Chapter two
Hatteras Inlet, North CarolinaLess than two hundred miles up the coast from Wilmington rests Hatteras, a long, low sandbar of an island forty miles in length, split in half by an inlet on one end and a bulging cape in the middle. The region is home to sharp reefs and thousands of shipwrecks dating back to the middle 1500s. Early in the nineteenth century, Hatteras had been claimed by a gang of ship wreckers who would snuff out the Cape’s lighthouse flame to lure ships to the reefs and the nearby Diamond Shoals in order to commit acts of plunder, murder, and illegal salvaging. By 1851, an east coast naval captain had summed up Hatteras by saying that “she was cursed by both God and Satan by mutual consent.”
When the war began, the ship wreckers vanished without a trace.
As he
