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excerpted from
Cape Lookout National Seashore: Paradigm for a Coastal System Ethic, Volume I, Book 1 of the North Carolina Land of Water Series.
By Stanley R. Riggs 

Ed. note: Since the 1970s, North Carolina Sea Grant has supported the seminal work of coastal geologist Stanley R. Riggs. The first book in his new series with North Carolina Land of Water (NC LOW) includes a foreword by conservationist Tom Earnhardt and makes science and history friendly for lay readers. It’s also a visual treat, including 100 figures and nearly 300 photographs, maps, and illustrations. Riggs covers the NC coast over several centuries, and the sections below bring pieces of that past to life.

Shore Whaling, Porpoise Hunting, and Turtle Harvesting

From the late 1600s to early 1900s, a small-scale whaling industry operated in the Cape Lookout and Shackleford areas. Whales provided a basic source of blubber oil for fuel and lubricant, whalebone for construction, and spermaceti oil for candles. Prior to 1700, whaling was restricted to New England whaling ships that followed the whales south in fall and back north in spring.

By the early to mid-1700s, local inhabitants of Cape Lookout and Shackleford Banks began whaling from shore. Whaling could be done from shore because right whales had a near-shore migratory route that was inside the northward flowing warm Gulf Stream waters.

Shore-whaling was a community affair that took place up to six times per year. Each hunt utilized up to 18 men and followed a similar pattern. The old men held watch from tops of large sand dunes at Lookout Hills.

Each hunt used 4 to 6 25-foot pilot boats stowed on the beach with all gear ready to go to sea. The boats had high, pointed bows and sterns, 4 to 6 oars, and a steering oar. When a whale was spotted, crews launched their boats and the sea chase began.

When a boat got close enough to a whale, it was harpooned. The struggle between man and beast began, often taking much of a day to diminish the massive animal.

Since right whales float, they could be secured to crew boats and with great difficulty paddled to shore where the whale was beached at high tide. Meanwhile, the community had set up beach shelters, collected firewood, built ovens, organized kettles, knives, cutting spades, and scrappers so they were ready to begin processing as soon as the tide was low.

Blubber was peeled off and cooked in 60-gallon kettles. Scoopers would dip out oil and filter it into wooden barrels ready to sell in Beaufort. Most years would see a harvest of four whales that produced about 1,800 gallons of oil and 450 pounds of bone per whale. The meat would be shared by the crews and communities.

After several weeks of messy and smelly work, the putrid animal remains were left to the crabs, gulls, and buzzards.

Shore-based whaling was more sustainable than whaling factory ships that sailed the high seas. However, the net impact of an entire whaling industry drove the world’s whale population close to extinction.

Discovery of land-based petroleum in the mid-1800s and subsequent development of gas-guzzling internal combustion engines quickly doomed world-wide whaling industries and saved most species of whales from actual extinction. Over-harvesting had taken a severe toll on the species, which finally came under legal protection in 1920.

Historically, schools of porpoise were extremely abundant off the coastal shores of North Carolina. Since porpoise were significantly smaller than whales, they could be trapped in seine nets by the hundreds and utilized for their hides, meat, and oil.

They were also processed at small plants that popped up for brief periods in different coastal areas, including Shell Castle Island, Cape Lookout, and Harkers Island.

The harvesting of porpoises ended with the whaling industries’ demise.

Marine turtles have always been harvested from most sand beaches of the world for their meat, eggs, and shells. During the summer nesting season in NC, sea turtles came ashore on Cape Lookout’s sandy beaches by the hundreds to lay their eggs.

Five types of turtles utilize NC beaches and are either vulnerable to extinction (loggerhead and leatherback), endangered (green), or critically endangered (hawksbill and Kemp’s ridley) due to many different pressures. Passage of the US Endangered Species Act in 1973 helped save our marine turtles.

However, turtles, like whales, porpoises, and fish, are all global species whose populations are impacted by every coastal country in the world.

