This Robinson Crusoe looking structure was located upon the low land near the sound, while bleak, sharp-pointed, treeless and grassless sandhills, blown into shape by the winds, arose in the background, and cut off a view of the ocean, which, judging from the low, melancholy moaning coming over the dunes, was in a sad mood.
The canoe was hauled into the bushes and tied securely for fear a deceptive tide might bear it away.The provisions, blankets, &c., were moved into the grass hut, which needed repairing.The holes in the south wall were soon thatched, and a bed easily prepared from the rushes of the marsh.It mattered not that they were wet, for a piece of painted canvas was spread over them, and the inviting couch finished.
As fresh water can usually be obtained on all these low beaches by digging two or three feet into the sand, I looked for a large clam-shell, and my search being rewarded, I was soon engaged in digging a well near the cabin.
Upon looking up from my work a curious sight met my gaze.In some mysterious way every sharp-pointed sand-hill had been covered by a black object, which swayed about and nodded up and down in a strange manner.As Iwatched the development of this startling phenomenon, the nodding, black objects grew in size until the head, body, and four legs of a horse were clearly cut against the sky.A little later every crest was surmounted by the comical figure of a marsh-tacky.Then a few sheep came out of the hollows among the hills and browsed on the coarse grass near the cabin, as though they felt the loneliness of their situation so far removed from mankind.With the marsh-ponies, the sheep, the wild-fowls of the sound, and the sighing sea for companions, the night passed away.
The bright moonlight roused me at five o'clock in the morning, and I pushed off again in shoal water on an ebb-tide, experiencing much difficulty in dragging the canoe over shallow places until deep water was entered, when the row to Ocracoke became an agreeable one.The landing-place at Ocracoke, not far from the lighthouse, was reached at noon, and the people gathered to see the paper boat, having been notified of my proximity by fishermen.
The women here can pull a pretty good stroke, and frequently assist their husbands in the fisheries.These old dames ridiculed the idea of having a boat so small and light as the canoe.
One old lady laid aside her pipe and snuff-paddle (snuff-rubbing is a time-honored institution in the south), and roughly grasping the bow of the craft, lifted it high in the air, then, glancing at the fine model, she lowered it slowly to the ground, exclaiming, "I reckon I wouldn't risk my life acrossing a creek in her."These people told me that the yacht Julia had stopped there to make inquiries for me, and had departed for Newbern.
It was more than a mile from the landing to Ocracoke Inlet, and a mile and three quarters across it to the beach.A straight course from the landing to the village of Portsmouth, on the lower side of the inlet, was a distance of five miles, and not one of the hardy watermen, who thumped the sides of my boat with their hard fists to ascertain its strength, believed that Icould cross the sound to the other village without rolling over.One kind-hearted oysterman offered to carry myself and boat to Portsmouth, but as the day was calm, I rowed away on the five-mile stretch amid doleful prognostications, such as: "That feller will make a coffin for hisself out of that yere gimcrack of an egg-shell.
It's all a man's life is wurth to go in her," &c.
While approaching the low Portsmouth shore of the sound, flocks of Canada geese flew within pistol-shot of my head.A man in a dug-out canoe told me that the gunners of the village had reared from the egg a flock of wild geese which now aggregated some seven or eight hundred birds, and that these now flying about were used to decoy their wild relatives.
Near the beach a sandy hill had been the place of sepulture for the inhabitants of other generations, but for years past the tidal current had been cutting the shore away until coffin after coffin with its contents had been washed into the sound.Captain Isaac S.Jennings, of Ocean County, New Jersey, had described this spot to me as follows:
"I landed at Portsmouth and examined this curious burial-ground.Here by the water were the remains of the fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters of the people of the village so near at hand; yet these dismal relics of their ancestors were allowed to be stolen away piecemeal by the encroaching ocean.While I gazed sadly upon the strata of coffins protruding from the banks, shining objects like jewels seemed to be sparkling from between the cracks of their fractured sides; and as I tore away the rotten wood, rows of toads were discovered sitting in solemn council, their bright eyes peering from among the debris of bones and decomposed substances."Portsmouth Island is nearly eight miles long.
Whalebone Inlet is at its lower end, but is too shallow to be of any service to commerce.
Hatteras and Ocracoke inlets admit sea-going vessels.It is thirty-eight miles from Whalebone Inlet to Cape Lookout, which projects like a wedge into the sea nearly three miles from the mainland, and there is not another passage through the narrow beach in all that distance that is of any use to the mariner.Following the trend of the coast for eleven miles from the point of Cape Lookout, there is an inlet, but, from the character of its channel and its shallowness, it is not of much value.
