Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Jersey
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| Map of New Jersey |
Once you notice the oddity of salt water in the lower reaches of the Delaware and Hudson rivers, it gets easier to understand current theory that southern New Jersey was once an island. Like Long Island, it was separated from the mainland by a sound, but in the Jersey case the sound silted up from Trenton to New Brunswick, creating a new peninsula of "West" Jersey by uniting the island with the mainland. The colony was named after another island of Jersey off the coast of England, a gesture for Sir George Carteret, who was initially given the American area out of gratitude for once sheltering the exiled royal brothers Charles II and James from Cromwell, in that other Jersey. Cape May was probably a second distinct island later joined to the larger one by the transformation of silted ocean into the bogs of the Maurice River. Cape May started as a whaling community, populated by Quakers from New York and New England, who always maintained a social distance from the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. The long Atlantic beaches of New Jersey now repeat the main geological process, with successive generations of barrier islands first heaved up by the ocean and then packed against the mainland, filling in the brackish bay. One cycle of forming and packing a successive barrier island takes about three hundred years before a new one starts; it still continues. In a larger sense, the process consists of the former mountains of Pennsylvania crumbling into the ocean, and then responding to wave action.
It's no mystery, therefore, why the former barrier island of southern New Jersey is flat, broken only by turgid meandering streams which casually empty in either direction. The head of Timber Creek, which flows into the Delaware, is only eight miles from the head of the Mullica River, flowing toward the ocean. During the Revolutionary War, the British found it too dangerous to sail up these winding creeks, since at any moment they might make a sharp turn and be facing a battery of cannon. An arrangement grew up that buccaneers would build ships in the center of heavy oak forests and sail them out to Barnegat Bay, thence out one of the inlets of the barrier islands into blue water. The financiers of Philadelphia, many of them with names now in the Social Register, would come from the rear, sailing back up the Delaware River creeks, and walking a last mile or two to privateer headquarters on the Atlantic-flowing creeks. Auctions were conducted, in which the ships were examined, the captain interviewed, and the crew observed in target practice. If you bought a small share you would be rich when the ship returned; and if it never returned, well, you had to invest in a different one. Robert Morris once confided that one ship which returned would be so profitable it could pay for three or four ships which were lost. New Jersey is indignantly of the opinion that these privateers were mainly
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