The Inner Islands
by
Bland Simpson
photography by
Ann Cary Simpson

Lost Carolina islands are restored by crisp photos and text
by David Rolfe, Winston-Salem Journal
Sunday, December 31, 2006

Behind North Carolina's barrier islands are a scattering of lesser-known "inner islands." Some, like Roanoke Island, are large enough to support small communities. Others once held a building or two but are now disappearing, worn to nothing by wind and waves, and some have all but vanished. Many of these islets had names I have heard before - Durant, Knotts, Mackay and Monkey Islands - but histories I never knew.

Bland Simpson's Inner Islands: A Carolinian's Sound Country Chronicle is an introduction to the islands, stringing together their histories with memoirs of Simpson's own visits to the islands over the years. A few bear the ruins of houses, clubs or docks for vanished enterprises. Some will not survive above the waters of the sounds for much longer.

Nearly all of the inner islands can be reached only by boat. Some, such as Shell Castle Island, Harbor Island and a shoal once known as Brant Island (today the resting place of the ferry Governor Scott) are places I would like to visit if I had a boat and a knowledgeable guide.

The book is illustrated by vintage photographs and drawings of the islands in earlier times. Simpson's wife, Ann Cary Simpson, made the black-and-white photographs depicting the islands in their current state. Many of her photographs are intriguing views of ruined walls and shady maritime forests that left me wishing for more.

The first photograph in the book is a mysterious black-and-white image of oddly round stones scattered about a grassy spit of obviously low-lying land, with water filling the horizon. The stones are nearly all that remains of Shell Castle Island, an 18th-century warehouse complex that once stood on the tiny shell island in the middle of the Ocracoke inlet.

Ocean-going vessels would offload their cargo at Shell Castle for transport across the shallow sound by smaller boats, and it did a thriving business until it was wiped out by a hurricane in 1846.

Another evocative set of photographs is of Harbor Island, to accompany Simpson's equally evocative descriptive style:

Harbor Island is a scant half-acre of bone-white shellbank curving away to east and west, with a tabby-walled huntclub ruin at the western side of what little landmass it has. This island stands small - it does not loom - a diminutive ghostly ruin that conjures images of lochside castles in Ireland, of old stone barns and roofless farmsteads glimpsed by travelers from far across the endless barrens of Iceland, perhaps even the fabled house of Roan Innish, or, down Beaufort way, the old fish plant's brick chimney on Phillips Island beside the channel of the Newport River. I first saw Harbor Island and its ruin on a clear, near-still August evening just after sunset nearly ten years ago, from the hurricane deck of Wilbur's Camp on soundside Core Banks. It lay about three miles distant from the camp, but scarcely seemed in that brilliant clarity more than one mile away, and my small binoculars brought the ruin right in close for inspection.

Why, I wondered, was this tumbled-in lodge more intriguing to me than if it had been whole and still functioning at its early-twentieth-century level, when tycoons and mere mortals alike showed up out here for some of the best gunning in the Carolina east?

Simpson's book is a love song to the ephemeral inner islands, the vanished lives they have harbored and seen pass, and the essential brevity and beauty of islands and man alike.

back to Bland Simpson's book page