I
CAPE MAY and Cape Henlopen form, as it were, the upper and lower jaws
of a gigantic mouth, which disgorges from its monstrous gullet the
cloudy waters of the Delaware Bay into the heaving, sparkling blue-green
of the Atlantic Ocean. From Cape Henlopen as the lower jaw there juts
out a long, curving fang of high, smooth-rolling sand dunes, cutting
sharp and clean against the still, blue sky above silent, naked, utterly
deserted, excepting for the squat, white-walled lighthouse standing upon
the crest of the highest hill. Within this curving, sheltering hook of
sand hills lie the smooth waters of Lewes Harbor, and, set a little back
from the shore, the quaint old town, with its dingy wooden houses of
clapboard and shingle, looks sleepily out through the masts of the
shipping lying at anchor in the harbor, to the purple, clean-cut, level
thread of the ocean horizon beyond.
Lewes is a queer, odd, old-fashioned little town, smelling fragrant
of salt marsh and sea breeze. It is rarely visited by strangers.
The people who live there are the progeny of people who have
lived there for many generations, and it is the very place to nurse,
and preserve, and care for old legends and traditions of bygone
times, until they grow from bits of gossip and news into local
history of considerable size. As in the busier world men talk of
last year's elections, here these old bits, and scraps, and odds and
ends of history are retailed to the listener who cares to listen—traditions of the War of 1812, when Beresford's fleet lay off the
harbor threatening to bombard the town; tales of the Revolution
and of Earl Howe's warships, tarrying for a while in the quiet harbor
before they sailed up the river to shake old Philadelphia town
with the thunders of their guns at Red Bank and Fort Mifflin.
With these substantial and sober threads of real history,
other and more lurid colors are interwoven into the web of local
lore—legends of the dark doings of famous pirates, of their mysterious,
sinister comings and goings, of treasures buried in the sand
dunes and pine barrens back of the cape and along the Atlantic
beach to the southward.
Of such is the story of Blueskin, the pirate.
