The Bittersweet Voyage of the Golden Ship Hatteras—A Love Story

Ira David Wood III is probably best known on the Outer Banks as the director of The Lost Colony for seven years, from 2012 to 2019. In Raleigh, where he now lives, he is the executive director of Theatre in the Park, a highly thought of community theater company with a 70-year history of producing plays at Raleigh’s Pullen Park.

And with the publication of The Bittersweet Voyage of the Golden Ship Hatteras, he is an author.

The book is a love story. However, that title brings to mind images of a maudlin tale of star-crossed lovers, which is unfair to what Wood has created.

Make no mistake, it is a love story, but it is also historical fiction and a paean to the Outer Banks, a place that Wood has made it clear he holds dear in his heart.

The story takes place on Hatteras Island at the turn of the 20th century, and Wood’s eye for detail and attention to the history of the Outer Banks and Avon—or Kinakeet, as the people who grew up there call it—where Adrian and Michele meet and fall in love takes the reader on a journey through time.

There are small touches that make the story seem real—a sailboat journey to Hatteras Lighthouse for a picnic lunch on a late summer day evokes a longing in the reader to experience that for themselves. A storm at sea and a daring rescue seem almost cinematic in how the action unfolds.

Good stories, though, invariably have compelling, interesting, and well-drawn characters, and The Golden Ship Hatteras is no exception to that rule.

We are introduced to Adrian at birth, and when we meet him again as a young man, he has a complex personality. He is curious about the world around him yet content with what he has.

Wood uses Adrian to make the point that although Avon was an isolated spot in 1903, the people living there were as aware of the world around them as anyone anywhere. Adrian’s interests, we learn, include reading, and his favorite author is Dickens, whom he quotes often and at length.

Adrian’s best friend Ned is a self-taught fiddle player and is clearly quite good at his craft. He plays at the local square dance, and calls out the steps for the dancers.

A scene that is exquisitely well created by Wood is the return voyage from Hatteras Lighthouse in the late afternoon. As the boat sails across a calm Pamlico Sound, Ned takes his fiddle out, sings, and plays Red River Valley. There is a poignancy to the writing that takes the reader to that moment in time as Adrian and Michele fall more deeply in love, serenaded by their best friend.

There is a sense of inevitability woven into the plot of the book.

From Michele’s first introduction to Adrian, which shocks her senses in an innocent and humorous way, to how everything comes together at the end of the novel—and no, we’re not giving away the end of the book—each step of the journey seems at once fresh and unanticipated, yet inevitable.

One of the most important features of good writing is to use dialogue that is at once realistic and moves the plot along. That is very much what Wood has done.

The stories Old Skip tells of the Golden Ship Hatteras seem random when told, yet they bring the story together in the end. He seems, at times, to ramble on about nor’easters and hurricanes that he had experienced, yet those memories become a path to where Wood takes the reader.

In his Afterword, Wood traces his personal history of creating the story, telling about the four years he spent as a cast member of The Lost Colony in the 1970s and the people he met. It was, he writes, the beginning of a love story, “one of the millions that have taken place along this beautiful and ancient coastline.”

The Bittersweet Voyage of the Golden Ship Hatteras is available at area bookstores and online.