. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. gated the half-million acres of tangled vine and bog called the Great Dismal Swamp, which lay astride the Carolina-Virginia line His destiny as national leader usurped his dreams of running a canal through the Dismal, but others picked up the charge. In 1805, the 22-mile Dismal Swamp Canal opened, connecting Deep Creek of the Virginia tidewater with North Carolina's Pasquotank River. Today it is the country's oldest man-made waterway still in existence and a crucial link in the Intracoastal Waterway. From
. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. gated the half-million acres of tangled vine and bog called the Great Dismal Swamp, which lay astride the Carolina-Virginia line His destiny as national leader usurped his dreams of running a canal through the Dismal, but others picked up the charge. In 1805, the 22-mile Dismal Swamp Canal opened, connecting Deep Creek of the Virginia tidewater with North Carolina's Pasquotank River. Today it is the country's oldest man-made waterway still in existence and a crucial link in the Intracoastal Waterway. From 1814 on, an incredible variety of boats plied the Dismal Swamp Canal, from barges bearing bacon and brandy to antebellum steamers to steel-hulled petroleum tankers that used the canal during World War II to avoid German submarines in the Atlantic. There was even the James Adams Floating Theatre, a 700- seat showboat fashioned from a wooden barge. In the meantime, two centuries of efforts to drain the swamp and convert the land to agricultural use were alarmingly success- ful. Only about 107,000 of the Dismal's original half-million acres remain. Such a fate has continually threatened the sprawling pocosins south of the Alligator River. Pocosins are a type of wetland that once covered hundreds of thousands of acres of Eastern North Carolina, but they have dwindled in the face of widespread ditching and draining. Not so the tangled thickets that border the Alligator River-Pungo River Canal. From the headwaters of the Alligator we cruise along mile after mile of a stick- straight channel that burrows through tangled pond pines and the evergreen shrubs of the pocosins. Deer skitter away into the underbrush; a timber rattlesnake, thick as a radiator hose, swims in front of the bow. In three hours we pass houses so widely spaced they can be counted on a single hand. Down the canal and into the wide Pungo River, our route for the day finally feeds us into the harbor at Belhaven. It's
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookcollectionunclibra, booksubjectoceanography
