Crossing the Sound: The Rise of Atlantic American Communities in Seventeenth-Century Eastern Long Island 9780814786727

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Crossing the Sound

Tribal teritories about 1630. Most of the modern towns were established after 1630.

Crossing the Sound The Rise of Atlantic American Communities in Seventeenth-Century Eastern Long Island

Faren R. Siminoff

a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London

new york university press New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2004 by New York University All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Siminoff, Faren Rhea. Crossing the sound : the rise of Atlantic American communities in seventeenth-century eastern Long Island / Faren R. Siminoff. p. cm. Based on the author's thesis (Ph.D.)—New York University, 2001. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0–8147–9832–2 (acid-free paper) 1. Long Island (N.Y.)—History—17th century. 2. Long Island (N.Y.)—Social conditions—17th century. 3. Long Island (N.Y.)— Ethnic relations. 4. Frontier and pioneer life—New York (State)— Long Island. 5. Indians of North America—New York (State)— Long Island—Social conditions—17th century. 6. British Americans—New York (State)—Long Island—Social conditions—17th century. 7. Dutch Americans—New York (State)—Long Island— Social conditions—17th century. 8. Community life—New York (State)—Long Island—History—17th century. 9. Land settlement—New York (State)—Long Island—History—17th century. 10. Culture conflict—New York (State)—Long Island—History— 17th century. I. Title. F127.L8S56 2004 974.7'2101—dc22 2004006085 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In loving memory of my father, Dr. Paul Siminoff, and my friend and mentor, Professor Robert J. Surtees.

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

p a r t i Native and Settler: Communities of Interest in Southern New England, 1600–1640 1

The Ninnimissinuok and Their Communities of Interest

15

2

English and Dutch Communities of Interest

34

3

East End Realignment

57

p a r t i i Engagements for Land and Community: The Struggle Moves to Long Island’s East End 4

English Settlers Cross the Sound

5

Treaties and Deeds: A New Land Tenure System on the East End

110

Atlantic American Communities Take Root on the East End

130

Final Thoughts

152

6

87

vii

viii | Contents

Notes

155

Bibliography

189

Index

205

About the Author

213

Acknowledgments

The author’s name always appears on the cover, but in reality no one completes this type of project alone. I have been fortunate in my family, friends, and mentors. When I decided to change careers, many acquaintances thought my decision to give up practicing law full-time and to become a historian was impractical. Why would anyone want to give up a relatively stable legal career and go down the uncertain road of academia? Yet, despite the financial and personal sacrifices, I was blessed with a supportive husband and friend, Leslie Salmon, who encouraged me to pursue what I love, the study of American history. I also have to thank my son, Jason Salmon, who often accompanied me to libraries and archives and never complained. In addition, the love and support of my mother, Mildred Siminoff, and sisters, Laura and Julie, have always been important. I also need to thank my in-laws, Elaine and Arthur Salmon (the latter is no longer with us but is much missed), who supported me by opening their home to me summer after summer so that I could spend time in the East End libraries and archives needed for this project. Friends add immeasurably to anyone’s life, and I have been fortunate to have so many wonderful and supportive friends, particularly Debra Michaels, for always “pulling me along,” Elaine Pinckney, Nancy Mykoff, and Cheryl Paradis. This project started as my doctoral dissertation, and I am forever indebted to New York University’s history department and to many of its professors. Professor Patricia U. Bonomi’s advice on matters both intellectual and personal was indispensable, and Professors Marilyn Young, Carl Prince, Jeffery Sammons, and Walter Johnson also gave generously of their time and guidance. In particular, the financial support provided by a teaching assistantship from Professor Moss Roberts, along with his

ix

x | Acknowledgments

willingness to listen to my endless complaints and worries, was invaluable. My thanks also to New York University Press and to my editor, Deborah Gershenowitz, for devoting so much time and energy to this project. A project like this requires that the author spend tremendous amounts of time in libraries and archives, and the assistance of the many professionals at these institutions is vital to its completion. Specifically, I would like to single out the East Hampton Library and the archivists of its Long Island Collection, Dorothy King and Diana Dayton, without whose assistance and knowledge this book could not have been written. Last, but certainly not least, I need to thank my dissertation adviser, Professor Karen Ordahl Kupperman. Professor Kupperman is a scholar of unstinting generosity with both her time and her knowledge, and without her support I would never have discovered my own historical “voice.” A simple thank-you will have to, but cannot, suffice.

Introduction

On May 26, 1637, in a short but destructive military engagement, militias made up of English settlers and spearheaded by the fledgling Massachusetts Bay Colony destroyed the Pequot Indians’ stronghold at Mystic and ended the Pequot War. Militia commander Captain John Underhill proclaimed that the powerful Pequots and their lands were “fully subdued and fallen into the hands of the English.”1 The southern New England Pequots, whose territory stretched from the Thames to the Connecticut River and whose influence extended to many of the native groups then living on the islands in the Long Island Sound, had emerged during the second decade of the seventeenth century as a pivotal economic and political power in the region. While the balance of power in southern New England was forever changed with the Pequots’ fall, the victors’ proclamation proved inaccurate, as the English settlers quickly came to realize.2 Three days later, a lone Montaukett Indian from the eastern end of Long Island arrived at Saybrook Fort, which was located close to Mystic, at the mouth of the Connecticut River. He identified himself as Wyandanch, “younger brother” to the powerful Long Island Manhasset sachem3 Poggatacut, and requested a hearing with the fort’s young English commander, Lion Gardiner. His stated purpose was to ascertain whether the English would trade with the peoples who resided on Long Island’s “East End” or whether they were “angry with all the Indians.”4 This exchange between a minor Montaukett sachem and the commander of Saybrook Fort heralded the incorporation of Long Island’s eastern end along with the entire Long Island Sound subregion, its peoples, and its valuable natural resources, into greater southern New England, as well as the emerging Atlantic world.

1

2 | Introduction

The origins of the Atlantic world date back to the fifteenth century, when Europeans, for the first time in their history, gained sufficient mastery of the oceans to support continuous and permanent interactions with Africa, the Americas, and Asia. This set in motion a global reshuffling of cultures and ultimately led to the rise of wholly new communities, particularly in the Americas. The Atlantic world, from its inception, was distinct not so much for its physical boundaries as a sphere into which ideas, peoples, and cultures were both exchanged and transformed. The meeting between Wyandanch and Lion Gardiner was typical of recurring exchanges in the region and demonstrated the role that distinct “communities of interest” played in southern New England. “Communities of interest,” is a term used here to denote the existence of multiple smaller communities within the larger traditional aggregates of peoples (English, Dutch, Ninnimissinuok) in southern New England; communities that articulated their own specific goals and gave shape to the formation of the Atlantic world. In southern New England, these communities included English grandees,5 Dutch merchants, and local English colonial authorities, as well as aspiring English settlers, along with a wide variety of the communities within the Ninnimissinuok.6 Community alliances were quite fluid and did not necessarily line up according to common ethnic or national affiliations. Individuals essential to this process of community building were the “boundary crossers.” The new realities unfolding both on the East End and in the entire region produced this new class of individuals, native and settler, whose success and accomplishments were in large measure rooted in their abilities to cross cultural boundaries, use or create new networks, and move easily between native and settler communities.7 Wyandanch and Gardiner exemplify this class of person, which would rearticulate community in Atlantic America.8 They not only moved with relative ease between groups but also used their abilities to facilitate the dissemination of goods and ideas. These boundary crossers were instrumental to land transactions and central to individuals’ and communities’ reassessment of their relationship to the land. Examples of this appear repeatedly in the colonial records. Crossing the Sound looks at the nature and content of the confluence of these peoples in the seventeenth century and relates how, over time, their collective struggle to impose their respective traditions and interests resulted in the creation of Atlantic American communities that flourished across the southern New England region generally, and on the East End

Introduction | 3

specifically. These communities were created by and reflected the adaptation of altered ideas, forms, and practices that proved better suited than those that preceded them for people living in an often chaotic and extremely dynamic region. The identity of an Atlantic American community was not strictly rooted in any particular native or European tradition but drew on multiple cultural constructions by which these older traditions and identities were reconfigured. By tracing the development of these communities of interest and their networks, the conventional seventeenth-century colonial developmental model that places the Massachusetts Bay Colony at its center is, perforce, recast. The proposed model suggests that the history of Atlantic American community development in southern New England at that time was more than just the product of activities that originated in and then radiated out from Massachusetts; it involved a complex process of constant renegotiation among a myriad of smaller settler and native communities of interest that spanned the region. To more fully understand this process, Crossing the Sound looks to an area outside the Bay Colony, the East End of Long Island, and uses it as a prototype for Atlantic American community formation. This area is ideal since it has received relatively little scholarly attention, yet it was an early product of the types of dynamic interactions that characterized Atlantic American community building in the region. Prior to 1637, the native peoples who inhabited the East End areas that bordered on the Long Island Sound had little direct contact with the English settlers who resided on the southern New England mainland or with the Dutch on the west end of Long Island and on Manhattan Island. These East End natives also limited their interactions with the other southern New England Ninnimissinuok. For the most part, during this time their contact with the outside world was mediated through their kinsmen, allies, and protectors, the Pequots. The power of their Pequot protectors was rooted in their role as successful middlemen in the lucrative fur trade, which, in turn, was largely predicated on their control of the wampum trade. Wampum were small, polished beads made from two types of hardshell clams found and manufactured exclusively by indigenous peoples who lived along the banks of the Long Island Sound, such as the Pequots, Narragansetts, Mohegans, Shinnecocks, and Montauketts. Within the traditional Indian world, these beads were potent objects, typically controlled by the local sachems and used in a variety of functions to demonstrate the power and status of its wearer. They formed part of diplomatic

4 | Introduction

and ritual exchanges, were used to assuage individual or community losses and even murder, and had been integral to precontact regional exchange.9 However, during the decade of the 1620s, wampum underwent a rapid and remarkable transformation because of its growing centrality to the fur trade and its increasing use as an acceptable substitute for specie by and between settler and native communities; it became a universally accepted mechanism for propelling goods and peoples into and through the networks of the emerging Atlantic American world. The growth in wampum’s importance produced an intense competition within this area of Atlantic America among those who sought both to increase wampum’s production and to control its producers. In particular, it was the fur trade that fueled this struggle. Both the Dutch merchants on Manhattan Island and the English settlers on the mainland acknowledged wampum as the sine qua non or “mother” of that lucrative and intensely competitive transatlantic trade.10 Plymouth’s governor, William Bradford, astutely observed that the settlers “could scarce ever get enough [wampum] from [the natives],” while native middlemen and wampum producers (particularly the Pequots, whose control over that trade was significant) grew “rich and powerful” thereby.11 Critical to that success was the Pequots’ control over and seemingly exclusive access to the wampum manufactured by the Shinnecocks and Montauketts on the East End.12 As the quest for this limited resource spread across the region and intensified, many communities cast about for ways to secure sources. In 1628, the Dutch merchants on Manhattan Island turned their gaze to the eastern tip of Long Island, where they learned of the “Sinnecox” (Shinnecocks), who supported themselves by “planting maize and making sewan [wampum].” Their evident interest in these peoples proved insufficient to open direct trade between themselves and the East End wampum minters because, as the Dutch merchant and official Isaack de Rasieres noted, the Shinnecocks were “held in subjection by, and are tributary to, the Pyquans [Pequots].”13 A short five years after the Dutch made their approach, the recently established Massachusetts Bay Colony evinced a similar interest in the East End. The Bay’s John Winthrop noted that “The bark [ship] Blessing” had been sent to “an island over against Connecticut, called Long Island. . . . There they had store of the best wampampeak [wampum], both white and blue.”14 Like the Dutch, the English were rebuffed.

Introduction | 5

Nor was the East End Indians’ rejection of outside overtures limited to European communities. Many mainland Indian communities, such as the Mahicans and the Narragansetts, poised to challenge the Pequots’ position as the premier middlemen in the fur and wampum trades, were also excluded from the lucrative East End wampum trade.15 Throughout the decade of the 1620s, and until the Pequots’ defeat in 1637, the wampum minters on the East End were either content or, possibly, forced to funnel their contact with the outside world through their Pequot protectors, helping to elevate the Pequots to a position of power and influence in the region and arousing the envy of many other groups.16 When the East End’s seemingly unassailable isolation was breached at the end of the Pequot War, the result was massive regional changes and a race to secure resources, such as land and wampum, formerly under Pequot control. The obvious allure of the East End was, of course, wampum, but wampum was only one attraction. This heightened interest was reflected in comments made by Captain Underhill, who had been active in and around the Long Island Sound during the recent conflict. He extolled the virtues of its islands, particularly its largest, Long Island, praising the “excellence of the whole country” as a veritable “garden.” With settler imagination ignited, and Long Island now seen as potentially ripe for new English plantings, mainland English colonists came forward to carry secondary migrations across the Sound. Indeed, in 1640, shortly after the war’s end, a group of English settlers moved from Massachusetts to Long Island, eventually establishing a number of towns there. The English settlers’ new undertaking did not go unchallenged. The local Dutch authority thwarted the first English attempt to settle on Long Island, and later, even after the successful establishment of English towns on the East End, actively opposed these plantings through diplomatic channels. They also competed with the English colonies for settlers and territorial advantage on Long Island. Dutch and English groups were not the only ones who believed they could elevate their local status after the Pequots’ defeat. Certain mainland Indian groups, such as the ambitious Narragansetts, also perceived the wampum-rich, strategically located East End as immensely attractive. Its acquisition would have not only given them control over its wampum banks but provided a critical base along the Long Island Sound between the English settler communities on the mainland and the Dutch settlements scattered from western Long Island and extending north along the

6 | Introduction

Hudson River. The Niantics, allied to the Narragansetts, were the first native group to assert their interests on the East End. In the summer of 1638, the Niantic sachem, Ninigret, crossed the Long Island Sound accompanied by a military attachment of about eighty men, who confronted the East End Montaukett sachem Wyandanch and demanded his submission. The attempt failed, but similar challenges from mainland Indian groups to the East End communities’ independence followed over the ensuing years.17 Consequently, the defeat of the East End communities’ gatekeepers, the integration of wampum into the Atlantic world, and the quest for land, settlers, and client native communities, changed the entire Long Island Sound subregion into a truly international arena. This transformation had other consequences, as well. It not only continued and intensified competition among the existing communities of interest but also further assisted in the reconfiguration of these into genuine Atlantic American communities. These competitors were not allied along the traditional categories of native and settler; as was true throughout Atlantic America, alliances and networks comprised a variety of groups that crossed traditional boundaries. This creative fluidity was seen in all phases of community building. For example, when the first permanent English settlement on the East End was established, in 1640, all of Long Island was claimed by the Dutch, who actually occupied only its western tip. At the same time, various native communities claimed areas from that island’s western to its eastern end. Yet, the planting of a permanent English settlement on the East End did not terminate competing Dutch and native claims to the East End. The English settlers could not ignore the opposing claimants, and this influenced the manner in which the English attempted to secure possession of and ownership rights to land. The reality for the East End (and for all Atlantic American communities) was that while claims were, on occasion, extinguished through force of arms, more typically the goal was accomplished without overt coercion and through (seemingly) voluntary transactions, such as treaties and deeds, between the native and English authorities. Understanding the role of land, its conceptualization and use, in seventeenth-century southern New England is also crucial to interpreting how these communities changed or adjusted traditional practices in response to this complex new world. On the East End, as elsewhere in Atlantic America, settlers began the difficult process of turning land into property in an environment outside the reach of established English prop-

Introduction | 7

erty laws. As a result, unlike what would have occurred in England where an Englishman seeking land was dealing with “property,” that is, acreage under an established chain of ownership free from competing non-English claimants and systems, the settlers faced a quandary: how to claim and retain land against numerous claimants, native and European alike. This was a complicated and often confusing process, since land in Atlantic America was potentially subject to multiple and competing systems, claims, and interests. Unwittingly, the settlers’ attempts to turn land into property forced all groups, settlers and natives alike, to each break with certain traditional ideas and relationships about and to land. Settler groups made a final break with certain English notions of and expectations about the nature of land tenure, while native communities had to accept altered notions of property. The result was the creation of a landholding system throughout the region in which freeholds18 became the most common form of ownership. Furthermore, this American-style freehold was not dependent solely on English-derived grants and patents but was deeply rooted in native title and landholding practices, as well. The result was that the underlying settler title was a tacit acknowledgment that native title not only existed but also had intrinsic value and legitimacy that, until properly extinguished, was good against all claimants except the sovereign. This added a new dynamic to the process of actual land acquisition and to the settlers’ notion of the role and nature of land, property rights, and community itself. Ultimately, the process of possessing and owning land in Atlantic America was a triadic process: “peopling and planting,”19 acquiring an Indian deed, and obtaining an English patent or derivative permission, accomplished in no particular order. This trinity became the Atlantic American method for land acquisition in areas that were still subject to multiple claims. For these reasons, the legal and symbolic constructions of land is particularly illustrative of the transformative processes at work in the region and that became a primary tool for negotiating and formulating the precise nature of these communities. Native communities were equally challenged and altered by these emerging realities, and they too adjusted many traditional precontact practices in an effort to adapt to a rapidly changing world. The East End natives confronted this new reality immediately following the defeat of their traditional ally and protector and sought to establish new networks and strategies to meet these demands. Several critical decisions had to be

8 | Introduction

made. Should they pursue a conventional strategy and establish a tributary-style relationship with a powerful mainland Indian group, opt for a policy of total neutrality and nonalignment, or pursue a direct relationship or alliance with one of the mainland English settler communities? They chose the third option. In so choosing, they discarded a traditional and formerly successful stratagem for navigating the enormous changes that had engulfed the entire region. This choice indicates that the native peoples of the East End did not wait passively for these strangers to appear on their shores. Instead, they took the initiative and attempted to implement a direct relationship with the English settlers, on their own terms, in pursuit of their goals and interests. To implement this new policy, they relied both on traditional practices and on innovative strategies. These new strategies were often embedded in the settler-native land agreements. Ironically, these deeds or treaties are often cited as evidence of the natives’ rapid capitulation to the settlers’ interests. My interpretation of these documents, however, demonstrates otherwise. Among most of the region’s native groups, it was the sachems and the ahtaskoaog (principal men) who acted as their communities’ advisers and negotiators. These officials attempted to shape these agreements to protect their communities’ interests through the inclusion of provisions for exclusive or concurrent use by the native groups of land and sea resources and for mutual defense. These provisions are evidence that sachems and ahtaskoaogs took deliberative steps to safeguard their communities. This view runs counter to many contemporary interpretations that view these deeds and agreements primarily as reflections of the settlers’ greed or patent disregard of native legal and actual interests. The historian Francis Jennings has referred to these transactions as the “deed game,” whereby the signatory sachem is characterized as either an unwilling dupe or the self-serving creation of local colonial authorities, held hostage to a world in which native peoples neither comprehend or control the unfolding events and acquiesce to the colonial entity’s interests and demands.20 Yet, the manner in which many of these deeds were negotiated, reflected by the documents’ language, belies this conclusion. Instead, many of the provisions in these agreements strongly suggest that a number of sachems attempted to honor their traditional duties to their communities and actively sought to turn these deeds, whenever feasible, into instruments of protection. Use of land in this manner was not unknown to the coastal Ninnimissinuok. These groups had traditionally employed land to anchor alliances or signify the existence of tributary-

Introduction | 9

protectorate relationships. Inadvertently, this strategy led all groups to alter their relationship to and their perception of land. When these documents are read from this perspective, the native signatories’ voice can be more clearly ascertained. The reinterpretation of these documents also situates these seventeenth-century sachems and counselors more squarely within the context of that era. After all, these were individuals born and bred under the traditions of the sachemship by which they assumed the roles of community leaders, advocates, and mediators. There is no reason to believe that during the early contact years such officials would suddenly and unilaterally abandon their traditional obligations. The early treaties negotiated by the East End sachems support the continued existence of these time-honored offices, along with their concurrent duties. For example, two East End sachems, the Montauketts’ Wyandanch and the Shinnecocks’ Nowedonah, both approached the English settlers from this traditional framework. They sought to use land to forge a relationship with the newcomers that would accommodate the Europeans while simultaneously preserving the Montauketts’ and Shinnecocks’ way of life and territorial integrity. The Atlantic American world of the seventeenth century was forged from the convergence within that arena of a multitude of communities of interest—a dynamic far more complex than that of European versus native. In this region, a multitude of communities of interest met and struggled for existence and, sometimes, for dominance. The result was the emergence of communities that adapted, blended, and reworked new and old patterns of life and expectations. This framework alters the telling of early America’s history. It becomes a story without a dominant voice or community at its core, one ultimately that is not about winners and losers. Instead, the rise of an Atlantic American world and, with it, the process of community building that took place on the East End demonstrates that neither static, monolithic groups nor interests existed or prevailed in the region; the community rested on and comprised a multitude of groups and interests whose interactions wove a pattern for the emerging Atlantic American society. This book relies on the words, actions, and documents of a variety of groups: Dutch merchants and officials, English grandees, and a variety of English setter and native communities. It was their words and actions that originally constructed and from which we can now reconstruct how Atlantic America came into existence. The use of sources from an array of

10 | Introduction

settler and European groups representing both imperial and local interests highlights that not all Europeans or even Englishmen spoke or acted from a uniform perspective. Many viewpoints existed within these groups, and their writings and artifacts reflect this. Additionally, I have attempted to tease from European-prepared documents, particularly the settler-native deeds, the native perspective and their interests. Despite the fact that seventeenth-century European settlers and officials produced these documents, native voices were clearly present and central, particularly before 1675, when the coastal regions along the Long Island Sound and its corresponding islands served as centers for wampum production and were coveted by many settler and native communities in pursuit of their expansionist ambitions. Evidence unearthed and interpreted by modern American archeologists, along with native oral history and stories, has been essential for reconstructing this story. Finally, this study also aims to bring Long Island’s East End, a region long ignored by historians of the colonial era, prominently into the literature of early colonial southern New England and into the growing body of work on the Atlantic world. The historiography of both seventeenthcentury southern New England and New York has been relatively silent about the history of the peoples, native and settler, who lived on the islands in the Long Island Sound, treating them and the region generally as a kind of provincial backwater. The reasons for this are numerous. To begin with Long Island, the most populous and largest island in the Sound region, was, until 1637, except on its western tip, relatively isolated. Additionally, the island’s political history was relatively anomalous in that it was not totally under the official jurisdiction of any one group until the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Indeed, throughout much of that century, parts the island were (nominally) subject to Dutch, New England settler, and Indian jurisdiction, until the entire island fell under the political dominion of the Duke of York, in 1664. But the issue was not entirely settled until 1674, when the Dutch staged their last attempt to reclaim Long Island from the English and the East End townships finally accepted a new patent for their lands from New York Colony. As a result of this shifting jurisdiction over and competing claims for Long Island, the area’s history has not fit neatly into traditional historical categories. This has contributed to its being lost in a kind of cloak of historical invisibility. Crossing the Sound is divided into two parts. Part I, “Native and Settler: Communities of Interest in Southern New England 1600–1640,”

Introduction | 11

defines and discusses the communities of interest that were active in the southern New England-Long Island Sound region and the culmination of these early engagements in the Pequot War. It examines the struggles among and between the native and the European peoples to achieve their respective interests, plans, and goals and how these struggles ultimately spread to and directly encompassed the native peoples who resided on eastern Long Island in the aftermath of the Pequot War. Part II, “Engagements for Land and Community: The Struggle Moves to Long Island’s East End,” illustrates and explains the complexities of these often clashing communities and examines the specific mechanisms and transformations that led to the entry of the East End, its peoples, and its resources into an emerging Atlantic American world. Crossing the Sound reconstructs the history of the East End from the earliest decades of the seventeenth century through the Pequot War to the area’s definitive conquest by imperial English forces in 1674. In turn, the examination of this history leads to a new framework from which to understand southern New England and, indeed, all of colonial America. Instead of imagining the making of southern New England as resting on a series of inevitable defeats for the Indians by conquering transplanted English villages centered in and radiating out from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Crossing the Sound reinterprets this history as the rise of a series of communities of interest that, in their respective struggles, collectively refashioned themselves and the region they inhabited into Atlantic America. From the vantage point of eastern Long Island, the unfolding events of the early Atlantic American world take on a more nuanced perspective and a different vision from which the dynamic and fluid world of seventeenth-century southern New England can be clearly discerned. What have been seen as monolithic groups and interests emerge as smaller communities of interest, which sometimes collectively and at times individually renegotiated the traditional patterns and modes of operation that they knew from their respective pre-Atlantic worlds. The result was the creation of an Atlantic American basin, a place into which diverse peoples flowed and emerged transformed.

part i

Native and Settler Communities of Interest in Southern New England, 1600–1640

1 The Ninnimissinuok and Their Communities of Interest

In 1660, a little more than twenty years after the end of the Pequot War, the former commander of Saybrook Fort, Lion Gardiner, published his memoir of that conflict. In it, he strongly criticized the settlers’ and, in particular, the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s pursuit of a policy that had led to the utter destruction of the Pequots solely in the pursuit of selfinterest and regional dominance. He further admonished his audience that the numerical superiority the settlers enjoyed over the native peoples in 1660 would secure neither the English colonists’ future physical security nor their hegemonic aspirations. Continued antagonism toward the region’s native people, he predicted, could end only in a conflict that would make the Pequot War appear “but a comedy” in comparison “if God do not open the eyes, ears, and hearts of some that I think are willfully deaf and blind.”1 Gardiner’s recollection reflects the attitudes and perspectives of a man formed by his experiences in Atlantic America and is a window through which modern eyes can glimpse the interests that were at the heart of the Atlantic American experience in seventeenth-century southern New England. As told by Gardiner, the sudden fall of the Pequots after the destruction of their stronghold at Mystic (in present-day Connecticut) so shook the region that, almost immediately, the area of the southern New England mainland along the Long Island Sound was reconfigured. It was this that precipitated the appearance of the East End Montaukett sachem Wyandanch at Saybrook Fort, on May 29, 1637, a mere three days after Mystic’s destruction. Gardiner recalled that Wyandanch arrived alone, without an entourage of any kind, and asked a single question: was it possible for the Indians of Long Island to have peace and trade with the English, or were the English angry with all Indians?2 Embedded in this

15

16 | The Ninnimissinuok

question was the sachem’s overwhelming concern for his community’s future in the vacuum created by the Pequot defeat. Wyandanch’s question sought clarification of the English policy toward the Montauketts. This one interaction strongly influenced the East End native polities’ choices for navigating their way through the shifting political channels created by the English victory. However, before exploring the East End peoples’ policy decisions and their impact, it is important to understand the context in which these decisions were made.

The Geolinguistics of the Ninnimissinuok The Ninnimissinuok of southern New England inhabited those areas that include most of the states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, the islands in the Long Island Sound, and Suffolk County on Long Island, New York, as well as small areas of coastal New Hampshire and southern Maine. The traditional boundaries of the Ninnimissinuok correspond almost exactly to those of present-day southern New England. The East End native communities formed an integral part of that mainland sphere before its contact with the Europeans. The East End groups were located on eastern Long Island, from the Shinnecock Canal to Montauk Point, the island’s easternmost tip. It was bounded on its northern shore by the Long Island Sound and on its southern shore by the Atlantic Ocean. In reality, the East End communities formed part of the greater southern New England cultural-linguistic district, which encompassed southeastern New England and the islands in the Long Island Sound.3 The Ninnimissinuok spoke one of five closely related Eastern Algonquian languages, and all followed similar economic, social, religious, and political practices.4 The East End peoples were most closely related to the cultural-linguistic unit often referred to as “Mohegan-PequotMontauk,” or simply “Mohegan-Pequot.”5 It is estimated that, in 1600, at least 13,300 people resided within this cultural-geographical district, making it one of the most densely populated areas in southern New England.6 Archaeological evidence points not only to the spread of these Mohegan-Pequot peoples across the Sound but to their continuing common cultural and political links even after they further divided into four ap-

The Ninnimissinuok | 17

parently separate but related communities commonly known as the Shinnecocks, the Montauketts, the Curchaugs, and the Manhassets.7 Ties of consanguinity connected them, and they appear to have sporadically acted in concert or accepted a particular sachem as preeminent among them, but at no time did their respective polities merge. These groups resided in small, scattered villages united by family and geographic ties, as well as by shared common cosmological beliefs. These commonalities not only loosely linked village to village on the East End but facilitated the maintenance of ties between villagers and their kinsmen on the southern New England mainland, particularly the Pequots.8 The East End native communities’ sociopolitical and economic patterns closely followed those of other indigenous coastal southern New England communities.9 Like the mainland Ninnimissinuok, these East End Indians lived in a series of stratified villages that comprised the sachemship, the common people, and those equivalent in status to servants. Typically, each village occupied a firmly bounded territory, using adjacent fields for planting and nearby marshes, bays, streams, and wooded areas for collecting shellfish, fishing, and hunting game and waterfowl. Familial and trade networks further linked Long Island to the mainland and facilitated the exchange of goods between coastal and inland areas. There is strong evidence to suggest that these people moved according to the season among specific villages and resource areas to which they returned annually. Even well into the seventeenth century, Europeans noted these living patterns among the island’s native people. The English settler Daniel Denton wrote, “They build small movable Tents, which they remove two or three times a year, having their principal quarters where they plant their Corn: their Hunting quarters, and their Fishing quarters.”10 A Dutch observer, Adrian Van der Donck, further added that “Their castles and large towns they seldom leave altogether.”11 Resource diversity also contributed to the rise of increased territoriality and local loyalties among the Ninnimissinuok during the period immediately preceding European contact. Intensive maize cultivation, often believed to be the catalyst for the rise of sedentary, complex societies, entered the southern New England region late, particularly on eastern Long Island, and did not play as critical a role in the region’s development as is often believed.12 Instead, the development of these densely populated, increasingly complex communities was rooted more in the diversity and abundance found in nearby oceans, bays, tidal pools, and marshes.13

18 | The Ninnimissinuok

Consequently, the arrival of Europeans in southern New England did not cause this process but simply accelerated a trend already present and gathering momentum in the region.

Sachems, Missinnuoks, and Matnowesuonckanes Between 1524 and 1528, Giovanni da Verrazano traveled the coastal areas of the New England and even into the Long Island Sound subregion. The record of this voyage captures a small but tantalizing snapshot of the Ninnimissinuok’s daily life and political institutions before the convergence of European settlers on their shore. The picture that emerges is one of coastal native societies divided into numerous separate polities, with genuine social stratification, and the existence of a vital institution, the sachemship. The sachemship consisted of the sachem(s) and his followers. It was in this institution that the daily discourse of political life took place. “Kings,” as Verrazano referred to the sachems, were distinguished from the common people by “their many attendants” and by their (more) elaborate dress and adornments.14 Even a century later, after European settlers had made extensive inroads into the region, the Dutch observer Van der Donck observed much the same characteristics: “The nations, tribes and languages are as different in America as they are in Europe. All those who are of one tribe or nation, form one separate society, and usually keep together; every tribe or nation has its own chief, and is a separate government, subject to its own laws and regulations. . . . They always are jealous of each other as it respects their national power; and every tribe endeavors to increase its own strength.”15 The sachemship was a complex institution made up not simply of a single or a number of sachems but of “ranked” offices and numerous “followers.” Some were bound to the institution through ties of kinship, while for others, their adherence was passed down from parent to child.16 Scholars and contemporary observers have identified the existence of numerous ranked offices such as the ahtaskoaog (principal men), who acted as advisers and who constituted a kind of council, along with the pniesesok, or, as Roger Williams referred to them, the “Under-Sachems,” who collected tribute for the sachem and led men into battle. These individuals—the followers and protectors of the sachemship—formed a distinct class or station within Ninnimissinuok society, although, as Euro-

The Ninnimissinuok | 19

peans noted, “Distinctions are supported and observed among all the Indian nations, but not as much as amongst us.”17 The office of the sachem tended to be (but was not always) hereditary, handed down from father to son or, in some cases, from father to daughter.18 “It is the custom for their kings to inherit, the son always taking the kingdom after his father’s death. If there be no son, then the queen rules; if no queen, the next to the royal-blood.”19 On Long Island, the daughter of the Montaukett sachem Wyandanch, Quashawam, became a female leader, sunksquaw or “squa sachem,” in 1663, after the deaths of her father, mother, and brother.20 Lineage and kinship were also important ties for Ninnimissinuok peoples, commoners and elite alike, within their local communities and to the world beyond. After the Pequot War, the Mohegan sachem Uncas used his kinship ties to a former Pequot sachem—he was married to the daughter of the murdered sachem Tatobem-to validate his claims to former Pequot lands.21 There is also considerable evidence that some groups had a dual sachemship consisting of an elder and a younger sachem.22 Roger Williams wrote of this dual sachemship among the Narragansett of Rhode Island: “the chiefest government in the country is divided between a younger Sachim Miantunnomu, and an elder Sachim, Caunounicus.” The “old Sachim,” he explained, “will not be offended at what the young Sachim doth; and the young Sachim will not do what he conceives will displease his uncle.”23 It is not known how widespread this custom was among the coastal Ninnimissinuok, but the Montaukett sachem Wyandanch alluded to the existence of this practice on the East End when, during his initial exchange with Lion Gardiner, he referred to himself as “younger brother” to the older, more powerful Manhasset sachem Poggatacut and made it clear to Gardiner that he could not firmly commit the East End peoples to an alliance with the English without first consulting with this older sachem.24 The power of the sachem was not unlimited. Indeed, it would be a mistake to equate the sachem with a European monarch. Daniel Gookin acknowledged this distinction. The sachem, he noted, was constrained to rule wisely and in accord with the will of the people; otherwise, “their men will leave them upon distaste or harsh dealings, and go and live under other sachems.”25 This type of fluidity among the Ninnimissinuok communities was common, and their political units were akin to

20 | The Ninnimissinuok

“confederations of local communities,” or what this study refers to as communities of interest.26 The sachem also played a critical role in the community’s daily social and political life.27 Oversight of the redistribution of goods and resources within the community was the sachem’s responsibility. Redistribution reflected core Ninnimissinuok values, particularly the individual’s and sachemship’s relationship to the community. On a daily level, the sachem’s access to resources and goods, his allocation of these, his possession and use of potent articles such as wampum, and his role as a mediator and leader in time of war and conflict enhanced his status and was the bedrock of that authority.28 Particularly symbolic of the sachem’s role was his control and use of wampum. Wampum signaled the status and power of the individual wearer, served as a symbol of trade relations, diplomatic exchanges and alliances, and was typically not handled by commoners.29 Indeed, by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries wampum was, for the most part, controlled by local sachems.30 During Plymouth Colony’s early years, Bradford observed this: “only the sachems and some special persons . . . wore a little of it [wampum] for ornament.”31 Cosmologically, the sachem was also expected to complement and uphold the traditional Ninnimissinuok understanding of the human condition and of humanity’s relationship with the natural (and supernatural) world. Maintaining a community’s balance and relationship in the world required that the sachem perform and observe specific rites and rituals. The duties and responsibilities of the common people and the elite formed a circle of obligations for all groups within both their quotidian and their spiritual worlds. When the sachem fulfilled his obligations, it triggered the duty of the people to support and follow the sachem. Conversely, the support of the people for the sachem and the sachemship gave rise to the people’s entitlement to material goods and protection.32 The common people, or missinnuok, more often than not are absent from the written annals, yet the average person was not without a voice in the community’s daily activities and its broader-reaching decisions. It was in the missinnuok that the general “will of the community” resided; it served both as witness to important transactions and decisions and as part of an informal decision-making body.33 While not a democratic body in the modern sense of the word, it certainly bore certain characteristics found in a nascent modern democratic society. Seventeenth-century observers remarked that the sachems had to rule “in accord with the will of

The Ninnimissinuok | 21

the people” or the people would and could “go and live under other sachems.”34 This has given rise to the notion that the missinnuok “voted with their feet.”35 The rise of Uncas, the post–Pequot War leader of the Mohegans, demonstrates the ability of the missinnuok to make (or break) the fortunes of a sachem. Before the Pequot War, Uncas was, according to Roger Williams, “but a little Sachim.” After the war, however, Uncas was able to put under “his charge about 300 men, most of whom are Pequots and that with them he has made himself great.”36 Uncas further solidified Pequot loyalties by marrying the daughter of the Pequots’ deceased principal sachem, Tatobem, thereby establishing the traditional kinship link.37 A third and last class of persons present in Ninnimissinuok society were the matnowesuonckane, or those with “no name.”38 These people formed a permanent class of servants or possibly even slaves. Roger Williams wrote that these were a class of people without voice, who, like the dead, were “obscure and mean persons.”39

Land and Territoriality Among the Ninnimissinuok, the corporate community owned land, but it was the sachem who embodied and symbolized the group’s sense of territorially and who assumed its defense.40 The sachem was charged with managing the land and its resources. This power extended to using the land to build alliances, to reward followers, and to further the general well-being of the missinnuok.41 Plymouth Colony’s Edward Winslow acknowledged that native groups exercised and acknowledged territoriality: “Every sachem knoweth how far the bounds and limits of his own country extendeth. . . . The great Sachems or kings know their own bounds or limits of land, as well as the rest.”42 Roger Williams reached a similar conclusion: “The Natives are very exact and punctual in the bounds of their lands. . . . And I have knowne them make bargaine and sale amongst themselves for a small piece, or quantity of Ground.”43 During the early seventeenth century, the use of land for external political purposes assumed an ever larger role in an increasingly fluid world. The Block Island Indians and the communities on the East End were both Pequot kinsmen and tributaries during this period. As tributaries, these communities not only “paid” the traditional tribute of wampum but also permitted the Pequots to use their lands for planting and the surrounding

22 | The Ninnimissinuok

bays and waterways for fishing and clamming. During the Pequot War, the Narragansetts reported to Roger Williams that the war’s exigencies had forced the Pequots to return to Block and Long Islands to “to take sturgeon and other fish and allso to make new field of Corne.”44 The Ninnimissinuok attempted to employ this diplomatic use of land to manage their relationships with the settler communities. Shortly before the Pequot War, the Narragansett sachem Canonicus attempted to establish an alliance/protectorate relationship with the English through the prominent Massachusetts Bay trader John Oldham.45 According to Roger Williams, Canonicus “gave” Oldham Prudence Island in Narragansett Bay, plus half of the fish caught in the adjacent waters on condition “he would dwell near unto them.”46 The intervening death of the English trader prevented the solidification of that arrangement. The pending transaction was not forgotten by the Narragansett, however, and, at the end of the Pequot War, Canonicus offered that same island to Williams under identical terms.47 The sachem’s renewed offer reflected the Narragansetts’ ongoing concern about their relationship with the English, particularly the Massachusetts Bay community. The astute Williams clearly understood that Canonicus had offered not a bargain-and-sale transaction but a political one that, if accepted, would obligate himself, the Bay Colony, and the Narragansetts to mutual and reciprocal obligations. Williams declined the offer. He told Winthrop: “they desire me to remove thither and dwell nearer to them” but “for the present I mind not to remove.” He suggested to Winthrop that instead he would “have it from them” by giving them “satisfaction for it” and would then further secure his rights to Prudence Island by building “a little house and put in some swine.”48 Internally, land among the Ninnimissinuok was used to solidify crucial internal kinship and political networks and was indicative of the individual’s or family’s status within the community. Only the missinnuok and members of the sachemship were entitled to share in community resources such as land and its by-products, whereas, as noted by Williams, the matnowesuonckanes could not.49 A family’s or individual’s claim to use land was often based on historical custom and use and the sachem’s discretion. Land could be granted to family units or to those who were followers and supporters of the sachemship. It could be granted without further remuneration for the lifetime of the grantee, in return for one single payment, or in return for a series of payments. Edward Winslow described how land was distributed

The Ninnimissinuok | 23

among the community: “Every sachem knoweth . . . his own proper inheritance. Out of that, if any . . . desire to set their corn, he giveth them as much as they can use, and sets their bounds.”50 These grants did not become the grantee’s private property but were a form of usufruct, dependent on the recipient’s active engagement or use of the land and maintained by the grantee’s continued community membership.51 All the community’s lands (hunting, planting, and residential) marked and delineated intercommunity rights and relationships between Ninnimissinuok groups.52 William Wood likened the divisions between native communities to English “shires,” “every several divisions being swayed by a several king.”53 This exclusivity extended to “hunting grounds,” native peoples being extremely fastidious in protecting their rights against encroachment.54 After the Pequot War, for example, the Mohegans and the Narragansetts each vied for the right to use the Pequots’ former hunting territory. In July 1637, the Narragansett sachem Miantonimi asked Massachusetts Bay to confirm the tribe’s use of that territory. The Narragansetts feared the Mohegans’ hereditary and political claims to that territory through their sachem Uncas, who was married to a prominent Pequot woman and who was said to have maternal family connections to the Pequots.55 Even the death of Miantonimi did not settle these conflicting claims. In the mid-1640s, the Niantics renewed their claims to these same hunting grounds.56 The East End natives’ land use and management practices mirrored those of their mainland kinsmen and neighbors. Many specific practices were employed to acknowledge territorial boundaries. For example, a hunter finding “young eagles . . . in the nests, [or] . . . deere that were drowned or killed in the water . . . [carried the] said eagles & the skins of the Deere to those Sachems or Indians that were [the] true owners of [the] land.”57 A corollary custom provided that if a Yeanncock killed a bear, for example, on Yeanncock land, the bear would belong to the entire community. However, if the animal were killed on Shinnecock land by a Yeanncock, native law and custom permitted the Yeanncock to keep only the flesh; the skin and grease had to be delivered to the Shinnecocks.58 Roger Williams noted similar practices among the Narragansetts. When a deer was killed in the water its “skin is carried to the Sachim or Prince, within whose territory the Deere was slain.” This skin, he noted, was called “Pumpom,” meaning a “tribute skin.”59 These practices commonly served as symbols of acknowledgment between communities among the coastal Ninnimissinuok.

24 | The Ninnimissinuok

Early Contact with the Europeans For nearly the first four decades of the seventeenth century, the native communities that lived on the East End were relatively isolated from the momentous events that were occurring on the mainland. Several factors contributed to this: their relative isolation from the mainland, the presence of competing Dutch and English settlements that straddled both sides of the Long Island Sound, and the East End native groups’ status as tributaries to and allies of the powerful Pequots. The result was that for close to forty years these communities did not maintain any sort of sustained contact or relations with the region’s major colonial competitors, and most of their contacts with the world outside their domain was filtered through their powerful kinsmen and allies, the Pequots. This relative isolation was not shattered until 1637, when the Pequots were vanquished as a regional power. Despite the East End natives’ limited contact with groups other than the Pequots during this time, both Dutch and English settlers and traders obtained an occasional glimpse of these elusive communities. In 1616, Adrian Block, a Dutch navigator who created one of the earliest maps of Long Island, identified the East End peoples as “Nahican.”60 Shortly thereafter, Johan de Laet, a director of the Dutch West India Company, referenced Block’s 1616 route and noted that “Fisher’s Hook” (presentday Montauk Point on Long Island’s eastern tip) was home to the “Mantouwax” (Montaukett) who “obtain a livelihood by fishing within the bay.”61 Twelve years later, Isaack de Rasieres, a Dutch explorer and trader and the secretary of the Dutch West India Company in New Amsterdam, followed up on these efforts to describe the East End and identify its inhabitants. In a letter to Samuel Blommaert, a prominent Dutch merchant and an occasional director of the Dutch West India Company, he described Long Island as “a very large island, full 24 leagues long” and noted that at its eastern end were “several creeks and bays, where many savages dwell, who support themselves by planting maize and making sewan [wampum] and who are called . . . Sinnecox.”62 This reference to wampum is crucial to understanding European and Indian interest in the East End. By 1622, wampum was coveted by all the region’s residents, European and native alike. It was not only essential to facilitating the fur trade between European traders and native fur suppliers but had also become a replacement for European specie, which was chronically in short supply.

