INTRODUCTION. 
15 
southern point of the State, the N. W. & S. E. boundary line between 
this State and South Carolina terminating on it at a point marked by a 
“ Cedar Post,” whose position is in latitude 33° 51' 37", as elsewhere 
stated. 
The chain of long linear sand islands called The Banks, which fringe the 
entire coast, constitutes a very remarkable feature of the region. Though 
composed of drifting sands, they form an impregnable barrier to the waves 
of the Atlantic. They are in fact Sand Danes of various elevations, from 
a few feet above tide level, (in many cases broken over by storm tides), to 25 
or 30 feet, and sometimes more, as in the Killdevii Hills along Currituck 
Sound. The breadth of these islands varies from a few rods to more than 2 
miles. The largest of them and the widest, is known as ITatteras Island, the 
easternmost point of which is the well known Cape Hatteras. These 
islands are composed partly of flat marshes, and partly of swells and 
ridges of beach sand, which tiie wind has heaped in ridges, often far be- 
vound the reach of the highest waves. 
As the sand and comminuted shells are rolled back in waves from the 
beach by the winds, they are. in part, caught and fixed by straggling 
tufts of a coarse grass which ins the power ot' continuous growth up- 
wards with the rise of the knobs and ridges of sand, and in part, are car- 
ried over into the flats and marshes and the shallow sounds beyond which 
are thus gradually silting up. The banks are generally covered with low 
scrubby thickets of cedar, live oak, pine, yaupon, myrtle and a number 
of smaller shrubby growths.* 
Swamps , Pocosins and Savannahs . — -There is a large aggregate of ter- 
ritory (between 3,000 and i,000 square miles), mostly in the counties bor- 
dering on the sea and the sounds knoivn as Swamp Lands. They are locally 
designated C£ dismals ” or “ pocosins,” of which the great Dismal Swamp 
on the borders of North Carolina and Virginia is a good type. They 
differ essentially in their characteristic features from an ordinary swamp. 
They are not alluvial tracts or subject to overflow. On the contrary they 
occur on the divides or watersheds between the rivers and sounds, and 
* These islands are inhabited by a hardy race of people, called Bankers, who subsist by fish- 
ing and whaling, occasionally by wrecking, and by raising for market a small, wiry, tough- 
sinewed, splay-hoofed variety of horse, called the bank pony, or marsh pony , which subsists on 
the coarse salt grasses of the wide marshes which margin the sound. These animals receive 
no care, save at the annual “ penning” frolic, when the banks and marshes are “ driven,” as 
in a deer hunt, and the horses collected in hundreds in order to be claimed and branded, or 
sold. 
Whaling is carried on chiefly along the Shackleford Banks, between Cape Lookout and Fort 
Macon. The whales are taken in April and May, some times 5 or 6 in tile course of one or two 
weeks. They are the common right whales, 40 to 00 feet long ; and a single animal frequently 
yields, in oil and bone, $1200 to 81500. On one occasion, two sperm whales were taken, one of 
which measured 62 feet in length. 
