The great sand dunes behind the lighthouse at the cape have their equal nowhere else on the coast.Blown by the ocean winds, the dunes work inland, overwhelming a pine forest to the tree tops and filling swamps in their course.The beach is strewn with every type of wreckage of man's vain attempts to conquer the sea.
The Life Saving Service men have strange tales to tell and show their collections of coins found along the sand.The old pilots live snugly in their neat houses in Pilot Row, waiting their turns to take the great ships up through the shoals and sands which were so baffling to Henry Hudson and his mate one hot August day of the year 1609.
The Indians of the northern part of Delaware are said to have been mostly Minquas who lived along the Christiana and Brandywine, and are supposed to have had a fort on Iron Hill.The rest of the State was inhabited by the Nanticokes, who extended their habitations far down the peninsula, where a river is named after them.They were a division or clan of the Delawares or Leni Lenapes.In the early days they gave some trouble; but shortly before the Revolution all left the peninsula in strange and dramatic fashion.Digging up the bones of their dead chiefs in 1748, they bore them away to new abodes in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania.Some appear to have traveled by land up the Delaware to the Lehigh, which they followed to its source not far from the Wyoming Valley.Others went in canoes, starting far down the peninsula at the Nanticoke River and following along the wild shore of the Chesapeake to the Susquehanna, up which they went by its eastern branch straight into the Wyoming Valley.It was a grand canoe trip--a weird procession of tawny, black-haired fellows swinging their paddles day after day, with their freight of ancient bones, leaving the sunny fishing grounds of the Nanticoke and the Choptank to seek a refuge from the detested white man in the cold mountains of Pennsylvania.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
A large part of the material for the early history of Pennsylvania is contained of course in the writings and papers of the founder.The "Life of William Penn" by S.M.Janney (1852) is perhaps the most trustworthy of the older biographies but it is a dull book.A biography written with a modern point of view is "The True William Penn" by Sydney G.Fisher (1900).Mrs.
Colquhoun Grant, a descendant of Penn has published a book with the title "Quaker and Courtier: the Life and Work of William Penn" (1907).The manuscript papers of Penn now in the possession of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, together with much new material gathered in England, are soon to be published under the able editorship of Albert Cook Myers.
There is a vast literature on the history of Quakerism.The "Journal of George Fox" (1694), Penn's "Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People called Quakers" (1695), and Robert Barclay's "Apology for the True Christian Divinity" (1678) are of first importance for the study of the rise of the Society of Friends.Among the older histories are J.J.Gurney's "Observations on the Religious Peculiarities of the Society of Friends" (1824), James Bowden's "History of the Society of Friends in America," 2 vols.(1850-54), and S.M.Janney's "History of the Religious Society of Friends," 4 vols.(1860-67).