The Ninnimissinuok | 25

Wampum was not easily obtained. It was a scarce commodity, manufactured exclusively by those native communities with access to the two types of clamshells found only along the banks of the Long Island Sound. The East End communities along the Sound were among a handful of native communities that produced wampum and consequently held a vital key to the fur trade.63 As the general use of wampum and the fur trade expanded and touched almost all communities, native and settlers alike, the drive to secure a regular supply of wampum intensified, as did European interest in the native people, including those on the East End, who created it. The English were also interested in securing wampum, and, five years after de Rasieres’s report, the English also attempted to establish direct contact with the region’s premier wampum makers on the East End. John Winthrop wrote, “The bark Blessing, which was sent to the southward, returned. She had been at an island over against Connecticut, called Long Island, because it is near fifty leagues long, the east part about ten leagues from the main, but the West End not one-mile. There they had store of the best wampampeak [wampum], both white and blue.”64 For all their interest, the English proved no more successful than the Dutch in securing the East End wampum trade, and the eastern Long Island area remained off limits to European settlers until 1637. This did not, however, discourage the Dutch from learning as much as they could about the elusive East End. They took careful note of these natives’ political divisions. They were, Van der Donck stated, divided into separate “nations,” and “All those who are of one tribe or nation, form one separate society, and usually keep together; every tribe or nation has its own chief, and is a separate government, subject to its own laws and regulations.”65 The sachems, Van der Donck observed, were “chiefs over their nations, tribes and settlements.” English chroniclers made similar observations. In 1642, Thomas Lechford published his description of Long Island and its peoples. The natives, he wrote, were “governed by Sachems, Kings; and Saggamores, petie Lords.”66 Their “pendants of wompom, and such toys in their ears” often denoted these officials, while their prominent women were distinguished by their “aire bracelets, and chaines of wompom.”67 These sachems, like their mainland counterparts, were often chosen according to claims based on kinship; “every family has its head, who is regarded as the most eminent and famous by descent,—from which their rank in the tribe is usually settled.”68 A “common person” could become sachem, yet, unlike the situation of those who

26 | The Ninnimissinuok

obtained the rank on the basis of “descent,” “the rank dies with them.”69 All European commentators seem to agree that, despite their prestige and power, none of the southern New England sachems wielded absolute power or made arbitrary decisions.70

The Rise and Fall of the Pequots, 1616–1637 By the decade of the 1630s the Pequots were in the enviable position of having secured access to and control over much of the interior fur trade and the coastal wampum trade.71 The rapid rise of the Pequots during the early decades of the seventeenth century was propelled, in large part, by the epidemics of 1617–1619, which killed many thousands in the Ninnimissinuok communities that resided between the Penobscot River and Cape Cod but spared those who lived further south, such as the Narragansett, the Pequots, and the communities on eastern Long Island. The Pequots and their rivals, the Narragansetts, were able to step into the void precipitated by this epidemic. This was borne out by the territorial reorganization that immediately followed the epidemic and that substantially increased the Narragansetts’ and Pequots’ land bases.72 By 1630, the Pequots had reached the zenith of their power and influence. They claimed as tributaries at least twenty-six regional sachems along with their respective villages between the Connecticut River and the western boundary of Rhode Island, and their reach extended across the Sound to eastern Long Island.73 In 1626, a Dutch chronicler recorded that the Pequots’ defeat of Sequin sachem Wangunk, leader of a loose confederation of Connecticut Valley communities, signaled the Pequots’ inevitable ascent and transformation into a dominant regional power. Two years later, de Rasieres wrote that the East End communities were “held in subjection by and are tributary to, the Pyquans [Pequots].”74 This meant that only a few years before the turn of the decade, the Pequots had exclusive access to the richest wampum “bank” in the region. In other words, the Pequots had secured for themselves significant land and economic bases from which they propelled themselves into regional prominence. Pequot power, however, never went uncontested. During the 1620s, for example, the western Niantics became tributaries to the Pequots, while the eastern Niantics were subordinate to the Narragansetts.75 This incessant struggle for tributaries affected the status of the native commu-

The Ninnimissinuok | 27

nities all across the region as they alternated between the orbits of the most prominent Indian groups. But, more than simply being a reflection of an inter-Ninnimissinuok quarrel, these shifting loyalties were a manifestation of a regional collision of interests, affecting Ninnimissinuok and European alike, over land and its use and over control of other resources, that ultimately engulfed settler and native groups alike. Indeed, the seeds of the Pequot War were sown in this struggle for the southern New England region generally and particularly in the intermittent clash of interests for control over the Long Island Sound subregion.76 The majority of these conflicts and exchanges in the area in the years between 1616 to 1637 occurred on the mainland or on the western tip of Long Island and on Manhattan Island, where the Dutch had established their stronghold. However, as competition for fur and wampum intensified, particularly after the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the attempts to establish direct relations with the native peoples who were living on the islands in the Long Island Sound intensified. This is not surprising in light of the growing regional importance of wampum. In addition, the channels in the Sound were important lanes for ingress and egress for trade ships and it was trade that sustained the entire region. During these years, the Pequots appear to have been firmly in control of the wampum minters on the East End, while control of the nearby, smaller islands in the Long Island Sound were contested by both the Pequots and the Narragansetts. From 1633 until the Pequot War in 1637, Europeans continued to enter the Long Island Sound subregion. Independent traders such as the merchant John Stone of Virginia, and the Massachusetts Bay traders John Oldham and William Hammond Jr. all attempted to trade directly with Long Island Sound communities, sometimes with disastrous results. The three major triggers for the Pequot War occurred on the lower Connecticut River and in and around the Long Island Sound, where inter and intragroup rivalries were the most intense. The first event was the Dutch settlers’ execution of the powerful Pequot sachem Tatobem, in 1634. The seeds for his murder were sown in 1622, when the Dutch trader Jacob Elkens imprisoned Tatobem on his vessel and demanded a large ransom for his release. Elkens told the Pequots that refusal to ransom their sachem would result in his imminent death.77 To obtain Tatobem’s release, the Pequots parted with the substantial sum of 140 fathoms of wampum.

28 | The Ninnimissinuok

The successful extortion of ransom of Tatobem by Elkens raised the perception of Dutch power in the eyes of the local native polities, and the ramifications of this extended far beyond the actual transaction. It paved the way for Pieter Barentsz, a Dutch West India Company trader and an accomplished linguist who could “understand all the tribes thereabouts,” to successfully negotiate a Dutch-Pequot diplomatic and trade agreement.78 Under the terms of that agreement, each side pledged to be the other’s exclusive trading partner in the region and to exclude other traders from the area. This meant that the Dutch would acquire their wampum and furs exclusively from the Pequots, while the Pequots pledged to trade only with the Dutch. This agreement, at least in theory, effectively excluded the Dutch from direct control over the supply or suppliers of wampum and secured the Pequots’ role as middlemen in that trade. It also brought into the Dutch camp a powerful regional native military power. There is little doubt that the Dutch counted on this arrangement to curtail, or at the very least limit, the territorial, military, and economic expansion of the nascent English settlements in southern New England. While the agreement would ultimately be disastrous for both parties, the Dutch and Pequots traded with each other and flourished over the next eleven years. Early in the summer of 1633, the Pequots gave permission for the Dutch to place a trading post, Good Hope, on the Connecticut River near modern-day Hartford.79 Shortly thereafter, the relationship went sour. The underlying causes were the very terms and conditions under which Good Hope was established. The Dutch and the Pequots had agreed that the Good Hope region was to be transformed into a kind of free-trade zone where all natives, regardless of community affiliation, could go to trade. However, soon after Good Hope began its operations, the Pequots realized that they had struck a poor bargain, because other native groups could trade, and were trading, freely with the Dutch with no appreciable benefit to them. The Pequots responded to this by actively attempting to dissuade others, particularly the Connecticut River Indians and the Narragansetts, from trading there. This effort culminated in the Pequots’ killing of several native traders who were on their way to trade at Good Hope. While the victims’ identities are not certain, most historians believe they were Narragansetts, the Pequots’ primary regional rivals.80 In retaliation for this breach, the Dutch, for a second time, seized the Pequots’ grand sachem Tatobem in 1634; this time, despite having accepted a large ransom of wampum for his safe return, the Dutch executed him.

The Ninnimissinuok | 29

Shortly after Tatobem’s execution, the Pequots killed an English sea captain, John Stone, while his vessel was moored in the Connecticut River. This was the second direct trigger for the Pequot War, since Stone’s murder drew the English into what until that time had been a Dutch-Pequot dispute. This further complicated what, for the Pequots, was an already a thorny situation. After all, the Pequots’ longstanding lucrative relationship with the Dutch was all but dead because of the Good Hope fiasco, and active hostilities between themselves and their archrivals, the Narragansetts, had begun anew. Moreover, the murder of Stone threatened to set the Massachusetts Bay settlers against them, too. The Pequots clearly understood that if this were to happen, it would complete their encirclement by both hostile settler and native communities. To break out of this dangerous situation, the Pequots decided to quell the Bay colonists’ anger over Stone’s murder. This was not a simple matter. Massachusetts Bay’s leadership was well aware of the Pequots’ predicament. Reflecting on this turn of events, John Winthrop wrote, “The reason why they [the Pequots] desired so muche our frendshippe, was because they were now in warre with the narigansett whom till this yeare, they had kept under, & likewise with the dutche who had killed their old Sachim, & some other of their men . . . who came to trade with the dutche at Conectecott. & by these occasions they could not trade safely any where.”81 In other words, the Bay colonists realized they held the winning hand. Thus began a kind of diplomatic dance between the Pequots and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. At first, the Pequots simply excused the alleged killing, claiming it had been a mistake. The Pequots, reported Captain John Underhill, claimed that they had not realized Stone was an Englishman and had mistakenly believed he was Dutch and thus a fair target for their wrath over the killing of their sachem. Or, in the Pequots’ words, they “took them [Europeans] to be one nation, and therefore we do not conceive that we wronged you.”82 Underhill rejected this excuse and alleged that the Pequots had lied when they claimed to be unable “to distinguish between Dutch and English, having had sufficient experience of both nations.”83 Next, the Pequots signaled their desire for friendship with Massachusetts by sending a messenger to its deputy governor in a bid to secure the Bay’s “frendshippe,” symbolized by “2: bundles of sticks, whereby he signified how many Beaver and Otter skins he would give us for that ende, & great store of wampomp[ege].”84 The deputy governor received

30 | The Ninnimissinuok

these presents, but this action did not signal the Bay Colony’s willingness to treat with the Pequots, as it would have among the Ninnimissinuok. The Bay’s deputy governor kept the offerings but made it clear to the Pequots’ emissaries that acceptance of the wampum did not signal the end of the tensions between the two communities caused by Stone’s murder. Instead, in a gesture that emphasized the Bay’s refusal to accept the wampum as indemnification in full for Stone’s life, he gave the messenger “a moose coate of as good value,” telling the messenger that the Pequots needed to send persons of “greater qualitye” before the “Governor would treate with them.”85 Shortly thereafter, two more Pequots, presumably of the rank of sachem, arrived, bearing more wampum. These two ambassadors, along with their offerings, were sent to Boston. Once there, the Pequot delegation was informed that no treaty was possible unless and until the perpetrators of Stone’s murder were voluntarily turned over to Massachusetts Bay authorities for disposition. The Pequots claimed that this was impossible since most were already dead of smallpox and that they “had no Commission to doe it.” The best they could do was to put the request directly before their superior sachem. Indeed, such a request must have shocked the Pequot delegation, since the Bay’s acceptance of the very lavish quantities of wampum and furs should, in their mind, have settled the matter and paved the way for an alliance.86 Massachusetts Bay authorities, however, were of another mind altogether. If the Pequots wanted that colony’s “friendship,” they had first to cede “all their right at Connecticut” and to assist, as much as possible, in planting new English settlements there. The Bay Colony also called for an additional four hundred fathom of wampum, forty beaver and thirty otter skins, and, upon demand, the two surviving men who had participated in the murder of Stone and his men. In return for all this, the Bay Colony would give the Pequots only a “pinnace [small ship] with cloth” in exchange for “all their trade” and be at peace with them.87 If the Pequots had assented to the proposed treaty, it not only would have resulted in the irrevocable loss of their former dominant position in the region but would have paved the way for the Bay Colony’s ascendancy over Connecticut and ultimately the entire region. In the end, the Pequots’ leaders refused to ratify this extraordinarily one-sided treaty.88 The third and final event that contributed to the outbreak of the Pequot War was the death of the well-respected Bay resident and trader John Oldham, in 1636. Oldham and Stone were almost polar opposites. While Stone was disliked in Puritan New England and was thought of as

The Ninnimissinuok | 31

a man of few morals and few scruples, Oldham was a well-liked and wellknown trader who plied his pinnace along the southern New England coast, trading with many of the native communities, and who was trusted enough by the leaders of the Bay Colony to occasionally act as a commercial agent on its behalf.89 He was, in other words, one of their “own.” In the spring of 1636, Oldham ventured into the Long Island Sound, a region contested by the Pequots and the Narragansetts, to open trade there. Oldham, along with his small crew of two English boys and two Narragansetts, stopped on Block Island, probably to trade. He never returned to English territory. A few months later, another English trader and Massachusetts resident, John Gallup, took a small vessel out on the Long Island Sound, intending to “putt in at Long Islande to trade,” but he and his crew “were forced by a suddain change of winde, to beare up for Block Iland.”90 There, Gallup spotted Oldham’s deserted vessel and discovered that he had been murdered. Gallup did not believe that the Pequots were the culprits. Rather, he suspected that either the Narragansetts or their tributaries, the Block Islanders, were responsible for Oldham’s murder. The Narragansett sachems Canonicus and Miantonimi later confirmed that Oldham was killed by “other” Narragansett sachems because Oldham had attempted to “make pease & trade with the Pekodes.”91 As noted by the editors of The Journal of John Winthrop, Canonicus and Miantonimi cleverly redirected Massachusetts Bay’s anger to the Pequots by admitting the direct involvement of other Narragansett sachems in Oldham’s death and by making a show of pursuing his killers who, according to Canonicus and Miantonimi, had taken refuge with the Pequots.92 From that time on, the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s policy moved steadily toward a direct and defining confrontation with the Pequots. From the fall of 1636 until the late spring of 1637, some of the English settlements in southern New England, led by Massachusetts Bay, waged war against the Pequots. The stated justification for this aggression was to avenge Captain Stone’s murder and to put an end to the alleged threat posed by the Pequots to the English settlements’ safety and security. Ironically, during this time of hostilities, both the Pequots and the Bay Colony experienced a similar problem, the inability to rally unilateral and unconditional support from within their groups. This was not simply a native-versus-settler conflict. Rather, almost until the war’s end, the interests of various communities of interest that were now shaping the region affected the alliances formed during this conflict.

32 | The Ninnimissinuok

The Pequots’ strongest competitors, the Mohegans and the Narragansetts, allied themselves with Massachusetts Bay, while most of the Pequots’ former tributaries and allies attempted to remain neutral. In the end, however, perhaps sensing the Pequots’ inevitable defeat, even the Pequots’ tributaries and kinsmen on the East End of Long Island either actively assisted or promised assistance in the hunt for the surviving Pequots and their grand sachem, Sassacus. Similarly, the Europeans did not act as a unified monolith during the struggle. The Dutch refused to be drawn into the engagement, while Plymouth steadfastly put off sending assistance to Massachusetts Bay until the war’s end. Winthrop himself sent a personal appeal to Plymouth, urging the colony to actively join the Bay’s war against the Pequots. In a plea designed to appeal to the settlers’ common origins, Winthrop wrote that he hoped Plymouth would regard the Pequots “and all other Indeans, as a commone enimie” and come to the aide of their “Christian brethren, who are now first in the danger.” At the same time, while Winthrop acknowledged that the war did not directly concern Plymouth and that the Bay Colony had not always acted in unanimity with Plymouth or its interests, he asked Plymouth to excuse the Bay’s past offenses and not allow them to keep Plymouth from coming to the Bay’s aid.93 Plymouth remained unmoved. Only at the war’s end did Plymouth vote to send a mere thirty troops, plus a ship to assist Massachusetts Bay; none were dispatched until the war was over.94 Differences between these communities’ interests and the fact that both the Dutch and the Plymouth settlers stood to lose both power and prestige to the upstart Bay Colony in the event of a Bay victory over the Pequots motivated these groups to remain on the sidelines. The end of the Pequot War deeply impacted the residents of the entire southern New England-Long Island Sound arena, none more than the native peoples on the East End. Within this context, Wyandanch’s question to Gardiner, posed three days after the Pequot defeat, about whether the Indians could have peace and trade with the English, was of vital importance to the East End communities’ future. These peoples would no longer be able to watch the unfolding events and changes from their safe harbor across the Long Island Sound. The English victory effectively ended their relative isolation and security. Direct contact with the settler communities was all but inevitable. The only question that remained was how the East End communities would fit into the Atlantic world and what strategy they would adopt to ensure a smooth and beneficiary tran-

The Ninnimissinuok | 33

sition. The recent Pequot War had given them some important material to grapple with as they considered how to construct their role in the new world order. One factor that must have been foremost in Wyandanch’s mind was the English conception of warfare. In the aftermath of the Pequot War the Massachusetts Bay colonists had relentlessly persecuted and hunted the Pequots throughout the region, mercilessly slaying them or selling the surviving Pequots into slavery in the West Indies. Such tactics were totally unknown among the Ninnimissinuok, who were accustomed to limited conflicts, relatively little bloodshed, and symbolic forms of submission between the victor and the vanquished. Defeat did not, as in European warfare, involve genocide or total submission.95 Having just witnessed the extreme measures the English had taken to rid themselves of a rival, the East End communities understood that navigating their way through the murky waters of Atlantic America would be vital to their future. The Pequot War was the culmination of more than twenty years of contact between the various native and settler communities and resulted in a new social, economic, and political configuration in southern New England, one in which many small communities of interest emerged, old alliances were broken, and new ones formed. It was a world in which these communities of interest drew ever closer, physically, politically, and economically, forcing accommodations that resulted in the emergence of Atlantic American communities.

2 English and Dutch Communities of Interest

The seventeenth century was a time of tremendous change not only for the Ninnimissinuok peoples but also for the flood of Europeans who crossed the Atlantic and became part of the rampant mixture of peoples who made up the southern New England landscape. Into this region were drawn ever-increasing numbers of Dutch and English settlers who asserted overlapping claims to lands on the southern New England mainland and, stretching across the Sound, on Long Island. Like the Ninnimissinuok, the Dutch and English who became part of this emerging Atlantic American world were connected to each other through a broader cultural identity, but, once ensconced in their new world, they quickly divided into separate communities of interest whose respective goals were seen and played out in a variety of forums.

The Dutch: In Pursuit of Their Interests Seventeenth-century Holland’s stature in Europe, along with its national identity and ambitions, was centered on trade. The original 1621 charter for the Dutch West India Company, through which Holland gained jurisdiction over New Netherland,1 reflected these aspirations and resembled more a modern corporate mission statement than a plan for colonial settlement. Its charter contained a “good government” clause that divided the company’s administration into five separate chambers of “managers” who were authorized to secure “the greatest profit and satisfaction of all concerned.”2 Dutch colonization was undertaken in pursuit of Holland’s ambition to establish a global trade network. This sentiment was frequently expressed in the writings and correspondence of the Dutch States

34

English and Dutch Communities of Interest | 35

General and the Dutch West India Company. The Dutch West India Company’s charter explicitly tied the success of the company to the success of the nation. It stated, “we knowing the prosperity of these countries, and the welfare of their inhabitants depends principally on navigation and trade . . . found it good that the navigation, trade and commerce . . . should not henceforth be carried on otherwise than by the common united strength of the merchants . . . and for that end shall be erected one General Company.”3 Its mission was to “increase Trade and Commerce.”4 The Dutch believed that God had bestowed on Holland a “great multitude of seamen” who “could not be employed” without trade. By extension, most Dutch occupations were perceived as appendages to these sea-borne commercial activities by which all were “maintained in continual action and prosperity.”5 Dutch control over land in the New World became a means to launch and access trade, but not an end in itself. Ultimately, permanent Dutch settlements in New York and southern New England served as staging points for Dutch trading activities; they were a tactic for excluding and repelling non-Dutch-sponsored (mostly English) settlements.6 The historian Patricia Seed has written that “discovery,” for the Dutch, was accomplished simply by “touching” lands not yet “discovered” by other claimant European nations. Possession was then secured by using these “discovered” regions as staging points for their ongoing trade activities. In the Dutch mind, “touching and trading” created a sufficient nexus for the assertion of a valid claim against all other Christian nations.7 Later, as trading posts and settlements were established in North America and as competition for the region with other Europeans (particularly the English) increased, the Dutch States General routinely reaffirmed Dutch title through the grant of charters. After 1629, yet another component was added; the Dutch began to obtain native deeds. Together, these charters and native deeds were considered by the Dutch settlers as sufficient to allow them to legitimately assert ownership in the face of all other claimants—particularly the English settlers who, with the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629, were aggressively spreading across the region.8 Thus, from the Dutch perspective, their title to lands in the New York and southern New England regions was perfected against any and all other transatlantic competitors by a combination of Dutch control over commerce and the appropriate official Dutch charters and native deeds.9

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The Dutch sought to apply this touching-and-trading standard to its transatlantic rivals. A dispute between the Dutch West India Company and Jacob Elkens, a former employee, illustrates this policy.10 By 1634, Elkens had left the Dutch company’s employ and was making his living as a kind of free agent for hire. He found and accepted employment representing English interests and was commissioned to press England’s claims to parts of the Hudson River north of its mouth near Manhattan Island. If successful, this claim would have come at the expense of his former employer’s interests there. In response to this perceived challenge to its rights, the Dutch West India Company wrote to the States General of the United Netherlands protesting Elkens’s actions and the English claims. In an emotionally charged remonstrance, the Dutch West India Company reiterated its rights to the region, on the basis of its sovereign’s 1609 “discovery,” to which it, the Dutch West India Company, was a successor in interest. Additionally, the Company argued, it had perfected its title to the region by building forts from which it “carried on trade . . . from the commencement of their charter, without anyone having justly [complained] of them for so doing, or endeavored by [blank] to destroy their trade.”11 For much of the remainder of their tenure in the region, the Dutch would attempt to impose, or at the very least insist that others respect, the Company’s claims, based on its very particular notions of perfecting title through touching and trading. However, in reality, before their tenure in the region ended, the Dutch not only insisted on the acquisition of Indian deeds to perfect ownership but also adapted and pursued the English method of “peopling and planting.”

The English: In Pursuit of Their Interests Unlike the Dutch, the English settlers in southern New England, took both meaningful “peopling” (actual settlement) and “planting” to signify legitimate occupancy. The English interpreted this as requiring improvements to the land through the erection (planting) of permanent structures and fields for agriculture and residential living.12 Taken together, these formed the fundamental basis for English settlers’ claims to legitimate possession and title. Unlike trade or charters obtained from distant sovereigns or even deeds from neighboring natives whose language and customs were foreign to the English colonists, “peopling and planting” was tangible and could be measured.13 Certainly, this legal construction of

English and Dutch Communities of Interest | 37

possession served the English settlers’ goals, which, unlike the Dutch, were focused on the establishment of permanent homes for themselves in New England. This was given even stronger voice and substance by the Great Migration of 1630–1640. During that time, an estimated thirteen thousand people from England, many of whom either traveled to their new homes as part of a family unit or formed part of a congregation, committed their own and their posterity’s futures to southern New England.14 Other activities, such as trade, were conceived of as incidental to the land but did not in themselves confer any special rights or privileges regarding the land. Unlike the Dutch, for whom land was a means to facilitate trade, the English saw land as its own objective. The idea of “improving” by plowing, planting, enclosing, and building pervaded the English settlers’ moral and legalistic standards for determining land ownership in southern New England.15 The settlers rationalized the application of this standard on both religious and secular grounds. Their thinking was influenced by biblical injunctions such as “be fruitful and multiply” and “subdue the earth” and by ideas that stemmed from the growing commercialization of land in seventeenth-century England. The first influence was reinforced through weekly sermons and individual Bible readings, while hedges and fences everywhere enclosed and transformed common lands from a community resource into a commercial commodity. These influences were clearly reflected in John Winthrop’s writings: “[T]he Indians . . . [have] only a natural right to so much land as they had or could improve”; otherwise, the “rest of the country lay open to any that could and would improve it.” Furthermore, Winthrop wrote that the native people “inclose noe Land . . . have any setled habytation, nor tame any Cattle to improve the Land by.”16 Such comments reflect the belief, held by many (but not all) of the early English settlers, that the native groups occupied the country in violation of both God’s commandments and human law. Initially, many English authorities, including Winthrop, attempted to use these impressions to deny the validity of native communities’ claims to large tracts of land that were neither “improved” nor “enclosed.”17 English settlers applied this litmus test of peopling and planting not only to indigenous peoples but to all groups, native and settler alike. This explains the apparent English disregard for Dutch claims to areas in southern New England and their grudging acknowledgment of the Dutch claim to the western portion of Long Island and to Manhattan Island.18 The latter was “improved” in the English sense of the word because the

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Dutch had built on and cultivated the land, whereas they had failed, for the most part, to do so on the southern New England mainland. Moreover, all English settler communities required their constituent members to enclose and fence their lands. These fences symbolized the rights and obligations of individual homesteads. To enforce this, towns appointed fence watchers to ensure compliance through fines and other sanctions.19 As various seventeenth-century English communities of interest competed for the same land base, this peopling-and-planting standard was often cited or implicitly used to assert the claim of one English group over another. This became the prevailing policy of the English settlers without benefit of official sanction from either the Crown or Parliament, its tenets reinforced by local officials, settlers, and communities alike throughout southern New England. However, even the English settler communities were unable to unilaterally impose their system. Like the Dutch and the Ninnimissinuok, they were forced to modify their practices, particularly after 1637, when almost all the English communities undertook to solidify their land claims by obtaining native deeds.

Communities of Interest Collide in Southern New England By 1610, the Dutch were routinely traveling up the Hudson River into Iroquois Confederacy and Mahican territory, seeking furs for the European market. In furtherance of that trade, the Dutch established a permanent trading outpost, in 1614, at Fort Nassau, south of present-day Albany, followed by New Amsterdam, on Manhattan Island, a short ten years later. The latter was settled by the Dutch as a port for its favorable situation at the mouth of the Hudson River and its easy access to the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, as well as for its proximity to the southern New England mainland.20 The early years of the Dutch-Indian fur trade consisted of the exchange of Indian-procured furs for European goods, such as iron and copper kettles, glass beads, and mirrors. Initially, this transatlantic exchange met with moderate success. However, the Iroquoian and Mahican suppliers soon appear to have tired of these goods that “were not . . . much esteemed.”21 The result was that prior to 1622, the annual fur shipments to Holland never rose above 1,500 pelts, and the Dutch fur enterprise, along with the New Netherland colony, verged on financial collapse. The Dutch venture was saved by the traders’ initiation into the intricacies and use of

English and Dutch Communities of Interest | 39

wampum. Wampum opened the door to a steady and rising supply of furs from the native suppliers, and the fur trade soon became a great source of wealth for the Dutch colony. Before that decade’s end, the Dutch saw their annual shipment soar to 10,000 pelts.22 New Netherland’s interests did not remain confined to the Hudson River region or its basin on the Atlantic coast. As early as 1616, the Dutch explorer Adrian Block had navigated parts of the Connecticut River and claimed it for Holland.23 By the 1620s, the Dutch renewed their interest in the southern New England mainland when they began to seek out an Indian partner in that area to serve as both a fur broker and, more important, a steady supplier of wampum, which the Dutch recognized as the “source and mother of the beaver trade.” Sometime around 1626, the Dutch trader Pieter Barentsz and the Pequot sachem Tatobem entered into what the Dutch characterized as an “exclusive” trade agreement with the Pequots.24 This agreement, for a time, contributed to New Netherland’s commercial success, but it was also a factor in the ultimate collapse of the Dutch as a regional power. Plymouth Colony, established in 1620, also recognized the fur trade’s financial potential and attempted to exploit it. In 1623, Plymouth traders sought to open trade with the Narragansetts to their south, but they were unable to break the Dutch commercial hold on that area.25 Plymouth next turned its attention north to the Kennebec River, in Maine; there the colony established a trading station. That outpost, relying solely on European trade goods as a medium of exchange with the nearby native communities, met with limited success. Plymouth’s Kennebec trading station was rescued by an unexpected savior—a Dutch official from New Netherland. New Netherland had become aware of and concerned about Plymouth’s attempts to enter the fur trade. The Dutch West India Company’s secretary-bookkeeper, Isaack de Rasieres, concluded that if Plymouth’s northern trading post failed, Plymouth would again turn its attention southward, toward the Long Island Sound and coastal southern New England. These areas were of the utmost importance to the Dutch because it was there that wampum was produced and in that area that the Dutch believed they had secured a powerful native ally, the Pequots, who could obtain for them a virtual monopoly over the wampum trade so vital to the fur trade. De Rasieres calculated that if the Plymouth venture in Kennebec failed, Plymouth would, perforce, cast about for other opportunities and might well challenge Dutch interests in the area to the south.

40 | English and Dutch Communities of Interest

De Rasieres explained it like this: “the seeking after sewan [wampum] is prejudicial to us, inasmuch as they [Plymouth] would, by doing so, discover the trade in furs; which if they were to find out, it would be a great trouble for us to maintain, for they have already dare to threaten that if we will not leave off dealing with that people, they will be obliged to use other means; if they do that now, while they are yet ignorant how the case stands, what will they do if they get a notion of it?”26 The Dutch West India Company concurred with de Rasieres’s concern and charged him with neutralizing the Plymouth threat. To this end, de Rasieres devised a plan to help Plymouth secure the northern fur trade. He hoped that if Plymouth’s northern commercial endeavor was successful, it would give New Netherland the time it needed to secure the region’s wampum supplies. This, in turn, would guarantee Dutch preeminence in the region’s growing fur trade. Ironically, de Rasieres chose to inaugurate Plymouth into the mysteries of wampum as the tool with which to accomplish this goal. De Rasieres opened communication with Plymouth Colony in the spring of 1627 with a letter, written in both Dutch and French, to Plymouth’s governor. He welcomed the Plymouth colonists to the region and offered to open trade between the two communities.27 The Dutch secretary had good reason to believe that the Dutch colony could influence Plymouth. After all, not only were the Dutch and the Plymouth colonists (practically speaking) coreligionists, but also many of the Plymouth settlers had recently lived in Holland, where they had found refuge from religious persecution in England. Governor Bradford’s reply to de Rasieres’s letter confirmed de Rasieres’s confidence in that historically forged bond. Bradford’s reply not only acknowledged a kinship with the Dutch based on their common religious heritage but also alluded to the bonds that many of the Plymouth colonists, including Bradford, had forged with the Dutch during their years of exile in Holland: “yet are many of us further obliged by the good and courteous entreaty we have found in your country, having lived there for many years with freedom and good content. . . . For which we . . . are bound to be thankful to your nation and shall never forget the same.”28 Their correspondence culminated in an invitation to De Rasieres to visit Plymouth Colony. Because of the danger to Dutch vessels from English ships plying the coast from Virginia, Bradford advised de Rasieres against making the short journey to the mainland in a Dutch ship and suggested he await a boat that Plymouth would send to bring de Rasieres

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safely to them. This was agreed to, and in the fall of 1627, de Rasieres arrived safely at Plymouth Colony.29 It was during this visit that the Dutch secretary explained wampum’s use to the Plymouth colonists. Before returning to New Amsterdam, de Rasieres sold the Plymouth settlers fifty fathom of those cylindrical beads to help them secure the northern fur trade.30 In 1628, Plymouth, armed with the Dutch secretary’s assistance and advice, realized a substantial profit from its northern trading post. De Rasieres’s strategy failed to bring the Dutch the security they sought. Plymouth’s adoption of wampum was so successful that the colonists “could scarce ever get enough from them [the natives].” As a result, competition for this limited commodity dramatically increased and rapidly engulfed the entire region.31 Plymouth’s Governor Bradford recalled that for the next two decades “it grew to thus be a commodity in these parts”; in particular, the Narragansetts and Pequots “grew rich and potent by it.”32 After 1628, wampum quickly emerged as the region’s substitute for European currency and was widely accepted in place of European-minted coins throughout the region by European and Ninnimissinuok alike.33 Two years after the meeting between de Rasieres and the Plymouth colonists, a new rival for southern New England’s land and resources entered what was fast becoming a crowded region. The Massachusetts Bay colonists arrived, bearing an English-issued charter, and almost immediately began to compete directly with both Dutch and Plymouth Colony traders for wampum and furs.34 Just as in 1628 the threat of competition from Plymouth had prompted the Dutch to attempt to focus Plymouth’s attention on its northern trading post, by 1632 the Dutch were again alarmed by Plymouth’s trade activity, this time in Connecticut. This time, the Dutch determined to take direct action to counter the English menace. Their strategy was to buy two separate tracts of land in what is today Connecticut from native sachems. Their first purchase was “Kieveet’s Hook” (Saybrook), located at the mouth of the Connecticut River, near the Pequot stronghold at Mystic.35 The Dutch made a second purchase in 1633 for land located near present-day Hartford, where they constructed the ill-fated trading post, ironically christened “House of Good Hope.”36 In typical Dutch fashion, they planned to use both areas to secure trade and not, in the English sense, for peopling and planting. The Dutch had no doubt that theirs was the superior European claim to the region, since it was their traders who had first ascended the Connecticut River in 1614 (“touching”) and used it as a staging point for trade “before any English

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people had ever dreamed of coming there.” They further secured their rights to the first purchase, as had become their practice, by purchasing it from the native owners and affixing the Dutch States’ arms (symbolic of their charter) to a tree in “token of possession.”37 The land around Good Hope was similarly secured. First the Dutch obtained a deed from their erstwhile trading partners, the Pequots, in 1633. This deal was brokered between the Dutch agent Jacob Van Curler, better known for his dealings with the Iroquois, and the powerful Pequot sachem Tatobem. It granted the Dutch rights not only to the Hartford area but also to the adjacent Fresh River.38 The construction of Good Hope, “erected in 1633 on the Fresh River,” was, in the words of the Dutch, “for further security” but was not seen by the Dutch as necessary to establish their claim, legally or morally.39 Of paramount importance was the provision “that all tribes of Indians shall be permitted to freely come thither to trade with us; and that the enemy of one or the other nation shall not molest each other on the purchased tract.”40 For the Dutch, the Pequot sale simply supplemented the original Dutch West India Company’s charter, which had granted them the liberty to take possession of the region. More important, the settlement was envisioned as a kind of regional clearinghouse where all Indians could go to trade freely with the Dutch without fear of molestation. This agreement did not go unremarked by their English neighbors. Both Plymouth Colony and the Bay Colony denounced the transfer as invalid because it was obtained from the Pequots, who had allegedly “usurped upon them [the former native owners] and drove them from thence.”41 Despite Plymouth’s remonstrance, William Bradford, unlike the Bay colonists, seems to have genuinely understood the Dutch assumptions and plans for land. In his observations regarding the establishment of Good Hope, he remarked that the Dutch wanted the land not so much for its own sake but to assist them in their “great engagements.”42 Bradford was disturbed by the expansion of the Dutch trade into Connecticut, not simply because it could potentially cut into Plymouth’s endeavors but also because he understood that if the Dutch were to permanently establish trade in the region, it would, from the Dutch perspective, legitimize Dutch claims to the region. Bradford was so troubled by his Dutch neighbor’s action that Plymouth took countermeasures. Plymouth’s Governor Winslow and Bradford traveled to Boston and proposed that a joint Plymouth–Massachusetts Bay trading station be built just north of the Dutch outpost to counter the Dutch occupation.

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Plymouth’s appeal, however, fell on deaf ears. John Winthrop recalled that the Bay Colony rejected Plymouth’s proposal, judging the site of the proposed trading post to be a “place . . . not fitt for plantation, there beinge 3: or 4000: warlike Indians.”43 At that moment, Massachusetts Bay perceived no interests sufficiently compelling for it to undertake the risks involved in challenging the Dutch in Connecticut; neither did it accept the notion that a threat to Plymouth’s interests represented a threat to all English settlers interests in the region. For his part, Bradford lamely excused the Bay Colony on the grounds that it was “but lately come” and thus was “not fit” to undertake such an endeavor.44 The differing responses to Dutch actions in Connecticut also reflected the different circumstances that faced the Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay colonies. By 1633, Plymouth had close to a decade’s experience in the region. It had watched the Dutch in action, witnessed the expansion of Dutch territorial claims, and understood the significance of touching and trading and its connection to Dutch goals for Atlantic America. There was also a level of familiarity between Plymouth and New Netherland because many of the Plymouth planters had spent time in Holland. This prior connection was absent between the settlers in Massachusetts and those in New Netherland. Plymouth’s actions demonstrate that by 1633 it viewed land and its acquisition in Atlantic America as a flexible and ever-changing process and, when necessary, was willing to change as circumstances demanded. This included use of a Dutch method for taking or countering possession when it suited its needs. The Massachusetts Bay settlers, on the other hand, resident in the region a mere three years but already possessed of numbers sufficient to aggressively pursue a policy of peopling and planting, rejected the notion that the mere construction of a trading post was a sufficient nexus by which the Dutch, or anyone else, could assert regional jurisdiction. Plymouth was undeterred by the Bay Colony’s refusal to join it and took action on its own to counter the Dutch occupation of Connecticut. Plymouth obtained a native deed from Natawanute, a Connecticut Valley sachem who resided just north of Good Hope, for lands that encompassed much of the territory claimed by the Dutch.45 In September 1633, Plymouth dispatched a ship up the Connecticut River under the command of Lieutenant William Holmes, accompanied by several Connecticut Valley sachems. On the ship was placed the frame of a house to be placed on the site of a new trading post, located a mere mile north of Good Hope.46 The Dutch protested Plymouth’s attempt to usurp their

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Connecticut claim by planting a rival trading post and demanded that Holmes “depart, with all his people forthwith . . . and break up his settlement on, the lands lying on the Fresh river, continually traded upon by our nation . . . purchased from the Indians and paid for.”47 But, as the Dutch noted, the Plymouth men ignored their protests and “sett up their howse notwithstandinge about a mile aboue the d[utche].”48 This was not the last challenge from the English colonies to the Dutch in Connecticut. Only two years after the establishment of Good Hope and Massachusetts’s refusal to join Plymouth in a plan to thwart Dutch ambitions in Connecticut, the Bay settlers’ assessment of the situation in Connecticut had changed, and they were prepared to aggressively wrest control of the area by peopling and planting. Perhaps the single most important event that influenced this policy about-face was the epidemic of 1633 in the Connecticut River valley. That epidemic, probably smallpox, “swept away many of the Indians from all the places near” or adjoining the Connecticut River valley region and radically changed the composition of the region.49 The three thousand to four thousand warriors Winthrop had worried about two years earlier suddenly ceased to be of concern for some Bay Colony residents. Thomas Hooker, along with his cocongregants from Newton in Massachusetts Bay, was among those who declared Connecticut ripe for new plantings and who petitioned the Bay Colony for permission to remove to Connecticut in 1635. It is well known that Hooker’s primary motivation to outmigrate was his religious differences with Massachusetts’s Puritan leadership. However, at the time of the request, both Hooker and the Bay Colony leadership downplayed this, emphasizing instead Hooker’s and his followers’ need for more land. What is not often discussed is that Hooker also urged the Bay Colony to consider that his followers’ physical occupation of Connecticut would benefit the Bay Colony by preventing the “danger of having it [Connecticut] possessed by other, dutche or Englishe.”50 And, while there is no doubt that this was not Hooker’s primary motive for leaving the immediate vicinity of Massachusetts, Hooker’s statement tapped into the local leadership’s fears of losing Connecticut to rival groups, even, as he suggested to other English groups. This was clearly a reference to the Plymouth colonists, who, like the Dutch, were attempting to stake out their own claim. Hooker’s strategy for winning Massachusetts’s consent for removal was premised on the notion that there did not exist a uniformity of interest among the English settlers and that these transplanted settlers were irrevocably connected to

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each other because of their country of origin. The removal of settlers from the Bay Colony to Connecticut drew repeated protests from Plymouth colonists, who saw the former as trespassers. Nothing illustrates this better than Plymouth resident Jonathan Brewster’s lament that “The Massachusetts men . . . coming almost daily [to Connecticut] . . . have . . . a great mind to the place we are upon.”51 Neither the protests from Plymouth nor those of the Dutch regarding the Bay colonists’ encroachments into Connecticut were heeded.52 Hooker’s plea to depart also reveals that the struggle for Connecticut was part of a larger ongoing regional conversation about land. At this particular time, English Plymouth and Dutch New Netherland both accepted the idea that there were a variety of ways to establish a jurisdictional nexus to land. The appearance of Massachusetts Bay in the region generally, and in Connecticut specifically, added another voice to this ongoing dialogue, which embroiled Ninnimissinuok and Europeans alike. Hooker’s idea that his removal to Connecticut would forestall the claims of “others” reveals the complete evolution of attitudes and assumptions regarding land that was taking place. Massachusetts was proposing a land system in which peopling and planting would be the sine qua non to perfection of possession and title, even as other groups were putting forward alternate and sometimes competing methods. In the minds of the Bay colonists, claims to Connecticut on the part of the Dutch and of the Plymouth colonists failed because of both groups’ failure to adequately populate and transform the area. This is not to imply that the chief motive for the Newton congregation’s removal was to form a vanguard against outside settler encroachments. Indeed, there is little doubt that Hooker and his followers’ dominant motivation was to remove beyond the Bay’s jurisdictional reach because of a fundamental disagreement over the very nature of the Puritan experiment being played out in that colony.53 After all, during his very short residency in Massachusetts, Hooker had come to see that colony’s nexus between revealed sainthood and political empowerment as a kind of perversion of Puritan ideals. This fundamental disagreement would lead many others either to leave, as Hooker did, or to avoid ever exposing themselves to Massachusetts’s theologically tangled jurisdictional grip.54 Like their Ninnimissinuok neighbors, the English settlers developed a pattern commonly seen among their native neighbors—the tendency to “vote with their feet” in the pursuit of interests that had diverged from the leadership’s.

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Hooker’s arguments also forced the Massachusetts Bay leadership into an anomalous and somewhat uncomfortable position. Bay colonists had, by that time, become committed to a system of peopling and planting. This system, in turn, implied that Massachusetts Bay’s claims to any and all lands depended on its own ability to meet this standard. The proposed Newton exodus posed a substantial danger for Massachusetts Bay. It might, as suggested by John Winthrop, set a precedent that would “deverte other frendes that would come to us,” thus jeopardizing the future expansion of Massachusetts and perhaps even its very legitimacy. After all, in a still sparsely populated and increasingly contested region, the possibility that settlers, then a scarce and much-sought-after resource, might be drawn away from Massachusetts to Hooker’s Connecticut settlement or to some other locale posed a real threat to the Bay’s legal underpinnings. The acceptance of peopling and planting as necessary to the perfection of title became a double-edged sword for Massachusetts and left its title vulnerable to challenge if, at some point, the Bay Colony could not rally enough people to join its circle of interest or if enough settlers “defected” to other communities. This concern pervaded the early settlement period and was not unique to Hooker’s removal. In 1641, when several discontented individuals from Lynn and Ipswich, Massachusetts, threatened to remove to Long Island and place themselves directly under Dutch jurisdiction, Massachusetts protested, fearing it would strengthen the Dutch and take from them “that . . . which our king . . . had granted by patent . . . to the earl of Sterling.”55 Winthrop was, of course, referring to the English great patent to Long Island, granted in 1635 to the Earl of Stirling. Winthrop’s words reflect the prevailing acceptance of the notion that an English patent, while desirable and ultimately necessary, was alone insufficient in southern New England for the retention of possession and perfection of title. It followed, then, that if the Dutch were able to people and plant Long Island, albeit even with settlers of English origin, the Dutch claim might ultimately defeat the English claim, despite the patent issued by the Crown. The insufficiency of patents or charters issued by a European government is understandable in a region where all European colonists wielded such dueling documents. It was rapidly becoming clear that new methods of obtaining possession and title were taking hold concurrent with the establishment of new communities of interests and that the link between these two was becoming firmly entrenched.

