with cargo creaked at the pilings. And 

 they placed me beside the Lyle cannon, 

 the only weapon used for saving lives 

 rather than taking them. Brave surfmen 

 used this gun to launch a weighted 

 cord to distressed vessels and their 

 shipwrecked crews. 



You'll find sections on living 

 along the Outer Banks, the Civil War, 

 storms and shipwrecks, and watercraft 

 ranging from sharpies to shadboats. 



The barrier islands are changing 

 rapidly due to a growing tourism 

 economy. So this album truly reminds 

 us of a coast without air conditioning 

 and fast-food restaurants. Witness the 

 Banker who carried his cattle from one 

 island to another in a small, flat- 

 bottomed sharpie. The image is 

 romantic in the mind's eye; it probably 

 wasn't to the local farmer who had to 

 clean the dung from the bottom of his 

 boat at the end of a bitterly cold day. 

 Most of these cherished photographs 

 don't belie the harsh reality of living 

 on this island landscape. 



I particularly enjoyed the short 

 chapter on windmills for its teasing, 

 evocative narrative. Coastal villages 

 never had the advantages of hydroelec- 

 tric power. They had no waterfalls or 

 running rivers to harness the water's 

 energy. So they turned to the wind for 

 power. They caught the prevailing 

 breezes on Dutchlike sail fans and used 

 the energy to grind wheat and corn and 

 pump fresh water. In the southern part 

 of the state, windmills were integral for 

 salt production; wind-powered pumps 

 pushed seawater into impoundments so 

 that salt could be extracted. With the 

 advent of electricity and gasoline, 

 windmills lost their appeal and were 

 abandoned. The only ones left are 

 preserved on these pages. The closest 

 model of one is in Colonial Williams- 

 burg, Va. 



Today, we drive easily from 

 Roanoke Island through Rodanthe to 

 Hatteras Village on Highway 12. But 

 this book vaulted me back to August 



1861, when no road met the greenhorn 

 Union and Confederate troops. They 

 plodded knee-deep in sand during one 

 of the early offensives of the Civil War. 

 In what is called the Chicamacomico 

 Races, an ebb and flow of retreat and 

 pursuit finally won the Outer Banks and 

 its important inlets for the Union. 

 Barfield selected details of the skir- 

 mishes to illustrate how weather, poor 

 communication, shallow waters and 

 dunes played havoc with troops as they 

 marched north and south on the island. 



In the chapter on whaling, Barfield 

 quotes a letter describing one of the 

 early hunts. Captain John E. Lewis of 

 Morehead City wrote in 1926 about a 

 whale that was named Mayflower by 

 the men who killed him May 4, 1 872: 

 "He was one of the biggest ever killed 

 in these parts, and perhaps the most 

 vicious, since it took fully half a day to 

 kill him." The whale had come into 

 Cape Lookout Bight, and six boats went 

 after it. The community rendered the 

 blubber into oil with small makeshift 

 brick ovens built right on the beach. 

 Barfield explains how local women 

 would use seashells to scoop spilled 

 whale oil out of sandy depressions 

 because they could not afford to 

 diminish the valuable oil they produced 

 for sale or buy it later. These details of 

 folklore light up the narrative. 



Rodney Barfield is director of the 

 North Carolina Maritime Museum in 

 Beaufort. It is natural therefore that a 

 large chapter focuses on the traditional 

 boats of North Carolina. Boats were 

 much more important to coastal folks 

 than horses or oxen. Roads were 

 seasonal, and no bridges connected 

 islands to each other or to the mainland. 

 Most goods and people traveled by way 

 of water. Barfield documents the 

 evolution of the flat-bottomed shifts 

 originally designed for New England 

 waters to designs suited for our sounds. 



As with cars, high-tech sailboats 

 and a few planes of today, racing 

 always honed the designs of coastal 



boats. A postwar race between the New 

 Haven Connecticut sharpie and the 

 local Beaufort log boats brought radical 

 change to the boatbuilders' designs. 

 The winning design was promoted and 

 copied by locals. Carteret County 

 developed the long and lean, fast- 

 sailing sharpie. The races continued to 

 round Shackleford Banks with North 

 Carolinians at the helm. 



Near Roanoke Island, where the 

 fishermen depended on the spring run 

 of shad and herring, George Washing- 

 ton Creef in the 1870s built a functional 

 workboat with graceful lines. The 

 Albemarle shadboat, made of natural 

 juniper or Atlantic white cedar, has a 

 round bottom, wide midsection and a 

 tapered bow. It was rigged with sprit 

 mainsail, jib and topsail. Few of Creef s 

 creations have survived. The photo- 

 graph from his Wanchese boatworks 

 shows off the shape of this lovely 

 vessel. 



Barfield tries to define the inhabit- 

 ants of the coastal islands within their 

 maritime culture by their independence 

 and their occupations. In his conclu- 

 sion, he quotes the Greensboro Patriot, 

 1858. 



"Ever since our schoolboy days we 

 had heard of Beaufort harbor ... where 

 the people lived on fish, and used 

 oyster shells as cups with which to 

 drink water out of old pine stumps ... . 

 The men of that region — as had been 

 reported and believed in the interior by 

 many — were scaly, had broad tails and 

 thorny fins growing from their backs, 

 the result of living on fish and diving 

 after crabs." 



Times and people have obviously 

 changed. Barfield' s effort has produced 

 a wonderfully illustrated text that 

 recalls "well-known and obscure 

 elements of the islands' past." I 

 recommend the book as more than a 

 coffee-table adornment. More than just 

 photographs, the book provides a taste 

 of the people as distinct as a strong cup 

 of coffee. □ 



COASTWATCH 21 



