Over the next several months I will be giving you details, fun facts, history and stories about the Island... stay tuned for more neat information!

Lighthouses, Legends and Loggerheads

Bald Head Island’s history is peppered with colorful people and connections. Through the years, the island has been a breeding ground for wild boar, a prime hangout for bootleggers, a supplier of materials for cedar pencils, a Civil War fort, a nesting ground for loggerhead turtles, and a produce farm and fruit orchard. Pirates, lighthouse keepers, Indians, river pilots, ruffians, soldiers, farmers, and entrepreneurs of all types have come and gone, and yet, Bald Head Island’s essence is unchanged. This can only be because the island itself is a living thing, with its own integrity and spirit, its wild beauty more or less disregarding man’s inclination to tinker.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, when pirates ruled the waters off the coast of North Carolina with greed and terror, Bald Head Island was a favorite refuge and base for these notorious buccaneers. In all, the waters surrounding Cape Fear were a hideaway for hundreds of pirates, the most famous of which were Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, and Stede Bonnet, the gentleman pirate.

Bonnet, the so-called “Gentleman Pirate” from Barbados, was an educated retired military officer who turned to piracy in 1717 as a second career in order to escape what one historian tactfully referred to as “the discomforts he found in a married state.” During his short stint as a pirate, Bonnet terrorized the Carolina and Virginia coasts aboard his sailing sloop Revenge with 10 guns and 70 men.

For a brief time, Bonnet even linked up with Blackbeard, a pirate who never carried the title “gentleman.” In 1718 Blackbeard was cornered and killed aboard his sloop, Adventure, by two warships sent by the governor of Virginia. Just three weeks later, Bonnet was captured at Bonnet’s Creek in Southport by Colonel William Rhett of South Carolina and hanged near Charlestown. Their deaths marked a dramatic end to the Golden Age of Piracy in North Carolina.

Long before pirates ever discovered Bald Head Island’s nooks and crannies, Native Americans hunted Bald Head Island and fished its surrounding waters in the spring and summer while maintaining permanent settlements on the mainland. The island was, in effect, a seasonal retreat for the Native Americans when supplies of corn or grain began running low.

Early river pilots were responsible for giving Bald Head Island its unique and descriptive name. Eager to offer their navigational services to ships approaching the entrance to the Cape Fear River, they took up watch on a high dune headland on the southwest point of the island. According to local lore, the headland was worn bare of vegetation, making it stand out in contrast to the forest behind it. This “bald” headland served as a reference point for ships entering the river, and the name Bald Head Island has endured.

(the above story taken from www.baldheadisland.com)

- Millie