|
A new "ballad" by the Red Clay Ramblers' Bland Simpson...
The
Story Within the Details As if North Carolina's barrier islands weren't fascinating enough as a nature preserve, humans -- whether in the routine of maritime commerce, or making war, or vacationing -- have made the Outer Banks a pirate's chest of terrific front-porch stories. Bland Simpson '70 and others at the tail end of his generation can remember the black stuff that sometimes coated parts of the beaches of their childhoods. It was oil still leaking from tankers sent to the bottom by German U-boats. Stuff like that got a kid's attention and kept it. One of the stories he heard, from his father, he thinks, was of a massive five-masted ship discovered aground off Cape Hatteras early one morning in January 1921. She was flying almost all of her sails; in fact, hours earlier she'd been mistaken by a passing vessel for a ship under way. Four days of rough seas passed before anyone could board the Carroll A. Deering, a cargo ship launched less than two years earlier in the storied shipyard of Bath, Maine, and now on the way home from the Caribbean. What rescuers found was less poignant than what they didn't -- the Deering's two boats, her anchors, her log and all 11 of her men were gone. None of the crew had shown themselves ashore at Hatteras. The weirdness was just beginning. Some said the seeds of mutiny were germinating when the ship left Barbados on Jan. 9. The captain's daughter threw herself into the task of finding out what happened to her father, leading then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover to order a federal investigation. A banks fisherman claimed to have found a message in a bottle that said the ship was pirated, which touched off a panic among shippers and islanders. All of the probing and rumors and wondering came to nothing. That still was the case when Simpson embarked on his new book, Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals: The Mystery of the Carroll A. Deering. "Of course, I heard this story campfire-style, so in the stories it was a dark and stormy night," said Simpson, who is director of the creative writing program in the University's English department. "As a kid you don't analyze that stuff -- you just soak it in." This time around, he wanted the facts. But not without the drama. He turned to the nonfiction novel, as he had in his previous book, The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey. During a leave in the fall of 1998, Simpson dug into the extensive national press coverage of the investigation. He read the captain's daughter's letters. He came up dry in the federal archives, then hit pay dirt at the Hoover library. He figuratively looked over the shoulder of an Elizabeth City newspaper editor who covered the event. He had a blast. He took his pile of facts and turned to a story form, modeled by the likes of Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, that combines the journalist's handling of a true story and the novelist's imagination. "I took the liberty of invention with three characters," Simpson said -- the daughter, the fisherman and the editor. "These things really happened. I use the form of the novel. It's not a linear narrative. But what I wrote, I believe, I wrote consistent with my understanding of what they said, and my understanding of them as people." The product is a blend of the tiniest details of the weather and of a site that might be a crime scene with the emotions, the sleuthing and the conniving of people with vested interests -- overlaid with the romance of lives spent at sea and lives spent picking up after shipwrecks. Lula Wormell: "Strange of me, perhaps, that I have kept going down from Portland to the Cape, even after the Deering came in with no one aboard. If there were hypnosis involved, it would have been I who was seeking to charm the sea -- oh, yes, I thought this wildly, crazily -- to charm her and make her produce Father, or send us some word of him." Christopher Columbus Gray: "Reckon I'm out on this beach more than anybody -- fishing, checking the tide line, seeing what old Neptune's flung up and left me of a morning. Why, half the stuff I've got in my house up there's come off this beach, planks and net-floats and, hell, even my little three-legged stool. Some milkmaid in Ireland kicked it in the creek, I bet, and two months later here it comes round the Cape washing up to me. ... Stuff's always drifting, and it's no telling, never, what might wash up. Way out here, something always does." W.O. Saunders: "If it's that simple, though, let's just look at it again: that captain knew Diamond Shoals were there, and yet he struck his ship and ran her hard aground and he had all his canvas out. Now, how came an old salt to do that? And having done that, how came he then to order his men to abandon ship, to take to the ship's boats in the dead of night and go down in the dark into the hideous breakers and the rough, rough surf without being able to see at all what was going on?" What was? The ship's charts were marked by someone other than the captain for the last week of the voyage. On the day before the wreck, a steamship saw the Deering inside the shipping lanes, on a course for the Hatteras shoals, crewed by men who should have known better. "Writing it was like getting on a ship and taking a wonderful ride," Simpson said. "Even when I had finished, I kind of hated for it to go away because I wondered if I'd ever find one that good again. What Lula Wormell constantly said, and the seamen [in Maine] kept saying, was this was not right -- that the combination of what wasn't right was pretty serious." Maybe a drunken mate curses the captain and touches off a deadly melee. Or the wild elements off the cape charge a high price for a navigator's mistake. Or treasures from the West Indies fall into the hands of a modern-day Blackbeard. It's sort of a full circle for the author -- an unsolved true story infused with the color of eerie tales told on beachfront porches on languid summer nights. |
