The famous navigator of the Dutch East India Company, Hendrick Hudson,
was the first white man who entered Delaware Bay. He discovered it on
August 28, 1609, two weeks before he entered Sandy Hook Bay and found
the Hudson River. When Thomas West, Lord De La Warr, Governor of
Virginia, was driven by stress of weather into the bay in 1611, his
name was given the river. In 1614 another redoubtable old skipper of
the Dutch East India Company, Captain Carolis Jacobsen Mey, searching,
like all the rest of the navigators of those days, for the northwest
passage to Asia and the Indies, came along there with a small fleet of
sixty-ton frigates, and tried to give the river and its capes his
names; but only one of these has survived, Cape May. The southern
portal at the entrance, which he wished to make Cape Carolis, was
named a few years afterwards, by the Swedes, Cape Henlopen. The
Indians called the river "Lenape-wihituck," or the "river of the
Lenapes," meaning "the original people," or, as sometimes translated,
the "manly men," the name of the aboriginal confederation that dwelt
upon its banks. It had various other names, for when the Swedes came,
the Indians about the bay called it "Pantoxet." In an early deed to
William Penn it is called "Mackeriskickon," and in another document
the "Zunikoway." Some of the tribes up the river named it "Kithanue,"
meaning the "main stem," as distinguished from its tributaries, and
those on the upper waters called it the "Lemasepose," or the "Fish
River," for the Upper Delaware was then a famous salmon stream, and
its early Dutch explorers thus came to calling it the "Fish River"
also. The Delaware, from its source in the Catskills to the sea, is
about three hundred and sixty miles in length.
The estuary of Delaware Bay is about sixty miles long and thirty miles
broad in the widest part, contracting towards the north to less than
five miles. The capes at the entrance are about fifteen miles apart.
As a protection to shipping, the Government began, on the Cape
Henlopen side, in 1829, the construction of the famous Delaware
Breakwater. It consists of a stone breakwater about twenty-six hundred
feet long facing the northeast, and an icebreaker about fourteen
hundred feet long, at right angles, facing the upper bay. These were
completed in 1870, there being an opening between them of about
sixteen hundred feet width, which was afterwards filled up. The
surface protected covers three hundred and sixty acres, and the whole
work cost about $3,500,000. It was estimated in 1871 that fully twenty
thousand vessels every year availed of the protection of this
breakwater, the depth of water being twenty-four feet behind
it--sufficient for most of the shipping of that day. But as vessels
have become larger and of deeper draft, they have not been able to use
it, and the Government has recently begun the construction of another
and larger breakwater for a harbor of refuge in deeper water adjoining
the regular ship channel, some distance to the northward. Delaware Bay
divides the States of Delaware and New Jersey. The first settlement in
Delaware was made by the Dutch near Lewes in 1630, but the Indians
destroyed the colony; and in 1638 a colony of Swedes and Finns came
out under the auspices of the Swedish West India Company, landed and
named Cape Henlopen, and purchased from the Indians all the land from
there up to the falls at Trenton, finally locating their fort near the
mouth of Christiana Creek, and naming the country Nya Sveriga, or New
Sweden. The Swedes and Dutch quarrelled about their respective rights
until New York was taken by the English in 1664, after which England
controlled. The first settlement in New Jersey was made by Captains
Mey and Jorisz in 1623, who built the Dutch Fort Nassau a short
distance below Philadelphia; but it did not last.
Delaware Bay is an expansive inland sea, subject to fierce storms, and
broadening on its eastern side into Maurice River Cove, noted for its
oysters. A deep ship channel conducts commerce through the centre of
the bay, marked by lighthouses built out on mid-bay shoals, and, as
the shores approach, by range lights on the banks, the Delaware Bay
and River being regarded as the best marked and lighted stream in the
country. Up at the head of the bay, years ago, a ship loaded with peas
and beans sank, and this in time made at first a shoal, and afterwards
an island, since known as the "Pea Patch." Here and on the adjacent
shores the Government has lately erected formidable forts, which make,
with their torpedo stations in the channel, a complete system of
defensive works in the Delaware, first put into active occupation
during the Spanish War of 1898, as a protection against a hostile
fleet entering the river. Over in the "Diamond State" of Delaware,
near here, on the river shore, is the aged town of Newcastle, quiet
and yet attractive, having in operation, and evidently to the popular
satisfaction, the whipping-post and stocks, a method of punishment
which is a terror to all evil-doers, and is said to be most successful
in preventing crime, as thieves and marauders give Newcastle a wide
berth. This was originally a Swedish settlement, the standard of the
great Gustavus Adolphus being unfurled there in 1640, when it was
called Sandhuken, or Sandy Hook, it being a point of land jutting out
between two little creeks. The Dutch soon captured it, changing the
name to New Amstel; and about 1670 the settlement, then containing
nearly a hundred houses, became New Castle, under English auspices.
The northern boundary of the State of Delaware, dividing it from
Pennsylvania, is an arc of a circle, made by a radius of twelve miles
described around the old Court House at Newcastle, which still has in
its tower the bell presented by Queen Anne.