-hour, 15-minute, 23-mile sailing from their Outer Banks home to spend the day shopping in Beaufort.

From Carova on the Virginia line to Calabash at the South Carolina border a narrow band of sandy islands called the Outer Banks stretches along the entire length of North Carolina’s 320-mile coast.

Averaging only 20 feet above sea level, some of the islands are as close as 200 yards from the mainland. Others, like Hatteras, are as far as 30 miles out to sea. The islands average a half mile to a mile in width.

Cut Off From Mainstream

Dramatic change has come to the North Carolina islands in the last few decades. Through World War II Outer Bankers for the most part were isolated and cut off from mainstream America.

Islanders seldom, if ever, visited the mainland. They lived in tiny remote villages. Outer Bankers fished. They manned Coast Guard lighthouses and Coast Guard search-and-rescue stations dotting the long narrow island chain, like famed candy-cane-striped Cape Hatteras Lighthouse (built in 1870), at 208 feet, tallest in the U.S., and Chicamacomico Lifesaving Station at Rodanthe, dating back to 1874.

After World War II islanders began building roads; prior to that they drove their vehicles on beaches. Bridges were constructed linking the Outer Banks to the mainland. Private and state ferry systems were inaugurated. In the last 10 years developers have had a field day.

Several islands are now solid condos, mile after mile of stilted (for hurricane protection), unpainted beach homes. A 125-mile stretch, however, has been spared and set aside as two national seashores. Cape Hatteras National Seashore, 70 miles long, was dedicated in 1958; 55-mile-long Cape Lookout was established as America’s bicentennial national seashore in 1976.

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Within Cape Hatteras National Seashore are eight old Outer Banks fishing villages including Ocracoke, population 626, where most residents--like Annie Lou and Earl Gaskins--trace their ancestry on the island to a time earlier than the Revolutionary War.

Isolated pockets of old-line Outer Bankers with their quaint Elizabethan speech can still be found in a number of fishing villages on other islands up and down the North Carolina coast.

“Our forefathers were yeoman-class people, the lower class who escaped from England to seek a better life in the Colonies,” explained Walter C. Willis, 64, chief engineer on the Ocracoke Ferry. Willis is a very common name among Outer Bankers.

“When I was a boy my great-grandmother told me how her people washed ashore on a beach at Portsmouth Island in the early 1700s. My daddy was born in 1883 at Diamond City, then a thriving whaling town on Portsmouth Island. By the turn of the century the town was gone. Hurricanes drove the people off the island. Hurricanes destroyed Diamond City.

“A few years ago a hurricane came through and uprooted all the graves at what had been Diamond City. A bunch of us went to the island, collected the bones and skeletons and reburied them. Hurricanes sweep through and create new inlets in the Outer Banks and close existing ones. Sand hills are always shifting. Wind and sea are forever changing the shape and character of the Outer Banks.”

“Good God, Ocracokers have a strange way of speaking. If you’ve not been here long, you can’t catch what they’re saying,” said Coast Guard Bosun’s Mate 2nd Ernest Rackliff, 30, of Rockland, Me., stationed at Ocracoke Island. On the other hand, Rackliff’s Maine accent seems equally strange to Ocracokers.

“It takes a hearty sort to live year round on these islands. In winter nor’easters blow something fierce,” said Rackliff. “Homes are belted with 60- to 90-m.p.h. winds. The island floods from breakers crashing over its shores in bad storms.”

Rackliff and coast guardsmen at Ocracoke are kept busy in winter rescuing mariners in distress. Waters of the Outer Banks, called the Graveyard of the Atlantic, are littered with the skeletons of more than 600 ships lost in treacherous seas. During World War II the Outer Banks picked up another nickname, Torpedo Junction, because of the heavy loss of Allied merchant ships and tankers sunk by Nazi U-boats.

British Property

Ocracoke coast guardsmen have an unusual chore. Each day they raise and lower the British Flag over a tiny island cemetery. The graveyard is property deeded by the U.S. to the British government.

The British Cemetery on Ocracoke has only four graves, the final resting place of four British sailors washed ashore after their trawler HMS Bedfordshire was sunk by a German sub May 11, 1942. A plaque on the white cemetery picket fence carries poet Rupert Brooke’s verse:

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is forever England . . .

U.S. coast guardsmen are caretakers of the British Cemetery, painting its white picket fence, pulling weeds. Each May 11, British Navy officers come to Ocracoke for a memorial service.

How did the island get its peculiar name, Gaskins is asked over the raucous bleating of blackhead gulls trailing in the ferry’s wake. “In the early days someone heard a rooster. He said this is the island where o-cock-crow. It stuck. O-cock-crow became Ocracoke,” said Gaskins.

