A HISTORIAN'S 



COAST 



A 



JL A. small miracle happened to me last summer. 

 As I kayaked at The Strait, just south of Brown s Island, 

 six or seven bottle-nosed dolphins suddenly surfaced. They 

 swam so close to my boat that I could have touched them 

 with my paddle. I had watched dolphins from afar all my life, 

 but I was still startled by their size up close, their beauty and 

 the stallionlike snorts they make as they clear their blowholes. 

 They stayed at arm's length for a half-hour rolling alongside 

 me and diving under my boat. If I slowed down, they waited. 

 If I sped up, they did too. In all my years of boating on 

 coastal waters, I had never experienced anything like it. 



In the holiday spirit of counting 

 one's blessings, I have been thinking 

 about such small miracles. Too often, 

 I take them for granted. As a historian, 

 for instance, I tend to view our coastal 

 history as a rather grisly tale of 

 environmental abuses. I forget all we 

 have to be thankful for. Much of our 

 native habitat has been lost, and far 

 too many wildlife species are endan- 

 gered. But beautiful places and wild 

 things worth fighting for still abound: 

 Seashores, swamps and forests have 

 miraculously survived centuries of 

 settlement, exploitation and develop- 

 ment. It's a miracle we have them — 

 and that we have a chance to save 

 them for future generations. 



The survival of bottle-nosed 

 dolphins is one of those small 

 miracles. Until the 1920s, most coastal 

 residents considered dolphins — or 

 "porpoises" as old-timers still call 

 them — an exploitable resource at 

 best and pests at worst. For more than 

 a century, in fact, they were hunted for 

 their oil and skin. They could easily 



have been exterminated if conserva- 

 tionists had not convinced our 

 political leaders to protect them by 

 law nearly 75 years ago. 



Today we can scarcely imagine 

 the wholesale slaughter of bottle- 

 nosed dolphins that occurred along the 

 coast in the 19th century. By 1803, 

 slave watermen near Ocracoke Inlet 

 already operated a dolphin factory. 

 Vast numbers of dolphins fed between 

 Bear Inlet and Cape Hatteras every 

 winter, and the enslaved watermen 

 had extra time because the season's 

 gales slackened ship traffic and 

 lessened demands on stevedoring and 

 piloting. 



In small boats, crews of 15 to 18 

 men surrounded the dolphin pods and 

 snared them in heavy, wide-meshed 

 seines approximately 800 yards long. 

 Once they trapped them in the surf, 

 the boatmen waded into the water and 

 knifed the dolphins that had not 

 already drowned. Then they gaffed the 

 animals and dragged them ashore. 



Continued 



COASTWATCH 21 



