This is chapter 3 of Shark Hunter: Russell J. Coles at Cape Lookout.

Between 1900 and 1925 Russell Coles always arrived in Morehead City, N.C., on the train that local people affectionately called the “Old Mullet Road” or the “Old Mullet Line” because of the seemingly endless barrels of that salted fish with which they filled its freight cars.

As soon as he stepped off the train, the first thing that Coles did, year in and year out, was go in search of Capt. Charles Wesley Willis in the Promise Land.

Everybody called him “Capt. Charlie.”  He lived in a neighborhood of fishermen and their families on the shores of Bogue Sound, on what in those days was the western side of Morehead City.

Nobody knows exactly why, but they called their neighborhood the Promise Land.

For almost a quarter century, Capt. Charlie was the leader of Coles’ fishing crew at Cape Lookout. He was Coles’ guide to the natural world, and he was also his friend.

Exactly when Coles made his first trip to Morehead City is a little unclear. But from the letters, diaries and other documents that my daughter Vera and I found at Coles Hill, his family’s estate in Virginia, we suspect it was a year or two before 1900.

Soon the trip became an annual pilgrimage. By 1902 at the latest, Coles was spending three or four months a year on a houseboat at Cape Lookout.

Capt. Charlie was his righthand man. He was a fisherman’s fisherman. He was the kind of man that other commercial fishermen watched closely to see where he was fishing and what kind of gear he was using and how he went about it.

Far more than any of the ichthyologists or other esteemed marine biologists with whom Coles later worked, Capt. Charlie Willis revealed to Coles the wonders of Cape Lookout and the ways of the sea’s creatures.

At Shackleford Banks

Like most of the Promise Land’s residents, Capt. Charlie and his wife had settled there only a few years earlier, after having lived all their lives on a remote island several miles to the southeast.

That island is called Shackleford Banks and it’s a 9-mile-long, narrow ribbon of sand, salt marsh and maritime forest. In those days, it was only separated from Core Banks and Cape Lookout by what people used to call “The Drain.”

The Drain was a low, sandy stretch where the ocean flowed across the island at high tide, but you could walk across it at low tide.

Many years later, in 1933, a hurricane opened a navigable inlet at the site of The Drain. At that time,  Shackleford Banks and Core Banks started really looking like two islands. Both are now part of the Cape Lookout National Seashore.

The Ca’e Bankers

Capt. Charlie was born on the Cape Banks– or “Ca’e Banks– as the families with roots there call them– in 1866.  He came from a family of fishermen, whalers and shipbuilders.

He married another islander, Elenous Guthrie. Her mother, Mary Gillikin, was a renown  local midwife and her father was a legend– half man and half myth.

(Maybe more than half myth, given all the tall tales I’ve heard about him over the years!)

His name was Decatur Gillikin and he was the Paul Bunyan of the Down East fishing communities in eastern Carteret County.

Beverly Willis Piner, who is one of Capt. Charlie and Elenous’s great-grandchildren, told me the other day that Elenous was “known for her cooking and feistiness.”

“Daddy said she got her feistiness from her daddy Decatur,” Beverly added.

Capt. Charlie and Elenous made their home on the Cape Banks until a series of storms laid the island’s communities to waste at the end of the 19th century. A pair of devastating hurricanes in 1896 and 1899 proved to be the last straws.

It was a hard time: cottages destroyed, gardens and orchards ruined by saltwater, graves washed away.

By 1902, Capt. Charlie and his family and all their neighbors too had uprooted and many of them had made a new home in the Promise Land.

Coles could not have found a better guide to Cape Lookout and its waters than Charlie Willis or the other old timers that had been raised on Shackleford Banks.

For generations they had lived off the sea and they had managed to survive by observing and learning its ways.

On Shackleford they had lived lives so deeply attached to the Atlantic that, when they moved to Morehead City, they seemed to many of the town’s citizens, and perhaps to themselves as well, to be foreigners in a strange land.

On the island they had fished, oystered and clammed and gone whaling. They built their own wooden boats, stitched their own fishing nets and girded their houses against hurricane winds with posts made of whalebone.

They lit their homes at night with dolphin oil, stuffed their mattresses with seaweed and lined the graves of their dead with seashells.

A few oral histories of people who grew up on the island have survived, especially at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island. When I listen those interviews, I always get the impression that there was nothing about the sea that they did not know, nothing that they had not seen.

But when they finally gave up living on the island and moved to Morehead City, many of the townspeople eyed them with suspicion.

They were looked down upon and vilified for their “old-fashioned” island ways and their manner of talking and their paucity of schooling.

The families in Morehead City looked at them the way people often do new immigrants to this country, and the young kids from the Promise Land soon learned not to walk out of the neighborhood alone.

In the Promise Land

That was not the way that Russell Coles looked at Capt. Charlie or the other Promise Landers, however. He wanted nothing more than to know the sea and its ways, and he knew that they were his key to do so.

Coles had plenty of faults, but not respecting the local fishermen or appreciating their knowledge of the local waters was not one of them.

The old islanders usually had little or no schooling and had lived hard lives with little profit, but Coles respected their deep understanding of natural history and judged them by their character and wisdom.

Coles came from a rigid, class bound society, but that was not what he found at Cape Lookout and the Promise Land. Indeed, he found the opposite and it was a way of life that seemed to suit him.

In his letters, diaries and other writings, I could always tell that he never put himself above Capt. Charlie or the other local fishermen with whom he worked.

Capt. Charlie’s descendants echo that opinion of Coles.