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Winthrop had other worries that resulted from these new emerging modes of settlement and communities. One was the increasing propensity of individuals to organize outmigrations in order to found new settlements without benefit of grant or patent from the appropriate authorities in England. Indeed, Winthrop expressed his concern about this lack of an official English document with regard to Hooker’s proposed removal; Hooker had, in part, disregarded Plymouth’s own Connecticut aspirations because the colony lacked any formal document. The Newton congregants were not the only settlers to ignore such formalities. The ever independent Roger Williams also founded his Rhode Island colony without benefit of any kind of English patent or official sanction. Would the English authorities, Winthrop wondered, permit the Newton congregation or any English settlers to “sitte downe without a Patent in any place which our kinge lyes claime unto”?56 Certainly, the settlers had not totally rejected the need for patents and deeds from England, and all settlements eventually sought them. However, this was not viewed as a requisite first step. Yet, it was this unorthodoxy that led colonial leaders such as Winthrop to worry that this evolving approach to ownership would ultimately be disputed by the authorities in England. While Winthrop never explicitly disavowed the evolving Atlantic American land system, it is clear from this statement that he feared that the system would ultimately prove unacceptable to the imperial authorities and would expose the settlers’ titles to land to a serious “home” challenge and even possible nullification at some future time. Certainly, the Bay colonists were aware that the Crown could and would revoke a charter, as happened with the Virginia Charter in 1624. Furthermore, Massachusetts Bay had recently experienced firsthand a very real threat to its charter from a Quo Warranto proceeding instigated by Sir Ferdinando Gorges, of the Council for New England, against the Massachusetts Bay Colony.57 While the Bay colony avoided the disastrous consequences that would have resulted had that complaint been sustained, the leadership understood that it pursued and enforced its unique land policy at its own risk.

English Proprietors and Grandees Stake Their Claims The contest for southern New England extended far beyond the immediate geographic region. Interest groups in England itself were coming together seeking to impose their own visions onto southern New England,

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plans, more often than not, at odds with those of the inhabitants of the region, Ninnimissinuok and settler alike. The activities of these groups, which appeared until 1634 often in quasi-governmental guise as the Council for New England and thereafter as individual patent holders or proprietors, also influenced the ongoing dialogue that was reshaping the region’s affairs. More often than not, these England-based groups and individuals actually proved ineffective at carrying forth their schemes; the threat they posed, however, was sufficient to affect the settlers and caused them to worry about the plans of these distant actors. The institutional groundwork for this conflict was laid before the Puritans ever stepped foot on the southern New England mainland. On November 3, 1620, James I approved the incorporation of the Council for New England. It was charged with the governmental and fiscal oversight of all colonial ventures in an area of America between the fortieth and the forty-eighth parallels of latitude, stretching (at least theoretically) from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, all territory claimed by England. This was the Council’s “Great Patent,” and all the land encompassed by it was known as “New England.”58 The Council’s charter authorized “the planting, ruling, ordering and governing of New England in America.”59 Its governing body was composed of forty patentees, all of whom were prominent citizens and thirteen of whom were members of the peerage. In reality, many of the seventeenth-century proprietary grantees who received lands in America (some granted directly through the Council, others not) were, at some point during the Council’s fourteen-year existence, connected to it. For example, one Council member, William Alexander, Lord Stirling, received two grants directly from the Council, one, in 1622, for Nova Scotia, the other, in 1635, for Long Island, while Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, who received his Maryland grant not from the Council but from the Crown, was also a Council member. Thus, both the Council itself and its grandee proprietors came to constitute, along with the settlers, distinct interest groups in southern New England even while an ocean kept these communities physically apart. The Council’s charter provided that the governing of these American colonies “would remain with the Council.”60 To this end, its charter specifically authorized the Council to “make, ordaine, and establish all Manner of Orders, Laws, Directions, Instructions, Forms, and Ceremonies of Government and Magistracy fitt and necessary for and concerning the Government of the said Colony and Plantation.”61 However,

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in reality, the Council failed to exercise such prerogatives and instead acted as a kind of clearinghouse, disposing of vast tracts of land in the form of proprietary grants, though even these grants never bore fruit for their erstwhile grantees. The Crown appears to have chosen to delegate its putative authority over this region because of the tremendous expense, in terms of capital outlay and manpower, necessary to carry out colonization. The Crown hoped to take possession of and control over a vast expanse of land on the North American continent with minimal expense and effort on its part by utilizing the private resources of its subjects; hence its recourse to the Council for New England and its very lax attitude toward rogue settlements (those that lacked any kind of explicit authorization), such as Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven. Ironically, it was this recourse to private initiative that gave rise to the independent and strikingly entrepreneurial shape these settlements assumed. In the process, the Council’s primary aspirations for itself and for New England and ultimately the Crown’s jurisdiction over New England were undermined. The moving force behind the Council for New England throughout most of its existence was Sir Ferdinando Gorges, an aristocrat and a close associate of the Stuarts who, for a good portion of his adult life, was deeply interested in the settlement and ordering of an emerging British American colonial empire. Gorges, a younger son, had, at an early age, sought his fortune through military service in the Low Countries. After that, he, like others similarly situated, turned his attention to American colonization.62 Gorges, however, was driven by his own very particular vision for North American settlement, which was deeply rooted in a traditional English hierarchal society. In this vision, colonial America would be anchored by large hereditary estates and worked by cadres of copyholders, leaseholders, and tenant farmers.63 Along these lines, Gorges and his associate, Sir Henry Spelman, proposed that laborers recruited to work the land in New England occupy a status akin to that of serfs on feudal manors. As such, these workers would not be permitted to “depart from the place where he is once planted, without lycence from his Land Lord.”64 Certainly, Gorges and his associates were articulating the prevailing norms of their time. Even the founders of Massachusetts Bay Colony had initially proposed that nonstockholding migrants “become lyable to the performance of some service certaine dayes in the yeare and their posteritie after them to hold and inherit, and by that service they and their posteritie after them to hold and inherite their lands, which wilbe a

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good meanes to enjoy their lands from being held in capite.”65 While the Bay Colony never enacted or enforced such a feudal arrangement and instead quickly embraced the general notion of fee-simple ownership, this quasi-feudal specter, embodied in the Council’s Great Patent, the stated vision of Council members, and extant proprietary grants, hung over the colonial landscape until near the end of the seventeenth century. During the Council’s fourteen-year existence, it attempted to fulfill its stated mission to plant, rule, order and govern and to transform New England into a “replica of England under royal control,” mostly by granting patents for large tracts of lands in New England for the benefit of its members.66 It also tried to regulate the commercial exploitation of New England. For example, it attempted to exclude the Dutch and the French from the fishing trade by passing a resolution prohibiting “strangers . . . to fish there . . . because the makeing of dry fish hath been peculiar to Englishmen. And the Hollanders and Frenchmen . . . If they . . . bee suffered to make dry fish . . . would . . . overthrow the whole Trayd.”67 It also sought to shape the direction settlement would take in New England by granting charters and patents for what it envisioned would become “great estates.” The 1621 Nova Scotia patent contemplated the creation of baronies, while the original Calvert charter for Maryland (not a Council grant) granted its owner, in theory, powers that rivaled those of any European monarch.68 Ironically, while the frameworks of many of the Stuart-issued colonial charters, Council grants, and patents were quasi-feudal in nature, the corporate New England colonies rejected this paradigm.69 Gorges and other patentees undertook a number of colonizing enterprises, all of which failed but that appeared to the New England corporate colonies as significant challenges to their continued existence and (relative) autonomy. One problem for the established corporate colonies was that many of the Council-issued grants overlapped with the claims of these established colonies. As early as 1623, one such patent threatened Plymouth Colony’s autonomy and political existence. The previous year, the Council for New England had issued a grant for lands encompassing the entire north shore of Massachusetts and extending thirty miles inland to present-day Concord, Massachusetts, to Sir Ferdinando’s son Robert. The terms of the grant also appointed Robert lieutenant-general of all New England. Robert actually traveled to New England to take up his commission.70 Plymouth’s William Bradford remarked that “About the middle of September arrived Captain Robert Gorges in the Bay of the

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Massachusetts, with sundry passengers and families, intending there to begin a plantation. . . . He had a commission from the Council of New England to be general governor of the country.”71 Robert Gorges’s task was to pursue the Council’s interests by establishing a viable colony directly under the Council’s control, thereby laying the foundation for the Council’s exercise of direct authority over the English colonists established at Plymouth.72 In reality, Robert Gorges’s brief stay proved more a nuisance to the Plymouth colonists than a real threat. Instead of challenging the Plymouth government’s legitimacy or attempting to establish his own settlement, Gorges spent most of his time pursuing the controversial Thomas Weston, an ironmonger from London and the front man for the Merchant Adventurers of London. Weston was the perpetrator of numerous getrich-quick schemes in America.73 Apparently, Weston had conned the Council for New England into granting him a license to transport “many pieces of great ordnance for New England, pretending great fortification here in the country, and I know not what shipping. The which when he had obtained, he went and sold them beyond seas for his private profit.”74 It was for this reason that the hapless Gorges apparently felt obligated to pursue the Council’s defrauder. To William Bradford’s great relief and Plymouth Colony’s good fortune, Gorges wasted his time on this pursuit and completely neglected his prime objective—to establish a viable Council-controlled settlement that could serve as a base for the Council’s exercise of actual authority over the region.75 Despite this failure, the Council continued to make grants until its demise in 1634. In 1629, John Mason received a grant for present-day New Hampshire.76 Mason actually led a group of settlers to the Piscataqua region in 1631, but the settlement failed.77 Later, colonists from the Bay Colony would successfully establish themselves at Exeter, in the Piscataqua region, lending legitimacy to Massachusetts’s claims to both New Hampshire and Maine. Other grants of this sort were issued as well, including the troublesome 1630 grant to the Earl of Warwick for a tract of land 120 miles in length in southern Connecticut.78 Ultimately, however, most of these proprietary grants proved fairly worthless to their putative owners. Despite its dismal colonization record, the Council made two last attempts, in 1632 and in 1635, to fulfill its singular mission in New England. The first effort posed a genuine threat to the Bay Colony’s continued juridical existence. In 1632, Gorges and his supporters moved to have

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Massachusetts Bay’s charter recalled. The Council’s groundwork for this proceeding was actually begun almost simultaneously with the colony’s initial settlement. In 1631 the Puritans in Massachusetts intercepted a letter from Sir Ferdinando Gorges to Sir Christopher Gardiner,79 whom they had taken into custody and charged with a variety of offenses. From that letter, the Massachusetts Bay leaders surmised that Sir Christopher was Gorges’s agent, charged with “spying” on their activities. If there had ever been any doubts in their minds as to Gorges’s intent, that letter certainly dispelled them. From Winthrop’s remarks regarding Gardiner and the letter he was well aware that Gorges claimed “a greate parte of the baye of mass[achuset]tes” and “had some secreat designe to recover his pretended right.” As a result, in the minds of the Bay leaders, Gorges had “declared himself an ill willer to our Government.”80 By 1632, Gorges had launched a full-scale assault on the Massachusetts charter before the Privy Council, accusing the colonists of having declared themselves independent of the Crown.81 The Privy Council appointed a committee to investigate the charges.82 Winthrop complained in his March 1633 journal: “Sir Ferdin. Gorge, & Capt. mason (upon the instigation of Sir Christ: Gardiner, Moreton, & Radcliffe) had preferred a petition to the Lordes of the privye Counsell against us, charginge us with many false accusations.”83 Two months later, Winthrop again complained of this petition, which he felt was being undertaken by Gorges and Mason because they had “begunne a plantation at Pascataqke & aymed at the general government of N:E:.”84 However, despite all the efforts, these plans failed. Not only was the New Hampshire settlement unsuccessful, but the Privy Council decided in favor of Massachusetts, refusing to quash what they deemed a potentially successful colony.85 Three years after their defeat before the Privy Council, Gorges and the Council for New England embarked on their last design. The plan entailed the division of the remaining lands contemplated within its Great Patent into eight separate patents to be held by “provincial lords” and a renewed attack on the Massachusetts charter.86 Among the patents issued was one to William Alexander, Lord Stirling, for Long Island, a large island located a short distance off the southern New England coast in the Long Island Sound.87 If successful, these grants, held by “knight service” tenure, would have paved the way for the implementation of the more traditional English forms of social, political, and economic systems, which still maintained direct vestiges of and links to feudalism. Simultaneously, the Council also planned to guarantee the success of this action

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by requesting that a royal governor be sent to New England to oversee its governance. The king assented to this plan, and, by the spring of 1635, the Council surrendered its charter in exchange for a plan that in fact called for the division of lands and, at least in theory, the idea of a royal governor for New England.88 In that same year, the long-awaited appointment to govern New England was granted to Gorges, and before summer’s end the Massachusetts Bay Colony received word of that commission. Winthrop dismissed the commission as nothing more than permission “to govern his province of Somersetshire.” Despite Winthrop’s dismissive words and the choice by the leadership to virtually ignore the commission, many in the English settlements were concerned.89 Certainly, the local colonial leaders had surmised the real meaning of the commission, since they had all been apprised of Gorges’s plans for the region for some time, through his repeated colonization efforts and the unsuccessful Quo Warranto proceeding brought against Massachusetts but a few years prior. Indeed, Massachusetts’s victory against that proceeding in the Privy Council was coupled with a warning that must have unsettled the Bay Colony settlers: “In case of further neglect or contempt shown therein their Lordships will cause a strict course to be taken against them, and will move his Majesty to reassume into his hands the whole plantation.”90 For all his maneuvers, Gorges never set foot in New England, and the threat from the Maine patent never materialized. Gorges’s strongest ally, John Mason, died in the winter of 1635, and in that same year the ship intended to transport Gorges to New England proved unseaworthy. With those two blows, Gorges lost his last real opportunity to impose his plans on the New England settlers.91 Yet, despite these aborted plans, the legacy of the Council for New England and Sir Ferdinando would haunt the English settlers for some years to come. Certainly, the Privy Council’s warning at the conclusion of the Quo Warranto proceedings must have served as a constant reminder to the colonists of the potential for, if not their physical ouster from New England, certainly their “political” expulsion by hostile forces in England. Of continuing concern, also, were the outstanding patents issued by the Council for New England before it was disbanded, which under the right circumstances might and could be used as a wedge or weapon against the established local New England governments. The Warwick patent for Connecticut, for example, proved vexatious, despite the Puritan leanings of its patentees. As early as 1636, Governor

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Winthrop received a letter from Sir Richard Saltonstall, a Warwick patentee, complaining that his rights under this patent for lands in Connecticut, at Windsor, were being ignored.92 Certainly, this must have been a reference to the Hooker-led settlement of the previous year, which acknowledged no rights to those lands but their own, established by actual engagement with the land. To counter this encroachment, Saltonstall proposed appointing John Winthrop Jr. as governor of his Connecticut lands. This move was clearly designed to protect his interests by establishing a close political nexus between the Connecticut patentees and the leaders of the Bay Colony, in direct opposition to claims by either Hooker’s Connecticut settlers or the Dutch.93 Saltonstall also requested that “Sergient Gardiner & some with him to set out my grounds where it may be most convenient between Plymouth Trucking house & the falls according to my directions.”94 Despite these tenuous connections, the tension between the Connecticut settlers and the Warwick patentees continued sporadically until 1661. Finally, in that year, under a threat from the Warwick patentees to either impose duties on settlers or sell their interests to the Dutch, Connecticut purchased the patentees’ interests.95 Of concern, too, was the 1635 Long Island patent held by Lord Stirling, a close associate of the king and a man who, like Gorges, had for many years demonstrated his interest in New England as a means of fulfilling an aristocratic vision for the colonial plantings. In 1637, Stirling’s agent, James Farrett, arrived, bearing the patent for Long Island. The timing of this patent proved very awkward for the victors of the 1637 Pequot War, who had high hopes that the defeat of their Indian competitors would clear the way for their easy expansion into all of the Connecticut region and across the Long Island Sound, as well. As the Warwick and Stirling patents demonstrated, the demise of the Council for New England did not bring an end to the fractious nature of the relationships and interests in Atlantic America. Instead, the legacy of the Council continued long after its termination, and that, along with the multiplying communities of interest in the region, only accelerated the changes that engulfed the southern New England region. The early settlement period saw the rise of multiple interests put forward not only by various native groups but also by Dutch and English communities that had begun to take root in the southern New England region. Like their native neighbors, the original English settlements soon fissioned into smaller communities of interests that spread across the

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southern New England mainland. Each community anchored and justified its claims to the region on the basis of its implementation of its own methods for claiming and retaining land. The Dutch, with their focus on trade, promoted a theory of touching and trading. The English settlers, on the other hand, were more divided. The Bay colonists, because of the sheer number of settlers, could, and did, rely on peopling and planting to legitimate their claims, while the Plymouth colonists appear to have accepted various methods, depending on the circumstances. While their standard certainly bore some of the hallmarks of the traditional English relationship to land, the settlers steadily discarded the more traditional feudal underpinnings of English land holding. Specifically, they dispensed with the requirement to first acquire title (via grant or patent) from the Crown or its agent or successor in interest and also abandoned any and all of the quasi-feudal obligations that still attached to land in England. The implementation of this standard not only resulted in conflicts between the English settlers and their Dutch and native neighbors but caused conflicts among English settlers, as well. Ultimately, the English settler communities defeated the challenge put forward by a competing community of interest, the English grandees. Later, particularly after the Pequot War, which marked the permanent entrenchment of the English settlements in the region, treaties and deeds obtained from the Indians would become equally important for individual English settlements and their residents in their quest to seize and control territory. It was in this chaotic and fluid environment that an Atlantic American system began to emerge.

Gardiner Family Bible London, Christopher Barker, 1599. Courtesy of the East Hampton Library.

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3 East End Realignment

By the early summer of 1637, at the end of the Pequot War, untold numbers of Pequots were dead, the survivors scattered and seeking refuge with neighboring native groups to escape capture and sale into slavery, while the surviving leadership attempted to elude the certain death that awaited them if they were captured by English militiamen or their native accomplices. Even as the Pequot polity disintegrated, new communities of interests were being configured in the complex and highly mobile landscape of southern New England. This new wave of changes engulfed communities throughout the entire region, including those native groups that lived on the islands in the Long Island Sound. As a result, these peoples, particularly those on eastern Long Island, were forced to reassess their position in the region and the strategies needed to secure their future. This reappraisal considered the ferocity with which the English had vanquished and eradicated their enemies, the potential impact of the East End groups’ traditional political and kinship ties to the Pequotsand particularly troubling to the peoples living on eastern Long Island— a rumor circulating among the English that they had killed an English trader. Of these three factors, the last one was of most concern, not least because the Pequot War had been precipitated (ostensibly) by the death of an Englishman allegedly at the hands of the Pequots. Late in the spring of 1636, the Massachusetts trader William Hammond Sr. sent a small vessel to Virginia to trade for corn. The modest crew that manned the ship included his son, William Hammond Jr. The ship never reached its intended destination or returned to its home port, and by June word reached Massachusetts by way of a Dutch informant that it had been wrecked off the Long Island coastline. Apparently, young Hammond had initially survived that disaster, but, instead of immediately returning home and despite the evident dangers, he attempted to salvage some of the cargo. A letter to Sir Simonds D’Ewes from Winthrop

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detailed how, after the ship floundered, young Hammond “went in a canoe . . . to looke for goods that was cast away, in the Barke that came forth of the bay, who noe sooner landed neare the wracke, but was sett upon, and immediately . . . slayne.”1 The tragedy was multiple; not only had the loss of the vessel and its cargo left the family bereft of its heir, but also, as a result of the accident, “Hammond sr’s estate lies in ruin.”2 The repercussions from young Hammond’s loss reverberated across the area. As had happened with the deaths of Captain John Stone, of Virginia, and the trader John Oldham, of Massachusetts Bay, the English settlers cast about to lay blame on one of their native neighbors. Some colonists were willing to attribute Hammond’s murder to the Pequots, who also stood accused of Oldham’s and Stone’s murders, despite much evidence to the contrary. Others, however, questioned this accusation. In a letter to John Winthrop, the prominent Connecticut trader and land speculator William Pynchon commented that he thought it “a pore shift for the Indians of Long Island to lay all the fault upon a Pequat Sachem.”3 Surely this reinforced Winthrop’s predisposition to think poorly of the East End natives, whom he had labeled “a very treacherous people.”4 All told, these speculations regarding the identity of Hammond’s killers, combined with the known political and kinship connections between the East End natives and the Pequots, raised dangerous suspicions that were daily reinforced. Only a month after the report of Hammond’s death, Captain John Endicott searched the Long Island Sound islands for the Pequot sachem Sassacus and the accused Pequot killers of Stone. After a fruitless slash-andburn operation on Block Island as he looked for the culprits, he returned emptyhanded to Pequot Harbor (now Groton, Connecticut). There, at the mouth the Connecticut River, he was met by “an Indian” who “demanded what they were & what they would have. The general tould him he came from the Gouernor of massachusett to speake with their Sachems.” The Indian replied that they would not find Sassacus there, as he had “gone to Longe Iland.”5 This informant confirmed in the minds of many English leaders the existence of not just a prior but a continuing connection between the Pequots and the East End natives, a link that proved increasingly perilous for the East End peoples during this post–Pequot War era. The East End peoples faced the very real quandary of how to break this association and reposition themselves within the region. The strategy ultimately adopted by the East End sachems was to forge a direct military and trade alliance with the English settlers and to reject their former policy of using a mainland Indian intermediary. This choice

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signaled the adoption of new tactics designed to maintain their traditional way of life, autonomy, and interests. Regardless of the eventual outcome, the East End leadership’s choice was made in the belief that its goals could be achieved.

First Steps: Old Relationships Severed, New Relationships Born The meeting between the young Montaukett sachem Wyandanch and the English commander of Saybrook Fort, Lion Gardiner, heralded the implementation of the East End leadership’s new direction. These two individuals came to exemplify the deep web of cultural attitudes and forms that was taking hold in the region. Both these men, during the course of their respective careers, emerged as the prototype for the many prominent individuals whose success would be rooted in their “liminality.”6 People like Gardiner and Wyandanch not only moved between identities and groups but often, because of their liminal qualities, successfully served as facilitators for the dissemination or diffusion of ideas between their two groups. Lion Gardiner, an Englishman by birth, had lived abroad since his youth. He started his career as part of Sir Horace Vere’s English volunteer force that fought the Spanish in the Netherlands in the religiously inspired wars that raged in the early seventeenth century. His later writings suggest that religious zealotry was not the driving force in his early career decisions, but by the date of his removal to the Connecticut frontier he was clearly an observant man who, like so many of his era, felt and saw Providence’s touch in the quotidian world.7 While common sense and the realities of life tempered his religiosity, his experience and worldview, like many others who formed the military vanguard of international Protestantism, were eventually shaped not simply by militarism or the Protestant cause but by the growing Puritan subculture. By the 1620s, a large contingent of English military volunteers was fighting in Europe for the Protestant cause, particularly in Holland. While it is well known that countless English Puritans during the early part of the seventeenth century sailed for Holland hoping to reform English Protestant worship from a Dutch base, less is known or written about those who left England to serve with the English troops who participated in the campaigns fought in the Low Countries. Some went with a general commitment to an anti-Papist mission, but many more were

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simply soldiers of fortune. However, many of these soldiers during their service became genuine converts not merely to a generic pro-Protestant impulse but specifically to Puritanism. Chaplains who ministered to the English troops in Holland were disproportionately drawn from the ranks of exiled English Puritans and did much to lay the groundwork for the relationship that was later forged between this community of itinerant Christian soldiers and the itinerant international Puritan community network.8 This network was later instrumental in the recruitment of muchneeded Christian soldiers such as Lion Gardiner for the nascent southern New England settlements.9 By 1635, Gardiner was well regarded by the Puritan authorities and other influential people in Holland. After his military service, he stayed on in Holland, where he married a Dutch woman and served for twelve years as the Prince of Orange’s engineer and master of fortifications.10 In that same year, the exiled Puritan minister Hugh Peters, along with the Puritan divine John Davenport, recruited Gardiner to supervise the building of what was intended as the bulwark of Lord Saye’s and Lord Brooks’s planned refuge for Puritan grandees, Saybrook Fort, at the mouth of the Connecticut River.11 Saybrook’s first governor was the younger son of John Winthrop, John Winthrop Jr.12 While the Bay Colony had no wish to promote the establishment of a “grandee” colony in the region, it was desperate to block expansion by the Dutch and by Plymouth colonists into Connecticut. It was also wary of the results of the recent Hooker-led migration of settlers from Massachusetts Bay to northern Connecticut. The Bay leadership made a strategic decision that a Puritan Connecticut settlement, under the daily leadership of one of their own (Winthrop Jr.), even though technically owned by the Puritan grandees Saye and Brooks, was a better alternative to the Dutch and Plymouth colonists. Consequently, the Bay Colony authorities permitted Winthrop Jr. to send “a Barke with Carpenters & other workmen to take possession of the place [Saybrook] (for the dutche intended to take it) & to rayse some buildinges.”13 This precipitated Gardiner’s arrival to the region: “In the year of our Lord, 1635, tenth of July came I Lion Gardiner and Mary from Woerdon a towne in Holland where my wife was born . . . to New England.”14 Gardiner and his Dutch bride traveled to Boston on the Batchellor, which landed at Boston harbor late in November 1635. After a brief stay in Boston, Gardiner and his family moved to Saybrook Fort, which was still under construction. His timing could not have been more unfortunate. Not only was dissension rife among the English colonists, but the Bay

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Colony stood on the brink of war with the fort’s neighbors, the Pequots. Of more immediate concern for the fort’s young commander was winter’s approach and, with it, poor prospects for the survival of the fort’s inhabitants. This fear was justly founded on the conditions Gardiner found at Saybrook. Despite his employers’ promises that he would have at his disposal three hundred men to complete the fort, build houses, and till the ground, there were only twenty-four men, women, and children in all, not nearly adequate to accomplish all these tasks before winter. To further complicate matters, Gardiner learned that the Massachusetts Bay Colony leaders were planning a full-scale armed attack against the Pequots as retribution for their alleged killing of Captain John Stone of Virginia. As soon as Gardiner discovered that Massachusetts had rejected the Pequots’ indemnity offer, he realized that war between that English colony and the Pequots was imminent and that Saybrook would become a target. Gardiner voiced his concern to George Fenwick, the only Warwick patentee resident at Saybrook, about such an event: Seeing you will take Mr. Winthrop15 to the Bay to see his wife, newly brought to bed of her first child, and though you say he shall return, yet I know if you make war with these Pequits, he will not come hither again, for I know you will keep yourselves safe, as you think, in the Bay, but myself, with these few, you will leave at the stake to be roasted, or for hunger to be starved, for Indian corn is now 12s. per bushel, and we have but three acres planted, and if they will now make war for a Virginian and expose us to the Indians, whose mercies are cruelties, they, I say, they love the Virginians better than us.16

While Gardiner’s protest was certainly based upon his concern for life and limb, the understaffed, poorly provisioned fort was clearly in no position to stave off a sustained attack by hostile forces. Gardiner bitterly noted, “they would have their lives and not their presents.”17 The most interesting aspect of Gardiner’s protest was his questioning of why he and his company should be imperiled for the sake of a “Virginian.” Gardiner’s query reveals the emergence of Atlantic American identities that were both complex and, at times, contradictory and distinct from traditional European notions of national ties. Gardiner was uniquely suited to become part of this new world; an Englishman by birth, a soldier in the wars for international Protestantism, the husband of a Dutch woman, and a former employee of the Prince of

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Orange, he quickly became the quintessential product of Atlantic America. By the time he arrived in Boston, his transnational experiences on the Continent had prepared him well to cross boundaries and to adapt easily to the new circumstances he confronted at Saybrook. Gardiner understood that in this truly new world being forged by the various Dutch, English, and native interests, community membership and commonality of interests lay more in a voluntary cleaving to collectively asserted goals than in the conventional notion of belonging based simply on one’s birthplace or ethnic origin. In Stone, Gardiner simply saw a man unconnected by such bonds and therefore a stranger who should not command the kind of sacrifice that would be called for if the English were to wage war against the Pequots. Gardiner expressed this view again shortly after a similar incident; this time the victim was a Massachusetts Bay resident, John Oldham, who was killed by Indians on Block Island, located in the Long Island Sound. Of this murder he wrote, “But I wonder, and so doth many more with me, that the Bay doth no better revenge the murdering of Mr. Oldham, an honest man of their own, seeing they were at such costs for a Virginian.”18 Gardiner again readily distinguished between what was owed to one’s “own” and to an outsider. Indeed, his words can be seen as a reflection and an articulation of evolving seventeenth-century perceptions of community and identity. Gardiner rejected the notion that Stone could claim rights simply on the basis of a common national origin, religion, or skin color. Instead, such a claim could be premised only on a voluntary assumption of the particular requisites articulated by the community. Of the two murdered Englishmen, only Oldham, from Gardiner’s perspective, was entitled to collective community action on his behalf because mutual ties and obligations, voluntarily assumed and accepted, tied Oldham to Massachusetts. In fact, the Bay’s leaders must have understood Gardiner’s juxtaposition of these two deaths and their link to the issue of identity and community membership in southern New England. By the date of the Pequot War, community and identity were already being renegotiated in the region and underlay many English settlers and colonies’ decisions, such as the Plymouth colonists’ refusal to actively aid their “Christian brethren” and fellow Englishmen from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in their war against the Pequots. Plymouth perceived its and Massachusetts’s interests as distinct and reminded Massachusetts that in the past Massachusetts had felt at liberty to pursue policies known to injure Plymouth. Why then,

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Plymouth queried, should it now risk its colonists’ lives on behalf of Massachusetts or to avenge the death of a Virginian who had offended the Plymouth colonists? The offense referred to had occurred in 1633 when Captain Stone seized a Plymouth-owned ship in Plymouth waters. The ship and its cargo were rescued and returned to their owner by a group of Dutch seamen who, Bradford related, had often stopped to trade at Plymouth, where they were “kindly entertained.” Upon learning of the theft, the Dutchmen had decided they would not “suffer our friends to be thus abused and have their goods carried away before our faces.”19 Gardiner’s questioning the propriety of the Puritan leaders’ decision to go to war with the Pequots and risk the lives of Bay colonists and of those at Saybrook for the sake of this “outsider” was, in fact, consistent with notions of identity and community that were circulating in the region. His criticism of that war was a defense not of Pequot rights but of the “legitimate” community and its members as it was becoming defined. This particular notion of community membership became more firmly entrenched in Gardiner’s mind as time passed and underlay much of the criticism of the Massachusetts Bay Colony expressed in Gardiner’s memoir, Relation of the Pequot Warres. In that memoir, Gardiner takes the Bay’s leadership to task not only for its past policies but for its treatment of former members of Massachusetts Bay’s militia and of some of the New England sachems who had pledged their loyalty to the English settlers after the Pequot War. In heartfelt, dramatic fashion, he wrote, “But our New-England twelve-penny Chronicle is stuffed with a catalogue of the names of some, as if they had deserved immortal fame; but the right New-England military worthies are left out for want of room.” As for the sachems, “Uncas of Mistick, and Waiandance, at the Great Swamp and ever since your trusty friend, is forgotten, and for our sakes persecuted to this day with fire and sword.”20 Certainly not all individuals, settler or native, voiced such expansive notions of identity and community; however, Gardiner’s approach to community and life in southern New England was truly symbolic of the type of fluidity that marked the Atlantic American experience as both native and settler communities in southern New England continuously fissioned and fused throughout the seventeenth century. Indeed, Gardiner expressed the standard for community membership that ultimately became a hallmark of Atlantic American life: voluntary acceptance of a community’s core values and agenda, as opposed to membership premised primarily on the accident of birthplace.21

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Despite these protests and heedless of the consequences to the unfinished, underpopulated Saybrook settlement, Massachusetts Bay sent a raiding party against the Pequots. As Gardiner reported, they “made that place their rendezvous or seat of war.”22 Again Gardiner protested the Bay’s actions, addressing this harsh judgment to Captain Underhill: “you come hither to raise these wasps about my ears, and then you will take wing and flee away.”23 These protests also fell on deaf ears. When Underhill proposed raiding a nearby Indian village, Gardiner proposed to accompany him, not to participate in the hostilities, but to load his and a Dutch settler’s boat with enough recently harvested Indian corn to help stave off the inevitable famine that was sure to visit once fullscale warfare further isolated the fledgling settlement from needed supplies. To Gardiner’s great relief and future preservation Underhill agreed. By 1637, however, skirmishing had evolved into full-blown warfare, forcing even the reluctant Gardiner to actively engage in the fighting. While Gardiner rejoiced at the news of the Pequots’ final defeat at Mystic, in May 1637, even this victory did not blunt his criticism of the policy that had led to a bloody and what he characterized as unnecessary war. He wanted posterity to remember and know “how and why so many honest men had their blood shed, yea, and some flayed alive, others cut in pieces, and some roasted alive.”24 Three days after the English burnt the Pequot fort at Mystic to the ground, the Montaukett sachem Wyandanch approached Lion Gardiner through the offices of Major Edward Gibbons, one of the commanders in charge of the Bay’s military forces and, like Gardiner, a veteran of the Netherlands Wars.25 Gibbons and Gardiner were in frequent contact during the Pequot War, and from the tenor of Gibbons’s correspondence, it appears that he held Gardiner in high esteem. In addition to fulfilling his military duties, Gibbons was frequently authorized to negotiate with the region’s natives.26 It is not surprising, therefore, that Gibbons served as Wyandanch’s introduction to Gardiner.27 Wyandanch described himself as the “younger brother” of the powerful Manhasset sachem Poggatacut. Whether he was or not technically his “brother,” he was in all likelihood a relation of Poggatacut and either a minor Montaukett sachem or perhaps the younger member of a dual sachemship. It appears likely that Wyandanch was sent as an observer to southern New England during the Pequot War in order to acquire sufficient knowledge of the events transpiring on the mainland. The peoples on the East End required firsthand knowledge of the changing New

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England theater if they were to control and secure, as best they could, their future. Consequently, Wyandanch’s presence in Connecticut probably served a dual purpose: to observe the war’s progress and to reposition the alliance in the event of a Pequot loss. As reported by Gardiner, Wyandanch inquired whether the English would trade with the East End natives or whether they were “angry with all the Indians.” From these words it is apparent that Wyandanch was aware that Gardiner specifically, and the English generally, could not or would not distinguish between different native communities or groups. Indeed, this exchange closely mirrors a prior exchange between Gardiner and some Indians who requested to trade with Saybrook Fort. Gardiner declined the offer, stating that “we knew not the Indians one from another, and therefore would trade with none.”28 Ironically, Gardiner’s words were strikingly similar to those offered by the Pequots in defense of their alleged killing of John Stone—that they could not distinguish one European from another.29 Wyandanch appears to reiterate what was rapidly becoming a dominant issue in southern New England—the question of how to define identities that had become murky as a result of rapidly shifting communities and reality. Thus, the question posed to Gardiner—could or would the English distinguish one indigenous group from another—had to be answered before Wyandanch was willing to proceed further. Gardiner answered that the English could and would so distinguish, but only if the East End peoples proved to his satisfaction that the Pequots and the East End natives were in fact separate groups. Gardiner emphasized this point by cautioning that if there were Pequots present on Long Island and the English traded there and were killed, “I shall think that you of Long Island have done it, and so we may kill all you for the Pequits.”30 To further reassure himself and the English settler authorities, he demanded proof that the East End native peoples had “severed” all ties with the Pequots: “kill all the Pequits that come to you, and send me their heads, then . . . you shall have trade with us.”31 Clearly, both men understood the prevailing regional divisions and alliances. Wyandanch’s answer also provides clues as to the political makeup of the East End, as well as to Wyandanch’s place within the sachemship. He told Gardiner that, while he lacked the authority to consent to Gardiner’s terms, he promised to return to Long Island swiftly and place the request before the sachem Poggatacut, his elder “brother.” However, before taking leave of Gardiner, Wyandanch gave Gardiner the following assurance:

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“if we may have peace and trade with you, we will give you tribute, as we did the Pequits.” Wyandanch’s response indicates that he held a “junior” position within the East End sachemship and that the distinct native groups there had close political and kinship connections. His words also suggest that the political organization of the East End natives was similar to that found among the mainland southern New England Indians. Finally, Wyandanch’s departing assurance also is evidence that the East End leadership had sent him not only to observe the events transpiring on the mainland but also to consider and, if circumstances warranted, advise on the need for a realignment of their interests. Wyandanch must have secured Poggatacut’s and the sachemship’s subsequent consent to Gardiner’s terms, because Gardiner recorded that Wyandanch “went away and . . . sent me five heads . . . for which I paid them that brought them.”32 With this proffer accepted, the East End natives charted an irrevocable course into the unfolding Atlantic world. Of interest, also, is why Wyandanch approached Gardiner and not some of the other Massachusetts Bay officials who were present in the area. Saybrook Fort was at the center of much of the military and diplomatic activity that occurred during the war, and numerous indigenous groups had approached Gardiner during that time. Consequently, Wyandanch may have perceived the fort’s commander as a focal point for the coming changes. Additionally, Saybrook Fort was located in the heart of Pequot territory, close to the Pequot stronghold at Mystic. As allies and kinsmen of the Pequots, this location may have indicated to Wyandanch’s community that Saybrook and its commander would become the successors in interest to that area if the Pequots were defeated. As a keen observer, Wyandanch was, at the very least, aware of the role Saybrook had played during the recent conflict. It stands to reason that Gardiner, while perhaps not the most powerful “English sachem,” was at a minimum empowered to observe, receive emissaries, relay messages, and perhaps agree to trade privileges. Since Wyandanch’s introduction to Gardiner came through the high-profile Captain Gibbons, this must have further reassured Wyandanch that this man was the appropriate contact. The meeting not only had serious consequences for the English settlers and indigenous communities on eastern Long Island but also forever altered the individual fortunes of these two men. Because of their experiences, each man gained special insight into and an understanding of cultures and agendas not his own, enabling him to serve as a bridge between the two communities. Each became preeminent in his respective domain

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but was also dependent on the other to sustain that position. This chance meeting provided each man with his most enduring and important relationship and came to serve as a metaphor for the new emerging Atlantic American reality in the post–Pequot War era.

A Disengagement Strategy The 1637 encounter between Gardiner and Wyandanch at Saybrook did not definitively settle the East End native peoples’ fate. Between the fall of Mystic and the establishment of permanent English settlements on the East End, these peoples undertook a series of initiatives to reposition themselves. This goal, however, was not easily accomplished, and a number of obstacles had to be overcome. After Mystic, the hunt for the Pequot sachem Sassacus and his remaining followers commenced in earnest. The English leadership included some who condemned the East End natives as Pequot kinsmen and former allies. These leaders believed, too, that Sassacus had fled to Long Island where his kinsmen had offered him sanctuary.33 Only a few weeks after Mystic’s destruction, Captain Daniel Patrick34 stated that not only did he believe Sassacus had taken refuge on Long Island but also that a significant population of “40 or 50 Pequots remain at Long Island.” This allegation prompted Patrick, on July 6, “at first wind,” to take an armed company to Long Island in search of Sassacus and his men.35 Here was the type of armed invasion feared by the East End communities and that they hoped Wyandanch’s proffer to Gardiner would prevent. Patrick was correct to suspect that a substantial number of Pequots had fled to Long Island but mistaken in his belief that Sassacus was among these refugees. Soon after the war ended, the surviving Pequots, including Sassacus, scattered across the region, fleeing the English militia. Many were able to reunite with their sachem around July 1 in order to discuss their individual and collective futures. Should they regroup and fight the Narragansetts or seek refuge with other native communities? In the end, most chose the latter. Sassacus, along with eighty of his staunchest supporters, chose to go to the Mohawks (who ultimately executed him), while others, ironically, chose refuge among the Narragansetts or other mainland and Long Island Sound native groups. Given the close relationship between the Pequots and the East End, the largest single group of Pequots removed to Long Island.36

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Patrick was not the only person interested in pursing the Pequot refugees to Long Island. The Narragansetts believed that the victory over the Pequots had entitled them to a share in the lands, tribute, and people that came with that victory. A short time after the war’s end, the Narragansetts began to suspect that Massachusetts and settlers in Connecticut had no intention of sharing the spoils with them. Repeated Narragansett requests to Massachusetts to pursue the Pequots to Long Island were rejected. Frustrated, they turned to the liminal English figure in their midst, Roger Williams. The Narragansetts confided to Williams their suspicions regarding the English colonists’ intentions and their belief that they were entitled to share in the winnings. They beseeched Williams to act as their intermediary on this matter with the leaders of the Connecticut settlements and of Massachusetts Bay.37 On August 20, Williams informed Winthrop that he would “pressse them to patience till Mr. Governours mind be known . . . and Miantunnomu . . . doth all he can to retreine them or els long since they had bene there.”38 Williams did not betray the Narragansetts’ confidence. He continued to work for the Narragansetts, as he had done in the past, to create an environment that would promote the Narragansetts’ interests. That meant reminding the leadership in the Bay of the close connection between the Pequots and the East End native peoples. In a letter to Governor Vane only days before the battle at Mystic, Williams told the governor that the Pequots were short on provisions and had, in accordance with their usual practice gone “downe to the Sea Side and 2 islands [one was Long Island] . . . especially to take sturgeon . . . and allso to make new fields of Corne in case the English should destroy their fields at home.”39 Only days after the fall of Mystic, Williams suggested that Sassacus had gone to hide on Long Island.40 Even as some groups and interests in the region were endeavoring to turn the English colonies against the East End communities, the native leadership was maneuvering to avoid what would have been a disastrous military confrontation between themselves and the English settlers. To this end, East End leaders undertook several initiatives. An East End squa sachem who proffered tribute and loyalty to the English undertook one such initiative.41 It was this action that Israel Stoughton, an original settler of Dorchester, Massachusetts, cited as evidence of the East End communities’ honorable intentions and also of the Narragansetts’ treachery. Stoughton became an outspoken champion of the East End native peoples.42 Stoughton urged the English settler leadership to view the East End communities as victims of stronger native groups that would, if offered

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English protection, turn their backs on the Pequots and become true friends to the English. As proof of this, he related that the Long Island squa sachem who “hath 200 men . . . desires peace with us, declaring that neither shee nor hers have ever shed any English blood: and we find it true by all the informations from the pequids, from the Mohiggens, from narragansetts, and from myantonomio himself . . . that she and hers would submitt to the English, and do no harme to the English hereafter, and the English would not hurt her.”43 As a symbol of her sincerity, she sent Miantonimi and Canonicus each ten fathom of wampum, the English thirty fathom, plus an additional ten fathom specifically “to make way for a treaty of peace.” She also “promised her utmost aid to compass [find] Sasacous now resident on Long Island.”44 Yet, Stoughton claimed, another obstacle stood in the way of her fealty to the English. It came, he alleged, in the guise of the Narragansetts’ great sachems, who had attempted to steal tribute meant for the English and transform this squa sachem and her people into Narragansett tributaries in order to “augment their [the Narragansetts’] owne Kingdome.”45 Stoughton asserted that Miantonimi “first sought to Compass her goods and subjects to himself: for Myantonimo takes all for himself, and tells her lett him alone for the English.”46 Miantonimi, Stoughton asserted, desired “to prejudice us against her etc. that we might fall foule with her.”47 The attempt to subvert the squa sachem’s loyalty from the English was confirmation of Stoughton’s longheld suspicion that the Narragansetts generally and Miantonimi in particular, harbored ambitions to supplant the Pequots’ former position in the region. Enveloped in Stoughton’s interpretation of these events was also his firm conviction that the squa sachem’s offer was a signal from God, who, “inclyning her heart,” sent her “directly to the English” to provide the evidence needed to thwart the Narragansett sachem’s designs. In Stoughton’s mind, Miantonimi’s dealings with the squa sachem was a warning to the English that this Narragansett sachem intended to raise himself and his group above the English settlers. The English, Stoughton cautioned, ignored this warning at their peril. He urged his fellow settlers to see the Long Island squa sachem’s offer as “a great providence of God for good toward us” that would bring “in other Indians.”48 Stoughton’s accusations against the Narragansetts and his staunch defense of the East End peoples helped divert some of the growing negative English settler opinions and recast the East End native communities in the role of victim. Our unnamed squa sachem worked quickly to reposition her people. In addition to seeking an English settler ally, she also sought to provide

