OF CAPTAINS AND KINGS: The Rich History Behind Cape May Diamonds

Trip Advisor has rated America’s oldest seaside resort, Cape May, New Jersey, among the top 25 beaches in the country, and for generations, it has not only charmed visitors with its hospitality and Victorian architecture but drawn beachcombers and rock hunters to the sparkle of the quartz pebbles and beloved keepsakes known as Cape May diamonds.

- L.A. SOKOLOWSKI

WHAT ARE CAPE MAY DIAMONDS? 

Best found while beachcombing Higbee (or Higby’s) Beach and Sunset Beach, these quartz stones (averaging a Mohs 7) can be collected, cut and polished to resemble diamond jewelry and sold as local souvenirs.

Ranging from granular sand to a record-holding three-pound, 14-ounce (1.8 kg) stone found in 1866 in New Castle, Delaware, Cape May diamonds tell a story that is thousands of years in the making, originating in Pleistocene gravel deposits before washing out, for hundreds of miles along ocean currents, and washing up on East Coast shorelines.

Their smoothness and clarity have led to incorrectly labeling some of these quartz stones as discarded glass, smoothed by the rivers that powered New Jersey’s once-thriving glass manufacturing industry.

But the real story begins centuries before, with the Kechemeches and Tuckahoes of the Lenni Lenape native peoples, the original inhabitants and the first to use the shiny stones they found washing up on the beaches of what is now Cape May Point. Believing them to bear supernatural powers of good fortune, success, and well-being, the shiny, clear stones were shared as gifts and traded with other tribes.

Or newly arriving European colonists.

CAPTAINS AND KINGS

Cape May and its borough are named for Dutch explorer and fur trader, Captain Cornelius Jacobsz May, who led a ƒeet of five vessels surveying the Delaware Bay on behalf of the New Netherland Company and, Tred…rin Easttown Historical Society records show, ready to trade.