As part of the Winterfest celebration, on Friday, December 7th from 3 pm to 5 pm, the North Carolina Maritime Museum at Southport will be giving special costumed interpreted tours of the exhibit gallery. The tours are 40 min.

Learn about the maritime heritage of the Lower Cape Fear with tours by a Victorian Lady, a Civil War Soldier, or Stede Bonnet the Gentleman Pirate. Learn about Colonial and Victorian holiday traditions as well as the storm that almost stole Christmas: the wreck of The City of Houston, 1878.

December 10th, 2018 marks the 300 year anniversary of the hanging of “The Gentleman Pirate” Stede Bonnet and his crew who were all captured during “the battle of the sandbars” in the Cape Fear River off of Southport NC!

Read all about this unique pirate in Island Life NC Magazine here!

The North Carolina Maritime Museum at Southport is located at 204 E. Moore Street, Southport, NC. Admission for this event is free.

One day in the spring of 2000, Ocean Isle Beach’s building inspector, Larry Cook, discovered a corroded piece of history and legend that had emerged from the sands of the island’s east end just a few blocks west of  The Winds Resort. What he found were the remains of a World War II Navy fighter temporarily exposed by the waves and shifting sands along the beach.

“I knew it was there from folklore,” Mr. Cook said. “It was rumored to have been there and sure enough she came up.”

The wreck of the propeller-driven plane had been spotted intermittently over the years, but it had never surfaced long enough to attract the attention that surrounded it that week.

“The previous building inspector told me it was there,” Cook said. “He’d heard some kids had dug down five feet and found a wing. Yesterday we found a machine gun. It wasn’t even low tide. People were just digging around it like a treasure hunt.”

The area was roped off and an ordnance disposal team from Pope Air Force Base was sent to check for any remaining live ammunition. None was found.

The plane was first thought to be an F-6F Hellcat but was later identified as an Army Air Corps P-47D Thunderbolt after further excavation and inspection exposed the plane’s numbers on the wings.

Air Corps flight records show that Lt. Robert Boyd, based during the war at Bluethenthal Field, now the Wilmington airport, went down on June 29, 1944, at 1615 hours when he failed to switch to his auxiliary fuels tanks and literally ran out of gas.

Lt. Boyd landed on the beach with his wheels in the up position but was not injured in the crash,
although he probably suffered a bruised ego when his fellow fliers heard about the incident.

While the plane’s recent emergence has drawn crowds of curious onlookers to the beach, the rediscovery has also provided several longtime residents, who had seen parts of it intermittently exposed over the years, a chance to view the whole thing.

Eldridge Stanley of the Brick Landing area first spotted the plane back in 1944 as an eleven-year-old, he said, when the barrel-shaped plane plunged out of the sky, skipped across the ocean, and skidded onto the then uninhabited beach.

“It kicked up a lot of spray because that propeller was still turning when it hit the waterway,” Mr. Stanley said.
He recalled it was one of two military aircraft that crashed onto the beach as he and his brother stood outside their grand- father’s fishing shack on a clear, late summer morning.

“There was always two,” said Mr. Stanley, who retired from the Army Corps of En-gineers after years of recovering downed jets from Pamlico Sound. “They patrolled the beach every day. It got to be where we would watch for them.”

Some days the pilots would fly low enough as they patrolled to wave at the two boys. Mr. Stanley speculates that the planes were possibly searching for German submarines known to prowl the Eastern seaboard during the war.

“All of a sudden this one veered off,” he said. “We thought it was going to land on the beach strand. . . . You know how a rock skips? Well, that’s just the way she skipped.”

The other plane crashed only minutes later near Shallotte Inlet and Mr. Stanley, who was fishing on Ocean Isle Beach at the time, witnessed both crashes. The second aircraft was recovered by a barge sent up from the Charleston Naval Shipyard in South Carolina, he said.

The first, however, was not as easy to recover and was left where it went down. Due to the strange coincidence of the dual crashes, Mr. Stanley said, rumor was that sabotage was involved but it remained a matter of local speculation.

Both pilots emerged from their wrecks unscathed. Mr. Stanley remembers that the men met back at his grandfather’s fishing shack to wait for the Coast Guard to pick them up.

When the wreck reemerged, Ocean Isle Beach town manager Greg Taylor went through weeks of phone calls and e-mails back and forth from Army and Air Force contacts to determine who had salvage rights to the plane. It was finally decided that the town had ownership but had nowhere to keep it safe and preserved. In the end the town donated the remains of the plane to the Carolina History of Aviation Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, where it was transported for preservation.

Records indicate that more than 15,000 P-47D Thunderbolts were built. Only 60 of the aircraft are still intact, with about a dozen of those in condition to be flown though not the one that met its untimely demise decades ago on Ocean Isle Beach.

The excerpt you are reading is from the book “Tales of the Silver Coast” by author and illustrator Miller Pope and author Jacqueline DeGroot.

Buy it in the Island Life Store here!

 

The Coast of North Carolina was fraught with activity during World War II as planes, battleships, submarines, and armies protected our shores. One such plane, the Thunderbolt P-47D, ran out of fuel and crashed on the beaches of Ocean Isle.

Ocean Isle, for the most part, was unpopulated at the time, and the place wreckage became buried by the sand, remaining there for decades. It wasn’t until the summer of 2000 when a particularly bad storm unearthed the wing of the plane.