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herself with additional protection from the “great sachems” Miantonimi and Canonicus and married an (unnamed) Narragansett sachem. This action acknowledged traditional ties to the Narragansetts while simultaneously sending the great sachems the message that she would not fall under their immediate orbit. It was her unnamed sachem and fiancé who served as her intermediary with Stoughton and who informed him of the attempted theft of the tribute by Miantonimi. Miantonimi’s response to this proposed marriage also provides some insight into intra-Narragansett relations and the institution of the sachemship. Neither Miantonimi nor Canonicus saw this marriage as an act of submission to the Narragansetts as a whole; rather, they perceived it as a threat to their dominant status within the Narragansett sachemship and recognized it for what it was—a strategy to undercut their aspirations on Long Island. Stoughton remarked that the “great Sachems of Narra:” were not pleased, “for they affect not others greatness.”49 Despite this setback, Miantonimi continued to press his “rights” to assume the mantle of “protector” or “intermediary” for the East End communities. In August 1637, he told Roger Williams that he accepted a “small present” from four women on the East End who “were no Pequts, but of that islaes [island]” who wished to place themselves under his protection.50 Not all Pequots successfully escaped the unabated wrath of the English. Thirteen days after their final council with Sassacus, approximately 280 Pequots-men, women, and children—took refuge in a swamp not far from present-day Guilford, Connecticut. First to converge on them were Roger Ludlow, an assistant in the Massachusetts Bay Company, along with Captains Mason and Patrick, who fired without mercy on the hapless Pequots. The commotion brought even more English soldiers, along with their native allies, to the area. They surrounded the swamp and demanded the Pequots’ surrender. The group’s sachem refused and resolutely answered that “they would sell their lives there.”51 The standoff continued, and sporadic shooting into the swamp was heard throughout that night. Only at daybreak did the Pequots “come forth, now some and then some, till about two hundred women and children were come out.” The male children were sold into slavery to the Puritan settlement on Providence Island, while the women and children were disposed of among the Connecticut and Massachusetts settlers.52 Bradford succinctly summarized the Pequots’ collective fate: “There have been now slain and taken in all, about seven hundred. The rest are dispersed.”53

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Only days prior to that final siege, two sachems from Long Island “came to Mr. Stoughton and tendered themselves to be tributaries under our protection.”54 It is perhaps not surprising that they sought out Stoughton, since he was the same English captain who had taken up the East End squa sachem’s cause against the Narragansett sachems Miantonimi and Canonicus. One of these was the same sachem who had accompanied Captain Richard Davenport to Connecticut and from there to the site of the swamp siege. Davenport reported to Hugh Peters that, during their search for Sassacus, he and his crew had put in at Long Island “to espy our enemy Sasacoos,” who had once again eluded his English pursuers. Peters’s presence on Long Island, however, provided the East End natives another opportunity to directly approach the English. Peters reported that a “Sachem came aboard us who tould us hee was gone thence to Quenepiacke and that he himselfe would goe to bee our guide to find him out: which motion wee accpeted . . . he allso promising his willingness that as Long Island had payd tribute to Sasacas hee would procure it to us.”55 While this unnamed Long Island sachem did not find Sassacus any more than Wyandanch or the squa sachem had, he too proved, to the satisfaction of the English, his willingness to forsake ancient loyalties to the Pequots. Peters, accompanied by the Long Island sachem and three other natives from the East End, arrived at Quinnepack (modern-day New Haven) on the “Lords day.” Because it was Sunday, Peters and the English crew remained on board while the four Long Islanders went ashore and “captured some Pequots 2 of whom they killed, one being a sachem.”56 These Long Islanders remained with Davenport and, like Wyandanch, participated in the swamp fight.57 This episode provided the East End leadership with yet another opportunity to demonstrate their distinctiveness from the Pequots and to further cement their nascent alliance with the English mainland colonies. A few weeks after the swamp fight, more tribute arrived from Long Island in the form of “Pequods’ heads and hands from Long Island and other places, and [blank] sachems of Long Island came voluntarily, and brought a tribute to us of twenty fathom of wampom.”58 It is unclear whether these “heads and hands” truly came from the Pequots who had sought refuge with their East End kinsmen shortly before the swamp fight, but this is a distinct possibility, since the East End groups were desperately trying to prove to the English that they had severed all ties to the Pequots.59 Later, the Manhasset sachem Poggatacut (the same sachem

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Wyandanch had referred to as their “great sachem” and his “elder brother”) sent Winthrop sixty fathom of wampum by Uncas, the Mohegan sachem. As Miantonimi had with the Long Island squa sachem’s offering, Uncas diverted that wampum to his own use.60 After these unsatisfactory experiences with mainland sachems, the East End natives made no further attempts to use mainland Ninnimissinuok groups or sachems as their intermediaries with the English or as protectors. By August 23, the same Captain Stoughton who had evinced his sympathy for the East End natives departed for Connecticut, where “the sachems of Long Island doe now wayte for him, with their tribute, at the river mouth.”61

Wyandanch’s Domain—Gardiner’s Island The defeat of the Pequots had not resulted in total English hegemony, and three sachems—Uncas, of the Mohegans, Miantonimi, of the Narragansetts, and Ninigret, of the Niantics-all emerged as contenders for the loyalties of the former Pequot clients. These three leaders were ready and poised to assume the mantle of intermediary between the various Ninnimissinuok communities and the English settlements. A year after the fall of Mystic, the eastern Niantics, under the leadership of Ninigret, made the first of several military attempts by a mainland native group to bring the East End communities under their direct influence.62 Sometime in June 1638, Ninigret, accompanied by some eighty men, crossed the Long Island Sound to the East End. He did not personally go to Montauk to greet the young Montaukett sachem Wyandanch, who had by that time emerged as one of the most powerful leaders in the area, but instead sent a smaller delegation. The delegation that met with Wyandanch proposed that the East End communities accept Ninigret and the Niantics as their protectors, instead of the English.63 Wyandanch realized that Ninigret would not accept no for an answer and fled. Ninigret’s men quickly captured Wyandanch. Once in Ninigret’s custody, the sachem attempted to convince his younger counterpart that the East End’s interests were best served by the proposed arrangement. Ninigret asserted that the English “were liars” and could not be counted on to fulfill the traditional obligations of protection and mediation toward a tributary and that they were motivated solely by Montaukett wampum. He cautioned that once the English had obtained Montaukett wampum and allegiance, they would “speak much but do little.”64 Ninigret, who had had closer, more pro-

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longed direct contact with the English, understood that none of the extant English communities would assume the type of obligations and duties to a client group that were traditionally assumed between Ninnimissinuok groups.65 Despite these arguments and a subsequent public “stripping” of Wyandanch’s clothes and wampum, Wyandanch remained unmoved. As a former Pequot tributary and a keen observer of the unfolding events on the mainland, Wyandanch may have viewed Ninigret’s speech as primarily self-serving. This was a reasonable assumption, since relationships among the seventeenth-century Ninnimissinuok sachems were marked by intense and constant rivalries, resulting in a constant shifting of alliances and a fissioning of communities.66 Not content with ascendancy over their own domains, these regional sachems often had ambitions that led to frequent realignments in their relations with neighboring communities and to leadership changes. Certainly, the growing presence of European settlements had fueled this trend, and the Pequot War was simply the most recent and intense example of this.67 Wyandanch, therefore, may have viewed Ninigret’s “the English are liars” speech as simply a calculated ploy to assert authority over the East End native groups. Another consideration may have been Wyandanch’s analysis of the region’s direction and future. After all, if the Pequots, who at their zenith were much more powerful than the Niantics at the time of their proposal, had been unable to sustain their position in the face of English opposition, what was the likelihood that the Niantics would be able to deliver promised protection? It was not unreasonable to calculate that accepting Ninigret’s offer would ultimately bring the East End native peoples into conflict with the English, leading to the type of devastating warfare Wyandanch had recently witnessed on the mainland. Furthermore, if he alienated the English, he risked the possibility that the accusations against the East End communities regarding Hammond Jr.’s death might resurface. Wyandanch’s assumptions and strategy appears consistent with that of the other East End sachems, who had all, since the fall of the Pequots, attempted to avoid conflict with the English mainland settlers. Finally, it is possible that Wyandanch, a product of the seventeenthcentury institution of the sachemship, harbored his own ambitions. Having emerged from the Pequots’ shadow, Wyandanch may have had no desire to be resubmerged by the Niantics. Such ambitions were neither out of line with seventeenth-century Ninnimissinuok political ideology nor a betrayal of the larger community, since Ninnimissinuok ideology tied the

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welfare of the sachem to that of his followers. Wyandanch, who had firsthand knowledge of the irrevocable changes that had taken place on the mainland, may have calculated that neither his nor his people’s goals could be realized by simply resubmitting to an Indian group. Instead, he appears to have concluded that the way might lie in taking his chances with one of the newcomer groups that, like it or not, had to be dealt with. Once released, Wyandanch immediately left for Connecticut, where he, as if to disprove Ninigret’s recent words, claimed the traditional rights due a tributary from the Connecticut settlers. In his appeal for protection, he pointedly asked the Connecticut leader, Roger Ludlow, and the military commander, John Mason, “How can I pay tribute to the English if they allow Ninigret to come and steal it from me at will?”68 Ludlow and Mason understood both the logic of the appeal and the long-term detrimental consequences for the English; more important for nearby Connecticut, should the Montauketts break their new alliance, the English faced the potential emergence of a large, united Indian “confederacy” flanked on both the southern and northern shores of the Long Island Sound. With this in mind, Connecticut dispatched Mason, along with a small but well-armed military detachment, to confront Ninigret and demand restitution of Wyandanch’s wampum, as well as an acknowledgment of the Connecticut-Montaukett alliance. Fearing additional military retaliation, Ninigret capitulated.69 A year after the Ninigret incident, perhaps encouraged by Ludlow’s and Mason’s response to the invasion and fearing renewed attacks from other mainland native communities, Wyandanch sought to reinforce his relationship with the English. He settled on the young commander of Saybrook Fort with whom he had recently become acquainted.70 In May 1639, Wyandanch arranged for Gardiner to purchase a small island in Peconic Bay known as Manchonake, “the place where they all died,” so called because the original inhabitants had all died in an epidemic.71 While historians of the region agree that it was probably Wyandanch who approached Gardiner regarding the island’s purchase, it was not Wyandanch who signed the deed but the great sachem Poggatacut, as well as Poggatacut’s wife, Aswaw.72 As before, Wyandanch acted neither unilaterally nor as a mere agent for the English. In all likelihood, Wyandanch was able to persuade a majority of the local East End sachems, many of whom at the end of the Pequot War had turned to the English with offers of tribute and friendship, to place Gardiner on that small island off their coastline. The offer to Gardiner was not without precedent. The Pequots’

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use of East End lands had served as a symbol of the special relationship between the Pequots and the East End peoples, while the Narragansetts had sought to implement such an arrangement a few years prior, first with John Oldham and later with Roger Williams.73 The proposal to place Gardiner on this island was part of a traditional Ninnimissinuok strategy to strengthen a tributary relationship. Wyandanch’s role in the transition indicates that his prestige and influence on the East End had grown. The special cultural knowledge Wyandanch had gained during his repeated diplomatic missions to the mainland and the firsthand knowledge he had obtained most likely persuaded the elder sachems, as well as the ahtaskoaogs, to heed Wyandanch’s counsel regarding external relations and the strategic need for the proposed arrangement with Gardiner. The sachemship’s original confidence in Wyandanch was validated by the manner in which the young sachem had carried out his mission to the mainland during the Pequot War and by his subsequent attempts to protect the community. Wyandanch had established long-distance trade relations with the English, helped avert a costly and disastrous military encounter with the English settlers, and disseminated the type of special knowledge the East End communities required to navigate the tremendous changes overtaking the region. Wyandanch’s newfound expertise, coupled with his seeming effectiveness, validated the sachemship’s initial and continuing confidence in his advice and judgment.74 Tellingly, the native signature to the deed that transferred Manchonake Island to Gardiner was Poggatacut’s and not Wyandanch’s, despite the fact this island lay closest to the Montauketts’ territory. This supports the existence on the East End of both a loose hierarchy among these sachems and an extensive community and kinship network. Poggatacut’s signature was also consistent with the sachem’s role within the sachemship and the broader community. It indicates that the East End sachems did, at times, seek the counsel and consent of other local Indian polities, particularly when an undertaking, such as the transference of a nearby island, would have ramifications far beyond a single community.75 Perhaps a final consideration for extending the offer to Gardiner was rooted in awareness of the tremendous demographic changes that had overtaken the southern New England Indians during the seventeenth century. It was impossible to ignore the reality that the Ninnimissinuok were dying at unprecedented rates, while the English were rapidly multiplying and expanding across the region. European-introduced pathogens

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ravaged the indigenous peoples in the Bay and Plymouth areas between 1616 and 1619 and the Connecticut River area in 1633; by 1638, they had already touched the East End. By 1640, the region’s English population had swelled to 18,500 souls, while the native population, which stood at an estimated pre-epidemic ninety thousand, was less than nine thousand by midcentury.76 This rapid and devastating loss of population did not go unobserved by the native people, and many explored ways to stave off these sicknesses. The Narragansett powwows were reported to have performed ceremonies at which the natives burned enormous quantities of European trade goods. The hope was that, since these epidemics had appeared at the same time as the settlers who brought these goods, their destruction would eradicate the new diseases.77 Similarly, Wyandanch and his fellow sachems and squa sachems may have perceived Manchonake Island as no longer fit for Indian inhabitation for reasons both spiritual and physical. That island’s population had been decimated by a “sickness” that, by 1639, many native peoples linked to the settlers. Consequently, the East End sachems may have regarded this island as physically and spiritually polluted and no longer fit for native habitation. The placement of an Englishman on that tainted spit of land may have been a tactic to appease or neutralize the malicious forces brought by the English.78 Such an attempt by Wyandanch and Poggatacut to mediate this seeming physical and spiritual impasse that was plaguing their communities was well within a sachem’s mandate.79 Positioning Gardiner on Manchonake instead of on Long Island itself also reflected the sachems’ desire to secure a closer English presence than was provided by the current one on Connecticut, while still maintaining a comfortable distance between the two communities. Despite the quick response of the Connecticut leaders to the Ninigret crisis on the East End, which signaled Connecticut’s willingness to play the role of protector, the East End sachems’ invitation to Gardiner was probably as much a response to a fear of future attacks by mainland native forces as it was an attempt to control and shape the impending East End-English relationship.80 The choice of Gardiner, a military man not highly placed within the English colonial hierarchy but one who was particularly visible, favors this interpretation. It was perhaps not a coincidence that Wyandanch’s choice fell on an Englishman seemingly of a status equivalent to his own. He chose a settler somewhat outside the Puritan hierarchy, yet one who, like Wyandanch, had served his people in both a military and a diplomatic capacity.

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Judging from the relationship that developed between Wyandanch and Gardiner, it seems likely that Wyandanch selected Gardiner because he suspected Gardiner would become both a mediator and an advocate for the East End peoples. This hope rested, in part, on the knowledge that, once Gardiner and his young family were ensconced on that island, they would be isolated from the other English settlements. A man placed on his own island, remote from other English settlements, might well be motivated to enter into the rhythms and patterns of local life and might be willing to serve as a bridge between his close native neighbors and the diverse communities that were multiplying across southern New England.81 Why did Lion Gardiner consider and accept this offer, and what was the reaction of the mainland settlers to the transaction? Like many of the English veterans of the war in Holland who had been recruited to serve Massachusetts’s military needs, Gardiner did not fare well after the Pequot War within the orthodox political establishment. Gardiner’s experience at Saybrook was a severe disappointment. The settlement was constantly understaffed, poorly provisioned, and exposed to much of the military action during the Pequot War, and Gardiner chose not to remain in Connecticut after his four-year contract to command Saybrook expired in 1639. Gardiner not only expressed disappointment about his treatment at Saybrook during his four-year tenure but openly complained about the general lack of prospects for himself in New England.82 He perceived his sojourn at Saybrook as evidence of the Bay Colony’s abject disregard for his interests and believed that the Bay officials did not hold him in high esteem. In fact, there were some in the Bay who openly questioned Gardiner’s judgment during the Pequot War, alleging that he “discourageth common men by extolling the valor of your adversaries.”83 Perhaps the comments directed at Gardiner were simply part of a general underlying tension between those settlers such as Gardiner who had been recruited for their military expertise and the civilian authorities.84 Yet, Gardiner’s critics appear to have detected Gardiner’s tendency to openly straddle boundaries. They picked up on that liminal quality that began to characterize both indigenous and transplanted populations during much of the seventeenth century and that many in the Bay, such as Winthrop, recognized but were ambivalent about. Gardiner himself expressed the opinion that there was a prevailing bias against (military) men of his “class,” many of whom were ultimately driven from Massachusetts or New England altogether by the prevailing powers. Even a quarter of a century after these events transpired and his own success and prominence

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on the East End was secured, Gardiner wrote bitterly of the banishment of his class, which he viewed as instrumental in the early success of the English settlers.85 Not only did Gardiner deplore the treatment of New England’s class of “military worthies,” but also, as some in Massachusetts noted, he showed a propensity to minimize traditional measures such as birth, class, religion, and nationality in determining loyalty and identity. It was not that Gardiner never considered these traditional factors but that their hold over his judgment was modified by other considerations. He particularly considered and appreciated the voluntary obligations individuals assumed that bound them together. In his memoir, Gardiner admonished the colonial authorities in Connecticut and Massachusetts for their treatment of certain sachems, seeing it as a betrayal of a group that because of its actions was deeply connected to the settlers and that Gardiner believed should be treated with loyalty by the settlers.86 He also clung tenaciously to the idea that Captain Stone had been a “stranger” unworthy of being defended by the New England settler community. At the same time, he included as members of English settler communities those of Dutch descent who lived voluntarily under English authority. He referred to these “loyal” Dutch settlers as “our Dutch Englishmen” and may have been one of the first to accept the possibility of the hyphenated identity that has become so prevalent in the United States.87 He passed this perspective on to his descendants, such as John Gardiner, his grandson and the third proprietor of Gardiner’s Island. The Montaukett George Pharaoh remembered that “old Mr. John talked Indian, came to their Wigwams to eat fresh fish and liked the young squaws of the old Sachem breed.”88 This view of identity was compatible with certain attitudes regarding identity and community membership that were held by many northeastern Indian societies, the Puritan practice of voluntarily gathered churches, and the general community fluidity that characterized all groups in the southern New England region at this time. The southern New England Ninnimissinuok framed much of its sense of community belonging in terms of volunteerism, such as with the institution of the sachemship, which was held together not only by hereditary considerations but by voluntary and reciprocal duties. As noted by many observers, fluidity characterized seventeenth-century Ninnimissinuok polities, and native peoples easily changed their “political affiliation and identity.”89 Wyandanch’s exploration into the possibility of East End realignment at the end of the Pequot War, for example, also reflected the idea that commu-

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nity membership was anchored in continued displays of commitment. Puritanism also displayed these touches of volunteerism and contributed to the linking of this practice with identity and community membership in Atlantic America. Once settled into their new surroundings, the New England Puritans favored the notion that a full commitment to a congregation could only be voluntarily entered into between a consenting adult and a congregation.90 This was a concept with roots in the Puritan diaspora in Holland, where Puritans, such as the English divine Hugh Peters, who fled to Holland late in 1627, began to implement practices unknown in England. Within two years of his arrival in Holland, Peters became the minister of an English congregation in Rotterdam that was sponsored by the English Society of Merchant Adventurers resident in that city. By 1633, Peters had reorganized this congregation along what became known as Congregational principles. He implemented these changes through a covenant, and only those who voluntarily subscribed to this covenant could take communion. These types of practices continued to evolve in southern New England, and Puritanism took on a character and identity distinct from that to which it had clung in England, where it had steadfastly maintained its connection to the Church of England.91 Added to spiritual volunteerism, the constant fissioning of settler communities was rooted not only in the desire for more land or opportunities but in community civic and ecclesiastical disagreements. These dissenters did not feel bound to remain within the community but, true to the voluntary spirit pervading the region, felt free to break away, as did their native neighbors. Unhappy or discontent settlers took to “voting with their feet.”92 In July 1636, Gardiner addressed this unhappy note to Saybrook’s absentee governor, John Winthrop Jr.: “we desire to lete you understand what necesaries we desire to have as we are servants to you first we have lived for a great while without meanes of grace and salvation . . . subsisting on pease porridge.”93 His feelings of abandonment by his employers only increased over time. In late fall, Gardiner again expressed such sentiments: “It seemes that wee have neather masters nor owners, but are left like soe many servants whose masters are willinge to be quitt of them.”94 The spring of 1637 brought yet another unhappy note to Winthrop Jr. It informed the Connecticut governor that, while the Saybrook residents had managed to survive the winter, Gardiner feared for their future security as “all the Indians have their eyes fixed upon us,” and he noted that the settlers slept with their clothes on since an attack could come at any time.95

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When Gardiner’s Saybrook contract expired in 1639, he resigned his command at Saybrook Fort. His resignation letter reflected the cultural contradictions prevalent in the region; he voiced simultaneously his deep disappointment with unmet expectations rooted in traditions of English paternalism and his willingness to participate in the growing trend in Atlantic America of separating from a community that had ceased to serve one’s interests. Gardiner declared that, since he had been provided for neither by his former employers nor by the colonial leaders for whom he so recently had almost sacrificed his life, he was “forced to shift as the Lord may direct.”96 It was shortly after he renounced his post that Gardiner accepted Poggatacut’s offer to remove to Manchonake Island. For the English colonial leaders, Gardiner’s purchase and settlement of that island had a different significance. From their perspective, Gardiner, along with his family and the few European servants who accompanied them, formed the vanguard for future legitimate English settlement on eastern Long Island. He would, after all, be the first Englishman to people and plant that region. In actuality, Gardiner first obtained the native deed (as happened with so many settlement undertakings) and almost immediately thereafter removed with his family to the island, where he built a house, planted fields, and only a year later obtained an English title. Significantly, neither the English leaders of the established mainland communities objected to his claim, nor did the titular English owner, Lord Stirling. In fact, that individual, Lord Stirling, granted him a deed with an alacrity that, as will be discussed, served the immediate needs of all parties.

Boundary Crossing on the East End Of critical importance to the reshaping of the region were the “boundary crossers” or liminal figures who appeared throughout Atlantic America in the seventeenth century. The two most prominent of these on the East End were Gardiner and Wyandanch. During this era, men like Gardiner and Wyandanch were most visible in facilitating the land transactions critical to the creation of Atlantic American communities. But these two were not the only individuals, native or settler, who functioned in this liminal sphere. Among the Shinnecocks, the ahtaskoaog Cockenoe-de-Long Island who, like Gardiner, was present on the mainland during the Pequot War, spoke and read English and was actively engaged in land transactions throughout Long Island for more than forty years after the Pequot

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War.97 Among the English settlers, Thomas James, East Hampton’s first minister, also preached the gospel among the East End native communities and wielded great economic and political authority, in large part because of his perceived ability to mediate between the settler and the native communities. As a result, he not only enriched himself but was instrumental in securing the interests of the community he represented. Another boundary crosser was Arthur Howell, who spoke the local native language and was married to Gardiner’s daughter. The Howell family was one of the first to form a private whaling company. Key to its success in the competitive world of seventeenth-century whaling was its ability to employ native whalers; the Howell whaling enterprise succeeded in part because Arthur’s ability to speak the native language helped secure the needed Indian whalers.98 Howell also put his talent to use in the service of East End townships’ interests, serving as a translator and facilitator between native and English communities.99 These individuals, and others like them, were frequently instrumental in bringing about the repositioning of interests in the seventeenth-century arena of southern New England and the Atlantic world. Contemporary historians have treated native boundary crossers very differently from their settler counterparts. Settlers such as the Gardiners and Howells are not chastised for any resulting personal gain but are seen as having well served their communities’ interests, even while benefiting themselves. In contrast, their native counterparts, such as Wyandanch and Cockenoe, are often condemned as disloyal or portrayed as “English puppets.”100 Yet, these two sets of boundary crossers essentially performed the same function for their respective communities—they all facilitated the dissemination of goods and ideas and helped facilitate the general repositioning of communities in Atlantic America. Any apparent personal gain or rise in status of these individuals was tolerated and even perceived as deserved. These individuals’ abilities and activities were valued because they not only enhanced the individual’s standing in the community but also secured benefits that inured to the community at large. For example, in 1652, Winthrop Jr. received from Gardiner seeds for an edible gourd that Gardiner had received from the Mohawks. Gardiner recommended this gourd as being as “good as weat frowar to thikin milk [wheat flour to thicken milk], and swet [sweet] as sugar, and bakid thay [are] most exelent, having no shell. You may keep them as long as anie pumkins.”101 Over time Gardiner’s liminality elevated his status not only on the East End but across the entire region.

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Like Gardiner, Wyandanch emerged during this time as a “great sachem,” or keetasontimoog, whose authority transcended the bounds of his immediate community because he was a hereditary sachem whose specialized knowledge had elevated him to that position. The specific provisions that appear in the many treaties safeguarding native peoples’ land, hunting, fishing, and usufruct102 attest to his success. Indeed, the role of all boundary crossers, natives and settlers, closely paralleled the traditional role of the sachem, whose success elevated both his status and his community’s simultaneously and who should be viewed through the prism of Ninnimissinuok values rather than through the lens of the European political tradition, in which the actions of the entrenched political hierarchy were almost exclusively self-serving. However, if we look at these boundary crossers and their actions from a native perspective, they take on an entirely different meaning. The end of the Pequot War overturned longstanding alliances and the prevailing balance of power in the region. The East End native leaders quickly mobilized to confront and find a space for themselves within the emerging Atlantic American world during the months that followed. Several matters had to be resolved before this could be accomplished. First and foremost, they had to decisively cut their former ties to the Pequots. The presence of East End leaders on the mainland, at the side of English settlers, in the months after the war pursuing the defeated Pequots avidly clearly marks their break with the Pequots. Additionally, the East End sachemship understood that the killing of English settlers had provided, and would in the future provide, the English settler authorities with an excuse to justify genocidal warfare against the accused native community. The death of the young Massachusetts trader Hammond Jr. off the Long island coastline placed the East End native communities in serious jeopardy of falling victim to the same fate as their Pequot kinsmen. Thus, these native communities also sought to convince key English military men, such as Israel Stoughton, that they were not responsible for Hammond Jr.’s death and that they could become English allies if they were liberated from the “chains” that had formerly bound them to the Pequots. The East End leaders Stoughton came into contact with must have been very convincing, since he not only emerged as these people’s avowed advocate but was persuaded that he saw Providence’s touch in the proposed alliance.103 It is clear from the numerous sightings of East End individuals on the mainland in the month following the Pequot War, and

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the many offers of tribute that were placed in the hands of English collectors, that the East End communities (whether formally or informally) had reached a consensus to pursue a direct relationship with the English settlers. Their former policy of using a native intermediary to mediate between themselves and the newcomers was dead. Wyandanch and other sachems hoped that their new policy would result not simply in the establishment of a direct relationship with the mainland English settlers but also in some form of tributary/trade/protectorate relationship. From the reaction of the East End peoples, particularly to the Ninigret threat, it appears that they envisioned that this relationship would follow a traditional pattern, and for a brief period of time it seemed as if their new policy might reap the benefits sought. Gardiner and his island, along with Wyandanch, became liminal symbols of the new realities emerging on the East End and throughout the entire southern New England region. That relationship, cemented by a land transaction, drew the East End native communities, for the first time, into direct and sustained contact with the new Atlantic American communities that were emerging on the southern New England mainland. The English authorities certainly interpreted Poggatacut’s permitting Gardiner to people and plant Manchonake Island as a kind of political submission. For native communities, however, Gardiner’s close physical presence not only betokened a formal tributary relationship with the English but also replicated the type of links that they had shared with the Pequots and that served as a symbol of their new relationship with the English settlers in Connecticut. Gardiner’s willingness to remove to the island conveyed several important messages to the East End native peoples. First, it signaled that the English had either relinquished or were willing to overlook their suspicions about whatever role the East End peoples had played in young Hammond’s death. Second, it suggested that the English were willing to entrust the safety of an apparently valued member of their community into the care of the natives and that they accepted the alliance, however informal, that such an undertaking created. Collectively, these signals indicated that the English were willing to enter into a close and binding association with the native communities on terms that very closely mirrored the traditional client-style relationship on which their communities were grounded.

John Speed Map of New England and New York, 1676. London, England. Courtesy of the East Hampton Library.

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part ii

Engagements for Land and Community The Struggle Moves to Long Island’s East End

4 English Settlers Cross the Sound

The English settlements on eastern Long Island were the result of the confluence of interests continually in flux throughout the region. The most common conduit for these interests was land. This was true for all the region’s players. The local English and Dutch colonial entities pursued an agenda that called for them to control as much land as possible in the region on their own terms; the English grandees desired to assert and replicate the home country’s traditional patterns; and individual settlers sought out “fruitful” lands, even in the face of official opposition, resulting in many outmigrations from established towns and villages. Finally, the East End native communities used access to land to cement and promote their budding alliance with the English and as a tool to preserve their own independence and traditional way of life.

The Grandee and Long Island William Alexander, Earl of Stirling (1580–1640) was a Scotsman and a favorite of the Scottish-born king, James I. Stirling, who served as Scotland’s secretary of state, was also a poet and playwright. In 1621, the king granted Stirling a royal charter in northern New England for land that Stirling named Nova Scotia. His New Scotland project proved to be a daunting, expensive, and unsuccessful undertaking, which eventually left the Stirling estate in financial ruins. Yet, this did not dampen Stirling’s interest or enthusiasm for colonization, and in 1634, he became a councilor to and patentee of the Council for New England. Only a year after Stirling joined the Council, it dissolved and surrendered its patent to the king.

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Most of that patent was subsequently redistributed in the form of individual grants and charters to the Council’s former members. Stirling received one of those grants, entitling him to what is now known as the Stirling Patent, which encompassed, among other areas, all of Long Island.1 Stirling quickly discovered that holding a patent to lands in North American did not guarantee possession of those lands. His first attempt to claim rights granted under the Stirling Patent was in 1637. In June of that year, Winthrop reported that the Massachusetts Bay Colony had news of a “commission granted in England to divers gentlemen here for the governing of New England, etc.; . . . The party who procured the commission, one George Cleeves . . . under the privy signet for . . . the planting of Long Island, by articles of agreement between the Earl of Sterling, Viscount Canada, and him.”2 Winthrop and the other Bay leaders were disturbed and threatened by these claimants, whom they perceived as interlopers: “Thus this and other gentlemen in England get large circuits of lands, etc., in this country, and are very ready to grant them out to such as will become their tenants, and, to encourage them, do procure commissions, protections, etc., which will cost them nothing, but will be at no charge in any right way of plantation, which should be by coming themselves, or sending some of their children, etc.”3 Winthrop’s words appear to reflect the belief that a patent to lands in America was not sufficient to convey ownership if no personal engagement with the granted land was undertaken. Cleeves, armed with a patent that theoretically put in jeopardy the settlers’ claims to former Pequot lands (including Long Island), was not about to be welcomed with open arms. Bay leaders Sir Henry Vane and John Winthrop openly expressed to Council members their dislike of Cleeves and his mission. In response, the Council’s leader, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, wrote to Vane assuring him that the Council was in receipt of “severall letters from servant Vines, and others of the generall dislike conceaved against Mr. Cleeves” and that all support for Cleeves had been withdrawn.4 Nothing came of this first attempt to claim or settle Long Island by a grandee, and Stirling appears to have realized that without some type of support from the in situ authorities in southern New England, nothing could be accomplished. Even though Cleeves ceased to represent Stirling’s interest in southern New England, over the next decade Cleeves continued to make sporadic appearances in the area as the erstwhile stakeholder to one piece of land or another, but always without success.5

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The Cleeves claim to Long Island and the Bay Colony’s reaction to it reveals the colonists’ developing attitude toward land and land ownership and their growing feelings of territoriality regarding the region. This reaction reflected a growing skepticism about the traditional rights of the English royalty and aristocracy to large tracts of land, which were set aside for hunting and leisure activities, while other parcels were rented out and tilled by a cadre of subordinates. These aristocratic owners were, for the most part, absentee landlords who left the daily running of their estates in the hands of an agent. The refutation of the Cleeves claim (and, by implication, any distant patent holder’s claim) also implied a growing moral condemnation of such a system on the part of the settlers. By 1637, the English settlers had begun to internalize what was rapidly becoming the de facto method of English settler land acquisition: peopling and planting either concurrent with or in advance of the procurement of a native deed and some type of English sanction (charter or patent).6 The same rationale used to critique the traditional English estate system and resist the claims of the Council for New England’s patentees was also an argument in the denial of native title to large tracts of hunting grounds.7 A dissenting voice was that of Roger Williams, who, by contrast, endeavored to persuade his fellow settlers to respect native title, citing its similarity to the landholding patterns of the English aristocracy: “the Natives, though they did not . . . subdue the Countrey . . . yet they hunted all the Countrey over . . . and therefore as Noble men in England possessed great Parkes, and the King, great Forrests in England onely for their game, and no man might lawfully invade their Propriety: so might the Natives challenge the Propriety of the Countrey here.”8 Williams was reminding his fellow settlers of the bonds that, while loosened, still tied them all to that distant authority in England. He also raised the specter that home authorities might perceive the basis for their rejection of native title as a rejection of the traditional rights of the English landed aristocracy. Williams was not alone in noting the evolving methods for land acquisition. The Dutch also commented on this in 1649. In their “Remonstrance of New Netherlands,” the Dutch complained that the English were willing to recognize the Dutch and make use of them in times of need but, whenever possible, would “regard them not and make fools of them.” The New Netherlanders attributed this to the Dutch “having neglected to people the country”; as the Dutch noted, the English settlers

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showed a singular disregard for claims based on the Dutch custom of touching and trading.9 The complaints of the Dutch and of Williams went unheeded in part because both local colonial leadership and the average English settler in southern New England had quietly done just that.10 What are the implications of the English settlers’ actions? In one respect, the colonial authorities were attempting to protect what they perceived as their vested interests and investors. The historian John Martin has convincingly put forward the argument that entrepreneurship and the requirements that the land be settled lent themselves to profit making, which was neither totally alien to the Puritan immigrants nor necessarily in conflict with Puritan theology.11 Winthrop’s evident disapproval of attempts by absentee patent holders to engross “large circuits of lands” in southern New England that “cost them nothing” supports this conclusion.12 After all, carving out English-style villages in a landscape formerly shaped by the region’s natives was neither an easy nor an inexpensive proposition. Local authorities such as Winthrop felt that engrossment in southern New England would “discourage new settlers,” leading to a dearth of the region’s most valuable commodity alongside land—its settlers—and result in “waste,” a sin in the Puritan mind.13 However, the English settlers faced an additional problem: how to turn land into property? The American property system, while deeply rooted in English law and custom even while it reflected the rapid commercial changes that were taking place in Europe and England from the late sixteenth century on, was also the product of the Atlantic American experience. Wholesale transference and application of the English property system was simply impossible. Land acquisition modes in England were well established and suited specific conditions and entrenched interests that existed there. Unlike the situation in southern New England, no foreign European power actively contested the local authorities for land in England; no non-English, indigenous population interposed claims that had to somehow be managed and extinguished; there existed no intra-English competition for land on the level found in Connecticut between outmigrants from Plymouth and from Massachusetts Bay. Consequently, unlike old England, southern New England was a contested arena in which the former’s land acquisition rules and practices simply could neither fully address nor satisfy settlers’ needs or interests. The result was that, out of a clash between the multiplicities of communities of interest present in the region, a unique land system was created.

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This legal vacuum was soon filled by settler-initiated adaptations and practices, some de facto, some de jure in nature. Peopling and planting became the de facto method of choice for English settlers throughout the region, despite Plymouth’s few failed attempts to promote acceptance of the Dutch touching-and-trading method.14 Again, Winthrop’s vociferous objection to Cleeves’s claim lends voice to the growing entrenchment of peopling and planting as necessary prerequisites for land acquisition. In a voice that comes close to mirroring native people’s sentiments regarding land, Winthrop objected to the claims made by absentee patentees in England because they would “be at no charge in any right way of plantation, which should be by coming themselves, or sending some of their children, etc.”15 Such patentees had no direct personal connection to the land or any southern New England community, rendering the nexus between their claim and the land insufficient to maintain it. While absentee landlords existed in southern New England, they were tolerated only if they were resident somewhere in the region.16 The local general courts incorporated this thinking into their approach to land ownership. While residency on a specific tract claimed was not a sine qua non of land ownership, neither would the courts permit land to lie waste. To maintain title, land speculators had to commit a minimum amount of resources to improve the land or risk title rescission by the court, after which the court could dispose of the land “to whome they please.”17 The local courts and the colonial leadership realized that if land in the region were engrossed on a large scale by a distant grandee or colonized under the vision originally proposed by the Council for New England, it would destroy what was rapidly becoming an entrenched expectation in the region—that is, that land ownership in New England had become “a natural right, conferring a basic dignity, some social status, and competency” on the individual settler.18 Consequently, Winthrop and others rejected these outsiders’ plans whenever possible. Early in its history, the Massachusetts Bay Colony began to formulate a legal framework to assist and control the transition from land to property through a series of laws. In 1633, the Massachusetts General Court required settlers to extinguish native title as a part of the process of perfecting title. A year later, the court sought to control land conversions by prohibiting the purchase of land from the natives without the court’s permission. The court then moved to further limit the unregulated transfer of land between settlers and suggested that “some course be taken to

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cause men to record their lands, or to fine them for that neglect.”19 Individual and company holders who had received large tracts of land by way of “letters patent” were still required to “settle and improve” the land within a certain period of time or risk forfeiture.20 Additionally, unlike English towns, towns in southern New England became the most important distributing agent of land.21 The aggressive rejection of the Cleeves/Stirling claim by the local authorities can also be linked to its timing. It followed closely on the heels of the Pequots’ defeat and came just as the victory by the English settlers promised to open up a huge expanse of territory to secondary migrations. The envisioned extension included the eastern portion of Long Island that the English had, for several years, eyed with interest for its abundant supply of fine wampum, for its potential as a site for actual cultivation and settlement, and for its strategic geographic location and usefulness as a buffer between New Netherland and New England. In his 1638 History of the Pequot War, the military commander John Underhill even took a moment to pause from his lurid tale of blood, savagery, and righteousness to extol the “excellence of the whole country,” including Long Island, as a veritable “garden.”22 The southern New England settlers were not about to yield such a prize to a distant claimant without some sort of struggle. Two years after Stirling’s unsuccessful attempt to enforce his claims through Cleeves, Stirling again attempted to assert his interests, this time through a Scottish agent, James Farrett, who arrived armed with a patent from the Council for New England and a “commission” (power of attorney) to act on Stirling’s behalf. Farrett’s first transaction under this patent was not so much of Farrett’s making but simply took advantage of an opportunity that presented itself. In the spring of 1639, Lion Gardiner had obtained a native deed for an island directly off Long Island’s eastern coast and had removed there with his family and a few men who had served under him at Saybrook.23 Less than a year later, Gardiner sought and received a second deed (“Gardiner’s deed”) from Lord Stirling’s agent, Farrett. For Stirling, who had spent the past four years unsuccessfully pressing his claim to Long Island, an English settler’s acceptance of a grant to land that technically fell within the purview of the Stirling Patent was a vindication of the Scottish lord’s rights under that patent. Gardiner’s deed records the history of Stirling’s attempts to assert claims under his putative patent. The deed states that, prior to the arrival of Stirling’s agent, Gardiner had purchased his island from “the ancient Inhab-

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itants the Indians” but was now “contented to hould the tenor and title of the possession of the . . . Island for the Earle of Starlinge.”24 Stirling’s victory was not in his ability to enforce a conventional English-style lordof-the-manor-to-tenant relationship on Gardiner but in his successful implementation of an Atlantic American method of obtaining a settler to people and plant under the aegis of his patent. Connecticut and Massachusetts authorities never contested the legality of the Gardiner deed. There may be several reasons for this. First, and probably foremost, was the reality of the Gardiner plantation—it was there. Peopling and planting had become the most effective and the one indisputable method for taking and retaining initial possession in the region, but it was rapidly being acknowledged that it could ultimately not stand alone; there were too many claimants to the region. After the Pequot War, the English widely adopted the Dutch-initiated procurement of native deeds and also acknowledged that, at some point, some type of English charter or patent would have to be obtained. Collectively, these three actions became the accepted method for securing possession and title to lands in Atlantic America. If Connecticut or Massachusetts had contested the Gardiner deed, the colonies would have found themselves in the difficult position of having to enforce such an edict. Enforcement would, more likely than not, have involved the physical eviction of Gardiner, his family, and his servants by the use of military force. It would have put the local colonial authorities into open conflict with an actual undertaking sanctioned by an English patent and by the Manhassets and the Montauketts. It would have been tantamount to a total rejection of English authority in southern New England and would have forced the English Crown to confront several thorny issues that all sides had heretofore chosen to ignore: who should be exercising daily jurisdiction in the region; what was the legal status of the towns and the individual parcels of lands being claimed and held, often without benefit of an English patent or deed; what should be the accepted method of obtaining legal title to lands; and how were these lands to be held?25 Forcing the English Crown and local authorities to ask and answer these questions would have set a in motion a series of decisions and actions that would have placed the entire evolving Atlantic American system in peril. Additionally, an attempted ouster of Gardiner from the island would have been a direct repudiation of the nascent mainland English-East End native alliance. This might have caused the East End leadership to

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reconsider that relationship. Certainly, it would have lent credibility to Ninigret’s warning to the Montauketts, made less than two years prior, that the English settlers “were liars” and would “speak much but do little.” The ramifications of such an action might have been another regional realignment, with the Niantics spearheading a pan-Indian alliance against the mainland settlements. A reignition of regional hostilities, with all of the southern New England Ninnimissinuok (perhaps even rallying the New Netherlanders to their side) unified against the English colonies would have had disastrous consequences for the settlers. Another factor in Connecticut’s and Massachusetts’s acquiescence to the deed issued by Stirling was Gardiner’s status as more one of their own than not. True, Gardiner had departed from Saybrook on a somewhat bitter note, but that feeling had quickly passed. Once Lion Gardiner was securely ensconced on an island of his own, he and John Winthrop Jr. developed a cordial personal and business relationship that endured for almost three decades.26 Within a year of his arrival on his island, Gardiner facilitated the planting of English settlers from the mainland on eastern Long Island. He quickly became active and effective within the East End settlement communities, helping to promote both his and the settlers’ interests. From the perspective of the mainland English colonies, Gardiner, who was both English and well known to local authorities, was more desirable as the first permanent European on eastern Long Island than a stranger or one whose interests might be patently adverse to theirs, such as Cleeves or the Dutch. Mainland settlers perceived Gardiner as a potential ally or kindred soul who had already proved his connection to the mainland English through his service at Saybrook and during the Pequot War. Nor did Gardiner appear as the vanguard of a larger wave of English settlers who would be arriving from England under Stirling’s direct authority. In a sense, Gardiner’s relationship to the mainland settlers, living as he did on that small island in the Long Island Sound, was more akin to the traditional Ninnimissinuok client-protectorate bond and was worth sustaining. In the end, both the East End natives and the mainland settlements appear to have viewed Gardiner’s presence as helpful to their efforts to build and anchor alliances and to create opportunities for all the region’s groups. Farrett’s presence was also substantially different in tenor from that of Stirling’s first agent, Cleeves. The aggressive Cleeves had arrived in the area ostensibly to take direct control over the lands contained within the Stirling Patent. From the moment of his arrival, Cleeves appeared to be a

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rival and a threat to the local establishment and system. Stirling knew of his first agent’s poor reception by the local authorities and understood that it was part of a long, ongoing resistance by the local New England authorities against claimants operating under patents issued by the Council for New England. Furthermore, Stirling’s economic circumstances were straitened, and he lacked the ability to finance a full-scale settlement operation. Stirling’s only hope of furthering his interests in the region was to enlist a prominent local figure, such as Winthrop, to serve as Farrett’s advisor and protector.27 Stirling’s “commission” to Farrett reflects this change of attitude and strategy. It directs Farrett to consult with and use Winthrop Sr. as his guide for the recruitment of settlers.28 The commission empowered Farrett to “let, set, mortgage sell, or by any other means, for . . . sums of money, or . . . yearly rent, to dispose of the said lands of the said islands . . . upon the advice of . . . Jno. Winthrop.”29 This commission must have reassured Winthrop and the other local authorities that Farrett had neither the means nor the intention of setting up an opposing, independent colony under Stirling’s leadership in their midst. The very language of the commission indicates that Farrett was to act more like a modern real estate agent (sell and go) than like a colonizer. Furthermore, the Gardiner deed, which was more a confirmation of rights that Gardiner had previously established through his native deed and by peopling and planting, was evidence of Stirling’s near-acquiescence to the legitimacy of this emerging Atlantic American system. Stirling’s financial condition at the time actually left him with little choice. He was all but bankrupt from his previous colonization venture in Nova Scotia and had neither the resources to independently fund colonization nor, apparently, the business acumen to put together a colonization corporation, which could have funded the transportation and maintenance of colonists from England to southern New England. The only recourse left to Stirling and his agent was to enlist the resources at hand in southern New England itself. That meant that he intended to “poach” established English settlers. This was always controversial in the area because of the scarcity of European settlers. Within the past five years, Massachusetts Bay had strongly resisted outmigrations, such as Hooker’s migration into Connecticut, fearing it would “deverte other frendes that would come to us.” Farrett, armed with the only means to entice settler—the ability to grant land—was evidently prepared to lure established, seasoned settlers for the purpose of peopling and planting Long Island. To overcome past resistance to the exercise of rights under

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patents issued to absentee grandees, Stirling directed his agent to enlist the cooperation of a key official in southern New England. Since Massachusetts was the oldest (except for the still struggling Plymouth Colony) and the most populous colony, it was essential to enlist the assistance of a leading authority in the region. Stirling identified John Winthrop as that person; he was, after all, the governor, and it is unlikely that the aristocratic Stirling’s choice would have fallen on a more representative body, such as the General Court. Stirling’s and Farrett’s good intentions were further reinforced in the minds of the local colonial authorities when, in 1640, only a year after the Gardiner deed, Farrett entered into an agreement with a handful of local settlers from Lynn, Massachusetts, for land on Long Island. This became known as Farrett’s Patent and serves as the underlying English land grant for present-day Southampton Township. Farrett’s Patent specifically names John Winthrop three times. The first mention is in a clause that provided that any compensation paid to Lord Stirling by way of “acknowledgment as the Patentee of the place” was at the sole discretion of John Winthrop.30 The second is the patent’s designation of John Winthrop as the sole and final arbiter of any and all disputes regarding the signatory parties’ rights and obligations under that document. The third mention is in a written addendum, dated February 1641 and located on the back of the patent, in which Winthrop acknowledges the patent and the parties’ rights and obligations thereunder, as well as his own responsibilities to the signatories.31 News of Stirling’s unexpected death was received in southern New England in February 1640, two months before Farrett’s Patent was issued. This guaranteed the mainland English settlers that this distant patent holder was genuinely out of the picture. Stirling’s death left Farrett stranded in America without funds and unable to receive new supplies, since Stirling himself had died almost bankrupt. Farrett’s only remaining option was to quickly dispose of as much property as he could under very liberal terms. This meant that Farrett appeared to the mainland settlers in a very different light than either his predecessor or the other English patentees’ agents sent in the past who had so disturbed the local English authorities. Farrett was alone and broke, with no recourse to either his patron or to the Council for New England, which was no more. Knowledge of Farrett’s straitened condition was so widespread that several years later, in a land dispute, Cockenoe, a Shinnecock prominent in regional land transactions, dismissively described Farrett as “a poor man.”32

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The circumstances of Farrett’s mission made it appear, from the outset, that he was less interested in establishing some sort of separate colony or domain to be controlled by a distant English lord than in disposing of Stirling’s holdings to settled colonists from the mainland in exchange for some sort of nominal payment or annual quitrent (which as experience had already shown, would never be collected). The mainland settlers began to view the Stirling Patent and its first derivative grant, Farrett’s Patent, as instruments that could be used to their advantage and Massachusetts quickly tried to do just that. The placement of the anticipated Long Island settlement under Winthrop’s “management” prompted Massachusetts to see it as simply a new Massachusetts outpost and another step in the unspoken campaign to oust the Dutch from the Long island Sound subregion. The Pequots were not the only group recently routed from the mainland. Despite the fact the Dutch had not been official belligerents in the Pequot War, they had also effectively been ousted from Connecticut, and no new Dutch outposts had been planted on the southern New England mainland. Meantime, English settlements were spreading rapidly across the area, and the remaining Indian powers (the Mohegans, Narragansetts, and Niantics) were, at least nominally, allied to one or other English colony. What remained of the Dutch claims to Connecticut were a deed from the defeated and scattered Pequots and an unenforceable charter from the Dutch government. The Stirling Patent, coupled with the defeat of the Pequots, presented the mainland English colonies with their first direct opportunity to challenge the Dutch in their stronghold and on the series of islands that straddled the Hudson River and the Long Island Sound. The mainland settlers quickly took advantage of the Stirling Patent and used it as a vehicle to advance both individual and English settler interests, ultimately at the expense of Ninnimissinuok, Dutch, and grandee interests.

