Epoxy

Queen's Creek

Hubert, North Carolina, USA

Also known as Queens Creek, Hubert, Swansboro

Otway Burns was born at the mouth of Queen's Creek around 1775 and became the most celebrated privateer North Carolina ever produced.

He and a New Bern partner bought a schooner in New York for $8,000 and had it commissioned as a privateer in August 1812. Renamed Snap Dragon, it ran three cruises out of Beaufort and Swansboro, two in the West Indies and one off Nova Scotia, taking British merchant shipping.

How much it took is disputed. The figure repeated everywhere is 42 vessels worth more than four million dollars, which traces back to a 1905 biography written by his grandson. Historians have since questioned both the numbers and the sources behind them.

Burns served four terms in the state senate after the war, lost his money, and died in 1850. He was buried without ceremony at Beaufort. Queen's Creek is a few miles of tidal water running down to the White Oak, and it is where he started.

Details

Feature: Lake
Build: Epoxy
Material: Solid Maple
Colour: Ocean Blue
Size: 10-1/2" x 16"
Completed: February 2025

Shop this Style $350.00 CAD

Detail of the Queen's Creek map by Keyway

How this one was made

Maple with blue for the water and black for the type, compass and star. The water runs off the right edge, so that side is dammed at the board edge rather than at a shoreline. The estuary is the hard part: it breaks into dozens of marsh islands with channels between them narrow enough to hold air under a flood, and the creek itself thins to almost nothing before it reaches the top corner. Maple stains from anything, and with a sixteenth to an eighth of engraving there is no sanding a mistake back out.