During those summers at Cape Lookout, Coles anchored his houseboat in Lookout Bight, the big hook on the south end of Core Banks that reached out into the sea, then curled around like a fishhook into a breathtakingly beautiful natural harbor.

On the houseboat, Coles, Capt. Charlie and the rest of the crewmen lived together, ate together and no doubt drank a dram or two together.

Many times Coles was also a guest at Capt. Charlie’s home in the Promise Land. On the 26^th of December 1916, for instance, he wrote in his diary:

“Was about to head to Edna Earl when Charlie told me that he had for dinner at his home fried fresh mullets, boiled collards with cornbread dumplings and pie…”

The Edna Earl was the houseboat that he anchored at Cape Lookout. (It might have belonged to Capt. Charlie.)

Like any one of right mind when presented the opportunity to dine on fresh mullets, collard greens with cornmeal dumplings and pie, Coles decided that the Edna Earl could wait.

That evening he stayed for dinner, and on many other evenings he also stayed the night.

A Little Warning for Teddy Roosevelt

At one point, Russell Coles invited Teddy Roosevelt to join him, Capt. Charlie and the rest of his Morehead City crew and go in hunt of giant manta rays (more on that story in a later chapter).

But before Roosevelt arrived, Coles felt obliged to write him and warn him that Capt. Charlie and his mates were not going to be his servants and would not abide being treated like servants, even by a man that had once been president of the United States.

“A Down Easterner is a strange animal– they can’t be driven and they can’t be led,” Down East fisherman, philosopher and county commissioner Jonathan Robinson (who just passed away) used to say of his people in the eastern part of Carteret County– and the same was true of the Promise Landers.

In an article that Coles wrote for the Danville Register of July 18, 1919, he described what he told Roosevelt about Capt. Charlie and the rest of his crew:

“Colonel, these men in my crew are a different type of man from any you have probably ever seen. They will risk their lives for you; they are absolutely tried and true. They have been with me for years. Well, these men will eat with us and sleep with us. There are no private dishes. We all eat and sleep together in one big room….”

Capt. Charlie’s Crew

At Coles Hill, Vera and I found an undated, handwritten note, in Coles’ hand, in which he briefly describes the crew with which he hunted sharks and rays at Cape Lookout.

At the time that Coles wrote the note, Charlie Willis was 49 years old. Coles explained that Capt. Charlie had “been my boat captain and companion on nearly every one of my expeditions for 12 years.” He called him “a natural leader” and the “highest possible type of native fisherman.”

Coles admired Capt. Charlie’s courage, self-reliance and seamanship. Willis was, he said:

“The most dependable man in an emergency from either storm or ‘dangerous game of the sea’ I have ever known. A natural leader of the NC coast type of fishermen.”

In that note, Coles also described two other local fishermen with whom he and Capt. Charlie worked for decades.

Those two men were part of Capt. Charlie’s regular crew when he was commercial fishing. Whenever Coles was at Cape Lookout, they usually made up part of the crew as well.

Both were cousins of Capt. Charlie’s through his father’s side of the family, Beverly Willis Piner, his great-granddaughter, told me recently.

Capt. Charlie’s first mate was a man named Roland Phillips, who was also from Morehead City and was just a little younger than the captain.

“A little man,” Coles said of him, “but hard and quick; extra good lookout. Has worked in Charlie’s fishing crew for nearly 30 years as second in command. I regard him a safe reliable man.”

The other crewman was Martin “Mart” Lewis, who also lived in Morehead City by that time, but apparently was from the Cape Banks where Capt. Charlie had been born and raised.

Coles described Lewis as a  “tall dark haired man” and said that he had worked for Capt. Willis for 30 years.

“A good camp cook, engineer and fisherman, but only valuable to me when working under Charlie as he has taken orders from him for so many years that he lacks initiative,” Coles confided.

For at least two decades, Russell Coles, Capt. Charlie Willis, Roland Phillips and Mart Lewis worked together in the waters around Cape Lookout. They also made at least three trips to the west coast of Florida that I’ll discuss in later chapters.  They lived together, worked together and risked their lives together.

The Coles Hill documents mainly tell a story of brotherhood and comradeship, but Vera and I did find one reference to an incident that shows that Coles and his crew did not always sail smooth waters.

In a May 16, 1918 letter to his sister-in-law Eliza, Coles describe his whole crew—at that time, Capt. Charlie, Phillips, Lewis and two other men— going on strike:

“Led by Charlie, my crew struck on me yesterday for double wages and for the first time in my life I yielded to a strike and now I am having to pay Charlie over a hundred dollars a month flat wages and Charlie gets to make a percentage of the profits from fish caught in his nets.”

Coles knew that Capt. Willis and his crew were worth the extra pay. In the coming days, as I chronicle more of Coles’ adventures and scientific research, be sure to remember, as he did, that he could not have done any of it without them.

Indeed, I firmly believe that at least some of Coles’ most exciting discoveries about sharks, rays and other fishes at Cape Lookout arose first from Capt. Charlie and his crew.

They had learned the diversity of marine life and the behavior of the sea’s creatures from decades of working on those waters.

They learned them from listening to their fathers and grandfathers, and sometimes their mothers and grandmothers, too.

In that way, Russell Coles did not benefit just from their experience, but he also inherited the knowledge of generations of Promise Landers that had come to know, deep in their bones, the ways of the sea and shore.

In a way, his greatest gift may have been that he had the wisdom to listen and learn from them.

-To be continued-