An English Settlement for Long Island The conquest of the Pequots was not simply a military victory for the mainland English colonies; it also gave them a sense of legal entitlement to all of Connecticut and to the islands in the Long Island Sound, home to many former Pequot tributaries. This sentiment was revealed in “A Declaration about the Pecoits Country and Quinapiack,” issued by the Massachusetts General Court on September 20, 1637:

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WHEREAS it hath pleased the Lord of his great mercy, to deliver into our hands our enemies the Pecoits and their [native] allies, and that thereby the lands and places which they possessed are by just title of conquest fallen to us, and our friends and associates upon the River of Connecticut.33

The victorious Massachusetts Bay settlers believed that their victory “delivered into their hands” not only Pequot territory but also the lands that belonged to their enemy’s former native allies and tributaries. Additionally, the swiftness with which the native inhabitants of the islands in the Long Island Sound offered tribute to the English after the war could have only reinforced the sentiments expressed in their “Declaration.” The first full-scale settlement attempt by mainland English settlers on Long Island, in 1640, resulted from a confluence of factors: elimination of the Pequots, the successful initiative by Gardiner on Manchonake Island, the Stirling Patent, the death of Lord Stirling, which resulted in the precarious financial situation of his agent, and, finally, the English setters’ desire to stem the tide of Dutch claims to the region. In 1640, the troubled town of Lynn, Massachusetts, became the staging point for the first permanent, substantial English settlement on Long Island. Lynn, one of the oldest of the Massachusetts townships, had been founded in 1629. During its first decade, the town’s precarious condition prompted many of its residents to leave; no fewer than six new settlements in the region were founded during this time as a result of the constant outmigrations from Lynn.34 One of these new plantings was the town of Southampton, which took hold across the Long Island Sound and gave rise to a permanent and official English presence on Long Island. During its first decade, Lynn was wracked by religious strife, economic distress, and physical disadvantages, including exceptionally poor soil conditions and a series of earthquakes that occurred in 1638 and 1639.35 Adding to Lynn’s woes, the town existed without a minister for its first three years, causing many of its residents to travel to neighboring Salem to join in communion. Nevertheless, in 1632, Lynn was gathered into the Bay Colony’s “Sixth Church of Christ.” Inauspiciously, its first minister was the Reverend Stephen Batchellor, who, almost from the beginning of his service, was a controversial figure.36 Batchellor was a member of the Company of Husbandmen, sometimes referred to as “Familists.” These Familists were technically Puritans but held beliefs that challenged the prevailing notions of social stratification, private property, and

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monogamy: “the Familists . . . depend upon rare Revelations, and forsake the sure revealed Word of Christ.”37 These convictions put them at odds with local Puritan authorities, who suspected them of blasphemy.38 Despite these misgivings, Batchellor was accepted in Massachusetts Bay, probably more because of a shortage of ministers in the colony than because the leadership approved of his beliefs.39 Unfortunately for the Lynn residents, Batchellor’s presence brought with it religious controversy.40 Only four short months from the date he accepted the Lynn pulpit, Batchellor ran afoul of his new congregation. A series of complaints lodged against him because of his conduct resulted in his arraignment in the Boston court, where he was ordered to “forebeare exercising his gifts as a pastor . . . in our Patent” and to preach to only “those he brought with him.”41 By 1633, Batchellor appears to have made peace with the Lynn congregants, and the Boston Court lifted its restraining order.42 The peace was short lived, and by early 1635, Batchellor’s conduct was again the subject of controversy when a number of church members questioned “whether they were a church or not.” These congregants claimed that the church had not been properly constituted and withdrew their support. This led to a direct confrontation between the minister and his disaffected parishioners. An incensed Batchellor demanded that his accusers present their grievances in writing.43 When they refused, he threatened them with excommunication. The squabbling became fractious enough and loud enough that intervention by a council of Massachusetts’s ministers was arranged, and in the spring of 1635, the council heard both sides of the dispute in an attempt to end the standoff. Their decision was that, while the Lynn church had not technically been properly constituted, the defect had been corrected by the subsequent actions of the congregation, which had, in fact, voluntarily gathered together and exercised its religious duties. This was a de facto church. Despite this decision, tensions and arguments continued to flare up, and in 1636, Batchellor was finally forced to relinquish his pulpit at Lynn and acquired a “dismission for himselfe & his first members . . . beinge granted upon supposition that he would leave the towne.” Lynn struggled in other ways, as well. The town’s land supply, while generous in its aggregate, contained hundreds of acres of unusable land, and by 1638, its residents complained of a serious land shortage.44 Adding insult to an already injured town were two earthquakes that shook the region, the first on June 1, 1638, and the second only seven months later, in January 1639.45 The first quake’s aftershocks were felt

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for twenty days; it was strong enough to cause “divers men . . . to cast downe their working-tooles, and run with ghastly terrified lookes.”46 These earthquakes seriously affected the Puritan psyche. After all, these were people for whom the weather, as well as all sorts of natural phenomena, were manifestations of Divine will. Edward Johnson linked the terrific force of the quake to the religious and civil unrest that plagued the colony, concluding that the quake was a “signe from the Lord to his Churches, that he was proposed to shake the Kingdomes.”47 In similar fashion, John Winthrop duly noted that the first quake had followed “a very hard winter” and a spring “so cold, that men were forced to plant their corn two or three times, for it rotted in the ground.”48 William Bradford ominously remembered that at the moment of the quake, various leaders and residents of Plymouth Colony were conferring on a proposed removal from the town. The earthquake, he suggested, was the Lord’s sign of “His displeasure, in their shaking a-peices and removals one from another.”49 For the residents of the already uneasy town of Lynn, these earthquakes must have added to the collective and individual sense of discontent that enveloped the town. Indicative of the town’s disquiet was the constant ecclesiastical and civil squabbling. Fully 10 percent of the cases brought before the civil court in the Bay Colony at that time arose from disputes between Lynn townsfolk.50 By 1639, the town’s turmoil began to adversely impact its relationship with the colonial authorities. In that year, the colony fined Lynn “10s for their bad wayes” and ordered to “mend them by the next Court.” The next year, however, found the hapless inhabitants of Lynn in the same predicament, and they were fined again, this time for not sending their warrants and their deputies’ names to the General Court.51 During those same turbulent years, they also found themselves embroiled in a boundary dispute with their neighbor, Salem, and by the late spring of 1640, the conditions at Lynn had so deteriorated that Massachusetts decreed that “Such as go to Linn village are for 2 years exempted from publike rates . . . such as are settled there.”52 Even five years later, Lynn’s problems continued, and the town was unable to collect its assessed colonywide tax.53 Winthrop cited Lynn as an example of what happened when a town was settled outside the “rule of the gospel.”54 On March 10, 1639, Edward Howell and Lieutenant Daniel Howe, along with several prominent Lynn citizens, formally organized themselves into an outmigration company, the Southampton Company, and

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proposed settling on Long Island. The reasons given for joining the outmigration were many. A number of the company’s organizers, such as Howell, expressed a general discontent with Lynn’s land quality. In 1639, he petitioned the Massachusetts Court on behalf of many Lynn landowners for a remedy regarding the “rottennesse of the March [marsh].”55 Others, such as Howe, had been involved in some of the serious complaints behind the general discontent felt by the Lynn residents toward their town.56 How and why did this group choose to settle on Long Island, relatively far removed from the other established English settlements? Howe, a well-respected freeman and landowner since 1634, sometime representative to the Massachusetts General Court, a Pequot War veteran, and a member of the Ancient Artillery Company, may have been key to this decision.57 Howe had been named a lieutenant from Lynn during the Pequot War and was active in and around the islands in the Long Island Sound. In the spring of 1636, he came under the command of Captain Patrick, and in June he accompanied Patrick to Block Island. These activities in the Long Island Sound region explain his familiarity with Long Island.58 No doubt, Howe, like Captain Underhill, was impressed with the “excellence of the whole country.” Other reasons to choose this relatively farflung location may have been the outmigrants’ desire to distance themselves from the central Massachusetts Bay authority, which had intervened frequently to quell Lynn’s problems but had resolved little and only added to the existing discontent by levying heavy fines in an attempt to coerce good behavior. These “undertakers,” as they referred to themselves, formed the Southampton Company and drew up a three-part agreement, which, taken together, is often referred to as the “Southampton Covenant.”59 The first part of this agreement, “The Disposall of the Vessell,” provided for the purchase of a ship, transportation to the site of settlement, and use by the projected town of the vessel for transportation between the future town and the mainland at least three times a year. It also referred to the undertakers’ rights to house and planting lots.60 The original twelve undertakers allocated eighty pounds for “setting forward a plantation” and agreed to finance any expenses for transporting any others chosen to go on the first voyage to Long Island. These men were, for the most part, a mix of substantial and modest Lynn landowners. Edward Howell owned five hundred acres in Lynn, making him the second-largest landowner in Lynn. Others, including Henry Walton, Lieutenant Howe, and the Sayre

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brothers, owned up to two hundred acres each, while the smallest holding comprised sixty acres.61 The second part of the Covenant, “Agreement of the Undertakers,” included guidelines for the initial land allotments and the future disposal of land, along with some general principles of self-rule. The undertakers claimed the right to dispose of all lands presently and prospectively within the settlement’s limits. They decreed that lots laid out for houses and plantings would always be used as originally intended and that no more than one house could be built on each lot. Each settler would receive a minimum of a four-acre house lot, a twelve-acre planting lot, and so much meadow and upland so that each individual holding would comprise fifty acres in total. Any allotments offered for sale would have to be sold in their entirety. This last provision reflected the undertakers’ dissatisfaction with land allocations in Lynn; they were attempting to safeguard their interests in their new plantation by prohibiting the use of planting fields as house lots so that “more Inhabitants might be received” and to prevent “the overcharging of Commons and the Impoverishinge of the towne.” They also, contrary to the prevailing trend in England, declared the public character of the region’s natural resource;62 no individual could “claime any proper interest in seas, rivers, creekes, or brookes howsoever bounding or passing through his grounds, but that freedom of fishing, fowling and navigation should be common to all within the banks of said waters whatsoever.”63 This resolution mirrored ancient English practices, which had, for the most part, been eliminated many years earlier. More remarkably, this clause paralleled Ninnimissinuok practices, which many native groups would, as soon to be seen in their deeds with the English settlers, seek to preserve in the face of the wave of English settlements that would blanket the region. The Southampton undertakers also reserved to themselves the right to resolve all controversies among themselves. The third and last part of the Agreement, “A Declaration of the Company,” declared the outmigrants’ intentions to be gathered into a Church, “constituted according to the minde of Christ.” Prior to departing, the Southampton Company arranged for the Reverend Abraham Pierson, of Trinity College, recently arrived from England, to serve as pastor of their church. John Winthrop’s journal approvingly noted that these outmigrants had “called one Mr. Pierson a godly learned man, and member of the church of Boston, to go with them who . . . gathered into a church body at Linn [before they went,] and the whole company entered into a civil combination.”64 While many New England settlements entered into

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such covenants, surely this group’s particular motivation for having a church and minister in place beforehand grew out of its recent unhappy experiences in Lynn. These three parts taken together constituted the Southampton Covenant and established the basic economic, secular, and religious framework for the new town. This document addressed many of the underlying problems these migrants from Lynn had experienced and that they now, in their own undertaking, were doing their best to avoid. Less than two months after the undertakers signed this agreement, they arranged with the Earl of Stirling’s agent, James Farrett, to settle on Long Island under the putative right to that island granted to Lord Stirling by the 1635 Stirling Patent. On May 1, 1640, the Southampton undertakers chose a site in Cow Bay (the present-day town of Manhasset) on the western end of the Island, close to the Dutch settlements. They had not been there long and had only just commenced construction of their first structures when Dutch officials arrested six of their company for trespassing on Dutch territory. The Dutch had apparently gotten word of the fledgling English settlement from a local Canarsie sachem, called by the Dutch Penhawis.65 After a brief internment by the Dutch, these would-be settlers left the area and apparently proceeded directly to the Island’s eastern end. Two weeks after their release, an entry made in June in Winthrop’s journal casually notes that “Divers of the inhabitants of Linne, finding themselves straitened, looked out for a new plantation, and going to Long Island, they agreed with the Lord Sterling’s agent there, one Mr. Forrett.”66 This entry refers not to the first settlement attempt but to the second, successful settlement attempt on the East End. Almost immediately after the failed attempt to settle on the West End, Farrett issued the Southampton undertakers another patent. Farrett’s Patent transferred to the undertakers “Eight miles square of land” on Long Island to “possess, Improve and enjoy.” That phrase perfectly captured the prevalent practice of peopling and planting and the idea that, unlike in England, this land was to benefit primarily the community’s members and not the original patent holder, Lord Stirling. Tellingly, too, the patent did not specify a location. Farrett’s Patent simply gave the settlers the right “to take theire choyce to sitt downe as best suiteth them Long Island, there to that eight mile square.”67 This suggests that the settlers were free to choose any site on that island they were capable of securing and planting. The reason for this lack of specificity may have been, in part, that neither Farrett nor the other undertakers had more than a

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general knowledge of the island. However, more significant, this vagueness also resulted from the fact that the Dutch for nearly three decades had not only asserted their sovereignty over the entire island but had established a significant settlement on adjacent Manhattan Island, along with several “satellite” towns across the East River that were scattered throughout Long Island’s western end. Additionally, various Indian communities that lived on long Island, from its western to its eastern tip, also claimed and held sway over the Island. Last, the Southampton undertakers’ recent experience on the West End had proved that the ability to secure possession was more important than the designation of a specific tract of land. Therefore, both grantor and grantees understood that the exact site of the proposed settlement would depend on the location of a place where a fledgling settlement could be established without resistance from other area residents and claimants. Under such circumstances, specificity was not only undesirable but also impossible. Farrett’s Patent also appears to have deliberately mirrored the older Southampton Covenant. It directly addressed the Covenant’s three major concerns: ownership of land and natural resources, civil government, and church formation. Specifically, the lands, harbors, rivers, and waterways encompassed in the eight square mile were to belong to the settlers and their heirs to “quietly and peaceably . . . enjoy . . . without any disturbance, lett or molestation from the said Earl.” Additionally, the patent provided for the settlers’ right to “enjoy as full and free liberty in all matters that doe or may concerne them . . . or that may conduce to the good and comfort of them . . . both in Church order and civell government,” these liberties and right being circumscribed only by “what other Plantations enjoy in Massachusetts Bay.”68 By 1640, the Puritan expansion across the region seemed guaranteed to proceed under terms and conditions favored by the English settlers, rather than according to the system that the English grandees and home authorities (such as the now-defunct Council for New England) had proposed and attempted to impose on the region since 1620, first, and unsuccessfully, through its agent, the Council for New England, and later, just as unsuccessfully, through individual proprietors such as Lord Stirling.

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The English Challenge the Dutch on Long Island Even before the English settlers arrived on the West End of Long Island armed with an English patent and ready to people and plant in an effort to challenge the Dutch for the Island, the Dutch were aware of English designs on Long Island and the English manner of claiming and holding territory.69 Moreover, by 1635, the Dutch expressed their dismay that their English neighbors, particularly those from the Bay Colony, should “so little care about their Netherland neighbors of the same religious profession, should so little respect their anterior possession.”70 The English, after all, had already effectively ousted the Dutch from areas they had claimed on the southern New England mainland without ever firing a shot directly. At this point, the English settlers were masters of their most effective nonmilitary tactic—people and planting—and used this method to successfully challenge not only the Dutch but also, from time to time, other English settlers’ claims to land. The English method of entry onto Long Island through the small planting in Cow Bay was nothing new, and the Dutch immediately recognized this settlement tactic and understood that it was the first step in an English effort to wrest control of Long Island, the “crown of New Netherland,” from the Dutch. As one Dutch report noted, “the English are greatly after it.”71 When news of the English settlement in Cow Bay reached the Dutch authorities in nearby New Amsterdam on May 14, the Dutch authorities, not surprised by this latest English incursion, immediately dispatched Secretary Cornelis van Tienhoven, a deputy sheriff, along with a sergeant and twenty-three soldiers, to challenge and dislodge the newcomers.72 By the time Tienhoven and his force arrived in Cow Bay, the Southampton undertakers had already taken their first step, tearing down the posted “Arms of the Lords States General of Holland.” This act was certainly no accident and was not without significance to the English settlers. It was well known that the Dutch routinely affixed the Dutch States’ arms as a symbol of their charter and “token of possession.”73 In fact, when questioned by the Dutch, the settlers confessed that Captain Howe and James Farrett, who had accompanied this vanguard to the chosen site, had torn down the arms and “carved the fool’s face in the stead.”74 The settlers’ second act was the immediate construction of a small house. Dutch authorities arrived at the site a mere two weeks after the settlers and found one completed house and a second building near completion. The Dutch officials demanded to know “What they were doing there; by

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what power or by whose authority they presumed to settle . . . and told they must show their commission.”75 They took six Englishmen into custody, leaving the other men, one woman, and a child at the settlement site. Once in Dutch custody, all the prisoners faced the same set of questions: had they been issued a formal claim to the island? Had the governor of Massachusetts Bay, John Winthrop, consented to it? Who had torn down the Dutch States’ arms? How many more settlers were expected, and did they plan to settle under English rule? From their answers, the Dutch learned that an agent for the Scottish Lord Stirling was circulating in the region with an English patent for all Long Island and was attempting to dispose of these lands as quickly as possible. The Dutch also ascertained that many more English settlers were planning to join them; that they considered themselves and their claimed plantation subject to English jurisdiction; and that Governor Winthrop not only knew of but had consented to the removal.76 After learning of their plans, the Dutch had to decide what to do with these intruders. One option was long-term imprisonment or execution. However, the Dutch must have concluded (as had Indian communities) from the recent English reaction to the death of two Englishmen that such actions would most likely result in war between the two neighbors, a war that the Dutch could ill afford. Instead, on May 19, the Council for New Amsterdam resolved to release the six Englishmen, since they had not personally torn down the Dutch arms, “on condition that they do promise to depart forthwith from our territory, and never to return to it without the Director’s express consent.”77 This last condition clearly indicated that Dutch displeasure was directed not only at the planting itself but at the jurisdictional assertion of that settlement. The six prisoners then signed a pledge agreeing to depart and never to return and acknowledged, in writing, that the territory they had so boldly claimed belonged to “their High Mightinesses, the States-General.” The settlers were also required to admit that they had had no prior knowledge that the land in question belonged to the Dutch and had been “deceived by Mr. Foret.”78 Soon after their release, these English settlers left Cow Bay as agreed and removed to the eastern end of Long Island, to lands claimed by the Dutch but practically out of their reach and substantially removed from the Dutch settlements. Despite Massachusetts Bay’s subtle approach to challenging the Dutch claim to Long Island, the broader implications of the English settlement policy and the Cow Bay settlement were not lost on the Dutch. Shortly after the failed West End settlement attempt and the successful

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planting on the East End, the Dutch governor, William Kieft, lodged an official complaint with the Massachusetts Bay governor regarding this perceived policy of encroachments on Connecticut and Long Island. The Massachusetts governor replied, “our desire had always been to hold peace and good correspondence with all our neighbors; and though we would not maintain any of our countrymen in any unjust action, yet we might not suffer them to be injured, etc. As for our neighbors of Connecticut, etc., he knew they were not under our government, and for those at Long Island, they went voluntarily from us.”79 A similar deft deflection of Dutch protests regarding the Southampton Company’s actions on Long Island can be detected in Winthrop’s words. According to Winthrop, the Southampton Company settlers were “too weak” to hold the westerly planting against the Dutch, and since they had “no encouragement to expect aid from the English . . . deserted that place, and took another at the east end of the same island.”80 The Dutch were surely unconvinced that this was simply a renegade group over which Massachusetts exerted no influence or jurisdiction. After all, Winthrop was a named party to the Farrett Patent, and his imprimatur was clearly on this undertaking. Less than a year after the Southampton settlement was planted, Winthrop exercised his right under the Farrett Patent and ordered Southampton to “pay yearly to the Earle of Sterling . . . foure bushells of the best Indian Corne there growing, or the value of soe much.”81 Additionally, there was added to the Farrett Patent a “Memorandum” or codicil that provided that Winthrop and Stirling, once “all things shall be settled and concluded by the Right honoreable John Winthrop,” would relinquish all claims and interests to the land.82 In other words, Winthrop’s participation in the settlement became a condition subsequent to the completion of the “contract” between Stirling and the Lynn settlers. Later, based on this codicil, Henry Walton, one of the original Southampton undertakers, wrote to Winthrop asking him to advise the Southampton Company whether it or Farrett needed to do anything else to complete the transaction between the settlers and the agent.83 Winthrop’s actions were in perfect compliance with Massachusetts Bay’s unofficial policy regarding encroachments on Dutch claimed lands; he did all he could to facilitate that effort but stopped short of formal authorization or direct military support.84 In light of Winthrop’s involvement with the Southampton settlement and the pattern of English encroachments on Dutch-claimed territory, the Dutch remained unconvinced by the Bay’s protestations of

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neighborliness. This impasse led the New Netherland authorities to implement a new policy during the 1640s in a renewed attempt to thwart English encroachments. In the summer of 1641, a new wave of would-be outmigrants from Lynn and from Ipswich, Massachusetts, sent representatives to “view Long Island.” Like the Southampton Company of the previous year, this group’s right to settle as part of an English vanguard was challenged by the Dutch. This time, however, instead of detaining the prospective migrants and ordering them out of Dutch territory, the Dutch offered them a settlement of their own on condition they settle under Dutch jurisdiction—that the migrants people and plant not in the name of the English but in the name of and for the Dutch. As Winthrop noted, the proposal was seductive. The Dutch offered English settlers “the very same liberties, both civil and ecclesiastical, which they enjoyed in the Massachusetts.” In response to the Dutch attempt to poach English settlers, the Massachusetts General Court admonished two of the main undertakers, Edward and Timothy Tomlins, not to settle under the Dutch, “because of scandall & offence.”85 Winthrop’s journal entry more directly addressed his colony’s concern: “The court were offended . . . and sought to stay them, not from going from us, but from strengthening the Dutch . . . and taking that from them which our king . . . had granted a patent . . . to the earl of Sterling.”86 This vigorous defense of an English grandee’s patent rights seems to contradict the mainland colonies’ past practice of opposing such grants. However, the unique circumstances surrounding the Stirling Patent—the death of Stirling and the impecunious condition of his agent—meant that this patent represented an opportunity for the English settlers, rather than an obstacle. Under these conditions, the English settlers were more than happy to defend its validity, knowing that the rights granted thereunder could be easily usurped and used by the mainland settlers to their own interests. To counter this grant and the general English expansion, the Dutch began to routinely and actively recruit English settlers to shore up their claims to Long Island and Manhattan Island.87 Judging from the negative reaction of the Massachusetts General Court in 1641 to the proposed removal by the Tomlins to live under Dutch jurisdiction, the Bay quite clearly understood the motivation behind the Dutch offer. The Southampton settlement on the East End was facilitated by a number of factors. First, and most important, was the changing balance of

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power in the region among the three major communities—English, Dutch, and Ninnimissinuok—and the factionalism between and within these. The defeat of the Pequots did more than simply eliminate the Pequot obstacle to the planting of an English outpost on Long Island, it also weakened the regional position of the Dutch, who had been another impediment to English expansion across the Sound. Particularly distressing for the Dutch was the English settlement on the East End, which not only rejected Dutch jurisdiction but shored up the English claim to Long Island by successfully asserting title to its land through, among other methods, an English patent. Another blow to Dutch regional interests was the shifting alliances of the various Ninnimissinuok communities. The former Pequot tributaries and allies, including the native communities on the East End, placed themselves under the protection of one or other of the English colonies or forged new alliances with them. Additionally, while the English settlers, with few exceptions, steadfastly rejected the Dutch method of touching and trading, they did, particularly after the Pequot War, accept the need to acquire a native deed to land, as first practiced by the Dutch. The Dutch, for their part, after 1640 attempted to counter these settlements by trying to entice English settlers to locate new towns under Dutch jurisdiction by offering them both land and civil and ecclesiastical liberties comparable to those they would have had under English jurisdiction. Their effort was only moderately successful. However, what happened after 1640 was the implementation of a trinity of actions—acquisition of a native deed, a European charter or patent and peopling and planting— as prerequisites for defensible claims of possession and title to land in Atlantic America. Another by-product of the Pequot War was the steady loss of territory in the region by the Dutch and the Ninnimissinuok to the multiplying English settlements. However, the English paid a price for their seeming growing hegemony. The English communities of interest reflected new ways of looking at land and community that were rooted in practices that owed as much to the Dutch and the Ninnimissinuok and to adaptations formulated to meet the demands of these growing Atlantic American communities as to English ways. Contrary to the way the story is often told, while the English settlers certainly “conquered,” in the standard meaning of the term, their own traditions and heritage became intertwined with those of the groups they defeated, and out of this emerged the hybrid systems that were the hallmarks of Atlantic America.

5 Treaties and Deeds A New Land Tenure System on the East End

The use of treaties and deeds negotiated between native and settler communities grew steadily during the early decades of the seventeenth century and became almost universally accepted practice shortly after the Pequot War. It was the Dutch who pioneered their routine use in Atlantic America, largely for self-serving reasons than out of respect for their Indian neighbors’ rights. The Dutch West India Company’s charter authorized it to take possession and title to lands for business and military purposes in North America but did not, as the English did, grant patents and charters in an attempt to define those lands with any specificity. By formally recognizing Indian rights (title) to land, the company created for itself an orderly and economic process (i.e., written deeds) by which it could claim and hold large tracts of land. This became increasingly important as the English began to challenge Dutch interests in the region. In 1633, the Dutch used a deed obtained from the Pequots to land in Connecticut in an attempt to keep out the Plymouth colonists who claimed the same area. Unlike earlier trade or peace treaties between English or Dutch representatives and Indian groups, this Dutch-native deed actually recognized that indigenous peoples could and did hold legal title to their occupied and claimed lands.1 This notion of “Indian title,” initially resisted by many English colonists, particularly those from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, slowly crept into the dealings between all settler groups and the indigenous communities.2 As increasing numbers of settlers struck out on their own to found towns, often without the prior blessing of either the local colonial or the imperial authorities, it became increasingly seen as necessary to acquire a native deed in addition to peopling and planting.3 These deeds became,

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by their very nature, a tacit acknowledgment that native title not only existed but had some type of intrinsic value and legitimacy, which, unless properly purchased and extinguished, could be purchased by a rival claimant. Only the European sovereigns were exempt from this requirement.4 In this manner, a new dynamic was added to the process of actual land acquisition.

Property versus Land The lack of a definitive and universally recognized method for land acquisition in Atlantic America during much of the seventeenth century had important ramifications for all the existing and aspiring residents in and to the region. Would-be English settlers confronted a tangled and confusing system, which often left the putative owner subject to competing claims. In sharp contrast to England, where an Englishman seeking land was dealing with “property,” that is, acreage under an established chain of ownership free from competing non-English claimants and systems and with an acknowledged paper value, the English settlers were dealing with what was, from their perspective, (bare) “land.” The settlers wished to convert the land they coveted into “property.” This was not necessarily a straightforward or known process, since the land in southern New England was potentially subject to multiple and competing systems, claims, and interests. After all, a multiplicity of communities of interest, native and European alike, pressed overlapping claims. These were considerations that could not be ignored by any of the settlers. While some of these competing claims were extinguished through force of arms, as with the Pequot lands, more typically the goal was accomplished through (seemingly) voluntary transactions between the appropriate native and settler authorities. Unwittingly, this process helped the settlers to make a final break with certain English notions of land tenure, most of which were remnants of England’s feudal past. While it is certainly true that by the seventeenth century there had been a steady movement away from the old feudalistic land tenure system, landholding in seventeenth-century England still labored under its influence. As one legal historian has commented, “an absolute ownership of land” simply did not exist in seventeenth-century England.5 Instead, the English common-law tenurial system was a complicated labyrinth of copyholders, leaseholders, and freeholders.6 In contrast, while remnants of feudalism

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existed in the southern New England region of Atlantic America, freeholding became the rule, not the exception.7 These new New Englanders specifically rejected feudal barriers to land ownership and economic advancement.8 By the 1640s, English settlers arrived with the expectation of becoming freeholders. In part, this belief was fueled by popular tracts, published in England to induce immigration to Atlantic America, that promised, “The division or allotment of Lands . . . to be Freehold land to all persons . . . servants to have the like quantity when they come out of their times.”9 For the majority of immigrants, this promise became a reality. Whereas in seventeenth-century England only one in seven owned a freehold and many still owed the token feudal-style payment to the lord of the manor, throughout the colonial era the vast majority of settlers were freeholders.10 Historians have most commonly associated this shift in expectations with the need to use land to attract settlers to a sparsely populated New England, whereas, in population-heavy but land-deficient England, land was used to “fetter a restless population.”11 Certainly, the need to attract people to southern New England was important in facilitating this shift. Equally important, however, the settlers confronted competing claimants and systems in southern New England. Consequently, it was the very process of obtaining land, which, as discussed, was quite involved and often uncertain, that promoted the psychological shift from the English to an evolving Atlantic American system in which settlers justified their claims according to a different set of standards. As one Southampton landowner proclaimed, “wee purchased ye land wee now possess of the natives, the then proper owners . . . and . . . with long and hard labor, subdued . . . these lands with the peril of our lives.”12 Clearly, these criteria for ownership—peopling and planting plus native deeds—would, with few exceptions, never have been put forward in England. On the East End alone, from 1640 until well into the nineteenth century, the settlers employed the process of claiming land through a combination of peopling and planting and native deeds over and over. In an uncertain foreign environment where, the settlers discovered, conventional English rules did not apply, peopling and planting along with treaties and deeds offered an orderly and acceptable process by which land could be converted to property, and over time the settlers turned this process into their own. An extension of this process was the use of centralized land recording systems that spread rapidly throughout colonial New England

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during the seventeenth century. Again, this stood in stark contrast to England, where such recording systems were not as widespread, as systematized, or as central to land tenure as they were in colonial New England.13 Early on, local colonial authorities recognized the importance of treaties and deeds to southern New England’s land tenure system. These authorities sought to deny local (town and village) communities the power to enter into such agreements and sometimes tried to retract it once granted. Often, local colonial governments enacted laws that specifically prohibited town and village authorities from entering into deeds with their native neighbors without some sort of formal sanction from the local government. As early as 1634, Massachusetts Bay’s General Court ordered that “noe person whatsoever shall buy any land of any Indian without leave from the Court.”14 In 1664, the proprietor of the newly created New York Colony, the Duke of York, also attempted to assert control over this process: “No Purchase of lands from indians After the first day of March 1664 shall be Esteemed a good Title without leave first been obtained from the governour. . . . And the Purchase so made . . . to be entered upon record in the Office & from that time to be valid to all intents and purposes.”15 This particular law implicitly recognized the importance of and the connection between treaties and deeds and a formal land recording system. The Duke’s Law required the aspiring landholder both to obtain an Indian deed (extinguish native title with the approbation of the appropriate colonial authority) and to record that deed. William Salmon, an early resident of Southold, on the East End, followed this formula. He purchased his land directly from Farrett but then, in 1661, obtained a confirming native deed 1661 from Wyancomb, Wyandanch’s son and successor.16 Conditions in New England produced a process that diverged from and transformed many of the practices and expectations regarding land tenure that had been common in England. While peopling and planting were often the first steps and were always necessary, for the settlers it was the deeds and treaties that became the official symbols by which settlers not only took possession but also transformed that initial act into a tangible legal right. These changes in the process of land acquisition in the region helped facilitate the shift in the settlers’ conceptions and understanding of their relationship to land and paved the way for the beginning of a distinctly Atlantic American understanding of the individual’s and the community’s relationship to land.

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Treaties and Deeds Reconstruct the East End The settlers who came to the East End from Lynn, Massachusetts (the “Southampton undertakers”), settled under the authority and right granted to them by Farrett’s Patent, which was a derivative grant from the Earl of Stirling’s Great Patent for all of Long Island. Unable to enforce that grant on the island’s western end, the settlers relocated to the East End under Farrett’s Patent. At the core of this grant was a directive for the Southampton undertakers to “settle” with the natives in the region. Farrett’s Patent did not grant the patentees clear and unfettered title or immediate and exclusive dominion over the area. It gave the settlers only the exclusive right to “sitt downe upon . . . Eight miles square of land” on Long Island and promised this grant would be good against any others who might claim that same purchase by “vertue of any gift or purchase . . . lyeing within the compass of the eight miles before mentioned.” Yet, these provisions were not an outright grant of free and clear title, because the patent also required the settlers to purchase “in their own names” the land in that eight-square-mile area from “any Indians that Inhabit or have lawful right to any of the aforesaid land.”17 This, therefore, was not a fee-simple grant but something more akin to an options contract or a contract premised on a condition subsequent. In fact, what the Farrett Patent actually granted the Southampton undertakers was the exclusive option to purchase the land from the original inhabitants, who, the patent acknowledged, had “lawful right” to the contemplated land. It guaranteed clear title and possession only upon the settlers’ extinguishment of Indian title. It gave the Farrett grantees the opportunity to turn a given tract of land into property. This condition required the settlers to confront and reconcile their traditional understanding of land acquisition and tenure with the native land tenure system. After all, the Farrett Patent required the patentees to negotiate directly with and to acquire a deed or treaty from the appropriate native authorities. This patent assumed that natives and settlers could reach a “meeting of the minds” (required to sustain the legality of any contract under English common law) and accepted the legal competency of Indian polities. Indeed, many aspects of the native land tenure system were familiar to the settlers; in addition, many native communities had their own cultural mediators to act as their advocates. Indigenous communities were not utopian communalists; not only did they recognize relatively clear territorial boundaries between distinct groups (often using

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natural landmarks as demarcations), but also there was a loose “peopling-and-planting” aspect to territoriality among the Ninnimissinuok. A sachem who could not command sufficient numbers to populate and dominate a region was soon without followers, territory, or power.18 And, like their English counterparts, the Indians also acknowledged several forms of individual land allotment and rights to land.19 For example, the right to allot land was within the purview of the sachem and was similar to what has been called “usufruct rights.”20 The sachem could allot land to commoners, kinsmen, or loyal followers. He could make such an allotment for life or attach hereditary rights to it. He could demand a single payment or a series of payments, and he could revoke the allotment and reallocate the resource. In fact, many such allotments were made in acknowledgment of the individual’s or family’s loyalty and continued service to the sachemship, thereby bearing, in the settlers’ eyes, familiar feudal markers.21 Conversely, those who had no claim to the use of the polity’s land were known among the Ninnimissinuok as matnowesuonckane, or those “who have no name.”22 The early settlers brought from England numerous notions about land that were remarkably similar to those of their native counterparts, particularly with regard to tying the rights of an individual or family unit to land usage. Some of these notions were rejected, some reinforced, and others reworked in the settlers’ new surroundings.23 The all-important English settler practice of peopling and planting was a direct result of the colonists’ Atlantic American experience, and it, along with the settlers’ and natives’ common experiences (so often ignored), as much as their differences, structured the early settler-Indian treaties and deeds system. Even while commodification of the land became increasingly important to the settlers, it intersected with and was influenced and tempered by impulses that very closely paralleled those of their native neighbors, the emerging Puritan notion of volunteerism, and older, traditional English ways, many of which had been abandoned in England. The resulting settler-native deeds that structured the land on the East End during the first two decades of English settlement not only fulfilled the conditions for ownership set forth in Farrett’s Patent but also had the unintended consequence of becoming the prime tool by which settlers (individuals and towns) and natives negotiated for, mediated, and reconciled their respective uses of the land. On an immediate level, these deeds served both the settlers’ and the natives’ purposes. From the settlers’ perspective, obtaining these deeds

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completed what by this time had become the de facto accepted local requirements for securing lands both from their native owners and against any and all future English or other European claimants. It also provided them with the basis to exercise freehold ownership over an area. From a native perspective, these deeds were not simply wholesale giveaways of their lands but represented settler acknowledgment that native peoples had intrinsic rights to the land; they were the natives’ attempt to protect their fundamental interests to the land, adjacent waterways, and beaches and were perceived as a way to secure other long-term benefits, such as military protection. Prior to the Pequot War, local English settler authorities, notably those in Massachusetts Bay Colony, often sought to avoid entering into agreements that provided for such reciprocal obligations. They assiduously avoided the establishment of the traditional protectorate relationship enjoyed between the various Indian communities. This was the case only months prior to the Bay’s war of extermination against the Pequots. At that time, Massachusetts attempted to impose a treaty of submission on the Pequots, rather than one that would have established a protectorateclient relationship. The Pequots emphatically rejected it.24 However, after the Pequot War, that policy began to undergo a subtle but noticeable shift, particularly among many of the settler communities living outside Massachusetts Bay’s oversight. Perhaps the settlers’ recent experience with the Pequots, despite their declared victory, demonstrated that native-settler relations could not be pursued in such a unilateral fashion without the settlers’ paying dearly in their most valuable resource, human capital. The immediate post–Pequot War dealings between the East End native communities and their English neighbors at Southampton, as well as the local colonial authorities on the mainland, illustrate the balance both sides attempted to strike in reconciling conflicting policies. Indeed, during their first two decades of direct contact with the English, the East End Ninnimissinuok persistently insisted on such a protectorate relationship and (at least as measured by certain objective facts, such as the transference of Manchonake Island to Lion Gardiner and the military aid provision in the settler-Shinnecock 1640 Southampton deed) appeared, in some measure, to succeed. This first of many deeds for East End lands was entered into on December 13, 1640, between the Shinnecock and Southampton settlers. The “Southampton deed,” as it is commonly called, provided that, in exchange for land, the Shinnecocks would receive corn and cloth coats. The

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coats, as indicated by the deed, had already been delivered at the time the deed was signed. The corn, on the other hand, would be distributed in September. This provision was clearly written in anticipation of the settlers’ first full harvest. Historians of this exchange have traditionally focused on the one-time payment of corn and coats to support their contention that the deed was one-sided (the Shinnecocks received no real value for the land) and that this was a document by and for the settlers.25 This analysis ignores several important aspects of that treaty that appear to have been consciously and deliberately negotiated by the Shinnecocks. First, the deed provided for an affirmative obligation on the part of the Southampton settlers to “defend us the sayed Indians from the unjust violence of whatever Indians shall illegally assaile us.”26 The significance of that provision cannot be ignored. It reflected the new realities forced on the Shinnecocks and the other East End native polities in the aftermath of a war that had deprived them of their longstanding client relationship with the Pequots and had left them exposed to the hazards of the emerging Atlantic American world. As such, many of the provisions in these early deeds appear to have been an attempt by the Shinnecocks and Montauketts to recreate some, if not all, of the aspects of that former protectorate relationship, which had been a complicated mix of familial, military, and land obligations. In the 1640 Southampton deed, the Shinnecocks linked land, a tributary-type payment of corn, and military obligations in an attempt to impose a more familiar and traditional structure onto their developing relationship with the Southampton settlers. This strategy was not unique to the Shinnecocks. The Montaukett sachem Wyandanch’s overture to Gardiner and the subsequent transference of an island in the Long Island Sound to Gardiner signaled not simply the beginning of a policy shift toward the acceptance of an English ally but was another attempt to draw the English settlers into the native world. The offer to Gardiner, it should be remembered, was made on the heels of an abortive attempt by Ninigret to substitute the Niantics for the recently defeated Pequots in their relationship with the Montauketts. The willingness and the ability of the English to halt Niantic aggression against the Montauketts convinced many East End Indian leaders, such as Wyandanch, that the English could and would serve as useful and powerful allies. The placement of Gardiner on a nearby adjacent island, like the Southampton deed, was one of many attempts by these native communities to use land in a most traditional manner—to cement political ties and concurrent obligations through the

