To Cuba and Back by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

All day there has been no sail in sight, except the steamer Columbia, for Charleston, SC; and she soon disappeared below the horizon.

We are near Cape Hatteras. It is night, and soon the Light of Hatteras throws its bright, cheerful beam for thirty miles over a huge burial ground of sailors. How many struggles with death, how many last efforts of the last resources of skill and courage, what floating wrecks of ships, what waste of life, has that light shone over! Under that reef, perished Bache, flying for harbor before the gale, in his little surveying brig. Every league has been and will be a field where lives and treasures are sown thick from the hand of Destruction -- one of those points on the earth's surface where, in the universal and endless struggle between life and death, preservation and destruction, the destroyers have the advantage.