Podcast: The Black Surfmen Behind One of the Greatest Water Rescues Ever
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In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, we visit the Outer Banks of North Carolina and unearth some surprising history about a place known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic because of how many shipwrecks have occurred there.
It was also home to early efforts at lifesaving and a precursor to the U.S. Kelly McEvers: If you drive down the coast of the Outer Banks in North Carolina, you get to a point where you get the feeling you’re going nowhere. You’re on a single-lane road and civilization just starts to disappear.
There’s fewer and fewer houses, no more restaurants, sand to the left, sand to the right with just a few beach grasses poking through. And today it is a wildlife refuge, one of the most untouched parts of the Outer Banks. And out here you will see a sign.
It’s nothing special. All it says is the name of a bridge. Captain Richard Etheridge Bridge.
It’s the kind of sign you might just drive past without even thinking about it. But there is a story behind that sign. A hundred years ago, this small piece of land in the Outer Banks was the site of one of the most amazing water rescues ever.
And it was led by a person and a team who, until recently, were mostly unknown. I’m Kelly McEvers, and this is Atlas Obscura. A celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places.
And today’s episode is brought to you in partnership with the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau. Today’s story is about how just 30 years after the Civil War ended, a black man led one of the most successful life-saving teams in the country’s history. And how their incredible rescue required them to go off book.
If you visit the Outer Banks today, it is clear you are in vacation town, right? Cute bookstores, mini golf courses, big houses for rent right on the ocean. But in the late 1800s, the Outer Banks was a different world.
Dave Zoby: They thought of the beachfront as like wasteland. They thought of the beachfront as a place you wouldn’t want to live. Kelly McEvers: This is Dave Zoby.
He’s a writer, and he used to visit the Outer Banks as a kid with his family during the summer. The Outer Banks, if you don’t know them, are a series of barrier islands, which means they’re basically a long strip of sand that runs parallel to the actual coastline. Like this outer buffer zone between the coast and the Atlantic Ocean.
Which means, especially back in the day, things could get rough. Dave Zoby: It was a hard place to live, you know. There was malaria, there was storms, there was blowing sand everywhere.
Before the bridges were built, the only way to get out there was by boat.
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