Ocracoke Inlet and Island, North Carolina

Why did Ocracoke Inlet matter?

North Carolina’s coast is guarded by the Outer Banks, a long chain of thin sandy islands. Behind them lie wide, shallow sounds, and the colony’s towns sat on the rivers that run into those sounds. To reach them, a ship had to find a gap in the islands. Ocracoke Inlet, between Ocracoke Island and Portsmouth Island, was the main deep-water gap in colonial times, linking the Atlantic to Pamlico Sound. Ships bound for Bath, Edenton and New Bern used it, and a modern state gazetteer calls it the colony’s “once chief trade inlet”.

It was never an easy passage. A shallow sandbar lay across the entrance and the channels shifted with every storm. Bigger ships often unloaded part of their cargo into small boats called lighters, so they floated high enough to cross. Later in the century the work grew so large that the village of Portsmouth was founded across the inlet in 1753 to handle it, well after the game’s era.

Where does the name Ocracoke come from?

The name is far older than any pirate. It first appears as “Wococon” on a map of 1585 by John White, an English artist on the early voyages to Roanoke. It may come from a Native American word meaning an enclosed place or a fort. Native people used the island for fishing and hunting in season, though no permanent village has been proven.

English writers spelled the name every way they could. It was “Okok” by 1676 and “Occacock” by 1709. A 1715 law wrote “Ocacock”, and a will of 1733 used both “Ocreecock” and “Ockrecock”. The modern spelling settled down much later.

Who lived on Ocracoke around 1715?

Hardly anyone. In 1715 North Carolina’s Assembly passed “An Act for Settling and Maintaining Pilots at Roanoke & Ocacock Inlett”. Pilots were local sailors who knew the shifting channels and guided ships over the bar for a fee. Later writers call the planned settlement “Pilot Town”, but the first pilots seem to have settled on the island only in the 1730s.

By the early 1730s the island was mainly grazing land. Richard Sanderson, a North Carolina landowner, kept horses, cattle, sheep and hogs there, and in his will of 1733 he left “the Island of Ocreecock” to his son. There was no customs house, no fort and no town.

What was Blackbeard doing at Ocracoke?

In 1718 Blackbeard had a busy year. After blockading Charles Town in the spring, he lost his big flagship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, when it ran aground in June at Topsail Inlet, now Beaufort Inlet. He went to the small town of Bath and accepted the King’s pardon for pirates. Then he based himself around Ocracoke in a sloop called Adventure for about five months.

Sloops were small, single-masted ships, like the Bermuda sloop, and they could cross the inlet’s shallow bar where warships could not. Blackbeard camped on the island near today’s Springer’s Point Nature Preserve and anchored in the channel just offshore.

In the autumn of 1718 Charles Vane sailed in, and the two crews spent several days together. It is often called the largest gathering of pirates in North America. Our main account of it comes from A General History of the Pyrates, a 1724 book by “Captain Charles Johnson”, which mixes fact with colourful invention, so the details of a long pirate party are best treated as a story.

What happened in Blackbeard’s last fight?

Virginia’s governor, Alexander Spotswood, decided to end Blackbeard’s stay without asking North Carolina. His two Royal Navy warships, HMS Pearl and HMS Lyme, were too big for the inlet, so he hired two shallow sloops, the Jane and the Ranger, and manned them with about 60 sailors from both warships under Lieutenant Robert Maynard of the Pearl.

They attacked on 22 November 1718. Both sloops stuck on sandbars, and a broadside from Blackbeard’s cannons tore into them. Maynard hid his men below deck on the Jane, and when the pirates boarded, the sailors rushed up. In the crowded fight that followed, Maynard wounded Blackbeard with a pistol shot and several of his sailors then killed him. Blackbeard’s head was hung from a sloop’s bowsprit, the pole sticking out from the bow, and carried back to Virginia. The full story is on our Blackbeard page.

Papers found aboard included a letter from Tobias Knight, North Carolina’s colony secretary, which raised suspicion that officials had been friendly with the pirates. No proof was found, and Knight was later cleared by the colony’s council.

How did Teach’s Hole get its name?

The deep channel off the island’s south-western end, where Blackbeard anchored, is called Teach’s Hole. The name is traditional, but it is old: it appears as “Thatches Hole” on Edward Moseley’s map of North Carolina in 1733, only fifteen years after the fight. “Thatch” is another spelling of Blackbeard’s surname, Teach.

What happened at Ocracoke later?

After the game’s era the inlet grew busier. A lighthouse stood on nearby Shell Castle from 1797 or 1798, and the present Ocracoke Lighthouse was built in 1823; it is the island’s oldest building. The British Cemetery holds the graves of four British seamen whose ship was sunk by a German U-boat in 1942. Today much of the island is part of Cape Hatteras National Seashore.