wait far longer for a favorable wind, a willing pilot or a new spar. Intimidated 

 by shallow, shifting Carolina inlets, many captains waited days just for a 

 swelling tide. Seagoing vessels might bide storms for a week in port. And a ship 

 caught at sea by a nor'easter might limp into Wilmington or Elizabeth City for 

 bulkhead repairs that stranded her passengers for a month. 



The historical record makes the voyage of the Ogeechee seem almost swift. 

 I have an account of an 1 867 trip merely from Beaufort to Portsmouth Island 

 that lasted five days. And when Gen. Ambrose Burnside's federal armada 

 invaded the Carolina coast early in the Civil War, his steamers tried to navigate 

 Hatteras Inlet for a month. The Union fleet nearly withdrew for lack of food and 

 water. 



Not only travel, but all of coastal life in the Ogeechee' s day moved to the 

 sea's measure. Long before weather radios, fishermen had to read the skies for 

 days before risking the open sea. Clammers and oystermen planned every day 

 around the tide and wind. Up coastal rivers, Carolinians waited months for 

 spring freshets to raise water levels enough for barges and rafts to carry cotton 

 bales and turpentine barrels to port. And many a sailor's wife had to wait 

 uncertainly for a husband's return, for few letters reached home before the 

 mariner himself. 



An old legend in Beaufort has it that when one of Sabiston's kinsmen, also 

 a mariner, perished at sea, he visited his widow as an apparition to let her know 

 that he had been lost. Alas, not every wife or mother had her fears confirmed so 

 quickly. 



Buckman's voyage itself could have lasted far longer. When the Ogeechee 

 finally passed back through Hatteras Inlet, she was soon in trouble again. 

 Becalmed halfway across Diamond Shoals, the schooner drifted helplessly 

 toward the beach, until Sabiston had to order the crew to take up oars and row 

 away from the breakers' edge. If the Ogeechee had wrecked, the survivors could 

 have waited weeks for passage home. And young Buckman could easily have 

 lost his life. Instead, the Ogeechee did at last reach Baltimore, and Buckman 

 went on to make a small fortune in the fruit shipping business. 



The world has changed a great deal since 1873, and our sense of time has 

 changed profoundly since Cecil Buckman's voyage aboard the Ogeechee. Tides, 

 currents and winds are no longer the measure of our days. Nor is our grander 

 sense of time — the sum of our days on this Earth — framed by confronting our 

 mortality at every inlet and shoal. 



Yet I still wonder whether, down deep, the sea's time has lost its hold on us 

 entirely. Life originated in ocean waters, and there still swells within us a deep 

 affinity with the sea. I am convinced, in fact, that this is an important reason that 

 so many people make pilgrimages to our coast. Maybe it is even why some 

 commercial fishermen are so reluctant to trade a trawler 

 for a time clock, despite the dangers and low pay of 

 fishing. I suspect that we are all fleeing the soul-crippling 

 pace of the modern age. We yearn for a moment's 

 renewal, quite literally, in another time. □ 



David Cecelski is a historian at the University of 

 North Carolina-Chapel Hill's Southern Oral History 

 Program and a regular columnist for Coastwatch. 



