Left behind,
and I entered a labyrinth of creeks and small
sheets of water, which form a network in the
marshes between the sandy beach-islands and
the mainland all the way to Cape Fear River.
The Core Sound sheet of the United States
Coast Survey ended at Cape Lookout, there
being no charts of the route to Masonboro. I was
therefore now travelling upon local knowledge,
which proves usually a very uncertain guide.
In a cold rain the canoe reached the little
village of Swansboro, where the chief personage
of the place of two hundred inhabitants, Mr.
McLain, removed me from my temporary
camping-place in an old house near the turpentine
distilleries into his own comfortable quarters.
There are twenty mullet fisheries within ten
miles of Swansboro, which employ from fifteen
to eighteen men each. The pickled and dried
roe of this fish is shipped to Wilmington and to
Cincinnati. Wild-fowls abound, and the
shooting is excellent. The fishermen say flocks of
ducks seven miles in length have been seen on
the waters of Bogue Sound. Canvas-backs are
called "raft-ducks" here, and they sell from
twelve to twenty cents each. Wild geese bring
forty cents, and brant thirty.
The marsh-ponies feed upon the beaches, in
a half wild state, with the deer and cattle, cross
the marshes and swim the streams from the
mainland to the beaches in the spring, and graze there
until winter, when they collect in little herds,
and instinctively return to the piny woods of
the uplands. Messrs. Weeks and Taylor had
shot, while on a four-days' hunt up the White
Oak River, twenty deer. Captain H. D. Heady,
of Swansboro, informed me that the ducks and
geese he killed in one winter supplied him with
one hundred pounds of selected feathers.
Captain Heady's description of Bogue Inlet was not
encouraging for the future prosperity of this
coast, and the same may be said of all the inlets
between it and Cape Fear.
Rainy weather kept me within doors until
Friday, the 7th of January, when I rowed down
White Oak River to Bogue Inlet, and turned
into the beach thoroughfare, which led me three
miles and a half to Bear Inlet. My course now
lay through creeks among the marshes to the
Stand-Back, near the mainland, where the tides
between the two inlets head. Across this shoal
spot I traversed tortuous watercourses with mud
flats, from which beds of sharp raccoon oysters
projected and scraped the keel of my boat.
The sea was now approached from the
mainland to Brown's Inlet, where the tide ran like
a mill-race, swinging my canoe in great circles
as I crossed it to the lower side. Here I took
the widest thoroughfare, and left the beach only
to retrace my steps to follow one nearer the
strand, which conducted me to the end of the
natural system of watercourses, where I found a
ditch, dug seventy years before, which connected
the last system of waters with another series of
creeks that emptied their waters into New River
Inlet.
Emerging from the marshes, my course led
me away from New River Inlet, across open
sheets of water to the mainland, where Dr.
Ward's cotton plantation occupied a large and
cultivated area in the wilderness. It was nearly
two miles from his estate down to the inlet.
The intervening flats among the island marshes
of New River were covered with natural beds
of oysters, upon which the canoe scraped as I
crossed to the narrow entrance of Stump Sound.
Upon rounding a point of land I found, snugly
ensconced in a grove, the cot of an oysterman,
Captain Risley Lewis, who, after informing me
that his was the last habitation to be found in
that vicinity, pressed me to be his guest.
The next day proved one of trial to patience
and muscle. The narrow watercourses, which
like a spider's web penetrate the marshes with
numerous small sheets of water, made travelling
a most difficult task. At times I was lost, again
my canoe was lodged upon oyster-beds in the
shallow ponds of water, the mud bottoms of
which would not hear my weight if I attempted
to get overboard to lighten the little craft.
Alligator Lake, two miles in width, was crossed
without seeing an alligator. Saurians are first
met with, as the traveller proceeds south, in the
vicinity of Alligator Creek and the Neuse River,
in the latitude of Pamplico Sound. During the
cold weather they hide themselves in the soft,
muddy bottoms of creeks and lagoons. All the
negroes, and many of the white people of the
south, assert, that when captured in his winter
bed, this huge reptile's stomach contains the hard
knot of a pine-tree; but for what purpose he
swallows it they are at a loss to explain.
In twelve miles of tortuous windings there
appeared but one sign of human life - a little
cabin on a ridge of upland among the fringe
of marshes that bordered on Alligator Lake. It
was cheering to a lonely canoeist to see this
house, and the clearing around it with the
season's crop of corn in stacks dotting the field.
All this region is called Stump Sound; but that
sheet of water is a well-defined, narrow,
lake-like watercourse, which was entered not long
after I debouched from Alligator Lake. Stump
Inlet having closed up eighteen months before
my visit, the sound and its tributaries received
tidal water from New Topsail Inlet.
It was a cold and rainy evening when I sought
shelter in an old boat-house, at a landing on
Topsail Sound, soon after leaving Stump Sound.
While preparing for the night's camp, the son
of the proprietor of the plantation discovered
the, to him, unheard-of spectacle of a paper boat
upon the gravelly strand.
