The name of Henlopen belonged to a different cape

Written July 2026 · Sources last checked 10 July 2026 · Corrections: hello@lewestown.com

Who named it, and what did they actually name?

The sequence is well documented. In August 1609 Henry Hudson, an Englishman sailing for the Dutch in the Half Moon, found the entrance to the bay. A year later Captain Samuel Argall of Virginia anchored there and named the cape for his governor, Thomas West, Lord De La Warr — the name that eventually attached to the bay, the river, and the state. Then in 1614 the Dutch navigator Cornelius Jacobsen Mey sailed the Fortune between the capes and scattered his own names: the northern cape took his surname (Cape May, as it remains), the southern cape took his given name, Cornelius — and the low headland well to the south, the “false cape” at present-day Fenwick Island, he called Hindlopen.

So the cape at Lewes was Cape Cornelius, and Henlopen was somewhere else. Early records and maps show the name migrating: for years it appears alternately at the false cape and at its present location, and the University of Delaware's survey of Delaware place names lists the full pile-up of variants for the Lewes cape — Cape la Warre, Cape Cornelius, Cape James, Zuijt Hoek, Cape Hinloopen — with no indigenous name recorded. By the eighteenth century the switch was complete and the southern cape of the bay was Henlopen for good, its spelling settling down only in the 1800s.

Where does the word Henlopen come from?

Honestly: it is not settled. Delaware's Department of Natural Resources, surveying the etymology of the state's place names, offers the likeliest candidates — a place name from the Netherlands (the Frisian town of Hindeloopen fits the earliest spelling, Hindlopen), or one of two Dutch men of the period, the navigator Jelmer Hinlopen or the merchant Tymen Jacobsen Hinlopen. Nineteenth-century writers sometimes derived it from a Dutch phrase for “running in,” which reads well but lacks documentary support. This article does not pick a winner because the record does not.

How did a naming confusion shape Delaware's border?

This is the part of the story with consequences. When the Penn family and Charles Calvert, Lord Baltimore, tried in 1732 to settle their generations-old boundary dispute, the agreement defined Delaware's southern line as running west from “Cape Henlopen” — and the map attached to the agreement placed Cape Henlopen at the false cape, at Fenwick Island, some fifteen miles south of the cape at Lewes. Whether the Penns knowingly exploited the old double meaning of the name is still argued; Baltimore protested that the document he signed did not reflect what he had agreed. A Chancery suit begun in 1735 ran fifteen years, and the 1750 ruling of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke upheld the agreement — false cape and all. The Transpeninsular Line was surveyed from Fenwick Island, and Delaware's southern border sits where the “wrong” Henlopen was. A seventeenth-century Dutch navigator's name for a minor headland, misapplied on a map, decided which colony got a sizable wedge of the peninsula.

And the cape itself?

One more document worth knowing: in 1682 William Penn granted the cape's land and its natural resources for the common use of the people of Lewes and Sussex County — the Warner Grant. Two centuries later, citizens cited that grant in court to block the sale of the cape as surplus federal land, and the outcome is today's Cape Henlopen State Park. The cape was, in effect, a public park before Delaware was a state. The granite lighthouse that stood on its Great Dune from the 1760s until 1926 has its own page in this archive.