North Carolina Azalea Festival 2009
April 1 - 5, 2009
Wilmington, NC
www.ncazaleafestival.org/
Franklin Square Gallery Members Show
March 30- May 9, 2009
Featured Artist: High School Show.
Franklin Square Gallery 130 E. West Street Southport, NC 28461
910/457-5450
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The Princess of Tides by Capt’n Jack
Originally published June 1993
We who live by the shore and travel about in boats also live by the tides. But people who live only a bit inland give nary a thought to this incessant rise and fall of the ocean water that so effects the lives of us who live and work by the sea.
From the beginning of time it has been important to seamen, fisherman, and merchant interests along the coast to know exactly the state of the tide and to be able to predict the tides days and even weeks ahead. The scholars who wrote down the times of the tides were like seers or prophets in the early days and the formulas they used were closely guarded family secrets. Today such people are call Tidal Mathematicians and, of course, the computer does all the hard work. When one of these ultra smart people with her neat little tailored suit walked into the Shamrock the other day I thought that perhaps for the price of a couple of beers I could get the straight poop on the tides. Besides, she wasn’t to hard to look at even if her name was Henrietta. I was greatly relieved when I found that she preferred to be called Muffy. Something left over from college days she said.
Everyone knows that the tides are caused by the moon’s gravity pulling up on the water making a bulge which travels around the world as the earth spins on its axis under the moon. Now, for a lot of complicated reasons, and everything about the tides is complicated, there are actually two bulges of water; one under the moon and the other on the opposite side of the earth from the moon. Suffice it to say that if there weren’t two bulges the earth could be out of balance and we would have wobbled out of orbit a long time ago. So now we have two bulges of water with two low spots in between going around the world giving us two high tides and two low tides every day. But, everyday is really every lunar day which is 24 hours and 50 minutes long so the tides tomorrow are going to be about an hour later than they are today.
Actually, this isn’t what my new friend said at all. She said that the tides were caused by the moon’s horizontal traction force along the surface of equilibrium…vector sum of the forces…line intersecting the surface tangent…
My version is sort of a loose translation of the Muffy’s mambo jambo. Capt’n Jack has a rule about never using the term “arc cosine”.
Just as the moon goes around the earth every lunar day, the sun goes around every solar day, that’s the one that is only 24 hours long, and also causes a tide. The sun’s tide is only about 40% as strong as the moon’s and on a different schedule (by 50 minutes a day) so the extra tide either adds to or subtracts from the regular moon tide which accounts for the difference in tide heights throughout the month. At new moon and full moon, the sun and moon are exactly lined up so the two tides fully add up making extra high tides called spring tides. At the quarter moons the tides are extra low and called the neap tides.
Listening to Muffy all this sounds perfectly simple and straight forward; except for the part about the hyperbolic intersections. But one thing has always bothered me. If, as we have established for reasons of neatness and safety, there are two high tides going around the world every day; how come some places have just one tide a day? Here on the eastern seaboard we are used to the apparently normal tide pattern, but down on the Gulf Coast they have just one diurnal tide. Many places in the world have diurnal tides. People in California think they have just one daily tide but in fact they have two; one is just much smaller than the other. And there, according to Muffy, is the whole answer. Everybody has two tides a day but one is large and the other is small. At Biloxi, Mississippi, the second daily tide is virtually zero so to them there is only one tide a day, and rightly so.
Any why, you may ask as I did, is one tide so much bigger than the next? Muffy says the diurnal high-water inequality happens when the interference vector… harmonic periods…dynamic equilibrium…
The gist of it has something to do with the outgoing tidal stream over riding the incoming tide and canceling it out one time and reinforcing it the next. This phenomenon is caused primarily by land forms which shape and direct the tidal flow. This land form effect can also cancel out the tides altogether in certain places in the Carribbean and Mediterranean or amplify them to the extreme such as in Nova Scotia where tides run as high as 50 feet.
Enough about the tides, it was one of those beautiful warm afternoons so I asked Muffy if she wanted to dig some clams at low tide, which she predicted was about 43 minutes and 15 seconds away. She said that she would love to for awhile, but then she had to go to a meeting of the astrophysics club in Wilmington. Someday, though, for the price of a couple more beers she would come back and tell me why the Carolina sky is so blue. I can hardly wait, really.
Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 5:59 pm by admin. Add a comment
The Last of the Bold Pirates by Capt’n Jack
Originally published in the first issue of The Pelican Post June 1993-
“Aye matey, pirate country ’twas and pirate country “twill always be ,” intoned one of my aging shipmates as he looked out across the wide river toward the open ocean from Waterfront Park in Southport. “Aye, and gold, there is plenty of that buried around these parts. Pirate gold, just waiting for some young sand dauber to dig it up.”
And it’s true. Oak Island, Bald Head and the Cape Fear River were well known to the bucaneers of old as they plied the sea lanes of the new world seeking treaure and adventure. Blackbeard himself often hid along our shores even though his headquarters was further north up the Pamlico. But others also lurked here and if my vigilant mate had been at the Whittlers Bench in the park two hundred and seventy-five years ago he would have witnessed the last great battle of the last great pirate of the golden age of piracy.
Stede Bonnet was a prosperous gentleman planter on Barbados in the early 1700s when he suddenly decided to give up everything and go “a pyratin.” Most historians agree that he was likely seeking refuge from a sharp-tongued, whining shrew of a wife. He may also have seen life at sea as a way to extricate himself from a messy affair with the wife of a high government official. Whatever the reason, Bonnet bought a ship and hired a crew, actions unheard of among pirates, and took to the seas to rob and pillage.
