gated the half-million acres of tangled vine 

 and bog called the Great Dismal Swamp, 

 which lay astride the Carolina-Virginia line 

 His destiny as national leader usurped his 

 dreams of running a canal through the 

 Dismal, but others picked up the charge. In 

 1805, the 22-mile Dismal Swamp Canal 

 opened, connecting Deep Creek of the 

 Virginia tidewater with North Carolina's 

 Pasquotank River. Today 

 it is the country's oldest 

 man-made waterway still 

 in existence and a crucial 

 link in the Intracoastal 

 Waterway. 



From 1814 on, an 

 incredible variety of boats 

 plied the Dismal Swamp 

 Canal, from barges 

 bearing bacon and brandy 

 to antebellum steamers to 

 steel-hulled petroleum 

 tankers that used the canal 

 during World War II to 

 avoid German submarines 

 in the Atlantic. There was 

 even the James Adams 

 Floating Theatre, a 700- 

 seat showboat fashioned 

 from a wooden barge. In 

 the meantime, two 

 centuries of efforts to drain 

 the swamp and convert the 

 land to agricultural use 

 were alarmingly success- 

 ful. Only about 107,000 of 

 the Dismal's original half-million acres 

 remain. 



Such a fate has continually threatened 

 the sprawling pocosins south of the Alligator 

 River. Pocosins are a type of wetland that 

 once covered hundreds of thousands of acres 

 of Eastern North Carolina, but they have 

 dwindled in the face of widespread ditching 

 and draining. Not so the tangled thickets that 

 border the Alligator River-Pungo River 

 Canal. From the headwaters of the Alligator 

 we cruise along mile after mile of a stick- 

 straight channel that burrows through 

 tangled pond pines and the evergreen shrubs 

 of the pocosins. Deer skitter away into the 

 underbrush; a timber rattlesnake, thick as a 



radiator hose, swims in front of the 

 bow. In three hours we pass houses so 

 widely spaced they can be counted on a 

 single hand. 



Down the canal and into the wide 

 Pungo River, our route for the day 

 finally feeds us into the harbor at 

 Belhaven. It's as pretty a waterfront as 

 there is on the Carolina shore, built with 



Scott Taylor and I shuttle duffel bags to the 

 "annex," where rooms have a charm all 

 their own, even if it is the charm of cinder- 

 block walls mixed with Second Empire 

 reproduction furnishings. We watch the 

 last of the day's light bleed from the Pungo 

 River, to be replaced by the winking lights 

 of a 1 16-foot yacht moored at the manor's 

 dock. 



Greetings from the Belhaven dockmaster 



timber money that poured into town 

 when the Roper Lumber Co. opened 

 mills in the 1 890s. In 1 899, company 

 president John Aaron Wilkinson began 

 construction on an imposing waterfront 

 mansion with an enormous curved 

 portico supported by towering Ionic 

 columns. Today his house is operated 

 as the River Forest Manor, a bed-and- 

 breakfast inn. 



As luck would have it — bad luck, 

 that is — guest rooms in the main 

 manor house, with its graceful leaded 

 windows and carved plaster ceilings, 

 are all taken, so Bellamy, photographer 



In the morning, we wake to skeins of 

 honking geese over the Pungo River and 

 the green hump of distant wooded points 

 like the prows of great ships in the early 

 mist. The gray-haired lady working the 

 morning shift at the front desk whistles at 

 the bill of the 8 1 -foot yacht Financial 

 Statement. She took on more than a 

 thousand gallons of diesel. I prowl the 

 quiet parlors of the River Forest Manor, 

 chuckling at the juxtapositions of mounted 

 elk heads and leaping swordfish on a 

 dining-room wall. 



But the quizzical and the curious are 



commonplace along the waterway. Water, 



Continued 



COASTWATCH 9 



