ob Spicer, a prosperous colonial, insisted on having
everything made at home by his sons and daughters--shoes, clothes,
leather breeches, wampum, even shoe thread--calculating the cost of
everything to a fraction and economizing to the last penny of money and
the last second of time. Yet in the course of a year he used "fifty-two
gallons of rum, ten of wine, and two barrels of cyder." Apparently in
those days hard labor and hard drinking went well together.

The Cape May people, relying almost entirely on the water for
communication and trade, soon took to piloting vessels in the Delaware
River, and some of them still follow this occupation. They also became
skillful sailors and builders of small craft, and it is not surprising
to learn that Jacocks Swain and his sons introduced, in 1811, the
centerboard for keeping flat-bottomed craft closer to the wind. They
are said to have taken out a patent for this invention and are given the
credit of being the originators of the idea. But the device was known in
England in 1774, was introduced in Massachusetts in the same year, and
may have been used long before by the Dutch. The need of it, however,
was no doubt strongly impressed upon the Cape May people by the
difficulties which their little sloops experienced in beating home
against contrary winds. Some of them, indeed, spent weeks in sight of
the Cape, unable to make it. One sloop, the Nancy, seventy-two days from
Demarara, hung off and on for forty-three days from December 25, 1787,
to February 6, 1788, and was driven off fifteen times before she finally
got into Hereford Inlet. Sometimes better sailing craft had to go out
and bring in such distressed vessels. The early boats were no doubt
badly constructed; but in the end apprenticeship to dire necessity made
the Cape May sailors masters of seamanship and the windward art. *

* Stevens, "History of Cape May County," pp. 219, 229; Kelley,
"American Yachts" (1884), p. 165.

Wilson, the naturalist, spent a great deal of time in the Cape May
region, because of the great variety of birds to be found there.
Southern types, like the Florida egret, ventured even so far north, and
it was a stopping place for migrating birds, notably woodcock, on their
northern and southern journeys. Men of the stone age had once been
numerous in this region, as the remains of village plats and great shell
heaps bore witness. It was a resting point for all forms of life. That
much travele