Stock Raising and Agriculture

Stock Raising and Agriculture

Virtually all commentators on the history of the Outer Banks agree that early settlers migrated down from the Chesapeake area in search of marsh and island areas for raising stock. When they arrived is unclear; almost certainly they were there by 1700, and probably earlier in the Currituck area south of the Virginia line.⁵ As economic enterprises tend to go on the southern Banks, stock raising continued for decades. David Stick quotes an “unidentified reporter” from the turn of the nineteenth century who noted that “the Banks are justly valued for their advantages in raising stock . . . in considerable numbers without the least expense or trouble . . . more than that of marketing.” Indeed a major object of the British invasion of Ocracoke and Portsmouth during the War of 1812 was to confiscate hundreds of easily available cattle and sheep.⁶

As the decades passed, however, stock raising seems to have declined markedly in importance. In his study of barrier island ecology, Paul Godfrey notes that the area around Portsmouth was denuded by overgrazing as early as 1810, and at length became overgrazed beyond its ability to repair itself.⁷

A keen early observer of agriculture and stock raising around Portsmouth was Edmund Ruffin, who published his often-cited Agricultural, Geological, and Descriptive Sketches of Lower North Carolina in 1861. Ruffin noted that the lands between Ocracoke and Beaufort harbor, though owned privately, were “held in common use,” offering vast open grazing lands, but that the cattle, horses and sheep that were to be seen were “obtaining a poor subsistence indeed.” Nevertheless, he observed, “the rearing of horses is a very profitable investment for the small amount of capital required,” so that there were hundreds of horses “of the dwarfish native breed” on the Banks south of Portsmouth. Twice a year, he reported, there was a festival-like general penning and branding of the young colts.⁸

With regard to agriculture – which some residents hoped would offer other modest economic possibilities, the news was not good from the town’s earliest years. A traveler passing through in 1783 reported seeing only “small gardens,” and about twenty-five years later another traveler commented that livestock seemed overabundant, while “the soil is not used for agricultural purposes, more than in Gardens & the raising of a few sweet potatoes.” All fresh fruit had to be imported because overwashing salt water made it impossible to grow fruit trees.⁹

A half-century later, Ruffin observed dismissively that the landscape offered only “moderate accumulations of sand . . . [which] make a wretchedly poor and very sandy soil, on which . . . some worthless loblolly pines . . . can grow, and where the inhabitants, (if any) may improve for, and cultivate some few garden vegetables. No grain, or other field culture is attempted south of Ocracoke inlet.”¹⁰

Thus during the early years of settlement on the southern Banks, two of what appeared to be the small array of economic options for residents – agriculture and stock raising – mirrored each other disappointingly. A question many a resident no doubt asked was, which will pan out? Which might we be able to depend on? The disappointing answer was – neither. Ruffin’s “wretchedly poor” soil wouldn’t grow much of consequence, and the livestock quickly overgrazed what vegetation managed to grow at all.

From a longer historical perspective, the latter-day romanticizing of the “wild horses” of the southern Banks confuses and obscures this history. “The Outer Banks of North Carolina is one of very few places in America,” one tourism web site informs,

where wild horses still roam free, stubbornly surviving in this once remote coastal environment. Descended from Spanish stock which arrived over 400 years ago, these hardy, tenacious horses have lived here since the earliest explorers and shipwrecks. In previous centuries there were thousands of these horses roaming the full length of the Outer Banks . . . . With the protected status now afforded to them, they should remain free to live as their ancestors have for centuries.¹¹

The wild horses, we are encouraged to believe, are at once emblematic of the forever wild landscape, and perhaps somehow analogous to the “remote” Bankers, enduring in symbiotic harmony with the wild and untamed landscape.

On the contrary, however – as Edmund Ruffin understood more than a century and a half ago – they are the stunted surviving remnant of an environmentally ill-advised enterprise, as are some of the structures that dot the landscape of Cape Lookout Village.¹² More appropriate as an emblem, one might consider, would be the ghostly trace of the whaling center of Diamond City, whose scores of houses were wiped summarily from the landscape by the great San Ciriaco hurricane of 1899.

