Down East Beacon

It’s a curious item to cause a stir, amid the canvas paintings, the boat models, and the astonishing collection of antique and contemporary hand-carved decoys from the Core Sound region of Eastern North Carolina. But causing a little stir is what Joel Hancock’s great-great-great-grandfather’s whale harpoons are doing. Hancock, a retired insurance executive, and his wife, Susan, crowd around a table with Karen Amspacher, director of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center, and Pam Morris, the museum’s collections manager, as Hancock hands over a pair of forged-iron harpoon spikes, pitted with age.

The soaring twenty-thousand-square-foot museum on the “east’ard end” of Harkers Island, as locals would say, is