Cape Fear River

yeah most of the time i make a decision

sometimes it's good sometimes it's not so but um that was um yeah so we live uh right north of fort fisher that's carolina beach um So we're in Wilmington, which is the port city that is there on the Cape Fear River.

It's a major port.

It's actually the largest port between Charleston and Norfolk on the east coast in the south.

Second, that you shall send a single man carrying or otherwise bringing, provided he is alone, a sum in gold amounting to five thousand pounds sterling.

Third, that this man shall be on the sandbars at the entrance to the Cape Fear River in Carolina at noon on the tenth day of September in this year of grace 1718, ready to deliver the sum before mentioned and to take in charge the boy also before mentioned.

Failing the accomplishment of any or all of these terms, the boy will be immediately put to death without stay or pity.

Expecting you to act with discretion and for the welfare of your son, ever your humble servant, Captain Thomas, ship Royal James.

I think most as much of getting him out of this scrape as you do as saving your lad.

Now here's my scheme.

I know that coaster on Cape Fear like I know the black schooner's deck.

I'll get down there about the first of September, and I reckon they'll be there near the same time.

But he did not find this most recent depredator, who had departed very promptly when he heard that armed ships were coming out of the harbor.

Now Mr. Rat, who was no more of a sailor than stayed Bonnet had been when he first began his seafaring life, boldly made his way up the coast to the mouth of Cape Fear River, where he had been told the pirate vessel was lying.

When he reached his destination, Mr. Rat found that it would not be an easy thing to ascend the river, for the reason that the pilots he had brought with him knew nothing about the waters of that part of the coast.

And although the two ships made their way very cautiously, it was not long after they had entered the river before they got out of the channel, and it being low tide, both of them ran aground upon sandbars.

If the Royal James had been ready to sail, there is no doubt that Bonnet would have taken his chance of finding the channel in the dark, and would have sailed away that night without regard to the cannonading which might have been directed against him from the two stranded vessels.

But as it was impossible to get ready to sail, Bonnet went to work with the greatest energy to get ready to fight.

He knew that when the tide rose, there would be two armed sloops afloat, and that there would be a regular naval battle on the quiet waters of Cape Fear River.

All night his men worked to clear the decks and get everything in order for the coming combat.

That site was the place where DuPont was manufacturing its PFAS in the last couple of decades, and it had contaminated 20,000 private wells around that plant through aerial emissions.

And then the Cape Fear River was terribly contaminated with PFAS from that site as well.

uh the north carolina deq had entered into a consent order with dupont and dupont's already our camores has already spent over i think it's like 1.2 billion trying to stop discharges from the site uh the settlement announced yesterday was another almost 600 million dollars To help the local governments in the state deal with the that was off site and pay for water treatment costs and other natural resource damages.

So.

I don't know what's going on, but she's not here.

Fayetteville in North Carolina sits along the banks of the Cape Fear River, a city that traces its roots back to the 1750s.

It was here in 1775 that a group of local patriots signed one of the earliest public pledges of independence in the American colonies.

For a brief moment in the city's history, Fayetteville was even considered as a permanent capital for the state, but it was the military that would come to define it.

In 1718, the U.S. Army carved an artillery training ground out of the pine woods northwest of the city.

Over the following century, it would grow into one of the largest military installations on earth.

Soldiers cycled through by the tens of thousands, and the sleepy market town that had once shipped lumber and naval stores down the Cape Fear River transformed into something else.

It became a bustling transient military city, and its population swelled and shifted with each new deployment, each new posting, each new family arriving.

It's, it's, it's a property of historic value somewhere in North Carolina.

It's close to the Cape Fear River.

Uh, anyway, it's absolutely perfect.

De Laurentiis, he's super happy, so he goes to the owners and he says, "We love this place.