NEWS

By DAVID WILLIAMSON
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- People who know the Cape Hatteras lighthouse is the nation’s tallest and think it might have been -- at 208 feet -- the loftiest ever built or, possibly, the world’s longest-lasting, should think again.

The Tower of Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, stood 450 feet and guided ships into the harbor at Alexandria, Egypt. Its wood signal fire, visible from 30 miles away, flamed night and day for 15 centuries. Built by Ptolemy II in 261 B.C., the tower remained in excellent condition despite many wars that swirled nearby until an earthquake toppled it in the 13^th century.

Such historical nuggets appear in a revised and updated edition of "The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse," written by Dawson Carr of West End and recently published by the University of North Carolina Press. Carr, who earned three degrees at UNC-CH, wrote the book because he "always loved coastal history, but I couldn’t find a book about the lighthouse, which I considered our state’s foremost symbol.

"Like many others, I would have liked to see the lighthouse remain where it was built, but encroachment by the Atlantic Ocean made that prospect unlikely," he wrote. "The relocation of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse to higher and safer ground has saved a major monument to our coastal heritage and one of our most important national treasures."

The author begins his tale with a first-person account of a Mrs. Harris of Hillsborough, whose schooner foundered near Hatteras Island’s Diamond Shoals during a gale in December 1812. After 16 days trying unsuccessfully to pass through Ocracoke Inlet, the ship ran aground in the breakers. Bitterly cold water filled Mrs. Harris’ cabin as wave after wave swept the broken decks. She and the other women on board thought themselves lost and nearly drowned trapped in the room.

"In an instant, a large, intrepid Negro was seen by us all making his way over the scattered remnants of the vessel to our room ... discovering that we were alive (which he had not expected), and made up to the dead-lights, which with wonderful strength, he pushed out with his arm (although they had withstood the force of so many waves), and then handed Miss Hines, Miss Henry, Lydia, myself and the remaining servant out of the cabin window to some men who stood on the beach to receive us... ."

Nearly frozen, all except the first mate survived their brush with Cape Hatteras, but thousands of others before and afterwards were not so lucky.

Romans built and manned as many as 30 lighthouses by the fifth century, Carr wrote, but after the empire fell to barbarians, centuries of darkness descended over the European and the Mediterranean coasts figuratively and literally. Pirates often built bonfires on shore to lure seagoing prey, and it wasn’t until monks and other holy men began manning signal fires did mariners trust them again.

"One place in Colonial America where ships were frequently lost was the region off the eastern coast of North Carolina," the retired professor wrote. "There, intersecting warm and cold currents combined with submerged shoals to form one of the worst traps for ships found anywhere in the world."

In 1773, an orphaned Alexander Hamilton, then 17, nearly died after sails on the ship carrying him to college in Boston caught fire, and the captain narrowly avoided being driven onto Diamond Shoals. Seventeen years later, Hamilton was the second ranking member of George Washington’s cabinet, and under his prodding, Congress passed an act known as the Lighthouse Bill that eventually led to construction of lighthouses along the East Coast.

"North Carolina’s 300 miles of sandy shores and barrier islands represented more than one-fourth of the total coastline of the original 13 colonies, and it may seem surprising that not one of the early lighthouses was located there," Carr wrote. "...North Carolina had few deep-water ports, and thus the coastal populations – and their political influence – remained small."

The first N.C. lighthouse at Smith, or Bald Head, Island went into service in 1795, and the second, on Shell Castle Island, was lighted around 1800 but shut down within 20 years when severe storms closed the inlet it marked at Ocracoke Island. Later, a lightning storm and subsequent fire burned the wooden structure to the ground near where Lt. Robert Maynard of the Royal Navy lopped off the pirate Blackbeard’s head in 1718.

At Hatteras, the tail end of the south-flowing Labrador Current and the north-flowing Gulf Stream collide, causing frequent fog, mist and underwater dunes up to 250 feet high that shift constantly in the rough water.

"When Henry Dearborn was finally hired to build a lighthouse at Cape Hatteras, it was not to guard an important commercial port, for the island was miles from any harbor; yet surely there was no stretch of coastline in greater need of a warning beacon," Carr wrote.

After numerous delays, workmen completed the structure and had it ready for operation by 1803, he said. Sperm whale oil fueled the light, but problems arose with distressing regularity. In 1806, an intense storm damaged the light so badly that it was out of service for a month. An 1809 fire destroyed the glass. The 18 oil lamps produced almost unbearable heat, geese and wild ducks careened into and cracked the new glass, and sea captains regularly complained about the light’s "wretched" dimness.

Roaring winds eroded sand around the foundation, and British attacks during the War of 1812 closed it temporarily for repairs in 1813. In 1830, keeper Pharoah Farrow was dismissed for paying others to tend the light while he relaxed at home.