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exchange or use of land in order to fashion a lasting and satisfactory client/protectorate relationship between themselves and the English.27 Four years after signing the Southampton deed, the Manhasset sachem Poggatacut appeared before the commissioners of the United Colonies of New England in Hartford on behalf of his and other East End communities.28 His petition asserted that a tributary relationship existed between these communities and the English and further declared that, since the East End native polities had “observed the articles of agreement, he might receive from them a certfyicate whereby his relacon to the English might appeare.”29 In response to this request, the commissioners issued him the following certificate: “To all whom it may concerne . . . whereas the Indians in the Easterne parts of long Iland are become tributaries to the English and have engaged their lands to them . . . it is our desires that the said Sagamores and their companies may enjoy full peace without disturbance.”30 The request for a “certificate” indicates that the indigenous communities’ leadership quickly came to understand the symbolic importance of the written word to the English, not dissimilar to the traditional exchange of wampum between native polities. Even after the certificate was issued, some within the English leadership resisted the idea that such a relationship had been established. Privately, the commissioners asserted that “the Colonies be no ways engaged to protect him.” Yet, the commissioners were not so certain of their position that they were willing to publicly disavow the certificate. The reactions and actions of the commissioners testify to their unfolding understanding of native diplomatic sensibilities and of the need to maintain the semblance of acquiescence. The commissioners’ certificate is yet another instance of the use by the region’s indigenous peoples of land to cement a client/protectorate relationship. Despite some discussion to the contrary, the commissioners acknowledged that the natives had “engaged their lands” to the English and thereby “become tributaries to the English.”31 While there is no denying that the English settlers were clearly acting in their perceived self-interest, this does not negate the fact that the colonists, at least outwardly, entered into a relationship that exhibited the hallmarks of a traditional Ninnimissinuok-style political alliance. From 1638 through the 1660s, the actions of the English signaled to the East End native communities that such a relationship existed. That bond was also symbolized and manifested by the relationship between Lion Gardiner, master of his own island and a prominent citizen of East

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Hampton, and Wyandanch, who was not only a Montaukett sachem but who became known as a keetasontimoog, or grand sachem.32 Friendship as well as political and economic ties characterized that complex and nuanced relationship. The relationship was tested in 1653, when Ninigret again attacked the Montauketts for refusing to join the Niantics and the Narragansetts in a military alliance to drive out the English settlers. The Montauketts turned to their erstwhile ally, East Hampton, for protection. Despite explicit promises to the contrary, the town turned its back on the Montauketts. These settlers were not only anxious over the direct hostilities against Montauketts but were nervously watching the escalating tensions between the mainland English settlers across the Sound and their Dutch neighbors (along with Indian allies of the Dutch) to their west. The East End settlers understood that an outbreak of hostilities between these parties would leave them caught squarely in the middle. In an attempt to remain outside any future conflict, East Hampton resolved that “noe Indian shall Come to the Towne” because it was rumored that the “Dutch hath hired Indians against the English.” And, in typical language of the day, reflecting the understandable uncertainty over identity and alliances, both native and settler towns asserted they could not distinguish the “Indians by face.”33 Yet, while the town either refused to or could not differentiate between native enemies and friends, Gardiner could and did. He never wavered in his loyalty to Wyandanch and immediately petitioned the New England commissioners to lend their support to the Montauketts against the Narragansetts. His pleas to the commissioners in Boston were ignored.34 Undaunted by the lack of mainland English support, Wyandanch marshaled his forces and met the Narragansetts on Block Island, where the Montauketts killed thirty of their foes. The Narragansetts responded by invading Montaukett lands, burning cornfields, and taking hostage fourteen Montaukett women, including Wyandanch’s daughter. Local history places the attack on the eve of Wyandanch’s daughter’s wedding.35 Only the kidnapping of a prominent kinswoman to the sachemship roused the mainland commissioners to take action on behalf of their putative Long Island native allies. Thomas Stanton was quickly dispatched to ascertain which sachem was responsible for the attack on the Montauketts and the abduction of their women. When Stanton finally caught up with and confronted Ninigret, he read Ninigret a message from John Winthrop Jr. demanding the return of the Long Island hostages. To this demand Ninigret asked “what the English had to doe to desire or demand his prisoners and

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tould Thomas they should neither see them nor have them.”36 Stanton returned to the commissioners emptyhanded. Resolution came through the efforts of the Reverend Thomas James, East Hampton’s minister, and Lion Gardiner, two boundary crossers. Speaking on Wyandanch’s behalf, James informed John Winthrop Jr., then residing in Connecticut, that Wyandanch, in light of the commissioners’ seeming repudiation of the promises contained in the 1644 “Certfyicate” obtained by Poggatacut, was seeking to structure a military alliance with the Mohegan sachem, premised on Uncas’s securing the release of the hostages. To demonstrate the Montauketts’ determination to ally themselves with the Mohegans if they proved faithful, Wyandanch had dispatched seven hundred fathoms of wampum to Uncas, with the promise of more upon success. Would such an action, queried James, give “offense to the English in any way”? And did Winthrop Jr. “think not well of it,” or would Winthrop Jr. “be a witness in the unfaithfulness of Uncas, if he shall deceive him in this matter”?37 This was a clear effort by Wyandanch to force the English authorities to either carry out their protectorate duties or face the possibility of an East End native realignment between the Montauketts and the Mohegans. What ensued was a long and fractured debate among the commissioners. They reviewed the actions of the East End natives and had to admit that these peoples generally, and in particular the “longe island Sagamore,” had time and again proved their loyalty and acquitted themselves as good friends to the English. They declared that Ninigret “refuseth to deliver the Captives hee hath soe unjustly taken . . . and unless the blood of these Innocent Indians bee duely Required by the Colonies att his hands neither shall the English nor theire Indian frinds bee safe . . . nor will either our frinds trust us heerafter nor Enemies feare to comite any hostile outrage.” In light of this, it was concluded that “The Commissioners duely weying the promises conceive themselves called by God to make a present war against Ninnegrett.” To carry out this determination, they voted to raise an army of 250 soldiers. The lone dissent came from the Massachusetts Bay commissioner, Simon Bradstreet, who claimed that “no agreement produced . . . proved whereby the Colonies are obliged to protect the long Island Indians.”38 In the end, the commissioners’ determination was stymied when the Massachusetts General Court upheld Bradstreet’s dissent. In sustaining that dissent, the court narrowly construed the 1644 “certificate of protection” obtained by Poggatacut to cover only Poggatacut and the Manhasset Indians and not all

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the native Long Island communities, despite the fact that three other sachems were specifically referenced in that certificate.39 It should be noted that the Bay Colony did not totally disavow the existence of a tributary relationship or the notion that the settlers in fact acknowledged such relationships. It simply construed the underlying certificate on which the relationship was claimed so narrowly as to exclude the instant claimant, that is, Wyandanch and the Montaukett community. This decision precipitated a crisis between the constituent members of the United Colonies. Connecticut, New Haven, and Plymouth had always been more willing to accede to and acknowledge the existence of these protectorate-client relationships between the settlers and natives, while the Bay Colony had tended to reject them. New Haven and Plymouth, in protest against the Bay’s decision, considered withdrawing from the “confederation” and charged Massachusetts with a breach of faith. New Haven went so far as to openly question the basis for the Bay Colony’s refutation of a protectorate relationship with the East End native communities.40 However, despite the Bay’s initial thwarting of the commissioners’ collective will, circumstances reversed that decision. Ninigret attacked Long Island again a year later. John Young, a Southold resident, petitioned the commissioners for assistance on behalf of all inhabitants on the East End, native and settler.41 In response to this, the commissioners declared that Ninigret “hath againe Invaded the long Iland Indians our frind Tributaries and in Covenant with us.” To put a halt to Ninigret’s invasion, the commissioners authorized the payment of 153 pounds to Young to blockade the Long Island Sound for a year against Ninigret’s canoes. Furthermore, the East End townships were ordered to render aid to the East End native communities if they were attacked by Ninigret.42 The very same Simon Bradstreet who had objected to a similar resolution the previous year now assented to this renewed acknowledgment of a tributary relationship between the East End natives and the English settlers. In addition to using land to create a client relationship between the native and the settler communities, the native polities, such as the Shinnecock, actively sought to use these deeds to safeguard their future interests to their lands. In the 1640 Southampton deed, the Shinnecock negotiators refused to sign the document unless an additional condition was added: the reservation of specific lands for Shinnecock use. The settlers’ negotiators acquiesced to the Shinnecocks’ demands, and a clause, added to the deed as a “memorandum,” provided that “Before the subscribing

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of this present writing it is agreed that the Indians above named shall have libertie to break up ground for theire use to the westward of the creek afore mentioned.”43 In essence, the Shinnecocks were granted an in perpetuam usufruct interest. While this reservation (in a strict legal sense) limited the use of the land by the settlers, the form that the reservation took (usufruct) was not unknown to the English signatories. There is little doubt that this clause was added at Shinnecock insistence and was an attempt to modify the impact of the contemplated irrevocable land transfer. There is no reason to believe that the settlers gratuitously appended this privilege; it does, however, indicate that the Shinnecocks (at least their negotiators) understood that English land use practices diverged in some important ways from their own. The 1640 deed stands as a clear example of how English settler and native interests were carefully mediated and given voice, not only in that 1640 deed but also in many of the treaties that followed. The question arises: how could the Shinnecock, who, as a group, had no prior direct contact with the English, negotiate so effectively? The answer may lie in the listed name of one of the signatories, “Checkepuchat.” This Checkepuchat may very well have been Cockenoe, the Shinnecock ahtaskoaog who, in 1640, was said to be living on the mainland. As previously mentioned, Cockenoe was most likely a Shinnecock originally sent to the mainland to observe the activities of both the native and the English settler communities during the Pequot War. After the war, he remained on the mainland, where, for a number of years, he lived in Sergeant Richard Collicut’s household in Dorchester, Massachusetts.44 There, Cockenoe learned to speak, read, and write English and assisted Collicut in his business dealings with the local native communities. Most likely, he was the young Indian that historians have identified as the “first teacher” of the famous English missionary John Eliot.45 By early 1640, Collicut was assigned the task of collecting the wampum tribute owed Massachusetts Bay by those Pequots now residing on Block Island and Long Island, and he became a frequent visitor to the East End.46 While no extant records detail the exact dates of these visits or the name of the native translator who assisted Collicut, circumstances point directly to Cockenoe, who had both the language and the kinship connections to ease that transfer between two former enemies. Cockenoe, like so many native individuals of that time, became known by a number of variant names—Cheehanoo, Chekkonnow, and Cockoo, among others—that appeared on numerous deeds from 1640 until 1687,

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including the 1648 deed for the original East Hampton Township.47 The East Hampton deed bears the name of the Shinnecocks’ interpreter, “Chectanoo,” acknowledged by scholars as that very same Cockenoe.48 In light of Cockenoe’s specialized knowledge, his connection to Collicut in the 1640s, and his access to the local sachemship, it is not overreaching to connect the “Checkepuchat” on the 1640 Southampton deed to the Cockenoe who actively moved within his community and in the region for close to forty years. There were, of course, other means by which the Shinnecocks could have become sufficiently acquainted with English plans for the land to realize that they would be wise to seek such specific protections in that first deed. As kinsmen and tributaries of the mainland Pequots, the East End communities had probably acquired considerable knowledge of the English and their settlement patterns from their mainland allies, knowledge supplemented through the observations of Wyandanch and Cockenoe, who were on the mainland during the Pequot War. At a minimum, they were alerted to the rapidity and rapaciousness with which the English settlers were spreading across the mainland, along with their customs for holding land. By the beginning of the Pequot War, native voices were already expressing concern and a certain degree of mistrust regarding the newcomers’ activities. For example, soon after the Pequots’ defeat, the Narragansetts expressed skepticism regarding the Bay’s plans for the Pequots’ former hunting lands. They were concerned that the Bay Colony was seeking to assert exclusive authority over both Pequot lands and people. To counter these ambitions, they asked John Winthrop to confirm and guarantee the Narragansetts’ free use of Pequot hunting lands. Ninigret personally went to the Bay Colony to secure these lands.49 Considering these publicly voiced concerns, the close connections between the mainland and the eastern Long Island native communities, and the physical presence of at least two Long Island Indians on the mainland during this period, it is very likely that the Shinnecocks had gained sufficient knowledge of English plans to understand the need to insert safeguards into the 1640 deed and subsequent agreements. These same understandings and strategies were reflected in the 1648 founding deed for the town of East Hampton. This deed, entered into between settlers living in Southampton and the Montauketts, reserved to the Montauketts the “Libertie, freely to fish in any or all creeks and ponds, and hunt up and downe in the woods without Molestation. . . . [They] are to have the fynns and tails of all such whales as shall be cast

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upp. . . . Allsoe, they reserve libertie to fish in all convenient places, for shells to make wampum.”50 This significant proviso was surely the product of the signatory sachems’ activism and was aimed at preserving the Montauketts’ quotidian and spiritual life. These provisions also attempted to substantially curtail the settlers’ unbridled access to the marine resources and land contemplated by this deed. There is no reason to believe that the settlers would have gratuitously granted these privileges unless pressed to do so by the Montauketts’ negotiators. The 1648 Easthampton deed highlights the Montauketts’ special relationship to the region’s beaches, waterways, estuaries and wetlands, as well as the growing importance of these sites for the settler communities, and, consequently, the Montauketts’ urgent need to protect their continued access to these resources. The Montauketts, like other coastal Ninnimissinuok polities, perceived the beaches, along with their watery extensions, as critical to their fundamental existence. Not only did much of the Montauketts’ subsistence depend on their continued access and use of these resources, but also their prestige and wealth were intimately connected to these beaches and waterways.51 The daring offshore whaling techniques developed by native peoples testify to the importance of the sea and its resources. Ninnimissinuok hunting crews went to sea in large dugout canoes made from oak or hard pine. Once a whale was sighted, the hunting crews surrounded the whale and attacked it with spears, arrows, and harpoons to which was tied a line of rawhide or vine, along with a buoy made of inflated pieces of animal skin. The captured whale was taken ashore, where the blubber was “tryed” (boiled) and its oil used in cooking and as a waterproofing agent for the animal skins used for clothing and other household goods. Next, the baleen was separated from the flesh and the muscle and the meat boiled and smoked for immediate and future consumption. The very size of these whales—up to fifty-five feet in length—meant that they provided the village with surpluses of blubber, meat, and baleen, which were used as gifts or in trade with other villages.52 Whaling was not simply an activity that provided supplemental calories and trading commodities; it symbolized community cohesiveness, reinforced mutual ties and obligations, and was a symbol of and a gift from the Manitou “Moshup.” Moshup (sometimes known as “Weetuck”) was an important spiritual figure among the coastal peoples of southern New England, and he was honored both in widely practiced rituals and in stories disseminated throughout the region. “Wetucks . . . ,” wrote Roger

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Williams, “wrought great Miracles amongst them . . . walking upon the waters.”53 The Indians on Martha’s Vineyard believe that, when their ancestors arrived on the Vineyard, they found a giant named Moshup, who lived on the island with his wife and five children. To feed his large family, Moshup caught whales and roasted them over a fire fed by whole trees that he had plucked from the soil. One day, his wife and children angered Moshup, and he changed them into a misshapen rock and fish, respectively. Saddened and demoralized by his own action, Moshup abandoned the island. However, before departing, he bestowed a gift on the recently arrived Indians. To help ensure their future well-being, he granted the Indians the use of the drift whales. By the seventeenth century, whaling was a multipurpose activity for the coastal Ninnimissinuok, supplementing the harvest from the land and serving as a reminder to the individual community members of their spiritual and social connections. In remembrance of Moshup’s generosity, native communities throughout the region continued to honor him through stories and sacrifices.54 On the East End, Moshup was commemorated with a powwow (ceremony) whenever a whale was successfully secured. During that ceremony, either the tail or the fin was roasted in his honor so that the shaman could intercede with the gods or spirits on the community’s behalf. In 1605, James Rosier described this ceremony: “when they have killed him [the whale] and dragged him to shore, they call their chief lords together, and sing a song of joy; and those chief lordes, whom they call sagamores, divide the spoil, and give to every many a share, which pieces so distributed, they hang up about their houses for provision.”55 Almost 150 years later, the chronicler and East End resident David Gardiner described a similar ceremony: “The most savory sacrifice made to their great deity was the tail or fin of the whale, which they roasted . . . and a prolonged pow-wow, or religious festival was held. At these festivals great efforts were supposed to be necessary to keep the evil one with-out the charmed circle.”56 After the ceremony, the remainder of the whale was distributed to the rest of the community. The 1648 East Hampton deed provided for the protection not only of the Montauketts’ rights to maritime resources but also of their traditional game rights: “if the Indyans, hunting of any deare, they should chase them into the water, and the English should kill them, the English shall have the body and the Sachem the skin.”57 In that agreement, the sachems, in keeping with their traditional custom, reserved for themselves

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the skin of any deer killed by an Englishman in the water. Even a decade later, native efforts to shape these documents continued. A 1658 deed between Wyandanch and Lion Gardiner secured the former’s “anciently granted” beach rights to the castup whales and license to cut the summer flags and bulrushes and required Gardiner to pay an annual rent of twenty-five shillings in perpetuity.58 Similar provisions routinely informed all deeds and treaties from 1640 on and are affirmations of the Montauketts’ and Shinnecocks’ ongoing relationship to their traditional resources. By signing such deeds, the signatory sachem reaffirmed his traditional role to protect the community’s political independence and economic integrity. What was the meaning of the settlers’ acquiescence in these concessions to native demands? At best, it signaled to these indigenous communities the settlers’ willingness to respect many of their traditional rights to land and (up to a certain point) to construct land use and sharing in ways that would have been unthinkable in England. At the very least, these concessions were interpreted by the native signatories to these deeds as symbolic of a burgeoning reciprocal alliance between the settler and the native communities. Many of these early deeds also established an almost dual sovereignty over the land, since these instruments did not transfer full sovereignty or ownership (the right to unilaterally exclude) to the settlers. Settlers always understood that native title underlay and was essential to the maintenance of their own title. Indeed, some towns, such as Brookhaven, on the East End, included a proviso in such deeds that the native sellers would “defend [the] towns titles to lands.”59 It was not a meaningless provision; settlers frequently called on Indian communities and individuals to defend settler titles. Moreover, the settlers were never able, or for that matter even desired, to fully graft the English land system onto Atlantic America. The settlers’ firm resistance to attempts by the Council for New England and other grandee patentees demonstrates that these settlers selectively rejected those long-established landholding practices that would have reconstituted and replicated much of the moribund social and economic scheme that still shackled much of the English population. Instead, the settlers opted to forge a land tenure system rooted as much in the traditions and practices of the older native populations they encountered as in the practices the settlers had brought from home.

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As such, there was no genuine attempt by the settlers to either unilaterally or wholly extinguish or deny native title, and in many instances the settlers found it desirable to support the continued existence of specific and circumscribed rights or privileges of the native communities, even as the settlers began to assert their own claims. Many of these deeds permitted native peoples to retain their most valued customary rights to the land and its resources—the right to fish, whale, hunt, and gather. Consequently, these agreements often resulted in a certain amount of shared and overlapping use, as well as new and adapted practices and patterns for the land by and between settler and their native neighbors. The result was a profound reworking of both traditional English and native customs and practices.60 The newcomers’ reference to and actual dependence on native title to support their current claims persisted throughout the colonial era. The resolution of a 1657 Southampton boundary dispute hinged on the testimony of a Shinnecock sachem’s wife. When asked “how farr Shinecock Indians bounds went when the english bought the land of them,” she responded, “it went to george cake or wainscott at the least.”61 It was this “deposition” that Southampton relied on to successfully ward off the attack to its territorial integrity. Even at the close of the seventeenth century, native title and precontact boundaries continued to be vital to settler title. In 1682, Nat Indian, a Montaukett, entered into a private lease for lands on Montauk with the settler Josiah Hobbard. After the lease was executed, Hobbard publicly let it be known that he planned to people and plant these lands. This arrangement brought a swift and public outcry from a group of citizens in East Hampton known as the “Montauk proprietors,” despite the fact that certain interests in these same lands were reserved to the Montauketts.62 The private lease was seen as a threat to the Montauk proprietors’ alleged interests. By a vote of the “Inhabitants to whom the land doth belong,” the East Hampton township decided to “get ye Indians together to speake with them about the land to see if they will Maintaine our right in ye land and to prepare matters for a trial.”63 Lawyers were hired, but the claim never went to trial. Sixteen months after the dispute began, the town reached an agreement with Hobbard that accepted him as a Montauk proprietor with an interest in the undivided Montauk lands.64 In exchange, he agreed to disclaim his interests under the nativegenerated lease. The wily Hobbard clearly understood the complicated

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land relationships in the region and used his knowledge of land and community to leverage his interests. First, he challenged the putative proprietors’ underlying title and interest to Montauk by setting up an alternative claim based on Nat Indian’s native title. Second, he threatened to people and plant the disputed area, a step that would have further secured his claim against theirs. The Montauk proprietors countered Hobbard’s putative claim by also attempting to secure and legitimize their claim through a native title. To do so, they turned to the Montaukett community itself in support of their claim. Unfortunately there is no record of the Montaukett response.65 In the end, however, they settled their dispute with Hobbard (who was not an inconsequential member of the East Hampton community) by offering him entry into the Montauk proprietorship, thus linking what had been mutually exclusive and competing interests. Ironically, the proprietors used a very “Indian” method for dispute resolution; they coupled community membership and land. While the colonists arrived hungry for land, they also arrived without a fully formed grasp of a modern, commodified land system. Additionally, they came prepared, almost uniformly, to reject much of the traditional English land system and to fulfill their dreams of a better life anchored by land. In particular, they rejected those aspects of English land tenure that were most firmly rooted in England’s feudal traditions, which, in reality, neither the Crown nor the home authorities had the ability to impose on the New England settlements. However, while the settlers arrived to find themselves relatively free of old encumbrances, they could not simply take possession of territory that was already inhabited by native peoples. What they found in southern New England was an indigenous land system already in place that could not be totally disregarded. The settlers’ use of land appears to have been influenced by their observations and interactions with their native neighbors. This led to the beginnings of an American land tenure system that had roots in England but that was also influenced by the factors and circumstances that the settlers found in New England, including the psychological and technical impact of peopling and planting and contact with the indigenous system. Nor did the takeover of the East End by an imperial English grantee, the Duke of York, immediately change the East End settlers’ relationship to the land. Despite the Duke’s efforts to limit and centralize land acquisition on the East End, the settlers clung tenaciously to the customs and

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practices they had developed over the past forty-odd years on the basis of English patents, native deeds, and peopling and planting. Ultimately, title and use of lands in the region became so intertwined with native title and use that the settlers could not repudiate the latter without denying their own interests and legitimacy.66

6 Atlantic American Communities Take Root on the East End

By 1640, after the Pequot War, Atlantic American communities began to take root on the East End, reshaping the land and all people’s relationship to it. This transformation was as much predicated in the parties’ precontact traditions and heritage as in the new circumstances created by the close and constant proximity of natives and settlers. Groups were forced to search out innovative ways to accommodate the other and to rework their own intracommunity dynamics. Particularly for the emerging settler towns, it brought about an intertwining of old, new, and reworked practices. As a result, the East End settler towns grew into genuine Atlantic American communities founded on principles and expectations that could only have come out of their sojourn in southern New England; because of their singular situation, they were forced to consider closely the interests of other European groups, such as the Dutch, and particularly those of their Indian neighbors. In similar fashion, the East End native communities began to feel the pull of the transatlantic world and adjusted their traditional expectations and way of life to accommodate the Atlantic world that was rapidly enveloping the entire region. Many of the outward expressions of these Atlantic American towns seemed to closely mirror the Ninnimissinuok, particularly in their formulation of community membership, which was closely linked to the individual’s or family’s right to use or own land, along with other economic privileges. These new towns did not permit just anyone to engage the land or make use of local resources but required town “admission.” This prerequisite transformed land ownership, and with it the right to access economic opportunities, into more than a mere material condition; land

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ownership signified community membership, much the same way it did among the Ninnimissinuok. Simultaneously, these settlers adopted a highly individualistic manner of holding land, the freehold, in seeming contradiction to the more communal patterns of life just described. Yet, the apparent contradictions between voluntary, individual action and communal obligations was not as unsolvable as might appear; in fact, over time these became complementary and mutually reinforcing. It was in this liminal space, where these seeming contradictions between the interests of the individual and those of the community and among the old, the new, and the adapted were negotiated; it was in this space that towns, such as those founded on the East End, began to take shape. In Atlantic America, the individual found that access to land and resources depended on one’s status as a community member and on fulfillment of community obligations. In turn, this status and the accompanying obligations triggered the community’s obligation to provide the member the opportunity to use assets, mostly land and its associated resources. Life in these Atlantic American towns became a circle of mutually reinforcing, voluntarily assumed obligations and benefits, best exemplified in the individuals’ and communities’ relationship to, use of, and conceptualization of land.

The Voluntary Community The East End settler villages were typical examples of seventeenth-century towns in southern New England; houses and home lots were settled in close proximity, and there existed a common street, village green, or home pasture, augmented by common fields individually allotted outside the town for mowing and tillage. Any undivided town lands were held in reserve to allocate or sell at a later date. During the time these vast surrounding tracts remained undivided, they were used for pasture and woodland purposes and regulated by guidelines promulgated by the town.1 In many respects, the outward appearance of these towns and villages was not unlike that of similar towns in the rural English countryside. Yet, despite any outward similarities, these corporate communities, created through private compacts, embodied Atlantic America’s reconfigured reality and shifting identities. The growth of this distinctive transatlantic spirit was commonly expressed through the settlers’ treatment of and relationship to land. On the East End, as elsewhere in southern New England, this distinctive Atlantic American spirit, which rejected

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much of the traditional English landholding patterns, where baronial estates were tilled and managed by a variety of tenants and copyholders, instead turned to fee-simple holdings that were tempered by a spirit of volunteerism.2 These settlers also veered away from the prevalent trend in England of enclosing the common fields and converting these into private lands, which benefited the few, leaving most Englishmen still landless.3 Another reason for the drastic change in the land tenure system implemented in southern New England was the chronic labor shortage that existed in the region. It permitted the individual to wield power that would have been unheard of in labor-glutted England. Chronically labor-starved southern New England towns competed for persons who had both “good conversation” and needed skills. Qualified potential residents were therefore in a position to make a demand that would have been impossible in England—a demand for land. Coincidentally, land was the only tangible resource these towns had at their disposal to lure new settlers. Countless settlers, such as Ezekiel Sanford, in 1678, benefited from this situation. Southampton offered Sanford fifteen acres, provided that he “continue in the towne & follow his vocation of making cart wheels the term of seven years from his time, at a reasonable rate and after that the land to be at his own dispose.” Likewise, in 1688, Joseph Wickham parlayed his skill as a tanner into an invitation to become a Southampton inhabitant and to acquire land.4 The region’s settlers also eliminated the traditional English controls over trade and labor, along with artisan wages and prices, refusing to reproduce the British merchant and craft guilds and British poor laws that functioned as occupational gatekeepers and restricted the underprivileged from seeking opportunities outside their designated parishes.5 This allowed towns in southern New England to become relatively open arenas for economic and social advancement as the two parties—the town and the individual—came to an agreement regarding inhabitancy, cemented, more often than not, with outright grants of land or promises of future grants of land.6 The settlers’ new surroundings also freed them to reject the mandatory nature of church membership in England and transformed southern New England congregations into voluntary associations based on mutual consent and consensus both among its congregants and between the congregation and the minister.7 These religious gatherings chose not only their own members but also their own ministers and even wielded the power

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to ordain (or not) their spiritual guides. All of this was in distinct contrast to the practices of the English Anglican church they had left behind.8 This spiritual sanctioning of a certain range of volunteerism, along with the influence of neighboring native communities and an abundance of land, facilitated the implementation of secular, voluntary communities.9 These sentiments were expressed in all aspects of a community’s life, from the town’s founding covenant to the establishment of formal requirements for town residency. Undertakers, such as those who founded Southampton, voluntarily came together for this purpose and agreed on town constitutions or covenants that set out the general terms and conditions for town life, which gave rise to the notion of mutuality. This pattern was carried through most of the seventeenth century. A little more than a decade after Southampton’s settlement, Easthampton, a spinoff town, voiced these same sentiments in its founding covenant: “that we the inhabitants . . . are now dwelling together . . . the vote of the major part, shall be in force among us.”10 The Southampton undertakers’ founding covenant illustrates the influence of this underlying spirit of volunteerism. Southampton, like so many southern New England towns, was, at heart, a private undertaking, underwritten by investors who agreed on the rights and obligations within and to the community. Of utmost importance was their founding document, which provided the terms and conditions under which not only the original but future inhabitants could own and dispose of individual freeholds and detailed entitlement to the town’s undivided lands.11 The Southampton undertakers sought to control land development and limited the size of homes and planting lots to four and twelve acres, respectively. These types of conditions were typical of the East End towns. A 1650 East Hampton law, for example, provided that a freeholder could only sell or lease his land with town permission: “whosoever shall take up a lot in Town shall live upon it himself and also that no man shall sell his allotment or any part thereof unless it be to such as ye Towne shall approve of and give consent to ye sale thereof.”12 The town enforced this ordinance in 1651, when Goodman Meggs attempted to lease his lot to a prospective newcomer, James Still. The town enjoined Meggs from leasing to Still and also ordered that Still “shall not stay here.”13 Likewise, when a Southampton inhabitant, Mr. Miller, made application to sell his lot, only conditional permission was granted. Recalling the rules that regulate modern cooperative apartments, the town reminded him that since

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the lot he owned was “graunted him by the towne” the sale could be concluded only “to such a one as the towne shall like and accept as a neighbor.”14 The history of the founding of these towns signaled the rise of self-selected communities in Atlantic America, accomplished through voluntary association and an ongoing reaffirmation that the covenant accepted by the governmental entity and the individual was based on principles agreed to and undertaken by all, rather than on conditions imposed through the accident of birthplace or status. These communities sought to balance the needs of the individual and the community—the need to give the individual the tools with which to achieve a measure of personal material success and independence within a sphere that maintained the corporate community’s integrity and stability. Two interconnected methods were adopted to achieve this: the implementation of the station of inhabitancy and the vetting of prospective settlers. Inhabitancy—full community membership—entitled an individual to a panoply of rights and obligations and was central to the Atlantic American experience. In Southampton’s founding documents, the term “inhabitant” recurs frequently, as it does in similar southern New England colonial town documents, though the term was never officially defined in either colonial or local town laws.15 Its frequent and widespread use throughout the region indicates that an inhabitant was a specific category of town membership and endowed the holder with specific rights and obligations.16 Inhabitancy closely mirrored the status of the missinnuok, who, as full members of the community, were entitled to full access to its resources, whereas the matnowesuonckane, simple residents or servants, had more limited rights. The experience of one East Hampton resident, Renock Garrison, demonstrates how this system worked. In 1673, Garrison had lived in the town for at least four years but had still not been admitted as an inhabitant. In that year, he petitioned the town for a small parcel of land. Inhabitancy was yet again rejected, and Garrison was granted only something akin to a life estate and not a freehold: “[if] god should take away the aforesaid renock” within four years of the grant, the parcel would revert back to the town.17 Garrison’s failure to secure the status of inhabitant limited his access to land and resources in East Hampton. Inhabitancy, even once conferred, was revocable, a fact that further reified Atlantic America’s culture of self-selection and volunteerism.

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Richard Smith, a Southampton inhabitant, learned this the hard way. Despite repeated warnings from the magistrates about his “unreverend cariage,” Smith continued in his objectionable behavior, and in 1656, he was given a mere “weekes liberty to prepare himself to depart” from Southampton.18 Inhabitancy could also confer other benefits on those who occupied that station, such as interest in a town’s undivided lands and, in some instances, the opportunity to take advantage of other economic and commercial ventures such as engaging in whaling or milling, operating a wharf, or even owning a “publicke” house.19 All these activities, even from the East End towns’ earliest years, required a town-issued license or some type of permission generally awarded only to inhabitants. In 1644, the inhabitant Edward Howell and the town of Southampton entered into an agreement for Howell to build a mill. That agreement permitted Howell to profit from the mill, provided he supplied “the necessities of the Towne.”20 From this and similar arrangements, these Atlantic American towns developed a framework through which to provide for their inhabitants’ relatively liberal access to resources, particularly land, in exchange for an appropriate return to the community. Existing towns sought to maintain their founding spirit by carefully screening prospective residents. Towns tended to look for individuals “known to be of an honest conversation and accepted by a major part of the towne.”21 On May 6, 1648, Southampton received Thomas Robbinson as an inhabitant. Robbison’s inhabitancy came with a fifty-pound lot freehold, provided he “be not under any scandalous crime which may be layed to his charge for 6 months after ye date hereof and that he carry himself heare as becometh an honest man.”22 Even nearby Brookhaven, settled fifteen years after Southampton, continued this practice, using a formally appointed committee charged with investigating the character of potential settlers. This process promoted a sense within these communities that the corporate entity and the individual were mutually self-sustaining. Admittance to a town or village, while voluntarily offered and received, was not without attendant obligations. Charges, such as taxes, were often levied. However, other duties, often of a nonmonetary nature (e.g., public labor), were required of inhabitants.23 Some could be performed concurrent with the individual’s private activities, while others could not, so that the line between public and private labor was often blurred throughout much of the seventeenth century. Some of these

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obligations had both a financial and a civic component. Community services could include serving on a jury or holding unremunerated town offices, such as those of magistrate and deputy. These were often time consuming and took the inhabitant away from his own private endeavors. Community service during the seventeenth century seems to have weighed so heavily on some that the burdens outweighed the benefits, and many individuals declined inhabitancy. Decliners must have become very numerous, since it was not unusual for a town to sanction those who refused the status through the imposition of a hefty fine, as happened in Southampton.24 Since the daily polity of these towns was played out at the town meetings and through appointed offices (similar to how the institution of the sachemship functioned), the entire voluntary scheme of these towns depended on responsible individuals’ assuming the status of inhabitancy, along with its attendant obligations. These towns’ laws reflected this: “all Inhabitants of this towne shall make their personal Appearance . . . upon every such default to paye two shillings. And who so shal appear and then depart without License of the Court shall be lyable to paye for every such default two shillings and stand to the further censure of the Court.” Later towns were empowered to order the seizure and sale of a fined party’s goods in the event the judgment remained unsatisfied for more than three days. Land ownership on the East End, as in many areas of southern New England, became a marker of community membership. When an East End town agreed to allot town lands or permitted a private land transfer to an outsider, that action told both the town and the recipient of the land that the new owner had been formally received into that community and consequently was entitled to a mélange of reciprocal rights, obligations, and even incentives. As among the Ninnimissinuok, land was used to reward community members who were particularly valued. On November 6, 1651, the town designated James Mulford as a whale watchman. This was an important function, since, as early as 1644, the East End towns had discovered the economic utility to the town and to individuals of recovering stranded and beached whales. Eleven days after his appointment, Mulford was given an additional two acres on the plain in “Consideration of the smallness of his accommodations.”25 Inhabitancy was always a prerequisite for the right to share in any future division of undivided town lands, and it became an important avenue for economic growth.26 It was also a minimal threshold requirement for

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voting on the East End, since only male inhabitants and landowners could exercise the franchise.27 The granting of inhabitancy, licenses, and land allotments was of paramount importance to town residents.28 Throughout much of southern New England during the seventeenth century, community membership, and particularly inhabitancy as it became a prerequisite for land ownership, was the gateway to opportunity in the East End English towns and throughout southern New England.

Seas, Bays, and Whales The East End settlers, like the coastal Ninnimissinuok, treated the resources connected to the tidal bays, inlets, and adjacent seas as extensions of the land. Nothing exemplifies this better than these communities’ evolving relationship to the whales that were off the East End coastline in abundance between October through April. In 1644, Southampton designated these sea mammals “God’s Provydence.” To better avail themselves of this gift from God, the town divided itself into four whalewatching wards. If a whale was found, two persons from each ward, drawn by lot, were appointed to cut up the whale and “for their paynes have a double share.” The rest of the whale was divided not only between the town inhabitants but among their dependents (women and minors), as well as servants, provided that “such person when it falls into his ward [be] a sufficient man to be imployed aboute it.” Laws providing for fines or a whipping for shirking one’s whaling duties reinforced this concept.29 Southampton permitted the introduction of private whaling endeavors, or, as they were known, “whale designs,” beginning in 1650, when it granted a license to John Odgen, a Southampton inhabitant, and his whaling company, organized to search for and capture offshore whales within town waters. The seven-year town license permitted the Ogden Company “free liberty without interruption from the Inhabitants . . . to kill whales upon the South sea at or within any part of the bounds of the saide towne.” This license could be revoked if, during the company’s first year of operation, it failed to prove itself “some what effectual.” That license also safeguarded and retained what the town referred to as its “traditional privledge . . . in dead whales.”30 Only four short years after the license was issued, Southampton sought to clarify its “traditional privilege,” because the Ogden Company had begun to harvest the drift whales found within the Shinnecock gut, foreclosing the ability of the town to

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communally harvest these whales. In response to this poaching, Southampton declared that the “said company are not to meddle with them [whales]” and must remember that it was limited to whaling on the open sea.31 This licensing agreement mirrored the Montauketts’ attempts to safeguard their “traditional rights” to whales as increased competition from the settler towns put these interests in jeopardy. A 1648 deed negotiated by Wyandanch provided that the “fynns and tails of all such whales as shall be cast upp” belonged to the Montauketts. Similarly, the Ogden’s license from Southampton sought to protect what the settler community had come to believe were its traditional rights.32 In theory, at least, both Southampton’s and Montaukett’s “traditional privileges” were not to be disturbed or diminished by other interests, and for at least twenty years from the founding of Southampton, these competing interests for the most part were able to coexist. However, before the end of the seventeenth century, the settler, Montaukett, and Shinnecock communities found it increasingly difficult to exercise or protect their traditional privileges regarding whales because of overfishing and increased and aggressive competition from private whaling companies. Before that century’s close, both the native and the settler communities’ set-asides to drift whales had become a factual anachronism.

Native and Settler Land Patterns Intersect Just as some historians have identified “persistent English localisms”33— those patterns of life that were successfully transplanted from England to America—so too there existed persistent “native localisms,” particularly those related to the traditional native relationship to land. These native localisms were embedded in the settlers’ relationship to the land within the emerging communities. As a result, settler towns and native villages displayed some striking similarities. The Atlantic American form of inhabitancy was rooted not only in the settlers’ precontact traditions but also in Ninnimissinuok ways. Roger Williams and others described a type of inhabitancy in the local Ninnimissinuok communities that was premised on individual access to land and other resources on community membership (though the Ninnimissinuok never allocated land in fee simple). For example, settler townships developed policies that promoted the conservation of resources to keep and attract new settlers (in 1675, East

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Hampton inhabitants were ordered to conserve the area’s timber or face a five-pound fine); similarly, the sachems among the coastal Ninnimissinuok accumulated and distributed goods and resources to retain old followers and even attract new ones.34 Southampton town authorities declared that vacant or abandoned town lands would be distributed to “Inhabitants for the good of the public”;35 in similar fashion, the sachem’s power and ability to retain his followers was rooted in his ability to command and distribute resources. A failure by either a town (as seen, for example, in Lynn) or a regional sachem to offer sufficient opportunities to land or other resources would result in what among settlers was referred to as “outmigrations” or, for a sachem, the desertion of his people, who would go “live under other sachems.”36 Both settler and native authorities understood this demographic fluidity and tied land and resource access to mutuality and community membership.37 Other aspects of English settlement activities tied these people to their native neighbors and preserved native localisms. More often than not, settlers preferred, during the initial settlement phase, to use land previously cleared and occupied by native communities, such as the Montauketts and the Shinnecocks. Settlers often referred to these as the “old fields” or “Indian fields.”38 The first Southold settlers chose their first planting fields not from those they deemed exceptionally fertile but from lands that gave evidence of prior agricultural use. Southold’s first land division was the seventy-acre “old field,” which lay a mile east of the village. Southold’s town records noted that the field had been cleared of woods and brush and that its soil was still filled with the remnants of oyster and clam shells.39 The crops the settlers planted were also influenced by the land’s native inheritance. The first East End settlers planted indigenous crops of pumpkins, squash, corn, and turnips. Well into the nineteenth century, East End farmers could still be found planting in native-style corn hills, rather than the European-style rows, and serving “Nausamp,” anglicized as “samp” (native corn mush), as part of their Sabbath meal. Samp, the settlers declared, was “exceeding wholesome for English bodies.” Nineteenth-century ship captains remarked that they knew when they were within striking distance of Southampton’s port by the sound of the samp mortars carried by the winds.40 Native localisms also found their way into the settlers’ use of the sea and its bounty. Colonists readily emulated the East End native groups’ use of the area’s shoreline and waterways. A substantial number of the first

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East End settlers had little or no experience exploiting coastal resources, and necessity and the desire to fully exploit their new home’s resources motivated them to quickly adapt native practices in order to take full advantage of the bays and beaches. Settlers readily added a variety of fish and shellfish to the native beans, squashes, and corn that made up their diet; the area’s salt meadows furnished the hay for their animals. They learned traditional native crabbing methods and adapted native designs for fishhooks and hemp lines and whaling techniques.41 Long Island Indians’ whaling techniques were replicated and then improved on by both the towns and the early whaling companies and were used well into the eighteenth century. The East End towns emulated the native method for harvesting drift whales, waiting for the whale to be beached or to drift close enough to the coast to be clubbed and driven to shore. Whales, as mentioned, provided the Indians and the settlers with both supplemental proteins and a regional trade item. Because of the whales’ importance, the East End native villages had organized much of their seasonal life around the whaling season and provided incentives for community members to alert the village when a whale was offshore. In seeming emulation of their native neighbors, the newcomers also sought to use drift whales for the benefit of the entire community; hence the implementation of whale watch wards. These settler towns also found that the harvesting of drift whales greatly supplemented their lives. Community whaling provided East End settlers with extra income and provided the towns with a marketable commodity with which to discharge its public expenses, such as the salaries of its schoolmasters and ministers. Furthermore, whale oil and whalebone were used as a kind of common currency and for the discharge of private debts; as late as 1672, an East Hampton inhabitant was required to pay a fine in whalebone.42 To maximize their harvest opportunities, the East End towns, like their native neighbors, encouraged individuals to “whale watch” during the whaling season; towns and sachems both offered rewards over and above the typical share to the first individual to spot a stranded whale.43 Both native and settler communities structured many aspects of community life to follow the whaling season, demonstrating the centrality of whaling. For example, the East End settler towns discarded the traditional European farming calendar, which freed children from school obligations during the months of planting and harvesting, and instead followed the cycle of the whale. As early as 1675, East Hampton’s town records record that the town’s

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schoolmaster, John Laughton, agreed to begin the school year on August 16 and to “breake off by reason of the Whale Designe until the first of April.”44 Many historians of colonial southern New England have pointed to the “assertion of Englishness on the landscape” when the settlers discarded indigenous place designations and replaced them with English ones.45 In fact, naming and its attendant significance and consequences held a place of particular importance for the European colonists. As early as 1621, the English Crown complained that the Dutch had “given new names” to several ports in North America claimed and named by the English. In 1632, this complaint resurfaced when Captain Mason protested that the Dutch had named lands between the Virginia Colony and Cape Cod.46 Given the importance of naming, it is equally significant that there are countless examples of instances where the settlers not only retained the Algonquian name for places and things but adapted Algonquian words and took these for their own.47 East End towns named Amagansett, Cutchogue, Mattituck, Sag Harbor, and Wyandanch coexisted next to those with English appellations such as Southampton, Easthampton, Southold, and Brookhaven. An example of a common Algonquian word that the East End settlers worked into their daily vocabulary is sagga. The sagga or apios tuberosa is an edible tuber, sometimes referred to as a groundnut or Indian potato. It was an important and widely available gathered food for the indigenous peoples and was also important to the East End settlers’ diet when they first arrived on Long Island. The East End settlers took the word sagga and used it to name towns and localities: Sag Harbor town, Sagaponack beach, and Sagaponack pond. So entrenched are Algonquian words that even in 1967, residents on the East End created the Sagg Swamp Preserve, and there is a neighborhood currently called Sagaponack. The Sagaponack road constructed in 1656 is still extant, as is the Sag Harbor Turnpike, today simply called the Sagg Turnpike.48 A derivative of sagga is found in the Algonquian word accabonac, meaning “a place where such tubers were in abundance.” Accabonac is today the name of a harbor in the East End town of Springs. A derivative settler localism, bonnacker, refers to those born and bred on the East End or engaged in the fishing trades.49 Ironically, the descendants of these settlers ultimately used an adaptation of an Algonquian word to distinguish individuals born and bred on the East End from outsiders.

