Out of Dover, I took the road toward Delaware Bay: out past the Delaware Fried Chicken stand, across the Muderkill River, and into Sussex County, an area once known to English settlers as the Whorekill, a name they took from the Dutch who called Lewes Creek the Hoerekill (“whore’s stream”) after Dutch sailors, one theory goes, consorted with Indian women there. Governmental officials now argue that the Dutch name was actually Hoornkill, after Hoorn, a village in Holland, but surely the American past isn’t always quite so proper as we hear it.
