The Hunt for Pigrates:
The Return Trip

While driving back to Dukerd University we noticed quite a few yard ornaments in Surfsail Village that celebrate the pigrate. Becky snapped this photo of a wooded pigrate that was sitting on a fish table in the side yard of a house on the sound. The patch over the eye and the wooden peg leg show how the people of this village revere the pigrates as national heros.



If your are not familiar with the story you might be interested to learn that the pigrates first learned to swim while aboard a fishing vessel during the Revolutionary War. One legend describes a battle between the ship carrying the pigs and a British battle ship. The pigs are noted as having single hoofedly sinking a fleet of British ships.



Naturalist and artist Christian Gray created this illustration from memory of what he saw on day three of our exploration.