Making a trip up the East Coast, I decided to use part of the Intra Coastal Waterway to more safely pass north of Cape Hatteras. As it turned out, the route I used, from Beaufort, NC to Norfolk, VA took us through the wild and mysterious waters of Eastern North Carolina, waters I would not have wanted to miss. The Pamlico, Pongo, and Alligator Rivers are home to some intimidating, swampy wilderness where there can be no doubt in your mind, that if you are lucky, you are just passing through. It's not that I felt threatened, or necessarily uncomfortable there, it's just that my usual status as top predator in this world did not seem to be the case. I'm not only talking about the wildlife, both seen and unseen, but I thought I saw some of the humans I observed along the banks licking their lips as I sailed by.
It was in these parts that I chose to anchor
in a place called Oriental, NC. I had heard that it was a nice stop, a
sailor's town, whose very name came from a wrecked ship, the Oriental. It
seems way back there in the eighteenth century her crew and passengers were
forced to take up a lubberly residence there when the ship was wrecked in a
hurricane. I discovered on my chart there was a small but protected anchorage,
which might answer my needs. Sure enough when I arrived there, late into a
blustery June afternoon, there was hardly a soul around. Jezebel, Laurie and I
slept deeply that first night as the warm front rain played rhythms on the
deck above. 
All the next day it rained. Finally, sometime in the early afternoon, Laurie had had enough, and rain or not she was going ashore, leaving Jezebel and I lazing around the cabin. I tired of reading and got out my fiddle. After running through a few of my favorites, I found myself wandering through and around the key of Dm, not one I usually fool with. It wasn't too long before a melody started to take shape as they sometimes do. But this melody was quite unique; actually it was eerie. And in this setting with the rain beating on the deck above in this lonely anchorage, the melody was perfect. So perfect I played it over and over again. Jezebel was, as she often is, way out there in dreamland at my feet on the cabin sole. It was then I got that feeling which I have come to recognize as"something is about to happen, get paper and pen quick".
On a boat nothing is very far away. I was soon ready for the words that came to me. For what I'd guess was the next fifteen to twenty minutes, I wrote as fast as I could with that weird melody as my only guide. Part of me was aware of what was going on while some other part of me was just listening for the next line of the song. What really struck me numb was the fact that I was not writing in the first person about me, but about Blackbeard. For a while I was Blackbeard.
When the song was complete I just sat there
wondering what had happened, even though I really knew. I picked up my guitar
and sang this strange song for the first time not knowing if it was good or
bad. After a while Laurie returned and I sang it for her. She told me she
thought it was very good. I still didn't know. It was too personal. 
All this happened in June of 1999. Since then Blackbeard has become one of my most popular and requested songs. Naturally, I started reading everything I could find about Blackbeard. It was several months later that I learned from a detailed historic account of his life that, during his last months, he had hid out all along the Pamlico River. In fact, not long before he was finally killed in Ocracoke Inlet on the North Carolina Atlantic shore, he himself had anchored in the Oriental anchorage. Now I ask you: who really wrote that song?