The primary reason marine turtles are in serious trouble is the over harvesting of nesting turtles and their eggs. But marine populations are also adversely impacted by their capture in fishing gear, known as bycatch; rising numbers of vessel-strikes in near-shore environments; ever-increasing amounts and types of ocean pollution and marine debris and critical beach habitat loss due to escalating rates of coastal development and human utilization.

These unintended consequences operate on global scales, but they severely impact coastal systems on regional scales such as with the Cape Lookout coastal system.

Wrecking and Beachcombing

The whole ocean shore of North Carolina is a terror to navigators, and is noted for the number of shipwrecks, and especially near Cape Hatteras.
— Edmund Ruffin
Sketches of Lower North Carolina (1861)

While traversing the beach—wreck after wreck, the gravestones of departed ships, projected their timbers from the sands.
— Nathaniel Bishop
Voyage of the Paper Canoe (1878)

Historically, shipwrecks and wrecking were major parts of life on the Banks. They brought with them many stories of storms, ships, life-saving stations, lighthouses, people, and cargoes of treasure. Countless shipwrecks since the beginning of colonial exploration during the 15th century have resulted in the legendary title of Graveyard of the Atlantic for the NC coast.

As colonial settlements began to develop on the barrier islands, floundering ships during the frequent nor’easters and hurricanes became a critical part of life. The first goal of Ca’e Bankers was to rescue ship-board crew and passengers if possible.

Then, if the wrecked ship was washed onto the beach, local Bankers would scavenge salvageable cargo, valuable personal items, and building materials. Everything on a shipwreck had value, was recyclable, and would quickly disappear.

Shipwrecks rarely happen in modern times. However, one story encountered occasionally while working on Core Banks during the 21st century was the mysterious arrival of broken-down remnants of survival rafts that occasionally washed up on the beach.

These simple makeshift rafts of inner tubes and Styrofoam were tied together and totally in shatters with scattered bits of remaining survival gear. They probably carried 4 to 6 desperate people leaving Haiti or Cuba with hopes to make it 90 miles into US waters and a new life.

Were they lost at sea, intercepted by the US Coast Guard, or maybe, just maybe they made it? These distressing records of their efforts were delivered to North Carolina’s Outer Banks via the northward flowing Gulf Stream.

In addition to shipwrecks, ocean storms and currents bring great volumes of flotsam and jetsam onto the ocean beaches. All one needs to do is follow drift lines left at a storm’s high tide to discover all sorts of treasures that can be sold, traded, or put to good use.

These objects range from natural materials including seashells, fossils, exotic wood and seeds to the man-made: pottery shards, historical artifacts, sea glass, and vestiges of previous wars. Historically, wreckers were the original Ca’e Bankers, often sailors who had jumped ship or were castaways, but today wreckers are marine salvagers, beach immigrants, and tourists.

In the post-WWII era, shipwreck numbers have diminished substantially, along with much of the flotsam and jetsam; consequently, beaches are generally clean until the next storm. However, up until the early 1970s, NC beaches were littered with 500 years of shipping debris and storm refuse.

There was enough wood on any beach to have all-night campfires and unlimited historic treasures for hardy beachcombers. Ship hatch covers were everywhere, as were all types of raw and finished lumber, exotic tropical hardwoods, mounds of fishing nets and broken-down pots, and buoys by the truck load.

General debris was everywhere it seems, swept off ships and carried along the coast by storms, then brought in from the Gulf Stream and Labrador currents. Scavenging by professionals and beach combing by tourists represented small-scale mining for treasure, which became so popular that by the early 1970s, the Outer Banks beaches were totally cleared of centuries of debris.

Not a scrap of wood remained for beachside bonfires.

The hatch covers had become fiberglass coffee tables and restaurant tables; weathered planks — wall boarding in fancy houses; exotic wood — artists’ sculptures; and old bottles, fish net buoys, shells and exotic wood fragments had become mobiles that filled the coastal gift shops.

Visit NC Land of Water for more information about Cape Lookout National Seashore: Paradigm for a Coastal System Ethic.