In the 19th century, Francis Winslow was a Navy lieutenant from Connecticut. By 1886 he’d been studying and surveying and plotting oysters north of here for a decade. He’d built a small hatchery aboard a survey schooner in order to track the progress of young oysters, a project that led to a longer “closed season.” He’d discovered that little parasites considered harmless to oysters were actually killing them. A scientist named the parasite Astyris Winslovii in honor of that discovery, according to Winslow’s obituary. Winslow, it seemed, was the man North Carolina was looking for to survey its oyster beds. Farther north, dredging had exhausted the species. Oysters were still abundant here, where people harvested by hand. Winslow would identify public and private beds, and the rest would be leased. “They knew people from Virginia were coming” to dredge in North Carolina, Ballance said. “It was an attempt to hold back the chaos.”

In 2002, Ballance made the trip to Raleigh to look at copies of Winslow’s hand-traced maps on oil cloth. They still looked new. As they might have looked when oystermen harvested hundreds of thousands of bushels each year in North Carolina. Ocracokers have made their living off the water for much of the island’s history. Ballance’s grandfather ran freight boats from the island to the West Indies, and when that industry died, he turned to fishing. Ballance’s father, Elisha, had fished and crabbed. Ballance returned to do the same after he finished college. So did Elisha’s two other sons. The four of them worked the waters of Ocracoke together for more than 20 years. When the men got home in the evenings, Elisha would fall asleep and Ballance would pore over math and programming books. He used a slide rule, and later a graphing calculator and later a computer, to keep track of the fish and “try to outsmart them.” Ballance, the man who fished for a living, crunched numbers for relaxation. That made him an ideal researcher for the fisheries division mapping project, which was funded by North Carolina Sea Grant. He would seek to show where oyster reefs once thrived. “Since that’s where oysters used to grow, presumably that’s where they would grow again,” said Bob Hines, a Sea Grant fisheries specialist. The state archives agreed to temporarily transfer Winslow’s maps to the Outer Banks History Center in Manteo, where they were scanned and stitched together in 2003. Ballance plunged into the project. He knows as well as any Ocracoker that the island is not the place it once was. “If fishing is going to survive,” he said, “we need something in the winter.” Back when Winslow showed up, oysters were that something.