re 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.

II

It was in the fall and the early winter of the year 1750, and again
in the summer of the year following, that the famous pirate, Blueskin,
became especially identified with Lewes as a part of its traditional
history.

For some time--for three or four years--rumors and reports of Blueskin's
doings in the West Indies and off the Carolinas had been brought in now
and then by sea captains. There was no more cruel, bloody, desperate,
devilish pirate than he in all those pirate-infested waters. All kinds
of wild and bloody stories were current concerning him, but it never
occurred to the good folk of Lewes that such stories were some time to
be a part of their own history.

But one day a schooner came drifting into Lewes harbor--shattered,
wounded, her forecastle splintered, her foremast shot half away, and
three great tattered holes in her mainsail. The mate with one of the
crew came ashore in the boat for help and a doctor. He reported that the
captain and the cook were dead and there were three wounded men aboard.
The story he told to the gathering crowd brought a very peculiar thrill
to those who heard it. They had fallen in with Blueskin, he said, off
Fenwick's Island (some twenty or thirty miles below the capes), and
the pirates had come aboard of them; but, finding that the cargo of the
schooner consisted only of cypress shingles and lumber, had soon quitted
their prize. Perhaps Blueskin was disappointed at not finding a more
valuable capture; perhaps the spirit of deviltry was hotter in him that
morning than usual; anyhow, as the pirate craft bore away she fired
three broadsides at short range into the helpless coaster. The captain
had been killed at the first fire, the cook had died on the way up,
three of the crew were wounded, and the vessel was leaking fast, betwixt
wind and water.

Such was the mate's story. It spread like wildfire, and in half an hour
all the town was in a ferment. Fenwick's Is