The Cape Henlopen pirate treasure

Documented pirate coast; the buried treasure is the lore

Cape Henlopen is the southern cape of Delaware Bay, the sandy point beside Lewes where the bay meets the Atlantic, and every ship bound up the river had to pass it, pirates included. The Lewes Historical Society's timeline runs tales of pirates and privateers from the 1690s to the middle of the 1700s, with names like Canoot, Blueskin, Captain Kidd and James Gillam, and some of them are on the record. In 1698 a pirate called Canoot took John Redwood's ship and raided Lewes the next day, and in 1709 a French privateer ravaged the town. Old letters call the place the Hore Kills, after the Dutch Hoerenkill, the English Whorekill; William Penn renamed it Lewes in 1682.

Kidd came in the summer of 1699. On 6 July Robert Quary, judge of the Admiralty Court, wrote from Philadelphia to the Board of Trade that Kidd had been in the bay about ten days, in a sloop with about 40 men and a vast treasure, sending his boat ashore to the Hore Kills for whatever he wanted while the people went on board him freely. A letter from Philadelphia the next April reported that a parcel of old pirates had settled at the Hore Kills, just by the capes, to give passing pirates intelligence and supplies, and that while Kidd lay in the bay these men had gone aboard constantly and brought ashore great quantities of East India goods.

That same month Penn named five of them to the Board of Trade: George Thomson, Peter Lewis, Henry Stretcher, William Orr and Diggory Tenny of Lewes. Three stayed aboard 24 hours and two for an hour, and between them they brought ashore goods worth about £300, which they hid and sold off as they could; Thomson, Lewis and Orr were suspected of being old pirates themselves. They said they had not known it was Kidd. Such men, Penn wrote, must not be endured to live near the sea-coasts, lest they become receptacles and brokers for younger pirates, and he waited on the king's orders.

Kidd sailed on to Boston, where he was arrested and sent to London for trial, and he was hanged in 1701. He had left some of his treasure on Gardiners Island to bargain with, and the belief that he had buried more inspired treasure hunts for centuries after.

At Henlopen the sand itself moves. The Cape Henlopen Lighthouse, finished on the Great Dune in 1769, collapsed on 13 April 1926 as the dune shifted beneath it. Penn had set the cape's beaches aside in 1682 for the use of the citizens of Lewes and Sussex County, and the land is now Cape Henlopen State Park, 5,193 acres.