Graveyard of the Atlantic: Shipwrecks of the North Carolina Coast by David Stick

Author:David Stick [Stick, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, United States, General
ISBN: 9780807806227
Google: yBQMAQAAIAAJ
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1952-11-15T00:11:58.013523+00:00

SHIPWRECKS AS A BUSINESS 1893–1899

The sea has long provided a livelihood for the residents of eastern North Carolina. Today, hundreds of thousands of inland folk come down to the shores to look at, bathe in, or fish from the sea, and so the tourist business is now the main source of income. Earlier, before modern roads and bridges made the seashore accessible to the tourists, it was commercial fishing that brought in most of the needed dollars; earlier still, shipwrecks provided the bulk of the income.

It is hard today to think of shipwrecks in terms of employment and profit. Yet, before the turn of the century, hundreds of our coastal men had steady jobs as lifesavers, lighthouse tenders, and crewmen on wrecking schooners. In addition, almost every community had a wreck commissioner or underwriter’s agent. And for those left out when the steady work was passed around, there was ample opportunity for a man with business sense to make a good profit buying and selling salvaged material, and frequent jobs were available removing cargo of vessels lost on the beach.

The magnitude of this over-all wrecking operation can best be seen by referring to the statistics for a given period of time. In the six years from August, 1893, to August, 1899, for example, an average of almost one ship per week was stranded on the North Carolina coast. The majority were gotten off, yet there were enough totally lost to leave nine full shiploads of lumber and eight of phosphate on the coast, as well as five shiploads of coal, two of shingles, and one each of iron ore, coffee, sugar, salt, grain, lime, molasses, cotton, marble, and crushed stone, not to mention a number that carried general cargoes or were in ballast. Shipwrecks, in those days, were big business; and business was rushing.

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