Ocracoke is the island where in 1718 British Navy officer Robert Maynard beheaded infamous Edward (Blackbeard) Teach and hung the pirate’s head from his ship’s rigging for all to see. He threw his body overboard. Legend has it Blackbeard’s headless body swam seven times around the British man-of-war before sinking.

Gaskins was in the Coast Guard as was his father and grandfather, a time-honored Outer Banks tradition. He was also in the Army during the Korean War. “My mates in the Army had a hard time understanding me speak. They thought I was a Limey. They thought I was in the wrong Army,” the Ocracoker Outer Banker said with a laugh.

For 300 years fishing has been the mainstay of Outer Bankers. Hundreds of island boats fish in Pamlico, Albermarle, Currituck, Crotan, Core and other sounds separating the islands from the mainland, as well as in the rich waters of the Atlantic.

“Fishing has always been decent to Outer Bankers,” said gill netter, “Bluewater Bob” Standing, 45, at Hatteras Village. “New York controls our market. Fish is trucked from the islands daily to Fulton’s Fish Market in the Big Apple.”

Shrimpers, scallopers, oystermen, lobstermen, clammers, crabbers ply the waters up and down the coast. Fishermen catch flounder, mullet, shad, herring, bluefish, spot, snapper, croaker, perch, King mackerel, trout, wahoo and much, much more.

Some Outer Bankers go down to sea in big 75- and 80-footers, some in sharpies, skiffs and smaller boats. And, some like Robert Willis, 53, of Gloucester never leave the beach. They wade up to their waists in bays and dig into the sandy bottom, clamming.

Willis spends four hours a day tossing as many as 1,000 clams into his No. 3 washtub, which floats inside an inner tube. “I’ve been doing this since I was knee-high to a grasshopper,” said Willis between digs. “I get 8 cents a clam. That’s $80 on a good day. I’ve only dug 250 so far today. That’s only $20 worth. But I’m just getting my feet wet.”

At Davis half of the 400 residents are named Davis and trace their ancestry to an English sailor who shipwrecked there in 1713. “We have 40 shrimp boats here. We shrimp at night. You can’t catch the type of shrimp we have during daylight hours,” said Grady Davis, 40, one of the Davis shrimpers.

On the beach at Corolla on Bodie Island Buddy Ponton, 42, his brother, Andy, 40, and California transplant Gregg Westner, 34, who graduated from Monrovia High and then came here “to escape the crowds and cruddy air,” use two trucks on the beach to haul in a 400-yard net they set hours earlier. They figure a 1,000- to 2,000-pound catch is a good haul.

In Hatteras Village, lifelong fisherman Ernal Foster, 75, has a building full of nets he has been using since the 1920s, shrimp nets, bluefish nets, all kinds of nets, many obsolete. “See these cotton nets? Nobody uses cotton anymore. Times have changed,” said Foster.

“The Outer Bank way of life, our Elizabethan speech is fast disappearing. Our culture is dying, being replaced by yuppies, condos and miniature golf courses.

“People are buying property on these islands like crazy. They come from Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio. They’re paving up the islands. A person can hardly breathe.

“We had something precious here once. It will be gone forever in another generation. Outer Bankers are being swallowed up by outsiders.”

One group of 37 Outer Bankers on Bodie Island at Carova live in a remote slice of sand bar without roads. They reach their homes by driving on the beach, the highway of nearly all Outer Bankers until pavement came during the ‘50s and ‘60s.

“We like it here because of the way it is. No roads. Quiet. Isolated. Sand and sea. Wild Spanish mustangs running free--descendants of horses running free in the Outer Banks for 300 years,” said Judy White, 39.

Traditionally Carovans have always had closer ties to Virginia than to North Carolina. They get their electricity from Virginia. They work, go to school, go to the doctor, shop and attend church in Virginia. It is only 12 miles to Virginia Beach, Va., from their homes; 140 miles to Virginia Beach by way of North Carolina.

In recent years the federal government established the Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge along three and a half miles of beach from the Virginia line northward. The government permits only the 37 Outer Bankers from Carova to drive their vehicles along the beach through the refuge, in a limited fashion. Each person is allowed only one round-trip a day, with a midnight to 5 a.m. curfew.

Soft-spoken Ernie Bowden, 60, is a fourth generation rancher who runs 100 head of cattle at Carova. He is also a Currituck County commissioner. He received more than 30 citations over a period of several months for driving the beach after curfew or more than one round-trip a day. He was fined $1,100 or a 50-day jail sentence.

“I could easily have paid the fine but I served the 50 days earlier this year as a matter of principle. I conducted my county commissioner business from behind bars except for voting which I was unable to do,” Bowden said. “My family and other residents here have used that stretch of beach going back to at least 1840.

“The government is unrealistic. The few in our settlement have never caused any environmental damage in the past 150 years, nor are they causing any now. This is just another nail in the coffin of old time Outer Bankers.”