Town officials roped off the remains of the plane and over time carefully had it excavated. It was moved to Charlotte, North Carolina to an outdoor aviation museum where it is paired with a non-wrecked version of the same plane.

December 10th, 2018 marks the 300 year anniversary of the hanging of “The Gentleman Pirate” Stede Bonnet and his crew who were all captured during “the battle of the sandbars” in the Cape Fear River off of Southport NC!

Our image of the stereotype pirate is of something far away from that of a “gentleman” but one pirate stands out as just that.

Raised in a wealthy English family and given extensive education, Stede Bonnet was the most unlikely pirate of them all.  Leaving his home country to take his wife and family abroad, Bonnet settled into a comfortable gentry life in Barbados.  As a sugar plantation owner and man of means, his family quickly rose in the island’s high society.  He even served their military with rank as an army major!   No one grew the least suspicious when this man who knew nothing of life at sea began building a ship.  Not just any vessel,  it was a fast, sturdy craft that showed six small cannon.  Bonnet explained that his ship was for trading and that he worried about pirates.  He named her Revenge.

Generally speaking, most pirates do not pay to have their ships built.  The usual course finds a new captain taking it by force, by mutiny or just normal theft.  And none ever used their own money to personally hire men.  They were, after all, pirates.  As it turns out, Bonnet needed to pay a crew to go with him.  He knew nothing about sailing!  Even less about hiring sailors.  The seventy men he recruited with high society silver were destitute souls dredged from the lowest taverns of Barbados.

Finally, preparations were done.  On a moonless night, Bonnet’s Revenge slipped silently out to sea, his wife and family disappearing in her wake.  Stede Bonnet was under way to his first cutthroat act off the shores of Virginia.

That pirate life began with a bang.  Near the entrance to Chesapeake Bay, Revenge took four unarmed ships.  After looting them all, one from Barbados was abandoned and burned.  It was a pattern Bonnet would follow the rest of his short career.  Every vessel from Barbados captured would be looted, its passengers and crew marooned and the ship burned.  He wanted no word of the deeds reaching his home.

For a time, Revenge sailed the American coast winning greater plunder.  In fear of England’s justice on his family, Bonnet never used his given name.  With his educated manner and gentry ways while looting the ships, victims came to call him “The Gentleman Pirate”.  His crew came to a different title.  Even though their take of treasure was good, resentment over taking orders from a land lubber like Bonnet grew.  The winds of Bonnet’s success were about to change.

On course to Nassau, Revenge was surprised and nearly destroyed by a Spanish Man-of-War.  Bonnet himself was seriously injured.  Revenge barely escaped and put to port for repairs and a new crew.  It was here that in 1717 Bonnet met William Teach, the infamous Blackbeard.  Teach waisted no time in exploiting Bonnet’s injuries and  weaknesses as a leader.  His own men took charge of Bonnet’s rearmed ship while her wounded captain was held under “guest arrest” in Blackbeard’s vessel.  Bonnet’s remaining men needed no urging to change captains.

Under Blackbeard’s flag, Bonnet’s crew plundered the American coast while he road out the adventure below deck. They joined Blackbeard for the immensely profitable blockade of Charleston, South Carolina.  It was a week long siege that ended with all pirates on the run and the grounding of their ships on sandbars in North Carolina.

With English war ships closing in and their own ships disabled, a desperate Teach released Bonnet to plead for amnesty from the Governor in the near-by city of Bath.  He promised Bonnet a full portion of treasure and the return of the Revenge if the Gentleman Pirate could get them all amnesty.  Bonnet was eager to go, after weeks below deck, his health was failing.

Taking a small boat and few sailors, The Gentleman Pirate pleaded their case to North Carolina’s Governor.  Speaking for the entire crew, he swore off the pirate’s life forever.  Whether it was Bonnet’s persuasive speech, elevated demeanor or the promise of near-by treasure, history will never say but whatever the reason, every pirate that raided Charleston was given full pardon!

An overjoyed gentleman ex-pirate hurried back to the sandbar.  Instead of a hero’s welcome, Bonnet was greeted with the faces of the few remaining injured crew and the emptied hulks of their ships.  True to his reputation, Blackbeard had double crossed them all!  He used the time Bonnet was away to gather all the treasure into smaller boats and escaped without a trace.

Enraged, Bonnet swore unyielding revenge.  Rigging the remains of his ship, he set out after the treacherous Teach but never caught up.   Bonnet threw his papers of amnesty to the waves and quickly returned to the pirate’s way.  It was a short trip.

At the mouth of the Cape Fear River, off the coast of a modest town called Southport in North Carolina, Bonnet was captured in his final battle.  Near a stream just outside that town is a small metal plaque that reads:

“BONNET’S CREEK…Stede Bonnet, the ‘Gentleman Pirate’, used the mouth of this creek as a hideout for his vessel, The Royal James formerly called Revenge.  Here on September 26, 1718, the great battle of the Sand Bars was fought between the pirates and the men sent to capture them under the command of Col. William Rhett aboard the Henry and Sea Nymph.  After a twenty-four hour battle there were nineteen men killed, twenty-three wounded, and Bonnet, with the remains of his pirate crew, surrendered.  On November 8, 1718, twenty-nine pirates were hanged in Charleston, S.C.”

Weeks later, Bonnet climbed those same executioner’s steps holding a cluster of flowers in his manacled hands to join his crew at the swinging end of “old stretch”.  He was a full pirate at last.

 

From the book Pirates Of The Carolinas by Author Illustrator and Historian Miller Pope.

 

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