Whaling

References to whaling stretch back to antiquity, but large-scale whaling arose only in the seventeenth century, when Dutch and British fleets ventured into the Arctic Ocean. For upwards of 300 years, the whaling industry provided an array of valuable products. Oil extracted from the blubber was used as fuel and lubricant. Foreshadowing plastics of later times, cartilage (baleen) commonly called “whalebone” was fashioned into corset stays, buggy whips, parasol ribs and other items. Spermaceti oil from the head went into premium candles.¹³

By the early eighteenth century, New England was the center of North American whaling, but some activity reached as far south as South Carolina. By the early nineteenth century, as Simpson and Simpson report, shore-based whaling was in evidence only in North Carolina, where the proximity of the Outer Banks to the Gulf Stream and the whales’ migratory routes were in fortunate conjunction.¹⁴

Like stock raising, whaling on the southern Outer Banks was economically marginal and relatively short lived as a substantial industry, although it was in evidence to some degree for perhaps 250 years. Initially it focused on “drift” or beached whales, but later crews (working in a six-month season that peaked from February to early May when right whales migrated northward) chased whales in double-ended rowboats, harpooned them, and towed them to shore for processing on the beach.¹⁵

By the late nineteenth century, most of what there was of whaling in North Carolina came to be centered on Shackleford Banks, but it was present in some form or other on some portion of the Banks from perhaps the 1660s until the last whale was killed on 16 March 1916.¹⁶

Holland’s early Cape Lookout history says that whaling was sufficiently in evidence in North Carolina waters as early as1669 to induce the Proprietors to include in the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina a provision that any whales taken belonged to them.¹⁷ By1681 inhabitants were given a free license for seven years to take whales.¹⁸ [ILLUSTRATION: Chadwick whaling license 1726 Jateff Fig 3-1 p19. CAPTION: Fig. 4-3: Thomas Chadwick whaling license, 1726. Jateff, Archeological Reconnaissance Survey for Shore Whaling Camps (2007), 19.]

The Simpsons argue that in fact shore-based whale processing was “well established”(e.g., on Colleton [Collington?] Island) by the 1660s and 1670s, and note that the 1681 license was later extended to 1691. After the latter extension, court records stand as evidence of heightened activity and conflict over the scarce and valuable resource. Shortly thereafter, North Carolina’s surveyor general observed the situation and reported in his New Voyage to Carolina (1709) that whales were “very numerous.” During the first and second decades of the century, the Proprietors regularly encouraged provincial governors to encourage whaling.¹⁹

The Proprietors’ injunctions also included instructions to encourage New England whalers to operate off North Carolina for a modest fee (two deer skins per year). As word spread and New England whaling captains ventured south, some jurisdictional conflicts ensued with Virginia, and directly with North Carolina when New England captains neglected to pay the required tax on their catch, or did not have proper customs certificates.

Broader and more protracted conflicts were associated with the transition of North Carolina from proprietary to royal colony in 1730. By then, whaling was so widespread and profitable that whale oil had become an accepted form of currency, government officials were tempted into fraud and embezzlement of proceeds, and political factions jockeyed for position by exploiting controversies in the industry. So central were whales and the whale tax to legal conflict during the 1720s and 1730s that much of what we know of whaling in that period comes from court records.²⁰

Paradoxically, those records do little to clarify the actual scale of the industry, and there are almost no other available records. The Simpsons speculate cautiously that during the early decades of the century, some six to nine whales per year may have been taken, yielding upwards of 300 barrels of oil per year. Further, as whales became scarcer off New England, whalers from the northeast expanded their southern operations, especially as the advent of onboard tryworks made processing more efficient and allowed ships to remain at sea for much longer periods. These advantages were somewhat offset, however, by the pirates who preyed upon them for their valuable cargo, and storms that sometimes wrecked them.²¹

The North Carolina industry remained quite active in the pre-Revolutionary period. On a visit to Core Banks in 1755, Governor Arthur Dobbs found that New England whalers had developed a “considerable fishery” around Cape Lookout.

The years of the Revolution – with their embargoes, seizures, blockades and other disruptions – were devastating for the American whaling industry. The number of vessels dropped dramatically; annual prewar oil production dropped from 45,000 to 10,000 barrels. Production and shipping revived after the war, with North Carolina whale products clearing (mainly) Port Beaufort for the middle Atlantic states, England, the West Indies, and Guadeloupe. In the late 1780s, shipments left Beaufort, Brunswick, and Currituck, bound for east coast destinations as well as the West Indies, England, and Dublin.²²

Information on North Carolina whaling between the War of 1812 and the Civil War is sparse, but oral traditions suggest that it continued to be carried on both by local shore-based people and also by more than forty New England offshore vessels. In the 1840s and 1850s, Provincetown whalers predominated, though many others were present. The 1850s were years of decline, however, as Atlantic whales became more scarce and activity shifted to the Pacific. By the beginning of the Civil War, the “Golden Age” of whaling had passed. The discovery of petroleum, the rising cost of outfitting ships, attacks on Yankee whalers by Confederate ships, and the need to undertake longer and riskier voyages put a damper on the industry. Lingering hostility after the war kept returning Yankee whalers well offshore and held down their take, but some of them continued to work in the area as late as the 1880s.²³

In the 1870s and 1880s, whaling continued from Beaufort as far north as Cape Hatteras and as far south as Little River, but only during a short April-May season, with a lot of activity concentrated between Cape Lookout and Fort Macon. It was still a fairly lucrative endeavor, with products from a right whale worth $1,200-1,500.