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Another way Algonquian words crept into the settler consciousness was in the names given to the waterways that were so vital to the economic life of the East End. The Peconic River and Mecox Bay coexist today with Kellis Pond, Long Pond, and Ocean beach. Roadways received similar treatment, and some of the oldest main roads and highways symbolize the continuity and interplay between the indigenous and the planted cultures.50 The 1650 Mecox Road connected the towns of Water Mill and East Hampton. Even Christian graveyards bear Algonquian name designations; the Mecox graveyard and the Poxabogue graveyard were established in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively.51 This confluence of language stands as a lasting testament to the influence of native culture on what became the more populous settler communities. The new towns, as previously discussed, also relied on traditional Shinnecock and Montaukett boundaries to establish their own legitimacy and territorial limits. This reliance continued well after Indian deeds to land were obtained. The outcome of a 1667 boundary dispute between the towns of East Hampton and Southampton depended on native testimony to prove which town was the legitimate “successor in interest” to original native owners; both litigants alleged that they had acquired the disputed area from the rightful native owner. Both sides produced Indian witnesses to prove their case; an elderly Shinnecock woman who affirmed that local Indian communities had traditionally acknowledged rights to specific territory and precise boundaries presented the most persuasive testimony. To illustrate her point, she gestured to her teeth and explained that when an animal was killed on Shinnecock land by an outsider, “the skin and the flesh was brought to Shinnecock” as acknowledgment of Shinnecock ownership of the area where the animal was killed.52 Southampton then used this testimony to successfully assert its current right to the disputed area on the basis of the fact that the skin and flesh of the animals caught in that sector were still routinely turned over to the Shinnecocks. The court agreed, and Southampton won its case.53 Reliance on evidence about native land rights and native testimony in both intrasettler and settler-native land disputes was routine not only throughout the seventeenth century but up to the end of the colonial era.54 In referring to and relying on the natives’ traditional boundaries to assert and validate their own title, settlers found that certain aspects of the natives’ perspective about land became mingled with their own and influenced the evolving conceptions of land use and ownership taking hold in the region.

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The Duke and the Settlers Late in the summer of 1664, the English conquered all of New Netherland. Immediately, the imperial English authorities began their attempt to take actual possession of the entire region; as a first step in that direction, they renamed the conquered territory “New York,” after its new proprietor, the Duke of York. All of Long Island was now under British control, and the news quickly spread across the island, from west to east. The relief the East End settlers initially felt at the defeat of their Dutch rivals was quickly replaced by anxiety when word spread that the patent issued for “New York” included not only Long Island’s western end but its eastern portion, as well.55 Their sense of foreboding was soon confirmed when Connecticut’s governor, John Winthrop Jr., informed the East End townships that he had received a valid letter-patent for eastern Long Island in the Duke of York’s name. Connecticut, which had exercised jurisdiction over the East End and the East End townships, sent letters protesting the proposed transfer, but to no avail. The Duke, once firmly in control of his new domain, moved quickly to assert full jurisdiction over land in the newly created colony of New York. The “Duke’s Laws” of 1664 required all former landowners to surrender their grants or patents and receive new ones from the Duke. The law also attempted to centralize the land acquisition process by providing that “No Purchase of lands from Indians After the first day of March 1664 shall be Esteemed a good Title without leave first had and obtained from the governour.”56 While the attempt to limit the right of individuals to purchase land directly from the Indians was not new, in the past these types of laws regulating the settlers’ daily lives and their relationship to land and resources had been administered by local authorities and not by an English grandee patentee residing in England.57 Connecticut relinquished jurisdiction over the East End without a fight, but the three largest East End towns, Southold, Southampton, and East Hampton, vigorously resisted the Duke’s claims of jurisdiction. In a letter from New York’s Governor Nicolls, dated December 1, 1664, to Southampton’s Edward Howell and Southold’s John Young, the Duke’s appointed representative to New York Colony imperiously informed the addressees: “You may informe all persons upon Long Island, that his Majesties Commissioners have fully Issued the difference of Bounds, betweene the Duke of Yorkes Pattent, and the Colony of Conecticutt. That the said Commissioners . . . have determined that all long Island doth

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remaine to the Dukes Pattent.” With regard to Long Island’s inhabitants, he further informed them “That I do not expect for the present no other service, but that they will with the same readynesse upon summons and notice given, Joyne in the defense of this his Majesties Territory, as they did in the reducing of it to his Majesties obedience.”58 Such imperial commands were not well received by the East End townships and only reinforced their determination to resist the Duke’s authority. In line with this determination, the East End townships refused the Duke’s order to petition for a new patent, a demand designed to mark the settlers’ submission to the Duke’s jurisdiction and authority. The Southampton settlers grounded their refusal on the fact that they had “purchased ye land wee now possess of the natives, the then proper owners . . . and it by the approbation of ye Lord Sterlings agent . . . and also with long and hard labor, subdued . . . these lands with the peril of our lives.”59 These words reflect nothing more or less than the prevailing trinity that had become the formula for land acquisition in Atlantic America: peopling and planting, native title, and an English patent (in this case, the Stirling patent). The townships’ refusal to apply for a new patent was a direct challenge to imperial English authority. They also asserted another fundamental concept that had taken hold in Atlantic America—volunteerism. In a bold move, these towns contended that since they had voluntarily placed themselves under the “Government and patent of Mr. Winthrop belonging to the Conitycot Patent,” they would either continue under Connecticut’s government or, alternatively, “be a free Corporation, as his majestys Subjects.”60 This refusal to request a new patent also put forward the additional notion that these towns could refuse to become members of the new colonial community being organized by the Duke. Over the next decade, the Duke of York, his representatives in the New York Colony, and the recalcitrant East End towns sparred over these issues.61 The East End townships’ last opportunity to extricate themselves from New York and rejoin Connecticut came in 1673, when the Dutch attempted to retake the former New Netherland. The Dutch challenge quickly failed, but the ensuing chaos provided the eastern townships with the conditions needed to renew their bid to reestablish their historic connection to Connecticut. Southold was the first to take this radical step. At a town meeting, its residents openly declared themselves subjects of Connecticut and not of the Duke of York. While Southold was perhaps the most vocal, East Hampton and Southampton also continued to resist the

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Duke’s claims, and all joined in sending a letter to New York’s governor asking permission to remain part of Connecticut. Their request was duly denied.62 Some twelve years after the Duke’s initial assertion of jurisdiction over the East End the towns fully submitted to the Duke of York’s jurisdiction, and then only when New York’s Governor Andros offered them a patent that permitted the townships to continue to hold their property as freeholders and guaranteed their rights to maintain control over the common lands within their precincts.63 The offer was accepted, in a victory of sorts for the towns. In the past, the Duke had required them to petition for a patent, implying that it was his to grant or refuse. In this instance, a new patent was proffered with the understanding that it would uphold the status quo on the East End. It was perceived as a confirmation of what these towns already knew was theirs; witness the failure of John Lewen, the Duke’s agent, to secure whaling tribute from the East Enders in 1680. In 1680, Lewen was sent to the East End to ascertain and demand the Duke’s “share” in the “Whaling designe,” or what imperial authorities referred to as the “Royal fish,” and “how much it has been for each year and where it has gone.” The East End officials roundly stymied agent Lewen’s attempts, and Lewen returned from the East End emptyhanded. Lewen complained that he could not locate the needed records. Other attempts to force compliance from these towns also met with failure.64 In 1711, Governor Robert Hunter required, in addition to the existing unpopular and uncollected 5 percent tax on whale oil, a colony-issued whaling license. None of these measures was obeyed or went unchallenged by the East End towns. An explanation for the East End settlers’ resistance to the Duke’s attempt to exercise authority over them was expressed by Samuel Mulford, a successful whaler, merchant, farmer, and sometime representative from the East End to the New York Colonial Assembly. Mulford claimed for his constituents what by the eighteenth century these people viewed as their “traditional rights” to fish, whale, and fowl freely, without hindrance from any outside the East End. The manner and expression of this right sounded suspiciously similar to the traditional prerogatives claimed and exercised by the Shinnecocks and Montauketts. In 1690, Samuel Mulford was elected to represent Suffolk County65 in the newly constituted New York Colonial Assembly. He had three goals: first, to establish an official port of entry on the East End; second, to obtain the rescission of the 5 percent whale oil tax; and third, by 1711, to

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win the repeal of the New York Colony requirement that whalers apply for and receive a colony-issued whaling license. Given Mulford’s background, his ardent defense of the settlers’ prerogatives over that trade is no surprise. What many might not anticipate was his rationale, which was not couched in the language of that era’s commercialism but was expressed in terms of the rights due to the East End townships as voluntarily constituted polities. Mulford’s agenda assumed that the East End towns held undisputed control over their lands, adjacent beaches, waterways, and resources. In a subsequently published speech, Mulford laid out the East End settlers’ position. He unequivocally asserted that the East End towns’ claim to their lands was premised on the original settlers’ independent initiatives (peopling and planting), covenants (the founding covenant and the Farrett Patent), and native deeds and on the settlers’ position as successors in interest to their native predecessors’ ancient rights to use and control the area’s adjacent waterways and derivative resources.66 This, Mulford asserted, rendered the attempted regulation of the East End’s “Whale Designe” unacceptable; in Mulford’s own words, these rights were “a Free Custom . . . an Antient Custom . . . more Antient than the Colony of New-York” and “not in any Man’s Memory to the Contrary till of late.”67 Consequently, native localisms also appear to have reinforced the settlers’ tendency to view land ownership as something distinctly disconnected from the whims of a distant sovereign or proprietor. Their title to and use of their land and sea resources were premised on peopling and planting, native deeds, and a prior English grant, all of which took precedent over any other claims.68 The Mulford protest and the general resistance to the Duke’s exercise of jurisdiction were the culmination of changing attitudes regarding the exercise of jurisdictional authority. Over the years, these English settlers had become Atlantic Americans freed from traditional English customs and attitudes, by which the East End towns would have readily accepted New York Colony’s authority. In fact, the attitudes and practices of the Atlantic American settlers in this regard were similar to those of their coastal native neighbors. Relationships within the coastal Ninnimissinuok and their tributaries were usually made possible by a sense of shared identity between the parties. Where such relationships were formed, there was generally a history of shared kinship and similarity of languages, traditions, and lifestyles, as occurred, for example, between the Pequots and the eastern Long Island

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communities.69 These connections were often cemented through the use of land, offers to share resources, and/or proffers of tribute, such as wampum. Unlike European alliances and conquests, among the Ninnimissinuok the creation of such subordinate/protectorate relationships never involved total submission or domination. The relationship between the southern New England English settlements and the local colonial authorities had, until the East End towns’ encounter with the Duke of York, been close in tone to that of the Ninnimissinuok polities, and Mulford’s remonstrance expressed this. This political pattern developed early in the English settlers’ history in the region. The best-known example is the settlement of an independent colony by Thomas Hooker and his followers in 1635 when they essentially “voted with their feet” and removed themselves from Massachusetts Bay Colony’s jurisdiction. Others followed their lead, including the settlers of the East End towns. Southold, settled in 1640, voluntarily placed itself under New Haven Colony’s jurisdiction because it identified with that colony’s orthodox interpretation of Puritanism. Conversely, Southampton, on its founding, opted for independence during its first four years of existence and did not, during that time, acknowledge the authority of any of the established colonial entities, English or Dutch. This is remarkable, considering that Southampton was in fact initially colonized by Massachusetts residents who had requested that colony’s permission to outmigrate and had sought John Winthrop’s imprimatur on its patent before the undertakers removed to Long Island.70 Despite this apparent strong tie, during its first years the Southampton settlement refused any formal connection with Massachusetts or with any other mainland colony. In 1644, Southampton began to explore the possibility of placing itself under the jurisdiction of an English colony. After a great deal of consideration, Southampton entered into negotiations with Connecticut to formally place itself under the latter’s authority. These talks culminated in the “Combination of Southampton with Hartford.”71 Under the negotiated terms of this union, Southampton became a Connecticut town but, according to specifically negotiated provisions, was exempted from certain specific obligations to which other Connecticut towns were subject.72 As their native neighbors had done with the Pequots, Southampton thus used land to denote its alliance, acknowledging its location as part of Connecticut, but it did not view this as implying total submission. Why, it might be asked, was Connecticut willing to negotiate such a deal with Southampton, a relatively small and out-of-the-way town? The

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answer probably lies in the fact that, unlike what would have happened in England, genuine choices were available to the town of Southampton. In the Atlantic American world of 1644, Southampton could have attempted to retain its independence, joined any one of several existing English mainland colonies, or even sought union with its neighbor to the west, the Dutch. This last option was not as remote a possibility as it might seem. After all, there were “English” towns on Long Island’s West End that were under Dutch jurisdiction. The colonial authorities on the southern New England mainland were also cognizant that the Dutch had, of late, had success in luring away “their [English] people.” A number of Bay colonists during this time either threatened to or did leave Massachusetts and place themselves under Dutch jurisdiction. In 1641, the Dutch almost succeeded in luring a number of families from Lynn and Ipswich after they were offered “very fair terms” to induce their removal; they did succeed when the Lady Deborah Moody, formerly of Lynn, and Anne Hutchinson, of Boston, in separate outmigrations, formed English towns under Dutch jurisdiction. These incidents highlight the freedom of the settlers to choose not only where to live but under whom to live. Like their native counterparts, settlers could “vote with their feet.” This attitude became engrained in these Atlantic Americans and was seen in the East End settlers’ resistance to the Duke of York’s assertion of jurisdiction over them.

Setting Boundaries As settlement density increased and the fledgling towns on the East End became firmly established, the fluid boundaries that had marked the earliest years of colonization began to harden as communities of interests became entrenched and established. With this, tensions over specific demarcations in the region arose. Not only did the expected inter-European tensions over the boundary between the Dutch and the English settlements on Long Island intensify, but also tensions between towns and their native neighbors and between the colonial authorities and the East End towns rose. Into these disputes the settlers brought their evolving understanding of their relationship to the land. The boundary between Dutch and English settlers was, from the start of English activities in the region, unsettled and contested. The Dutch, in particular, routinely protested what they saw as English settlers’ en-

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croachment on their lands. These complaints began when the English moved onto their lands in Connecticut and continued until English imperial forces forcibly ejected the Dutch authorities in 1664. When the English settlers, led by Theophilus Eaton, in 1638, purchased land from the area’s native inhabitants and settled what became the New Haven Colony, the Dutch protested that these settlers were “violaters of the Right of his Lords for being soe bould as to meddle att Newhaven within the Limitts of New Netherland.”73 The English denied the Dutch claims, citing the Dutch failure to people and plant in the contested area and alleging that the Dutch native deed was not from the legitimate Indian owner of the contested area.74 This ultimately forced the Dutch, as seen in the Dutch offers of land to English settlers, to add the English method of peopling and planting to their practice of relying on touching and trading and on native deeds. The Dutch pursued this policy until conquered by the English, and by 1661, the Dutch, eager for new settlers, were offering New Netherland as a home to all “Christian people of tender conscience in England or elsewhere.”75 The Dutch employment of peopling and planting proved relatively successful, and a string of what the Dutch referred to as the “English towns” was established under their jurisdiction in what today are Nassau and Queens counties.76 In 1650, these two competing European claimants attempted to resolve their differences on Long Island and in Connecticut by agreeing to an official boundary line. This culminated in the Treaty of Hartford, entered into between the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England and Peter Stuyvesant, Governor General of New Netherlands. It provided for Dutch control over Long Island to extend as far as Oyster Bay Township, at which point English jurisdiction would start and extend as far as the eastern tip of Long Island.77 This treaty did not pretend to affect the rights of the native claimants to the region, whom, by that time, both the Dutch and English treated with for land as independent, sovereign entities.78 It was not only colonial entities that concerned themselves with boundaries; individuals and towns also sought to impose such demarcations. Boundaries reflected delineations between communities of interest. The most striking example of a community trying to maintain its own particular understanding of a boundary was the East End towns’ reaction to the pronouncement in 1664 that they were no longer under the jurisdiction of Connecticut Colony. As discussed in Chapter 5, these towns resisted this boundary shift until 1674. Their last serious resistance to this

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change came during the renewed Dutch-English conflict in 1673. During that conflict, Southampton appealed to the mainland New England colonies for military assistance in repelling any aggression against them by the Dutch and their native allies. The New England colonies responded by immediately dispatching Captain John Winthrop Jr. to the East End to “inquire how the real state of their matters stand in reference to their fears of the enemy . . . and what help may be necessary for their present relief.”79 On learning that that the East End towns were under pressure by the Dutch to “Force and Constrain the people there to take the oath of obedience to the States General and the Prince of Orange,” the Connecticut governor and Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England declared it “expedient . . . to go over to the said island . . . & treat with such forces . . . & doe your endeavor to divert them from using any hostility against said people & from imposing upon them.”80 Oddly, the New England colonies did not refer their former dependents to the governor of New York Colony for assistance. The East End towns, in fact, did surrender to the Dutch that same year; later, after the Dutch were again ousted, they used this temporary political detachment from New York Colony to assert their independence from New York’s grasp.81 Behind the East End towns’ persistent resistance to New York Colony’s authority was their belief that the manner in which their towns were founded and rights to land secured accorded them the prerogative to associate with the colonial entity of their choice, though these townships never went so far as to assert the right to disassociate themselves from the Crown. Yet, the East End towns did believe that, on the local level, they had a right to pursue the political affiliation that they believed best complemented their interests, as they defined them. This right, the towns contended, had been earned through actions they had willingly undertaken to people and plant and to secure the appropriate native deeds and English patents.82 The East End towns proved tenacious in holding to their beliefs regarding their undisputed right not only to their lands but to association. Like their native neighbors who voted with their feet, they claimed a right to choose. In the end, the process of peopling and planting and the acquisition of native deeds did not extinguish the relationship between natives and settlers but served only to create new and different ones both between and within these groups. For the settlers, this relationship transformed their understanding of their relationship to land, which was reflected in the quality

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and substance of both individual and corporate land tenure, and affected their ideology of land, which they, like their native neighbors, used to decipher and define community membership. Within the southern New England colonial community, exclusion from membership in the corporate community meant exclusion from the right to make the fullest use of the land and its collateral economic potential. Land use, therefore, its symbolism and ideology, became one of the key components through which a community’s spirit and vision were expressed and maintained. Like their native counterparts, only community members could share in the community’s resources. While certainly the need for labor helped to fuel this policy, there can be little doubt that the New England communities were rapidly rejecting old England’s patterns of paternalism in favor of a society based on voluntarily assumed and reciprocal obligations.83 Indeed, it appears that the voluntary nature of these communities formed one of the underpinnings of these emerging Atlantic American communities. Thus, not only was land transformed by the conditions found in the region, but in the end it became an ideology unto itself, which informed individuals and towns alike of their rights, duties, and privileges on the East End.

Final Thoughts

In reexamining the history of southern New England’s peoples and settlements, Crossing the Sound discards the traditional notions of a “New” England, which, like the name it bears, conjures up an image of English communities that were virtual facsimiles of their homeland. Over the past decades, historians of southern New England have added immeasurably to our knowledge of the area, through both local town studies and the tremendous amount of research done concerning the lives and activities of the region’s indigenous peoples. Yet, despite these additions to the colonial New England narrative, the reader is often still left with the sense that by the close of the seventeenth century, the transplanted settlers had mostly superimposed English localisms on their new home and cleared away the Indians and, with them, their significant imprint on the land and the new merging communities. This impression relegates the native people to a mere footnote in the region’s postsettlement history. With the advent of Atlantic world studies, a different model with which to analyze and understand the creation of what we today refer to as colonial America has been provided. Within this framework, colonial southern New England can be understood as more than the result of a massive relocation of European settlers (mostly from the British isles during the seventeenth century); it was the consequence of balanced exchanges among a wide variety of groups that were at that time constantly circulating within a complex transatlantic arena. From this perspective, the development of even a relatively homogenous region, such as southern New England, can be reconceived as deeply rooted in the transformative matrix of the Atlantic American experience. This study offers three interconnected propositions that enhance our understanding of community development in colonial southern New England and of the formation of an Atlantic American world. First, it has rejected the prevailing Massachusetts-centric view of community de-

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velopment in seventeenth-century southern New England in favor of recognizing the so-called peripheral areas, such as eastern Long Island, as typical of the entire region’s development and representative of community formation in this new world. Second, the creation of these communities is viewed not only as a clash between a few large, disparate groups—European or English versus native—but also as an interaction of smaller, emerging communities of interest that split off from these larger groups. The idea of the creation of small interest groups allows us to envision the synthesis of a new society and not simply the triumph of one monolithic group over another. With this in mind, there are no clearcut winners or losers in this Atlantic cauldron but simply a vast matrix in which all groups were immersed and from which they emerged altered. Last, this book elucidates the indelible contributions of the region’s native people on Atlantic American community formation, despite their demographic and political losses by the end of the seventeenth century. This new world, therefore, was not simply the product of native declension followed by settler replacement but the result of ongoing interaction between a multitude of transplanted peoples and indigenous communities. In this narrative, the native voice is restored and shown as lasting and integral to a transformative process that flourished on these shores. Underlying but central to these propositions was the approach to land use and possession adopted by the various factions in pursuit of their respective goals, first on the southern New England mainland and then on the East End. The seemingly limitless supply of land profoundly affected strategies for dealing with the new realities gripping the region. For the native communities, which could not have foreseen the momentous demographic shifts that overwhelmed them and the rapidity with which the settler population grew, the perceived abundance of land offered the possibility of pursuing their interests by accommodating the settlers through the use of land to cement and betoken alliances. For the settlers, the perceived surplus of land freed from traditional English obligations permitted them to rework their former relationship to land and to one another, while a shortage of desirable settlers in the region further reinforced the notion that land was the anchor for both community formation and population retention. It was in this new environment that the settlers’ nascent Puritan drive toward spiritual volunteerism intertwined with entrenched native practices and attitudes to help form the basis of Atlantic American communities.

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Also pivotal to this process were the liminal actors or “boundary crossers” who acted as conduits to facilitate group interaction. They alternately negotiated treaties, acted as diplomats and translators, and advocated their respective communities’ position and interests. Most important, they provided the cross-cultural nexus that allowed for a repositioning of the region’s divergent communities. The history of the East End during the seventeenth century offers a unique opportunity to see this process at work and suggests that the roots of an American culture and society developed without a single dominant voice. A little more than one hundred years after the East End towns fully capitulated to New York Colony’s jurisdiction, a resident of Southold township by that time a part of the state of New York in the newly constituted United States of America, crossed the Long Island Sound to embark on a short walking tour of southern New England. Daniel Young’s 1784 diary of his travels and his reaction to what he saw illustrates that the new nation Young had recently fought for and of which he was a citizen, was the creation of a transatlantic experience that had birthed an Atlantic American nation. In his journal, Young wrote nonchalantly of the “Small light collard woman” holding a “few lusty red headed children” who was living in a poor dwelling along a country road. He asked for directions from an “Old Squaw” and observed, without surprise, children—two white, one brown, and two black—playing in an orchard. The world of Daniel Young in 1784, a descendant of seventeenth-century migrants to Long Island’s East End, was indeed the product of a cultural matrix by then almost two hundred years old. Like his ancestors before him, and like all those who inhabited the new American nation, he had crossed the Sound years before into an Atlantic American world.

Notes

notes to the introduction 1. Captain John Underhill, Newes from America (1638), reprinted in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser., 6 (Boston, 1883), 3. 2. The geographic subject of this book is southern New England, which in this book in considered to encompass present-day Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, as well as the Long Island Sound basin, which takes in all the islands in the Long Island Sound, including Long Island, New York. 3. Generally, the seventeenth-century southern New England sachem can be described as a political leader whose authority was secured sometimes through hereditary connections, sometimes due to specific skills, and always with the community’s tacit approval. However, in all cases, the sachem was a member of the institution of the “sachemship,” or local polity. Kathleen Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (Norman, 1996), 140–141. 4. Lion Gardiner, Leift. Gardener His Relation of the Pequot Warres, (1660), reprinted in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser., 3 (Boston, 1883), 150. 5. The English grandees were men of elevated rank who had taken an active political and/or financial interest in the colonization of North America. A few grandees immigrated to North America, but for the most part they remained in England, where their interests often diverged from, and sometimes were at odds with, the English settlers’ interests and plans. 6. The Algonquian term “Ninnimissinuok,” used by the anthropologist Kathleen Bragdon in her book Native People of Southern New England, refers broadly to the indigenous people of southern New England. The word itself connotes people who share a broad common heritage, familial, social and political organization, yet does not necessarily connote membership in a unified polity. Here I adopt Bragdon’s use of “Ninnimissinuok” and use it to designate people indigenous to southern New England in much the same way the term “English” is used to denote membership in a broader ethnic/cultural community, even when the individual or group no longer is an English national or even resides in England proper. Because the paradigm I use views America as created through the struggles and relations between myriad communities of interest and through

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156 | Notes to the Introduction cross-cultural exchanges between groups from both sides of the Atlantic, it seems that the term “Native American” is inappropriate. After all, America, as we use and understand that term, did not exist in the minds of the native people, or in anyone else’s for that matter, in the seventeenth century. “Ninnimissinuok” conveys the understanding that, like the Europeans present in southern New England, the native peoples were themselves divided into smaller interest groups and polities, even though they retained broad cultural, social, economic, and familial connections. When the participants of seventeenth-century southern New England are understood within this context, the emergence of Atlantic American communities becomes more comprehensible. 7. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, 2000), 212, and Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches, Discourse on a Silent Island: Marquesas 1774–1880 (Chicago, 1980), 157. 8. I use the term “Atlantic America” to refer to the new society that emerged in the Americas as a result of the assemblage of peoples, products, and cultures from both sides of the Atlantic. 9. The modern-day location of these shell banks corresponds to coastal Rhode Island, Connecticut, and the northern shore of Long Island; all front the Long Island Sound. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 96–98. 10. Letter from Peter Stuyvesant to the Directors in Holland, 21 April 1660, in E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the History of the State of New York, 15 vols. (Albany, 1856–1887), 14: 470. 11. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York, 1970), 203. 12. Bert Salwen, “Indians of Southern New England and Long Island: Early Period” in Bruce Trigger, ed., Handbook of the North American Indians: The Northeast, vol. 15 (Washington, DC, 1978), 172. 13. The Dutch informant called these Indians “Sinnecox.” They were most likely the East End Shinnecocks. Isaack De Rasieres, “Letter to Samuel Blommaert,” in J. Franklin Jameson, ed., Narratives of New Netherlands (1628; reprinted, New York, 1909), 103. 14. Richard Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle, eds. The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649 (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 98. 15. T. J. Brasser, “Mahican,” in Bruce Trigger, ed., Handbook of the North American Indians: The Northeast, vol. 15 (Washington, DC, 1978), 203; Salwen, “Indians of Southern New England and Long Island: Early Period,” 172. 16. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 98. 17. Roger Ludlow to John Winthrop, June 1638, The Winthrop Papers, 4: 43–48. 18. A freehold is the ownership of real property of undetermined duration, alienable by the owner through sale, gift, or inheritance. It is not subject to traditional feudal obligations and conditions.

Notes to Chapter 1 | 157 19. Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (New York, 1995). Seed has named and pioneered this concept. It refers to the process by which the English settlers staked out a claim through fielding settlers and planting and improving the land. 20. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York, 1976), 128–145. notes to chapter 1 1. Gardiner, His Relation of the Pequot Warres, 151. Fifteen years later, Gardiner’s prophesy was fulfilled in the bloodiest settler-native engagement of that century, King Philip’s War. That conflict directly or indirectly resulted in the death of close to 30 percent of the English settlers and almost half of the native peoples on the southern New England mainland. The horrors of King Philip’s War indelibly stained the culture and consciousness of all southern New Englanders, native and settler alike, for decades to come. 2. Ibid., 150. 3. Dean R. Snow, The Archaeology of New England (London, 1980), 30, 285; Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, xi–xiii. 4. Salwen, “Indians of Southern New England and Long Island: Early Period,” 160. 5. Snow, The Archaeology of New England, 30, 285. 6. Ibid., 33, 85. 7. Ibid., 85. 8. Salwen, “The Indians of Southern New England and Long Island,” 160–176; Ives Goddard, “Eastern Algonquian Languages,” in Bruce Trigger, ed., “Indians of Southern New England and Long Island: Early Period,” Handbook of the North American Indians: The Northeast, vol. 15, (Washington, DC, 1978), 72, identifies the languages of eastern Long Island as “close to those on the opposite shore of Long Island Sound.” He classifies Montauk as a dialect within Mohegan-Pequot. See also Geraldine Laws Edwards, “A Study of Society and Cultural Change among Indian Populations of East Long Island” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook), 55. 9. Salwen, “Indians of Southern New England and Long Island: Early Period,” 160–176; William Starna, “The Pequots in the Early Seventeenth Century,” in Laurence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry, eds., The Pequots in Southern New England, The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation (Norman, 1990), 33–47; Neil Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York, 1982); Snow, The Archaeology of New England. 10. Daniel Denton, A Brief History of New-York (1670; reprinted, London, 1966), 7.

158 | Notes to Chapter 1 11. Adriaen Van der Donck, A Brief Description of the New Netherlands (1656), reprinted in New York Historical Society Collections, 2d ser., 1 (1873), 197. 12. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 66–67. The major deviation between Long Island and other communities on the coastal mainland appears to be in the development of agriculture after 1000 c.e. Snow and Dunford have argued for the introduction of more intensive maize cultivation in southern New England circa 1000 c.e., and Bragdon sees that trend growing, particularly in the coastal mainland, into the sixteenth century. Annette Silver, “Comments on Maize Cultivation in Coastal New York,” North American Archaeologist 2(2) (1981): 117–130; Snow, The Archaeology of New England; Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, ch. 2. However, some Long Island scholars do not see this pattern of development on Long Island. See John A. Strong, “The Evolution of Shinnecock Culture,” in Gaynell Stone, ed., Readings in Long Island Archaeology and Ethnohistory, vol. 6 (Stony Brook, 1983), 26; Lynn Ceci, “Radiocarbon Dating ‘Village’ Sites in Coastal New York: Settlement Pattern and Change in the Middle to Late Woodland,” Man in the Northeast 39 (1990): 2–3; Rose Oldfield Hayes, “Shinnecock Land Ownership and Use: Prehistoric and Colonial Influences on Modern Adaptive Modes,” in Gaynell Stone, ed., Readings in Long Island Archeology and Ethnohistory, vol. 6 (Stony Brook, 1983), 331–335; Kent Lightfoot, Owen Lindauer, and Linda Wicks, “Coastal New York Settlement Patterns: A Perspective from Shelter Island,” Man in the Northeast 30 (1985): 72–75; David Bernstein, personal communication to Kathleen Bragdon, in Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 69; and Edwards, A Study of Social and Cultural Change among Indian Populations of Eastern Long Island, 1, 25–50. Of all the coastal Ninnimissinuok, those residing on the East End appear to have been the slowest to integrate maize cultivation into their dietary patterns; even on the eve of contact, the East End communities do not appear to have depended on maize as heavily as some of their mainland counterparts. 13. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 86. 14. Lawrence C. Wroth, ed., The Voyages of Giovanni da Verrazzano, 1524–1528 (New Haven, 1970), 138–139. 15. Van der Donck, A Description of the New Netherlands, 205. 16. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 141. 17. Van der Donck, A Description of the New Netherlands, 210. 18. Elise Melanie Brenner, “Strategies for Autonomy: An Analysis of Ethnic Mobility in Seventeenth-Century Southern New England” (Ph.D. diss. University of Massachusetts, 1984), 41. 19. William Wood, New England’s Prospect, ed. Alden T. Vaughn (1634; reprinted, Amherst, 1977), 97, Thomas Lechford, Newes from New-England: A Short View of New England’s Present Government, Both Ecclesiastical and

Notes to Chapter 1 | 159 Civil, 1642, reprinted in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 3rd ser., 3 (Boston, 1833), 102; John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler: A Critical Edition of Two Voyages to New-England, ed. Paul J. Lindholdt (1675, reprinted, Hanover, NH, 1988), 308–309. 20. Lara M. Strong and Selcuk Karabag, “Quashawam: Sunksquaw of the Montauk,” Long Island Historical Journal 3(1) (1990): 189, state that the “presence of female leaders was common in Northeastern Algonquian societies.” They further define “sunksquaw” (also known as a “squa sachem”) as “a woman who exercised a dominant role in community decision making.” John A. Strong, “Wyandanch: Sachem of the Montauks,” in Robert S. Grumet, ed., Northeastern Indian Lives, 1632–1816 (Amherst, 1996), 69, writes that Quashawam was “named sunksquaw over the Montauks and Shinnecocks by the towns of Easthampton and Southampton,” implying that she had been imposed on the Montauketts and Shinnecocks by the English, thereby casting doubt on her legitimacy. This analysis does not consider the role that kinship traditionally played in the acceptance of a sachem. 21. Eric Spencer Johnson, “Some by Flatteries and Others by Threatening”: Political Strategies among Native Americans of Seventeenth Century New England (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, 1993), 54–57. 22. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 140. 23. Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (1643), reprinted in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1st ser., 3–4 (Boston, 1849), 229. 24. Gardiner, His Relation of the Pequot Warres, 150. 25. Daniel Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians in New England (1792; reprinted, Towtaid, Maryland, 1970), 20. 26. Johnson, “Some by Flatteries and Others by Threatening,” 41, 45. 27. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 140. 28. Southern New England natives laboriously crafted wampum, primarily during the winter season, from four species of shells found in the cold waters of the Long Island Sound. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 97–98; Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 277, fn. 5; U. Vincent Wilcox, “The Manufacture and Use of Wampum in the Northeast,” in E. Truex, ed., Readings in Archaeological and Ethnohistory (Stony Brook, 1981), 297; and Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (Cambridge, 1997), 20. 29. While there is much debate over wampum’s date of origin, recent archaeological evidence suggests that its manufacture goes back as early as 1000 c.e. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 97–98; Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 277, fn. 5; and Wilcox, “The Manufacture and Use of Wampum in the Northeast,” 297. 30. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 97.

160 | Notes to Chapter 1 31. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York, 1970), 203. 32. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 133–134. 33. Ibid., 142, 169. 34. Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians in New England, 20, and Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 142–143. 35. James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York, 1985), 143. 36. Glenn W. La Fantasie, ed., The Correspondence of Roger Williams, 2 vols. (Hanover, NH, 1988), 1: 117. 37. Johnson, “Some by Flattery, Others by Threatening,” 5– 56. 38. Williams, A Key into the Language of America, 208. 39. Ibid., and Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 142–143. 40. Charles A. Bishop, “Territoriality among Northeastern Algonquians,” Anthropologia 28 (1982): 42. 41. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 137–139; William Cronon, Changes in the Land (New York, 1983), 59–60. Native people owned the land in common, and it was never distributed to community members in fee simple. 42. Edward Winslow, Good Newes from New England, reprinted in Edward Arber, ed., The Pilgrim Fathers, (London, 1897), 587. 43. Roger Williams, The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, 7 vols. (New York, 1963) 1: 180. 44. Williams to Governor Henry Vane or Deputy Governor John Winthrop, May 13, 1637, in La Fantasie, The Correspondence of Roger Williams, 1: 78. 45. John Oldham had been in southern New England probably as early as 1623. The records reveal that by 1630 he had settled in Watertown, a modest town within the confines of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. There he became a freeman, landholder, and prominent trader among the natives, particularly those along Narragansett Bay and the Long Island Sound. Late in the spring of 1636, Oldham was on Block Island to trade with the Indians, despite the growing tensions in the region. He was killed there, allegedly at the hands of the Pequots. His death assumed enormous importance in the annals of settler-native relations, since the Massachusetts Bay authorities used his murder as one of the justifications for their ruinous campaign against the Pequots in 1637. Charles Henry Pope, The Pioneers of Massachusetts (Boston, 1900), 334–335. 46. Roger Williams to Winthrop, October 28, 1637, in The Winthrop Papers 1598–1628, 4 vols. (Boston, 1929), 3: 502–503. 47. Roger Williams to Winthrop, October 28, 1637, in The Winthrop Papers 1598–1628, 4 vols. (Boston, 1929), 3: 502–503. 48. Ibid. 49. Williams, “A Key into the Language America,” 5.

Notes to Chapter 1 | 161 50. Winslow, Good Newes from New England, 587. 51. John M. Cooper, “Land Tenure among the Indians of Eastern and Northern America,” Pennsylvania Archaeologist 6(3) (1938): 56. The beneficiary of a usufruct “hath only the usufruct [use], and not the absolute property of the soil.” Blackstone Comments II, in Oxford English Dictionary at www.dictionary.oed.com. 52. Glenn La Fantasie comments that scholars of native land rights tend to agree that sachems allocated hunting rights to family units and particularly to larger village units. La Fantasie, The Correspondence of Roger Williams, 1: 244. 53. Wood, New England’s Prospect, 75 and 98. 54. La Fantasie, The Correspondence of Roger Williams, 1: 246, ed. note. 55. Ibid., 1: 244–246, ed. note. The Niantics appear to have been closely connected to the Narragansett through political and familial ties and occupied adjacent (and sometimes) overlapping territories. Up until the Pequot War, the Narragansett occupied the senior role in this relationship. After the war, the relationship slowly changed, and the Niantics began to emerge as a regional political force, often speaking for themselves as well as for the Narragansett community. After King Philip’s War (1675–1676), the Narragansett and the Niantic formally merged. 56. Ibid., 1: 255, ed. note. 57. James Truslow Adams, History of the Town of Southampton (1918; reprinted, Port Washington, NY, 1962), 37. 58. Peter Christoph and Florence Christoph, eds., New York Colonial Manuscripts: English Records of the Court of Assizes for the Colony of New York (Baltimore, 1983), 61. 59. Williams, “A Key into the Language of America,” 234. 60. David Grayson Allen, “Dutch and English Mapping of Seventeenth-Century Long Island,” Long Island Historical Journal 4(1) (1991): 46. 61. Johannes De Laet, New World, or Description of West-India, in J. Franklin Jameson, ed., Narratives of New Netherlands (1625; reprinted, New York, 1909), 44. It should be noted that De Laet compiled his New World from information derived from books, manuscripts, and other sources he collected; however, he himself never stepped foot in North America. 62. The “Sinnecox” referred to were most likely the Shinnecocks. De Rasieres, “Letter to Samuel Blommaert,” 103. 63. Letter from Peter Stuyvesant to the Directors in Holland, April 21, 1660, in O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the History of the State of New York, 14: 470. 64. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, 98. 65. Van der Donck, A Description of the New Netherlands, 205. 66. Lechford, Newes from New-England, 102. 67. Lechford, Newes from New-England, 102.

162 | Notes to Chapter 1 68. Van der Donck, A Description of the New Netherlands, 205. 69. Ibid., 210. 70. As Roger Williams clarified, “although they have an absolute monarchy over the people, yet, they will not conclude ought that concerns all . . . unto which the people are averse Williams, A Key into the Language of America, 230. 71. E. B. O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland, 2 vols. (New York, 1845–1848), 1: 149–150, and Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians in New England, 7. 72. Salwen, “Indians of Southern New England and Long Island,” 172. 73. O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland, 1: 149–150, and Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians in New England, 7. 74. De Rasieres, “Letter to Samuel Blommaert,” 103. 75. Ibid., 172–173; Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 147–148; and Alden T. Vaughn, The New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians 1620–1675 (Boston, 1965), 55–56. 76. Vaughn, New England Frontier, 57; Gookin, Historical Collection of the Indians in New England, 8. The Pequots never held unchallenged or absolute dominion over the region generally or the East End specifically. The boundaries of political and economic power and influence in the region were constantly in flux during this period. In addition, it should be noted that after the defeat of the Pequots in 1637, the Narragansetts did not emerge as the preeminent native power in the region that had to contend with the Mohegans’ ambitions. 77. Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse (Chapel Hill, 1992), 88–89. 78. Ibid., 87. 79. John W. De Forest, History of the Indians of Connecticut (1851; reprinted, Hamden, 1964), 72. 80. De Forest, History of the Indians of Connecticut, 89; Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst, 1996), 104; Vaughn, New England Frontier, 127; Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 218. 81. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 134. 82. Underhill, Newes from America, 9. 83. Ibid. 84. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 133. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. 87. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 148, and Cave, The Pequot War, 71, 76. 88. Instructions to John Winthrop Jr. from John Winthrop and Governor Vane, July 1636, in The Winthrop Papers, 3: 285. 89. De Forest, History of the Indians of Connecticut, 77, 87–88; Alfred A.

Notes to Chapter 2 | 163 Cave, “Who Killed John Stone? A Note on the Origins of the Pequot War,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 49 (1992): 521. 90. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 179. 91. Ibid., 181. 92. Ibid., 181–183 and 182, fn. 45. 93. William Bradford, Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation, ed. William T. Davis (New York, 1908), 336–337. 94. Cave, The Pequot War, 140. 95. Adam J. Hirsch, “The Collision of Military Cultures in Seventeenth-Century New England,” Journal of American History 74(4) (1998): 1190–1191. notes to chapter 2 1. The early European grants and charters to lands in North America were vague and, for the most part, defined and bounded by latitude and longitude. New Netherland was no exception. Consequently, the Dutch and English imperial claims in the northeast overlapped in many vital areas, including in Connecticut and on Long Island. 2. “Translation of a Charter given by the High and Mighty Lords, the States General, to the West India Company, June 1621,” in Ebenezer Hazard, ed., Historical Collections: State Papers, 2 vols. (1792; reprinted, Freeport, NY, n.d.), 1: 124. 3. Ibid., 1: 121. 4. E. B. O’Callaghan, The Documentary History of the State of New York, 3 vols. (Albany, 1850), 1: 39. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 1: 283–284. 7. Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World 1492–1640, 2–20. 8. O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the History of the State of New York, 1: 43. 9. Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, 154, 170. 10. Elkens was a prominent figure in the Dutch commercial world in southern New England. As previously discussed, he had been instrumental in introducing the Dutch to the use of wampum a little more than a decade earlier. See Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 88–89. 11. The Assembly of the Nineteen to the States General, October 25, 1634, in O’Callaghan, The Documentary History of the State of New York, 1: 93–94. 12. Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, passim. 13. The English settlers did not totally ignore English issued patents; however, their reference to them was highly selective and was often ignored by settler communities when convenient.

164 | Notes to Chapter 2 14. Virginia DeJohn Anderson, New England’s Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1991), 15. 15. Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, 17, fn. 10; Peter Charles Hoffer, Law and People in Colonial America (Baltimore, 1998), 25. 16. John Winthrop, “Reasons to be Considered, and Objections with Answers,” in The Winthrop Papers, 2: 140–141; and Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 284. 17. Roger Williams was the most prominent voice to dissent from this perspective. Williams advocated respect for native land rights and maintained that the native use of land was not inherently wasteful. 18. Officially, the English and the Dutch always disputed one another’s claim to the southern New England region. See O’Callaghan, The Documentary History of the State of New York, 1: 57. However, in practice, the English settlers backed off claims to areas in which the Dutch had undertaken “serious” planting, improving, and peopling. As is discussed later, the attempted English settling of Shout’s Bay on the western end of Long Island and the English settlements in the Connecticut River area are both examples of English attitudes and practices regarding land claims in southern New England. 19. For an extensive discussion of the importance of fencing and enclosing in colonial southern New England, see Cronon, Changes in the Land, Ch. 7. 20. O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland, 1: 69. 21. Kevin A. McBride, “The Source and Mother of the Fur Trade: NativeDutch Relations in Eastern New Netherlands,” in Laurie Weinstein, ed., Enduring Traditions: The Native Peoples of New England (Westport, CT, 1992), 38. 22. O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the History of the State of New York, 14: 470; Cave, The Pequot War, 51; Lynn Ceci, “The First Fiscal Crisis in New York,” in E. Truex, ed., Readings in Long Island Archaeology and Ethnohistory, vol. 5 (Stony Brook, 1981), 308–309; Lynn Ceci, “Native Wampum as a Peripheral Resource in the Seventeenth-Century World-System,” in Laurence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry, eds., The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation (Norman, 1990), 58. The story of wampum’s introduction into the Dutch sphere is a murky one. However, there is little doubt that by 1622, the Dutch began to fully appreciate the power of wampum and to routinely incorporate it into their trade patterns with the Indians. 23. O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland, 73. 24. Letter from Stuyvesant to the Directors in Holland, April 21, 1660, in O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the History of the State of New York, 14: 470; Cave, The Pequot War, 51; Ceci, “The First Fiscal Crisis in New York,” 308–309; Ceci, “Native Wampum as a Peripheral Resource in the SeventeenthCentury World-System,” 58; and Nicolaes Van Wassenaer, “Historisch Verhael,

Notes to Chapter 2 | 165 1624–1630,” in J. Franklin Jameson, ed., Narratives of New Netherlands (1624–1630; reprinted, New York, 1909), 86. 25. O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland, 1: 105. 26. De Rasieres, “Letter to Samuel Blommaert,” 110. 27. O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland, 1: 106. De Rasieres was most likely quite confident that Governor Bradford could read Dutch, since he had lived many years in Holland. 28. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 380. 29. O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland, 1: 106–108. 30. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 202–203, and O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland, 1: 108. 31. Bradford, 203. 32. Ibid. 33. Ceci, “Wampum as a Peripheral Resource,” 59–61. 34. Ibid., 59, and Cave, The Pequot War, 55–57. 35. De Forest, History of the Indians of Connecticut (1851, reprinted, Hamden, 1964), 71. This area, claimed by the Dutch, fell within the English Warwick patent. 36. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 259; O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the History of the State of New York, 1: 150, 152. 37. “Remonstrance of New Netherland: Of the Dutch Title to the Fresh River,” July 28, 1649, in O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the History of the State of New York, 1: 287. 38. Ibid., 1:542 and 2: 139–140. “Fresh Water” was the Dutch name for the Connecticut River. 39. Ibid., 2: 150. 40. “Condition and Agreement entered into between Commissary Jacob van Curler and the Chiefs of Sickenames,” June 8, 1633, in O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the History of the State of New York, 2: 140. 41. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 257–258; Nathaniel Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay, 1638–1641, 1: 394; The Winthrop Papers, 4: 454. 42. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 258. 43. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 92. 44. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 258. 45. Today the site of Windsor, Connecticut. O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the History of the State of New York, 2: 134. 46. O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland, 1: 153–154. 47. “Condition and Agreement entered into between Commissary Jacob van Curler and the Chiefs of Sickenames,” June 8, 1633, in O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the History of the State of New York, 2: 140. 48. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 99.

