For a remote patch of real estate with a year-round population of little more than 3,000, Hatteras has witnessed extraordinary. It may have been the destination of the Lost Colony. Blackbeard likely hobnobbed with the locals. The Monitor went to its watery grave nearby. Radio towers on the island made history’s first transmission of music and received the distress call from the Titanic. Billy Mitchell proved the ascendancy of air power by sinking a pair of mothballed battleships offshore. Bodies washed up on the beach following U-boat attacks during World War II. The surfmen of the island’s lifesaving stations made some of the most heroic rescues ever. And the coastal icon, the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, has stood watch.

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    But Hatteras Island: Keeper of the Outer Banks is more than a history. It is rather, as author Ray McAllister says, “a conversation with an island.” It tells of a vacation paradise that can change instantly into a storm center, of a resort island kept largely free of development — but hardly of controversy — by a national seashore park. It tells of the hardy few who brave the Hatteras winters, those who come to catch record-sized fish from the piers, those who travel disaster-prone Highway 12 and who drove the bare sand before it, those who stood and watched as a 208-foot lighthouse was moved half a mile.

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    “Pull up a chair,” McAllister says. “Have a listen.”

 

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NOW UPDATED AND ENLARGED IN A NEW 2ND EDITION FOR 2019

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