No battle report this week folks – I spent Week 4 of the Summer of Plunder on vacation in the Outer Banks, North Carolina!
This wasn’t my first trip to the Outer Banks. I spent most of the 1990s living on the mainland of NC, not far from the barrier islands. I’m a military-brat, so we moved around from camp to camp while I grew up, but life conspired to keep us in North Carolina far longer than anywhere else we ever stayed. Both of my younger brothers, and my sister, were born there, and many of my long-time friendships started there.
Unfortunately, that means that I don’t really do the “tourist” thing and take a slew of pictures. I spent most of the week fishing, crabbing, surfing the choppy beach breaks, hanging out with the family poolside, and eating some of the world’s best seafood. We also drank enough beer to fill an Olympic swimming pool, but hey: when in Rome, right?
But, it wouldn’t be a Deadman Vacation if there wasn’t something suitably Pirate-y about it. The Outer Banks are America’s “pirate country,” and they’re proud. Place names like Nag’s Head and Killdevil Hill are based directly on pirate and smuggler activity. We visited Ocracoke Island, which was the site of Blackbeard’s last stand from the B&P starter set. We also tried to hit a few educational spots during the trip.
We visited the Wright Brother’s museum at Kittyhawk. What do a couple of brothers building flying machines at the turn of the 20th century have to do with piracy? Well, they flew their contraptions off the dunes at Kill Devil Hills. According to local lore, the town got its name for ‘kill devil’ rum, smuggled in from the Caribbean. The smugglers would either wreck – and their rum wash ashore – or would intentionally bury the rum in the sides of the hilly sand dunes, where it would be picked up by their compatriots ashore and distributed through the early colonies.
Unfortunately, the awesome Graveyard of the Atlantic museum in Hatteras was closed to visitors – along with the Cape Hatteras lighthouse. Both were undergoing repairs and renovation. The waters of the North Carolina Coast are some of the most treacherous in the Atlantic, dwarfing the Bermuda Triangle in numbers of wrecks and lives lost. Over 5,000 ships litter the sandy bottom between Bodie Island and Cape Fear. Shifting sandbars, hurricanes, German U-Boats, and local “wreckers” have seen to that.
The Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort has an entire, permanent exhibit dedicated to Blackbeard. That was an additional 4-hour drive from where we were staying though, and wind & tide conspired to keep us from making it to that amazing museum.
We did manage to make it to the Adventure Museum on the island of Roanoke, to visit one of North Carolina’s own tallships, the Elizabeth II. The Elizabeth II is a replica of one of the merchant vessels which attended the fateful 1585 Roanoke voyage, which established the ‘Lost Colony’. There is a museum on site which depicts life on Roanoke; from the first Native American settlements, to the Lost Colony, and its participation in the American Civil War and use as a Freedmen’s Colony.
DMC will be back with more battle reports for week 5, where the objective is to begin the game with Wind Speed -2. Until then, happy plundering!
