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A new "ballad" by the Red Clay Ramblers' Bland Simpson...
North
Carolina's unsolved mystery The sea has its own secrets. What happened aboard the Carroll A. Deering off Cape Hatteras in early 1921 remains unsolved to this day. The story has been vividly re-created in a new book by Bland Simpson, acknowledged grandmaster of the life and lore of Eastern North Carolina in print and musicals. On Jan. 31, 1921, a lookout, scanning the ocean with a telescope from a cupola atop the lifeboat station at Hatteras, spied a five-masted schooner, all sails set, aground on Outer Diamond Shoals, not quite 10 miles away. A surfboat, launched through the breakers, was able to get within 500 yards of the vessel. No signs of life were observed. When four days later the sea finally abated sufficiently to enable a salvage tug out of Norfolk to put a crew aboard, what was found was a deserted ship, with steering gear ruined, wheel broken, binnacle box bashed in, rudder disengaged from its stock and stock driven through the deck, dory and yawl gone, and running lights and red distress lanterns aloft burned out. In the galley were a pot of coffee, a slab of spareribs and some pea soup. The ship's papers, log, chronometer and navigation instruments were missing. By then the winter ocean, its waves breaking over the deck, had shredded several sails, dug the wooden hull deeply into the sands and twisted the ribs and plankage beyond saving. The ship was identified as the Carroll A. Deering, Captain Willis B. Wormell, out of Bath, Maine, 2,114 tons, 255 feet long, running light and overdue in Norfolk after delivery of a cargo of coal to Rio de Janeiro. The last port the ship had made was Bridgetown, Barbados. On Jan. 31, it passed the Frying Pan Shoal lightship off Cape Fear. Six days later, after an extended nor'easter with 75-mile-an-hour winds had pounded the offshore waters southwest of Hatteras, the five-master moved past the Cape Lookout lightship. Someone aboard -- apparently not the captain -- called out through a megaphone: "We've lost both anchors and chains in the gale off Frying Pan Shoals -- forward word to our owners!" The lightship's engineer photographed the schooner, its sails set, jib topsail slacked down, and seemingly in decent shape, though it was noted that its crew were scattered about the deck in undisciplined fashion. Late the next afternoon, a northbound steamship sighted a five-masted schooner 25 miles southwest of Diamond Shoals lightship and "steering a peculiar course," apparently aiming straight for Hatteras itself. By the following dawn it was spotted hard aground on Diamond Shoals. No trace of its captain, mate, crew or ship's boats was ever found. Three stranded and famished ship's cats were rescued aboard it. Such are the bare bones of the mystery. To dramatize the tale, Bland Simpson, after tracking down documents and sources from Maine to Hatteras, westward as far as Iowa and in the government archives in Washington, has developed hypothetical commentaries by the captain's daughter, a newspaper editor in Elizabeth City, and others. He has, however, invented nothing that might modify or distort anything that took place. What vastly complicated the story, and kept it in the news for weeks, was a letter, supposedly discovered in a bottle found on the beach at Buxton, written by the Carroll Deering's engineer and describing the boarding and seizure of the ship by persons unknown. Several persons in Maine who knew the engineer identified the handwriting as his. The news, together with the wrecking of several other vessels along the coast, set off a string of rumors about pirates operating off the coast, similar to the "mystery" of the Bermuda Triangle of recent years. Added to that was a delayed report that the mate had been jailed for drunkenness at Barbados, where he had threatened to get the captain, and that a week later the schooner had been seen off Abacos behaving in very odd fashion. Moreover, this was the early 1920s, when the enactment of Prohibition in the United States had turned Barbados and other West Indies ports into centers for rum-running. Federal agents confronted the Buxton waterman who had found the bottle with the evidence that the handwriting was his -- only then did he confess that the message was a hoax. Thereafter the rumors subsided, but the mystery remained unsolved. No hard evidence has ever been turned up. As for what remained of the shipwrecked schooner itself, weeks of pounding by wind and ocean broke it up. The larger portion was dynamited by a Coast Guard cutter as a hazard to navigation. The bow section eventually grounded near Ocracoke, and remained buried in the sand there until 1955, when Hurricane Ione dislodged and floated it nine miles away to Hatteras Island. Bland Simpson wisely declines to develop his own hypotheses or propose theories about what happened to the 11 sailors -- five New Englanders and six Scandinavians -- who sailed away from Rio aboard the Carroll Deering. The facts, and the drama, are set forth. Readers of this skillfully crafted book may make of them what they will. ********** Louis D. Rubin Jr. lives in Chapel Hill. His books include Seaports of the South and My Father's People: A Family of Southern Jews. |
