What's in a name? Graveyard of the Atlantic

Legend has it that Alexander Hamilton, the early American statesman, gave the Outer Banks its colorful moniker, one that over time came to romanticize what mariners once dreaded. According to author Ben Dixon MacNeill in "The Hatterasman," published in 1958, Hamilton "passed Cape Hatteras on a summer night in 1773 and thereafter remembering the night's terror, he spoke of that portion of the sea as the Graveyard of the Atlantic."

Hamilton's story was a creation of the imaginative MacNeill, said Kevin Duffus, author of the 2007 "Shipwrecks of the Outer Banks, An Illustrated Guide."

"Unfortunately," Duffus said, "many, many writers and historians have repeated this."

Over the years, "Graveyard of the Atlantic" has come to broadly describe the area where an extraordinary number of shipwrecks are scattered off the waters of the Outer Banks, or more correctly, off the coast from Cape Henry to Cape Fear.

Hamilton, who as U.S. secretary of the treasury under George Washington encouraged construction of coastal lighthouses, was on a vessel heading from the West Indies to Boston at age 14 when the ship caught fire. But there is nothing in historic records indicating that Hamilton was off the coast of Hatteras when his boat caught fire, Duffus said, or that the ominous description can be attributed to him.

"Nowhere in Alexander Hamilton's personal writings did he ever say that he was in danger of being shipwrecked off the Outer Banks," Duffus said.

"There is absolutely no credible evidence that he had anything to do with Cape Hatteras or concerning the phrase Graveyard of the Atlantic. "

Numerous dangerous areas off the nation's coastlines have earned the morbid maritime nickname, Duffus said, including off New Jersey, Cape Cod and Sable Island. None of them, however, have close to the number of vessels lying in watery graves off North Carolina's Graveyard of the Atlantic - where more than 1,000 vessels over 400 years were claimed by storms, wars or pirates.

Many historic accounts tell of southbound ships that were lost as they attempted to navigate past Diamond Shoals, shallow fingers of sand stretching off Cape Hatteras, where the Labrador Current meets the Gulf Stream.

"You can stand on Cape Point at Hatteras on a stormy day and watch two oceans come together in an awesome display of savage fury," wrote author David Stick in the 1952 classic, "Graveyard of the Atlantic: Shipwrecks of the North Carolina Coast."

"Thus is formed the dreaded Diamond Shoals, its fang-like shifting sand bars pushing seaward to snare the unwary mariner. Seafaring men call it the Graveyard of the Atlantic."

Duffus said the late historian's research has stood the test of time. And it was Stick's popular book, which is still in print, not Hamilton's remark, that with one phrase melded the Outer Banks to its dramatic maritime history.

"There's no dispute," Duffus said, "that it really was David Stick who put Graveyard of the Atlantic on the map."

Catherine Kozak, (252) 441-1711, cate.kozak@pilotonline.com