Much of Outer Banks’ treasure lore is fabricated for the show, but Denmark Tanny is actually based on a real-life formerly enslaved man from Charleston, South Carolina. The first season of Outer Banks follows adventurous teenage characters - the Pogues - in North Carolina’s Outer Banks beaches, who go on a treasure hunt to find the $400 million in gold left on a shipwreck from the 1800s. Season 2 follows the same kids, John B, Sarah, JJ, Kiara, and Pope, as they discover further treasures from the sunken Royal Merchant, including secrets about the shipwreck’s sole survivor, Denmark Tanny.
Outer Banks’ fictional history puts Denmark Tanny as one of the area’s early wealthy citizens, a formerly enslaved man who was a cook onboard the Royal Merchant until its sinking. Tanny was the only man who survived the shipwreck, bringing many of the ship’s treasures on land to build a community where he freed other enslaved people around North Carolina. His vast estate is currently known as Tannyhill, where Outer Banks' Ward Cameron and his family live on the wealthy Figure Eight part of the island.
Denmark Tanny is inspired by South Carolina’s Denmark Vesey, a Black activist in Charleston who was born into slavery somewhere in the Caribbean in the late 1700s, eventually gaining his freedom after winning a lottery at age 32. After becoming a free man, Vesey, similar to Tanny, tried to purchase the freedom of his wife and children to no avail. Both the fictional Tanny and the real-life Vesey are well-known activists and leaders within their community as freedmen. Vesey founded an African Methodist Episcopal church, which is similar to Outer Banks’ Demark Tanny founding a church on the island to meet with the other enslaved men he freed (which also happened to be the location where he hid the Cross of Santo Domingo).
Considering part of Outer Banks season 2 also takes place in Charleston where the Limbreys reveal they held Denmark Tanny’s wife and children as slaves, the connection between the two men is no coincidence. Both Vesey and Tanny also met their demise in similar ways: at the plotting of wealthy white slave owners who had stakes in their families’ ownership. Vesey was executed for allegedly planning a widespread slave revolt to free his family, and Tanny for trying to free his wife and children, eventually being hanged after he buried his wife’s bones under a tree in the Outer Banks.
The real Denmark Vesey never came to a vast fortune nor was subject to a high-profile shipwreck, but his tale and tragic demise that are reflected in Denmark Tanny contribute to the growing conversations on Outer Banks about racial and wealth inequality. Now that the Netflix TV show revealed Pope Heyward is a direct descendant of Denmark Tanny and probable heir to the Royal Merchant's treasures, the series will likely put much more effort into discussing his backstory and what it means for the family reclaiming Tannyhill. Outer Banks’ popularity may also inspire Charleston historians to put more research into Denmark Vesey’s story and his effects on Southern race relations in the Carolinas.
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