The sea raiders such as Bonnet and Blackbeard were virtually all from the Caribbean where a thriving economy was already well established in the British, French and Spanish colonies. But with civilization also came law enforcement which forced the freebooters to find easier pickings. And they certainly did in North Carolina when Charles Eden became the Royal Governor in 1714. He let it be known that pirates were welcome in North Carolina as long as he got a cut of the booty. I guess that was kind of tradition even in those days. Anyway, old Blackbeard took the Governor’s offer so much to heart that he bought a fine home near government house in Bath, took a wife and settled in as one of the foremost citizens of the colonial capitol.
By 1717, Captain Bonnet and his crew of the Royal James were also regular residents of the hidden bays and coves of the Carolina coast, enjoying the protection of Governor Eden. The Lower Cape Fear was his favorite haunt and he had etablished camps on both Bald Head and Oak Island. The region was wild and pristine not yet having been settled by white men. The land grant to Maurice and Roger Moore for this entire area wasn’t issued until 1725 and Brunswick Towne wasn’t established until a year later. By then the pirate menace had been broken and most of the pirates had seen their final day swinging from a royal yard arm.
In late 1717, Governor Robert Johnson of South Carolina and Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia had grown weary of constant harassment from the pirates and decided to act in concert with the Navy to “wipe out the pyrate pests.” Colonel William Rhett the Receiver- General of South Carolina and commander of her militia was charge to mount an expitionary force to wipe out the scoundrels.
On the afternoon of September 26th, 1718 , the sloops Henry and Sea Nymph under the command of Colonial Rhett rounded the eastern end of Oak Island and spotted the topmasts of the Royal James further upriver. Bonnet was caught by surprise and should have been finished then and there, had not both the Henry and Sea Nymph run hard aground on a sand bar in the river. Probably the same one I’ve run on a few times. It was midnight before the Navy ships floated off on the rising tide. By this time Stede Bonnet had been able to get the Royal James ready for combat at dawn.
At first light anchors were weighed and the battle was joined with all three ships issuing broadside after broadside. In maneuvering to cut off Bonnet who was trying to escape to the open sea, the Sea Nymph went aground again and it looked as if the pirates would escape. But the Navy sloop was still able to bring her guns to bear wrecking great damage on the pirate ship.
Next the Royal James went aground on the falling tide letting the Henry close to a hundred feet before she too fetched up on the bottom. Soon the militia swarmed over the side into small boats and attacked the stranded pirates in hand-to-hand combat. It was a pitched battle and many men on both sides were killed but Colonel Rhett finally prevailed at great cost and captured Captain Bonnet and the remainder of his pirate crew. His battered little task force returned to Charleston with the prisoners on October 3rd.
Meanwhile a little to the north Lieutenant Robert Maynard and “sixty of the best men in the Royal Navy” sailed aboard HMS Ranger with but a single mission; to find and end the career of Blackbeard the pirate. On November 21st, less than two months after Bonnet was captured, Maynard found Blackbear in Ocracoke Inlet and killed him in one of the mot furious sword and pistol fights in Navy history. With the severed head of Blackbeard on the bowsprit, HMS Ranger sailed up the Pamlico to Bath delivering a message of sorts to Governor Eden.
Stede Bonnet stood trial in Charleston and was sentenced to hang. But, as always seems to be the case, he had his loyal supporters. One of those supporters was a most surprising gentleman. In what was perhaps the greatest tribute to the buccaneer, his captor and nemesis, Colonel Rhett, offered to personally accompany Bonet to England to seek a pardon from the King. But the Admiralty stood firm and on December 10th, nineteen days after his compatriot, Blackbeard, had been killed at Okracoke, Stede Bonnet, gentleman planter and last of the bold pirates, swung out from the gallows and was left twisting in the wind until his bones were white, as a lesson to any man who might get a notion to go a-pyratin.
And what of Governor Eden? Well he got the just deserts that all crooked politicians eventually get; they named a town for him across the Pamlico River, Edenton.
The old seaman said that there would always be pirates about and he was probably right. We know that the Caribbean still teems with pirates and buccaneers most of whom are driving taxicabs. But what about the decendants of the pirates of the Carolinas? I’m pretty sure I have run into a couple of them down in Myrtle Beach. And then there was a used car dealer here- abouts that I thought might have had some pirate blood, but he said not so. He was from an old and respected family up in Beaufort County by the name of Teach.
(Capt’n Jack is our local expert on all things nautical, philosophical and historical. For ten years, he was captain of a sailing ship that ranged from Canada to Venezuela along the Eastern Seaboard and throughout the Caribbean. Now days you might find him hanging about the waterfront watching the ships. )
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NEW-The Pelican Post Online Magazine
The publishers of The Pelican Post magazine have taken the magazine to the next level with The Pelican Post Online Magazine. You will still be getting the same old favorites- Tide Tables, Ferry Schedule, Events, Ongoing Events, Area Attractions, and The View from the Bridge, but we are also excited about adding some new content that space did not allow us to add to the printed version!
New to the website will be a Archives of old stories back to the first issue, a Business Directory, and a section called The Arts which will include Artists & Writers.
We hope you enjoy our NEW website- We thank you for supporting The Pelican Post over the years and we hope you will continue with us on this new journey.
To use this page- Click on the CALENDAR on the left to pull up posts from a certain day or go to ARCHIVES on the right to see past articles.
Southport, NC