In 1837, Racer’s Storm forced the sleek new 550-ton sidewheel steamer Home onto the beach near Hatteras, and only 40 of the roughly 130 crew and passengers survived the raging surf. Because only two life preservers were aboard, and the two people who wore them survived, many felt others would have lived had the ship been better equipped.

"As a direct result of this tragedy, one year later Congress passed the Steamship Act requiring that life preservers be available for all shipboard passengers," Carr wrote.

During the Civil War, the strategic importance of Cape Hatteras and its lighthouse, along with the Cape Fear River and other Outer Banks inlets, was obvious to both the North and the South. Adopting Blackbeard’s tactics, small Confederate ships, part of a "mosquito fleet," slipped out of hiding to attack Yankee sailing craft. The ‘Winslow’ captured 16 Union vessels near Hatteras Island in just six weeks in 1861.

Pressured by Southern successes, the North sent a superior force under Gen. B.F. Butler to seize forts Clark and Hatteras. Before being driven away, outgunned Confederates removed the lens from the lighthouse and hid it, possibly in Tarboro, and no one has ever found it.

"The loss of the light turned out to be far more damaging to Union seagoing forces than to the Confederacy," Carr wrote. "Whereas the South had few ships traversing the area, nearly 40 of the Union’s navy vessels were lost on the shoals. The Union lost more vessels to the shoals than in battle with Southern forces, and some have suggested that a few more shoals might have helped the South win the war."

On a hot day in 1861, fearing they would be surrounded by Georgia and North Carolina troops, 600 soldiers of the 20th Indiana Regiment fled south from the northern end of Hatteras Island through 20 miles of soft sticky sand. The exhausted Hoosiers left a trail of discarded clothing that amused the pursuing rebels before reaching the lighthouse near nightfall.

The next morning, the Georgians, discovering that their ship-borne Tar Heel allies had run aground two miles from shore and were unable to support them, faced a much stronger combined force of Indianians and New Yorkers. They, in turn, abandoned plans to blow up the lighthouse and fled back north toward Roanoke Island shedding hot clothing along the way just as their enemies had.

Both sides claimed victory, but neither suffered much damage beyond embarrassment, the author wrote. Wags quickly dubbed the debacle the "Chicamicomico Races."

Just over a year later in December 1863, the U.S. Navy’s first ironclad sank 20 miles from the lighthouse in stormy seas. The tow ship, the USS Rhode Island, saved 41 members of the Monitor crew, but 16 drowned.

Because of eroding sand around the foundation that caused the building to vibrate and substantial cracks in the tower, in 1867, Congress grudgingly authorized $75,000 to begin construction of a first-class replacement. The new structure, modeled after the Cape Lookout lighthouse, would stand 600 feet north of the old light on 40 acres bought 40 years earlier from Pharoah Farrow for $200. It was to consist mostly of Vermont granite and more than 1.2 million Virginia bricks.

Sickness, mosquitoes and sometimes-meager rations plagued the workers, employed for $1.50 a day, but the new lantern was finally lit. In December 1870, light from its first-order Fresnel lens began sweeping the mid-Atlantic far beyond the outermost shoal. By then, more than 50 loaded schooners a day skirted Cape Hatteras.

Adventures continued. In 1879, lightning struck the tower, and hurricanes were common. In 1884, seven crewmen from the life-saving stations at Cape Hatteras and Creeds Hill, strapped into their dory to keep from being pitched out, rowed a half mile into the worst storm they had seen to rescue all crew members aboard the barkentine Ephraim Williams.

In 1886, an earthquake centered at Charleston rocked the lighthouse.

A hundred ships still were lost to the shoals between 1871 and 1900. In 1918, a German U-boat sank the Cape Hatteras Lightship No. 71, while other subs sank so many U.S. ships off Hatteras and Ocracoke islands during World War I and II that the area became known as "Torpedo Junction."

In 1936, because waves lapped at its foundation, the lighthouse was shut down, replaced by a steel tower near Buxton Woods, vandalized and not restored, along with a new light, until 1950. Last summer, engineers lifted it eight feet and inched it forward with hydraulic push jacks at speeds ranging from 10 feet to nearly 300 feet per day. Now it sits at its new safer home about a third of a mile from the sea.

"No one knows for certain if the oceans will continue to rise, but some pessimists predict that melting glaciers will raise sea levels as much as three feet over the next hundred years," Carr wrote. "If that happens, the Cape Hatteras lighthouse will no longer be safe even in its new location, but then neither will the Outer Banks themselves, or any of the other structures perched precariously along their shores.

"For now, though, the lighthouse once again sits as far from danger as it did when it was first built over a century ago. Ultimately, it is a pawn in the struggle between humankind and nature, and only time and technology will determine the victor, but at least a small battle has been won, and the Cape Hatteras lighthouse still shines over the Graveyard of the Atlantic."

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Note: Carr can be reached at (910) 673-8761.

Contact: For a photograph of the lighthouse, call David Williamson at (919) 962-8596.