Banks whalers lived in houses constructed of rushes and grouped into “camps” (two or three of them, of three six-man boat crews each – a total of perhaps 75 to 100 or so) from which they posted lookouts. When a whale was spotted, the boats put in and the chase was on. When a harpoon was set with a “drag” attached, the crew waited for the whale to “have its run.” [ILLUSTRATION: Whale boat tools from Jateff p 40 Fig 4-6. CAPTION: Fig. 4-4: Whale boat tools. Jateff, Archeological Reconnaissance Survey for Shore Whaling Camps, 40.] Overtaking the tired whale, a gunner shot it with a whaling gun and towed it to shore. [ILLUSTRATION: Whale on beach at Beaufort from Jateff p 44.tiff. CAPTION: Fig. 4-5: Whale on beach at Beaufort, before 1894. Jateff, Archeological Reconnaissance Survey for Shore Whaling Camps Associated with Diamond City, 44, reproduced from Brimley, “Whale Fishing in North Carolina,” Bulletin of the North Carolina Department of Agriculture 14, no. 7 (1894).] Onshore, the blubber was cut off and “tried out” in great vats over fires.²⁴ [ILLUSTRATION: Cutting blubber on Shackleford 1894 Simpson and Simpson p19. CAPTION: Fig. 4-6: Cutting Blubber on Shackleford Banks, 1894. Simpson and Simpson, Whaling on the North Carolina Coast, 19.] [ILLUSTRATION: Trying out oil [1894] from Simpson and Simpson p19. CAPTION: Fig. 4-7: Trying Out Oil from Whale, 1894. Simpson and Simpson, Whaling on the North Carolina Coast, 19]

The Banks culture that grew up around whaling included the frequent practice of giving names to the whales appropriate to the occasion or circumstances of their capture: the Little Children’s Whale, the Tom Martin Whale, the Big Sunday Whale. The best known of them, the Mayflower, captured 4 May 1894, was the most vigorous fighter ever encountered in the area. Before giving up after a six-hour battle, it dragged the Red Oar Crew (consisting of Josephus Willis and his five sons – an “all-whaling family”) six to eight miles out to sea. It alone produced forty barrels of oil and 700 pounds of whalebone. The remainder of it hangs in the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh.²⁵

In recent years, much of the attention to the history of whaling near Cape Lookout National Seashore has focused on now vanished Diamond City. Archeologist Emily Jateff, who investigated the area in 2007, says that the eastern end of Shackleford Banks was “populated by European transplants from at least the late seventeenth century,” and that a community on the eastern end of the area was first mentioned in archival sources in 1723.²⁶

Several small communities – based in whaling, fishing, crabbing, and the like – developed on the sound side of Shackleford banks: Wade’s Shore and Mullet Pond, east of Beaufort Inlet on the far end, Bell’s Island in the middle, and Lookout Woods on the near end at Cape Lookout Bight.²⁷ [ILLUSTRATION: Shackleford banks communities 1850 to 1890 Simpson and Simpson p33. CAPTION: Fig. 4-8: Shackleford Banks whaling communities, 1850-1890. Simpson and Simpson, Whaling on the North Carolina Coast, 33. Map by Connie Mason, National Park Service, 1987.] The Lookout Woods community (renamed Diamond City in 1885) appears to have grown up on two tracts of land that Joseph Morse and Edward Fuller bought from John Shackleford in1757. The transaction specified that whaling privileges in the bay were included. By the year 1764-65, whalers’ huts and tents were in evidence.²⁸

Diamond City came to be the largest of the communities. There were perhaps only two dozen or so residents by the 1850s, but the census of 1880 indicates that there may have been as many as 500.²⁹ It included family graveyards, stores, factories, and a school, and stretched almost half the length of Shackleford Banks. Coastal historian David Stick says that 3,000 or more people sometimes gathered at Diamond City in the summer for religious camp meetings that might last three to four weeks. Perhaps a hundred or so people also lived at Wade’s Hammock on the far end of Shackleford Banks, and a few other families settled at what was called Kib Guthrie’s Lump.³⁰

As whaling waned toward the end of the century, however, Diamond City declined. The deadly San Ciriaco hurricane of August 1899 put an end to it; within a short time, everyone had left for the mainland. The hurricane, the decline in the whale population, and a change in women’s fashions in 1907 (ending the demand for whalebone stays) ultimately killed the whaling industry in North Carolina. Two whales were belatedly captured in 1908, and the last one on 16 March 1916.³¹