ich like southern Jersey had originally been a shoal and then an
island. The Jersey watershed, with its streams abounding in wood duck
and all manner of wild life, must have been in its primeval days as
fascinating as some of the streams of the Florida cypress swamps. Toward
the ocean, Wading River, the Mullica, the Tuckahoe, Great Egg; and on
the Delaware side the Maurice, Cohansey, Salem Creek, Oldman's, Raccoon,
Mantua, Woodberry, Timber, and the Rancocas, still possess attraction.
Some of them, on opposite sides of the divide, are not far apart
at their sources in the old forest tract; so that a canoe can be
transported over the few miles and thus traverse the State. One of these
trips up Timber Creek from the Delaware and across only eight miles of
land to the headwaters of Great Egg Harbor River and thence down to the
ocean, thus cutting South Jersey in half, is a particularly romantic
one. The heavy woods and swamps of this secluded route along these
forest shadowed streams are apparently very much as they were three
hundred years ago.

The water in all these streams, particularly in their upper parts, owing
to the sandy soil, is very clean and clear and is often stained by
the cedar roots in the swamps a clear brown, sometimes almost an amber
color. One of the streams, the Rancocas, with its many windings to Mount
Holly and then far inland to Brown's Mills, seems to be the favorite
with canoemen and is probably without an equal in its way for those who
love the Indian's gift that brings us so close to nature.

The spread of the Quaker settlements along Delaware Bay to Cape May
was checked by the Maurice River and its marshes and by the Great Cedar
Swamp which crossed the country from Delaware Bay to the ocean and thus
made of the Cape May region a sort of island. The Cape May region, it
is true, was settled by Quakers, but most of them came from Long Island
rather than from the settlements on the Delaware. They had followed
whale fishing on Long Island and in pursuit of that occupation some of
them had migrated to Cape May where whales were numerous not far off
shore.

The leading early families of Cape May, the Townsends, Stillwells,
Corsons, Leamings, Ludlams, Spicers, and Cresses, many of whose
descendants still live there, were Quakers of the Long Island strain.
The ancestor of the Townsend family came to Cape May because he had
been imprisoned and fined and threatened with worse under the New York
govern