166 | Notes to Chapter 2 49. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, 260; Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 101. 50. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 126. 51. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 280–281. 52. For protests from Plymouth and New Netherlands regarding Hooker’s and other migrants from the Bay encroachments, see William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 280–284, and O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the History of the State of New York, 2: 141–145. 53. Winthrop noted that there were ample vacant lands in the Bay where the Newton congregation could have settlers. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 126. 54. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “The Connecticut River: A Magnet for Settlement,” Connecticut History 35(1) (1994): 53. 55. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, Dunn, 357–358. This proposed removal was unconnected to the 1640 English settlement in Southampton, Long Island. 56. Ibid., The Journal of John Winthrop, 127. 57. “A Quo Warranto proceeding brought against the Company of the Massachusetts-Bay by Sir John Banks, Attorney-General,” reprinted in Hazard, Historical Collections, 1: 423–424. A Quo Warranto was a writ issued on behalf of the king or an alleged legal claimant to a franchise declaring that the claimant’s right, liberty, or franchise interests had been illegally usurped by an individual or other entity and requiring the defendant(s) to demonstrate by what legal authority he (they) exercised that franchise, right, or liberty. 58. “The Patent for the Council for New England,” reprinted in Hazard, Historical Collections, 1: 105; “Records of the Council for New England” (Cambridge, 1867), 5. Gorges’s biographer, Richard Arthur Preston, states that the use of the word “Council” as opposed to “society” or “corporation” was intentional, highlighting the Council’s primary function as the ruling or governmental body for New England. Richard Arthur Preston, Gorges of Plymouth Fort (Toronto, 1953), 171. 59. “The Patent for the Council for New England,” reprinted in Hazard, Historical Collection, 1: 106. 60. Preston, Gorges of Plymouth Fort, 176, and Records of the Council for New England, 5. 61. “The Patent for the Council for New England,” reprinted in Hazard, Historical Collections, 1: 109. 62. Preston, Gorges of Plymouth Fort, 5–13, 25–28. 63. Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, vol. 1 (New Haven, 1934), 321. 64. “Records of the Council for New England,” in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, 1867), 93.

Notes to Chapter 2 | 167 65. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay, 1: 405. 66. Preston, Gorges of Plymouth Fort, 5. 67. “Records of the Council for New England,” 19. 68. Viola Florence Barnes, “Land Tenure in English Colonial Charters of the Seventeenth Century,” Essays in Colonial History Presented to Charles McLean Andrews by His Students (1931; reprinted, Freeport, 1966), 15–25. 69. In “A Letter from New-Plimoth, 1622,” William Hilton wrote home giving Plymouth Colony an enthusiastic recommendation: “Wee are all Freeholders; the Rent-day doth not trouble us.” In Hazard, Historical Collection, 1: 120. 70. “The Council of Plymouth’s Grant to Robert Gorges,” in Hazard, Historical Collections, 1: 152–155; James Phinney Baxter, ed., Sir Ferdinando Gorges and His Province of Maine, 3 vols. (New York, 1967), 2: 11, 49. 71. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 133–134. 72. Gorges, A Brief Narration of the Original Undertakings of the Advancement of Plantation into the parts of America, reprinted in Baxter, Sir Ferdinando Gorges and His Province of Maine, 2: 49–54. 73. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 37, fn. 2. 74. Ibid., 135. All told, during the course of Weston’s turbulent career, he had dealings and speculative investments in Virginia, Massachusetts, Maine, and, finally, Maryland. In 1646, Weston died bankrupt and virtually friendless in England, leaving behind a trail of frustrated creditors and investors. 75. Herbert L. Osgoode, The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, vol. 1 (New York, 1930), 122. 76. “Council of New-England’s Grant of New Hampshire to John Mason,” in Hazard, Historical Collections, 1: 289–293. 77. “Records of the Council for New England,” 49. 78. This grant from its inception proved particularly vexatious for the New England settlers, since it overlapped not only with lands granted to Massachusetts under its charter but with lands claimed by Plymouth. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 384–385. 79. Sir Christopher Gardiner, a Roman Catholic convert, arrived in Massachusetts Bay approximately one month before the initial Puritan migration in order to monitor the Puritan activities and report back to Gorges. Gardiner very quickly ran afoul of the Puritan authorities, who arrested him in the spring of 1631. He was subsequently released and expelled from the colony and returned to England during the summer of 1632. See Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 53, fn. 4; Preston, Gorges of Plymouth Fort, 289. 80. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 53. 81. Preston, Gorges of Plymouth Fort, 291. 82. Ibid., 292. 83. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 88.

168 | Notes to Chapter 2 84. Ibid., 90. 85. “Order at the Court at Whitehall, January 19, 1632,” in Hazard, Historical Collections, 1: 325. 86. Preston, Gorges of Plymouth Fort, 305. 87. “Records of the Council for New England,” 71. 88. “The Act of Surrender of the Great Charter of New-England to his Majesty” and “A Conclusion of the Lords Commissioners for the Government of New-England,” in Hazard, Historical Collections, 1: 347, 393; and Preston, Gorges of Plymouth Fort, 305. 89. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 224. 90. “A Quo Warranto brought against the Company of Massachusetts-Bay by Sir John Banks, Attorney-General,” in Hazard, Historical Collections, 1: 423–424; and Preston, Gorges of Plymouth Fort, 313. 91. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, 1: 422. 92. “Wonderworking Providence of Sions Saviour in New-England,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2d ser., 8 (Boston, 1819), 42–43, and Kupperman, “The Connecticut River,” 58. 93. “Articles made between the Right Honorable the Lord Viscount Say and Seal, Sir Arthur Hasselrig, Baronet, Sir Richard Saltonstall, Knight, Henry Lawrence, Henry Darley and Lord Fenwick, Esqrs. on the one part, and John Winthrop, Esq., the younger, of the other, the 7th of July 1635” and “Appointment of John Winthrop, Junior, to be Governor of the River Connecticut,” in Hazard, Historical Collections, 1: 395–396. 94. “Wonderworking Providence of Sions Saviour in New-England,” 42–43. 95. Benjamin Trumball, A Complete History of Connecticut, 2 vols. (New London, 1898), 1: 198. notes to chapter 3 1. The Winthrop Papers, 3: 270–271, 276. 2. John Winthrop to Sir Simonds D’Ewes, June 24, 1636, in The Winthrop Papers, 3: 276. 3. William Pynchon to John Winthrop, June 2, 1636, in ibid., 3: 267. 4. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 98. 5. Ibid., 185. 6. Cultural anthropologists see liminality as a kind of transitional or marginal phase or state. During that time, the subject’s state or position is “ambiguous.” The anthropologist Greg Dening refers to this as the process of “boundary crossing,” which is “a step, neither inside nor outside but in-between.” In a similar vein, the historian Karen Kupperman has identified the existence of individuals during the colonial era who “crossed lines and moved between English and American identities” and “possessed the capability of seeing events and beliefs

Notes to Chapter 3 | 169 from the other side’s point of view.” Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of the Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, 1967), 94–95; Dening, Islands and Beaches, Discourse on a Silent Island, 157; and Kupperman, Indians and English, 212. 7. Throughout his life as a prominent citizen of East Hampton, Gardiner was an active church member and warmly attached to East Hampton’s first minister, Thomas James. Roger Wunderlich, “‘An Island of Mine Owne’: The Life and Times of Lion Gardiner, 1559–1663,” Long Island Historical Journal 2 (1) (1989): 3–14, 8. 8. Francis J. Bremer, Congregational Communion: Clerical Friendship in the Anglo-American Puritan Community, 1610–1692 (Boston, 1994), 93. 9. The historian T. H. Breen writes that, with the 1622 Virginia uprising in mind, the leaders of the Bay Colony secured the assistance of an unspecified number of professional soldiers from “the wars of the Low Country to fortify the commonwealth and to train the settlers in the arts of war.” Most of these men, such as John Underhill and Daniel Patrick, according to Breen, ultimately proved unable to live under the rigid tenets of the Bay Colony and left. T. H. Breen, Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America (New York, 1980), 33–34. 10. Alexander Gardiner, “Biographical Sketch of Lion Gardiner” (1842), reprinted in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser., vol. 10 (Boston, 1849), 173–174. 11. This grant of land was known as the “Warwick patent.” Gardiner, His Relation of the Pequot Warres, 132; Kupperman, “The Connecticut River,” 57. This same area was claimed by the Dutch and was called by them Kievet’s Hook. 12. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 157, and Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay, 1: 170–171. 13. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 162. 14. Curtis Gardiner, Lion Gardiner and His Descendants, 1599–1890 (1890; reprinted, St. Louis, 1913), 3. 15. This was John Winthrop Jr. 16. Gardiner, His Relation of the Pequot Warres, 137–138. 17. Gardiner, His Relation of the Pequot Warres, 137. 18. Ibid., 152. 19. O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland, 1: 146–147; and Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 269; Bradford, Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation, 336–337. 20. O’Callaghan, 158. 21. Lawrence Fuchs, The American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity and the Civic Culture (Middletown, CT, 1990), proposes the existence of an American civic culture premised on this idea of volunteerism. 22. Gardiner, His Relation of the Pequot Warres, 141. 23. Ibid.

170 | Notes to Chapter 3 24. Ibid., 151. 25. Edward Gibbons, a veteran of the wars in the Netherlands, immigrated to Massachusetts in 1630. He was a freeman and the fifteenth member of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts. He served Massachusetts during the Pequot War. Oliver Ayer Roberts, History of the Military Company of the Massachusetts Now Called the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts, 1637–1888, vol. 1 (Boston, 1895), 1: 38–39; and Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England 1620–1633, vol. 1 (Boston, 1995), 1: 749–755. 26. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay, 1: 254. 27. Letter from Edward Gibbons to John Winthrop November 1636, in The Winthrop Papers, 3: 326. 28. Gardiner, His Relation of the Pequot Warres, 145. 29. Underhill, Newes from America, 9. 30. Gardiner, His Relation of the Pequot Warres, 150. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Daniel Patrick to Increase Nowell, July 6, 1637, in The Winthrop Papers, 3: 440–441; Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 297. 34. Like Gardiner, Captain Daniel Patrick was a veteran of the Low Country wars and was married to a Dutch woman. He was engaged by the Massachusetts Bay Colony to train the colonial militia. Like almost all such veterans, he ultimately incurred the displeasure of the Bay authorities and removed to Connecticut. He was murdered there in 1644. Pope, The Pioneers of Massachusetts, 348. 35. Daniel Patrick to Governor and Council of War in Massachusetts, June 19, 1637, and Daniel Patrick to Increase Nowell, July 6, 1637, in The Winthrop Papers, 3: 431, 440–441. 36. Roger Williams to John Winthrop, July 10, 1637, in La Fantasie, The Correspondence of Roger Williams, 1: 96. 37. Roger Williams to John Winthrop, July 10, 1637, and September 9, 1637, in ibid., 1: 97, 117. 38. Roger Williams to John Winthrop, July 10, 1637, in ibid., 1: 117. 39. Roger Williams to Governor Henry Vane, May 13, 1637, ibid., 1: 78. 40. Roger Williams to John Winthrop, June 2, 1637, in ibid., 1: 83. 41. A squa sachem was a female sachem. 42. Israel Stoughton was the tenth original member of the Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts Bay. He was one of the original settlers of Dorchester and the first captain of the Dorchester trainband in 1636. Roberts, History of the Military Company of the Massachusetts, 1: 31. 43. The Winthrop Papers, 3: 442. 44. Israel Stoughton to John Winthrop, July 6, 1637, in ibid., 3: 442.

Notes to Chapter 3 | 171 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Roger Williams to John Winthrop, August 20, 1637, in ibid., 3: 489–490. 51. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 397. 52. Ibid., 227. 53. Ibid., 398. 54. Ibid. 55. Richard Davenport to Hugh Peters, July 17, 1637, The Winthrop Papers, 3: 452. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 3: 453. 58. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 231. 59. The Winthrop Papers, 3: 457. 60. David Pulsifer, ed., “Acts of the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England,” Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, vols. 9–10 (1859; reprinted, New York, 1968), 9: 102–103. 61. Richard Davenport to John Winthrop, August 23, 1637, in The Winthrop Papers, 3: 491. The East End communities were so successful in convincing the English that their status as Pequot tributaries was wholly “forced” on them that later historians have taken this as a given. The historian John W. De Forest writes that the Pequots “extorted tribute from the eastern inhabitants of . . . Long Island.” De Forest, History of the Indians of Connecticut, 62. The historian Marion Fisher Ales held a similar view. Marion Fisher Ales, “History of the Indians on Montauk, Long Island,” in Gaynell Stone, ed., Readings in Long Island Archaeology and Ethnohistory, vol. 3 (Stony Brook, 1979), 32. 62. The eastern Niantics were sometime allies and kinsmen of the Narragansetts and occupied territory on the modern day Connecticut-Rhode Island line. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 183, fn. 44. 63. Roger Ludlow to John Winthrop, June 1638, The Winthrop Papers, 4: 43–48. 64. Ibid., 4: 43–45. 65. Ibid., 4: 43–48. 66. Johnson, “Some by Flatteries and Others by Threatenings,” 33–39, 56, 62. 67. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 149–150. 68. Roger Ludlow to John Winthrop, June 1638, in The Winthrop Papers, 4: 45.

172 | Notes to Chapter 3 69. Ibid. 70. Wyandanch correctly gauged the extent of the continuing threats from mainland native groups and the need for some sort of alliance. The East End Natives were subsequently attacked in 1642 and 1654. Johnson, “Some by Flatteries and Others by Threatenings,” 238. 71. Wunderlich, “‘An Island of Mine Owne,’” 3. 72. Ales, “History of the Indians on Montauk, Long Island,” 36; John A. Strong, The Algonquian Peoples of Long Island from Earliest Times to 1700 (Intelaken, NY, 1997), 167; Wunderlich, “‘An Island of Mine Owne,’” 5–6. Poggatacut, sachem of the Manhassets of Shelter Island, “signed” his name as “sachem of Paumonoc” and was also referred to as Youghco, Yoco, and Yovowan. Ales, “A History of the Indians on Montauk Long Island,” 22. 73. See infra., for a discussion of the Narragansetts’ efforts to place John Oldham and, later, Roger Williams on Prudence Island. 74. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 146–155. 75. Ibid., 141. 76. Salwen, “Indians of Southern New England and Long Island,” 34. 77. Winslow, Good News from New England, 358–359. 78. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 151. 79. Ibid., 153. 80. The historian John Strong contends that the “These fears undoubtedly prompted the eastern Long Island sachems to invite Lion Gardiner to establish the first English presence on Long Island.” Strong, The Algonquian Peoples of Long Island, 160. 81. Gardiner’s Island remained an independent political subdivision until 1788, when it was annexed to the town of East Hampton. John Lyon Gardiner, “Gardiner’s East Hampton,” New York Historical Collections, vol. 2 (New York, 1869), 228. 82. Alexander Gardiner, “Biographical Sketch of Lion Gardiner,” 178. 83. Letter from Edward Winslow to John Winthrop, May 22, 1637, in The Winthrop Papers, 3: 419. 84. See Louise A. Breen,” Religious Radicalism in the Puritan Officer Corps: Heterodoxy, the Artillery Company, and the Cultural Integration in SeventeenthCentury Boston,” New England Quarterly 68(1) (1995): 3–43. 85. Gardiner, His Relation of the Pequot Warres, 158. 86. Ibid., 158. 87. Ibid., 152. 88. John Lyon Gardiner, Gardiner of Gardiner’s Island (East Hampton, Star Press, 1927), 81. 89. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 150; Johnson, “Some by Flatteries and Others by Threatenings,” 45, 51, 82, 83–85. 90. James F. Cooper Jr., in his recent book Tenacious of Their Liberties: The

Notes to Chapter 3 | 173 Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts (New York, 1999), has written extensively about the “voluntary” aspects of New England Puritanism. 91. Bremer, Congregational Communion, 94–95. The historian John Cooper has linked Congregationalism to “New England’s libertarian ideology.” He writes, “Congregational thought and practice in fact served as one indigenous seedbed of several concepts that would flourish during the Revolutionary generation, including notions that the government derives its legitimacy from the voluntary consent of the governed . . . while by no means democratic, Congregationalism encouraged a significant (if varying) degree of popular participation.” 92. The historian T. H. Breen states that “The immigrants were so obsessed with local autonomy that . . . they created institutions that looked very little like those they had left behind.” They realized that “broad participation in civil, military, and ecclesiastical affairs would help to secure local independence from central authority and voluntariness quickly became the hallmark of Massachusetts society.” Breen, Puritans and Adventurers, 16. 93. Lion Gardiner to John Winthrop Jr., July 1636, in The Winthrop Papers, 3: 281–282. 94. Lion Gardiner, “Letters of Lion Gardiner,” in Massachusetts Historical Society Collection, 4th ser., vol. 7 (Boston, 1865), 53. 95. Lion Gardiner to John Winthrop Jr., March 1637, in The Winthrop Papers, 3: 382. 96. Gardiner, The Papers and Biography of Lion Gardiner, 65; Alexander Gardiner, “Biographical Sketch of Lion Gardiner,” 178. 97. Cockenoe probably belonged to the Shinnecock community. The colonial records indicate his status as a member of the sachemship, possibly as a counselor or ahtaskoag but not as a sachem. Even in a 1684 agreement delineating native land rights at Montauk, “Checkenoe” was part of a signatory group that comprised “Sachams and our Counselors,” and he was specifically referred to as the “Chief Counselor.” Sometime after the Pequot War, he married the sister of a Shinnecock sachem, Nowedonah, an alliance that both reflected his own status and most certainly enhanced his prestige within his community. William Wallace Tooker, “John Eliot’s First Indian Teacher and Interpreter Cockenoe-de Long Island: The Story of His Career from the Early Records,” in Gaynell Stone, ed., Readings in Long Island Archaeology and Ethnohistory, vol. 4 (Stony Brook, 1983), 176–198; George L. Weeks, Isle of Shells Islip (New York, 1965), 30; and La Fantasie, The Correspondence of Roger Williams, 1: 121, fn. 12. 98. T. H. Breen, Imagining the Past (New York, 1989), 168–169, 172. 99. David Faris, Descendants of Edward Howell, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, 1985), 29–33. 100. John A. Strong, “How the Land Was Lost,” in Gaynell Stone, ed., Readings in Long Island Archaeology and Ethnohistory, vol. 6 (Stony Brook, 1983), 54–60.

174 | Notes to Chapter 3 101. Lion Gardiner, “Letters of Lion Gardiner, 1636–1660,” 62–63. 102. The right to use land that legally belongs to or has been transferred to another. 103. Israel Stoughton to John Winthrop, July 6, 1637, in The Winthrop Papers, 3: 442. notes to chapter 4 1. T. Crouther Gordon, Four Notable Scots (Stirling, Scotland, 1960), 78, 80, 120–121; Mark Finan, The First Nova Scotian (Halifax, 1997), 92–92, 97; Charles Rogers, Memorials of the Earl of Stirling (Edinburgh, 1877), 32, 60, 159–160; Baxter, Sir Ferdinando Gorges and His Province of Maine, 1: 122; and “Records of the Council for New England” (Cambridge, 1867), 66; O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the History of the State of New York, 14: 29–30. 2. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 224. 3. Ibid., 224–225. 4. Baxter, Sir Ferdinando Gorges and His Province of Maine, 3: 280. 5. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 496, 496n. 80, 618–619. Dunn notes that Cleeves fell afoul of Sir Ferdinando shortly after presenting that original commission to the Bay in 1637 and moved on to pursuing interests at Casco Bay. 6. Evidence that the link between improvements to land and ownership became the staple of colonial English America and endured well into the nineteenth century is seen in the New York colonial laws that often granted large tracts of land conditioned on “ability to settle and improve the land” within a certain time and in the numerous nineteenth-century homesteading acts that tied ownership to residency and improvement. The Laws of Her Majesties Colony of New York (New York, 1710), 82–83. 7. Hoffer, Law and People in Colonial America, 23, 101. Hoffer holds that the Puritans did not respect native rights, particularly to hunting lands, because they were not “proper cultivators of the land.” He also notes the early settler moved away from the feudal types of land tenure and toward universal fee simple. 8. La Fantasie, The Correspondence of Roger Williams, 1: 19. 9. O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the History of the State of New York, 1: 285. 10. Note that the English settlers had been unwilling to challenge and had not even contemplated a challenge to such rights in old England. In their “new” New England, they rejected that system and were clearly willing to oppose the imposition of the traditional English system. William I. Davisson and Dennis J. Dugan have argued that the seventeenth-century settlement of southern New England was a “revolution in political economy, one which overthrew the exist-

Notes to Chapter 4 | 175 ing English land system” and that “In England, land was for nobility, for taxes, for profit. In Massachusetts . . . land was for people to own, to cultivate, to live upon.” They conclude that this new concept of “land for the people” was in direct opposition to the English tradition of large estates for the aristocracy and landed gentry. William I. Davisson and Dennis J. Dugan, “Land Precedents in Essex County Massachusetts,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 106(4) (1970): 252–253, 275. 11. John Frederick Martin, Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, 1991), 3–4. 12. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 224–225. 13. Martin, Profits in the Wilderness, 116. It should be noted that the local authorities, despite their evident disapproval of engrossment, were never able to totally abolish that practice. 14. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 69. 15. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 224–225. 16. Martin, Profits in the Wilderness, 28–30, 37–38. 17. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay, 1: 114. 18. John S. Wood, The New England Village (Baltimore, 1997), 39. 19. Records of the Court of Assistance of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, 3 vols. (New York, 1973), 2: 40 and Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay, 1: 112, 201. 20. The Laws of Her Majesties Colony of New York, 82–83, and Cronon, Changes in the Land, 75. 21. Vickers, The New England Village, 39. 22. Underhill, Newes from America, 13. 23. Gardiner, The Papers and Biography of Lion Gardiner, 65. 24. Records of the Town of East-Hampton, 1: 3. 25. For example, the New Haven Colony, founded in 1638, was claimed under the Warwick patent and over the protest of the Dutch, who also claimed that territory. It was established without benefit of a patent, deed, or charter. The New Haven settlers first peopled and planted; this was followed by the execution of a native deed. Only later, in 1644, did New Haven, along with Connecticut, send a delegation to England to secure an English patent. G. H. Hollister, The History of Connecticut (Hartford, 1857), 1: 93–96; Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 633–634; Charles J. Hoadly, ed., Records of the Colony and Plantation of New Haven from 1638 to 1649 (Hartford, 1857), 211 and Mary Jeanne Anderson Jones, Congregational Communion: Connecticut, 1636–1662 (Middletown, CT, 1968), 80. 26. Lion Gardiner,”Letters of Lion Gardiner, 1636–1660,” 52–65. 27. Isabel MacBeath Calder, “The Earl of Stirling and the Colonization of

176 | Notes to Chapter 4 Long Island,” in Essays in Colonial History Presented to Charles McClean by His Students (Freeport, 1966), 81–82. 28. Copy of “Lord Stirling’s Commission to James Farrett,” April 20, 1637, in Southampton Town Archives: Miscellaneous Documents and Indian Deeds. The other example of a grandee patentee who, to a certain extent, successfully enlisted the cooperation of the mainland authorities was, of course, Lord Saye and Lord Seale. They wisely commissioned Winthrop’s son as the Governor of Saybrook and cultivated a rather sympathetic relationship with the local Puritan authorities. 29. Copy of “Lord Stirling’s Commission to James Farrett,” April 20, 1637, in William S. Pelletreau, ed., Fifth Book of Records of the Town of Southampton with Other Ancient Documents (Sag Harbor, 1910), 1–6. 30. “Farrett’s Patent,” in Southampton Town Archives: Miscellaneous Documents and Indian Deeds. 31. “Farrett’s Patent.” 32. Pulsifer, “Acts of the Commissioners of the United Colonies,” 10: 377. The official record recorded Cockenoe’s name as “Checkenoe,” one of the many variants of his name found in the colonial records. 33. “A Declaration about the Pecoits Country and Quinapiack,” in Hazard, Historical Collections, 1: 427–428. 34. Alonzo Lewis, The History of the Town of Lynn (2nd ed., Boston, 1844), 192. 35. Thomas B. Wellman, History of the Town of Lynnfield, Massachusetts, 1635–1895 (Boston, 1896), 51. 36. Edward Johnson, Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence 1628–1651, in J. Franklin Jameson, ed., Narratives of New Netherlands (1659; reprinted, New York, 1959), 73, 74, fn. 1. 37. Ibid., 31. 38. Philip F. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (Middletown, CT, 1984), 4; Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger, Inequality in Early America (Hanover, NH, 1999), 46. 39. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 165, fn. 86. 40. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory, 44. 41. John F. Cronin, ed., Records of the Court of Assistants of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay, 1630–1692, 3 vols. (Boston, 1928) 2: 27. 42. Ibid., 2: 30. 43. Lewis, History of the Town of Lynn, 76, 81, 87, 90–93. 44. David T. Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts, 1629–1692 (Chapel Hill, 1979), 39, 43–44. 45. Edward Johnson, “Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence, 1628–1651,” in J. Franklin Jameson, Narratives of New Netherlands (New York, 1959), 160, fn. 3.

Notes to Chapter 4 | 177 46. Ibid., 185. 47. Ibid., 160 and 185. 48. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 256–257. 49. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 302. 50. Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts, 27–28. 51. Cronin, Records of the Court of Assistants of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay, 2: 83; Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay, 1: 301. 52. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay, 1: 253, 292. 53. Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts, 39. 54. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 281. 55. Petition of Inhabitants and Freemen of Lynn to the Court, 1639, in The Winthrop Papers, 4: 104. 56. White, ed., New England Congregationalism, 30–31. 57. Alonzo Lewis, The History of the Town of Lynn, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1844), 65, 103–104. 58. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay, 1: 190, 197, 212; Anderson, The Great Migration Begins, 2: 1011–1012; Alonzo Lewis and James R. Newhall, The History of the Town of Lynn (Boston, 1865), 124, 167. 59. The term “undertaker” referred to those individuals who joined in and financially underwrote the private settlement corporations established to promote town settlement in southern New England. 60. “Disposall of the Vessell,” March 10, 1639, in Southampton Town Archives: Miscellaneous Documents and Indian Deeds. 61. Lewis and Newhall, The History of the Town of Lynn, 171, 194. 62. In fact, this was contrary to the then current practice in England of “enclosing” common lands. The effect of this practice was to remove lands from the public’s use; land was turned over to private ownership for that owner’s sole use and benefit. 63. “Agreement of the Undertakers,” March 10, 1639, in Southampton Town Archives: Miscellaneous Documents and Indian Deeds. 64. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 327; Nathaniel S. Prime, The History of Long Island from Its First Settlement by Europeans, to the Year 1845 with Special Reference to Its Ecclesiastical Concerns (New York, 1845), 187, fn. 72. 65. O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland, 1: 214. 66. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 326–327. 67. “Farrett’s Patent.” 68. “Farrett’s Patent.” 69. O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland, 1: 209.

178 | Notes to Chapter 4 70. Ibid., 1: 168–169, fn. 1. 71. O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the History of the State of New York, 2: 285. 72. Ibid., 14: 29. 73. Ibid., 1: 287. 74. Ibid., 14:29 and 2: 146–147. 75. Ibid., 2: 145–146. 76. Ibid., 2: 146–149. 77. Ibid., 2: 149. 78. Ibid., 2: 150. 79. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 328. 80. Ibid., The Journal of John Winthrop, 327. 81. “Winthrop Settlement of the Stirling Patent,” August 20, 1641, in Southampton Town Archives: Miscellaneous Documents and Indian Deeds. 82. “Farrett’s Patent.” 83. Henry Walton to John Winthrop, October 3, 164-, The Winthrop Papers, 4: 284. 84. Ironically, despite Winthrop’s imprimatur on the fledgling Southampton settlement, the town never fell under the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s jurisdiction. Southampton was an independent settlement until 1644, when it voluntarily placed itself under Connecticut Colony’s jurisdiction. The other towns settled on the East End during this time all formed part of Connecticut except for Southold, which chose to become part of New Haven Colony’s jurisdiction. 85. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay, 1: 337. 86. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 358. 87. Ibid., 358, fn. 68. notes to chapter 5 1. Francis Jennings, “Dutch and Swedish Indian Policies,” in Wilcomb E. Washburn, ed., Handbook of the North American Indians: The Northeast, vol. 4 (Washington, DC, 1988), 14. 2. John Winthrop was one of those who argued that Indian title to land should not be recognized. He claimed the native inhabitants had “noe other but a Naturall Right to those Countires.” In The Winthrop Papers, 2:118. Not all English settlers agreed, and Roger Williams, founder of the Rhode Island colony, argued strenuously against the Winthrop thesis and for acknowledgment of Indian title. Ibid., 534n. 3. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 69, and Martin, Profits in the Wilderness, 18, 151.

Notes to Chapter 5 | 179 4. This requirement followed American landholding patterns and requirements into this century. During the late seventeenth century and to the end of the colonial era, the British imperial authorities increasingly and formally imposed such requirements on the colonists, culminating in the Proclamation of 1763. Furthermore, the new American Republic continued this practice with the enactment by Congress, in 1790, of the Indian Non-Intercourse Act, which today exists as 25 U.S.C. 177. 5. Robert Ludlow Fowler, History of the Law of Real Property in New York (New York, 1895), 28. 6. Anderson, New England’s Generation, 92–94. 7. Hoffer, Law and People in Colonial America, 12–15, and Stephen Innes, “Land Tenancy and Social in Springfield, Massachusetts, 1652 to 1702,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 35 (1978): 33–56. 8. Sybil M. Jack, Towns in Tudor and Stuart Britain (New York, 1996), 51, Anderson, New England’s Generation, 92–94. 9. F. L. Hawks, Certain Inducements to Well Minded People Who Are Here Strained in Their Estates or Otherwise, in Early American Tracts (New York, 1865), 17–18. 10. Anderson, New England’s Generation, 124; Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England (New York, 1995), 28. 11. Lawrence Meir Friedman, A History of American Law, 2nd ed. (New York, 1982), 62; Anderson, New England’s Generation, 161; and Hoffer, Law and People in Colonial America, 101. 12. William S. Pelletreau, Second Book of Records of the Town of Southampton with Other Ancient Documents (Sag Harbor, 1874–1877), 357. 13. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 74. 14. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay, 1: 112. 15. Charles Z. Lincoln, ed., The Colonial Laws of New York from 1664 to the Revolution, vol. 1 (Albany, 1894), 40. 16. Chase, Records of the Town of Southold, 169–170. 17. “Farrett’s Patent,” April 17, 1640, in Southampton Town Archives: Miscellaneous Documents and Indian Deeds. 18. Native and English conceptions of what constituted peopling and planting, of course, varied greatly. The English required that there be greater population density and significantly more human-wrought physical transformation of land before they would declare that peopling and planting had been accomplished. 19. Bishop, “Territoriality among the New England Algonquians,” 38, 41–42; Carl Watner, “Libertarians and Indian Proprietary Justice and Indian Land Rights,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 7(1) (1983): 148; and Cooper,

180 | Notes to Chapter 5 “Land Tenure among the Indians of Eastern and Northern North American,” 56. 20. Henry Campbell, Black’s Law Dictionary, rev. 4th ed. (St. Paul, 1968), 1712–1713. 21. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 137. 22. Williams, A Key into the Language of America, 208. 23. Ibid., 22. 24. Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 133–135; The Winthrop Papers, 3: 285; Cave, The Pequot War, 71, 76; Cave, “Who Killed John Stone?” 509–521; Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 148. 25. Strong, “A Documentary History of the Shinnecock Peoples,” 37, 54–55. 26. “Southampton Deed,” December 13, 1640, in Southampton Town Archives: Miscellaneous Documents and Indian Deeds. 27. See, this volume, for a discussion of Pequot use of East End lands. 28. Poggatacut was also known in some colonial documents as “Youghco.” 29. Hazard, Historical Collections, 2: 16. 30. Ibid., Historical Collections, 2: 16. 31. Ibid., Historical Collections, 2: 16. 32. Gardiner, Chronicles of the Town of East Hampton, 34; Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 150. 33. Records of the Town of East-Hampton, 1: 31. 34. Gardiner, Chronicles of the Town of East Hampton, 336–337; Pulsifer, “Acts of the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England,” 10: 89–90. 35. Gardiner, Chronicles of the Town of East Hampton, 336–337; Pulsifer, “Acts of the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England,” 10: 89–90. 36. Pulsifer, “Acts of the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England,” 10: 94. 37. Thomas James, “Letters of Thomas James, 1654–1667,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th ser., 7 (Boston, 1865), 482–483. 38. Pulsifer, “Acts of the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England,” 10: 98–99. 39. Hoadly, Records of the Colony and Plantation of New Haven, 2: 113. 40. Ibid., 2: 115–116. 41. Southold was and is a town located on the East End. 42. Pulsifer, “Acts of the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England,” 10: 149–151. 43. “Southampton Deed.” 44. Richard Collicut arrived in New England in 1632 from Barnstable, England. He settled in Dorchester, where he listed his occupation as tailor, trader,

Notes to Chapter 5 | 181 and agent. He was admitted as a freeman and a member of the Dorchester congregation in 1632 and was particularly active in the early native-settler affairs of the colony. During the Pequot War, he served in the Massachusetts militia and obtained the rank of sergeant. He is also listed as the twentieth member of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts. He shared this distinction with other, better-known names of that era, such as Israel Stoughton, Edward Gibbons, and John Underhill. By 1633, Collicut was actively trading furs in the region. Most likely, this accounts for his perceived “influence” among some of the native communities. Collicut was also quite active during the Pequot War, and in 1637 he was authorized to make provisions against what became the final expedition against the Pequots. Shortly after the war, he returned to his former commercial activities. By 1640, Collicut, along with two associates, was granted a license by Massachusetts to trade with the southern New England Indian communities and was authorized to collect the wampum tribute due Massachusetts from the surviving Pequots who had taken up residence on Block and Long Islands. There are a number of references to Collicut and his employment of natives in pursuit of trade and business opportunities in southern New England. Both Roger Williams, in 1638, and Benedict Arnold, in 1644, reference Collicut’s use of native go-betweens and messengers: “I received by an Indian, from mr. Collucott of Dorchester.” While Cockenoe is not specifically named, it is clear from the records that he was in Collicut’s service during that six-year period from 1638–1644. George L. Weeks, Isle of Shells Islip (New York, 1965), 30; La Fantasie, The Correspondence of Roger Williams, 1: 121, fn. 12; Tooker, “John Eliot’s First Indian Teacher,” 175–177; Anderson, The Great Migration Begins, 1: 439; Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay, 1: 212; Benedict Arnold to John Winthrop,(no month) 1644, in The Winthrop Papers, 4: 26, 431. 45. Tooker, “John Eliot’s First Indian Teacher,” 177. 46. Ibid., 177, fn. 5. 47. Ibid., 180, 189. 48. Records of the Town of East-Hampton, 1: 3–4; Tooker, “John Eliot’s First Indian Teacher,” 176–177; and Strong, The Algonquian Peoples of Long Island, 193. 49. La Fantasie, The Correspondence of Roger Williams, 1: ed.’s note, 90, 97, 244–246, and 255. 50. Records of the Town of East-Hampton, 1: 3. 51. Archeological evidence indicates that while the East End Natives had practiced horticulture precontact, it may not have been their mainstay. The historian Lynn Ceci has persuasively argued that, as late as the seventeenth century, corn was not as central to the diet of the coastal southern New England natives as it was to those who lived inland, in part because of the so-called little Ice Age

182 | Notes to Chapter 5 of 1550–1800 and the poor soil conditions along the coast. The anthropologist Kathleen Bragdon has also concluded that there was only a “moderate commitment” to maize cultivation in coastal southern New England even as late as the early seventeenth century. Indications are that these coastal peoples had a precontact inland-to-coast trade network and that Long Islanders were able to exchange wampum for other commodities, perhaps even for maize. It was possible that the East End Indians’ control over wampum, a much desired but “scarce” commodity, not only provided these Long Islanders with entry into trade networks but may have obviated some of the need for intensive maize cultivation. As a consequence of their control over wampum, these coastal peoples were able to develop sedentary, relatively large populations without the type of primary reliance on maize cultivation seen in inland communities. The archaeological evidence further suggests that, prior to contact, the East End had established strong material and cultural ties to southern New England, reinforced and perpetuated by marriage alliances and an extensive trade network, which was particularly strong between the East End natives and the coastal communities in Connecticut and Rhode Island. Evidence indicates that for at least one hundred years prior to the 1640 Southampton settlement, the East End communities were involved in intensive shellfish harvesting, settlement aggregation, and trade with the mainland. Thus, it appears that the diverse resources at their disposal may have reduced the need for intensive horticultural activities. Ceci, “Radiocarbon Dating ‘Village’ Sites in Coastal New York,” 18–19, Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 89–90, 121; and see generally Ceci, “Native Wampum as a Peripheral Resource in the Seventeenth-Century World-System,” and Edwards, A Study of Social and Cultural Change among Indian Populations of Eastern Long Island, 51, 55. 52. John A. Strong, “Shinnecock Whalers: A Case Study in Seventeenth-Century Assimilation Patterns,” in William Cowan, ed., Actes du Dix-Septième Congrès des Algonquinistes (Ottawa, 1986), 327; John A. Strong, “The Shinnecock Indian,” 33–34. 53. William S. Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620–1984 (Hanover, 1986), 173. 54. Ibid., 172–179. 55. James Rosier, “Report on Weymouth’s Voyage to New England, 1605,” in Harry Burrage, ed., Early English and French Voyages (New York, 1907), 392. Rosier’s observations were of natives in northern New England. 56. Strong, The Algonquian Peoples of Long Island from Earliest Times, 116; Gardiner, Chronicles of East Hampton, 291. 57. Records of the Town of East-Hampton, 1: 3. 58. “1658 Gardiner-Wyandanch deed,” in Southampton Town Archives: Miscellaneous Documents and Indian Deeds. 59. Records of the Town of Brookhaven, 12.

Notes to Chapter 6 | 183 60. In fact, even today the United States accepts the principle that Native Americans who live on reservations exercise a limited sovereignty over their lands, thereby excluding the exercise of jurisdiction by state and local governments in many instances. 61. William S. Pelletreau, First Book of Records of the Town of Southampton, 114. 62. The Montauk proprietors were a group of East Hampton settlers who claimed to be the rightful owners of a large tract of land located on Montauk Point. 63. Records of the Town of East-Hampton, 1: 118. 64. Ibid., 1: 119–129. 65. It seems likely that they refused, since the settlers readily recorded favorable native assertions in support of settlers’ land claims. 66. Even today, the link between land and native title has not disappeared. Land title challenges based on underlying “Indian title” are still alive and well in the federal courts. notes to chapter 6 1. Adams, History of the Town of Southampton, 59–60; Jeanette Edwards Rattray, East Hampton History Including Genealogies of Early Families (Garden City, NY, 1953), 11. 2. Joseph S. Wood, The New England Village (Baltimore, 1997), 17. 3. Of course, in southern New England the settlers could not have enclosed in the strict English sense (i.e., extinguishing the common rights). Rather, enclosure would have taken the form of not providing, ab initio, for common lands. Innes, Creating the Commonwealth, 104; Wood, The New England Village, 17–19. 4. Pelletreau, Second Book of Records of the Town of Southampton, 75, 111. 5. Innes, Creating the Commonwealth, 70–71, 104, 176–179, 213–215, 220, 228–229; Jack, Towns in Tudor and Stuart Britain, 51; Samuel McKee Jr., Labor in Colonial New York, 1664–1776 (1936, reprinted, Port Washington, 1965), 21–22, 26–27. 6. Land ownership on the East End was not free from all restrictions. Just as land quickly came to denote town membership, the restrictions placed on land use and its disposition was part and parcel of the underlying covenant—this spirit of volunteerism that marked the relationship between town and individual. Certainly, the existence of restrictions and obligations connected to the use or ownership of land was not a new concept for these English settlers. Landowners in England were accustomed to rendering “knight service” in exchange for land, and town freemen had service obligations of their own. However, even in the

184 | Notes to Chapter 6 seventeenth century, the privileges of the English freeman had little to do with self-government, community benefit, or even the further acquisition of land and more to do with obtaining limited business advantages, such as an exemption from area tolls. On the other hand, the system developed in southern New England and on the East End fundamentally diverged from English practice and had everything to do with the ability to acquire and use land and to exercise expansive political and economic rights and opportunities. Even into the nineteenth century, legal scholars and commentators recognized the tie between land and the long arm of feudalism. Clearly, the New England settlers rejected this use of land. The Bay Colony, for example, took affirmative steps to ensure that the old system would not be planted in the new world when it banned feudal land tenures and established a contractually based legal system. Evidence for the success of this approach was seen in a freehold rate in New England of 80 percent, compared to a rate of only 14 percent in England. In England, the average Englishman could not look to land to ameliorate his lot in life; by contrast, for the New England settler, not only was land ownership a real possibility, but its ownership was marked by mutually beneficial obligations and duties. Jack, Towns in Tudor and Stuart Britain, 71, 75, 89; John F. Dillon, The Laws and Jurisprudence of England and America (1894, reprinted, Littleton, CO, 1994), 355; Friedman, A History of American Law, 62; Innes, Creating the Commonwealth, 24, 28; Anderson, New England’s Generation, 124; and D. C. Coleman, “Labour in the English Economy of the Seventeenth Century,” in Paul S. Seaver, ed., Modern Scholarship on European History (London, 1976), 112–134. 7. Joshua Miller, “Direct Democracy and the Puritan Theory of Membership,” Journal of Politics 53(1) (1991): 59; John F. Cooper Jr., “Higher Law, Free Consent, Limited Authority: Church Government and Political Culture in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts,” New England Quarterly 69(2) (1996): 201–202. 8. Bremer, Congregational Communion, 117. 9. Cooper, “Higher Law, Free Consent,” 201–203. 10. Harry D. Sleight, ed., Trustees Records of East Hampton 1725–1772 (East Hampton, 1925), 167–169. 11. Anderson, New England’s Generation, 96, 161 12. Rattray, East Hampton History, 16. 13. Records of the Town of East-Hampton, 1: 20. 14. Ibid. 15. Martin, Profits in the Wilderness, 218. 16. Ibid., 217–218. 17. Records of the Town of East-Hampton, 1: 321, 353–354. 18. Pelletreau, First Book of Records of the Town of Southampton, 112–113. 19. Ibid., 226, and Rattray, East Hampton History, 16.

Notes to Chapter 6 | 185 20. Pelletreau, First Book of Records of the Town of Southampton, 40. 21. Rattray, East Hampton History, 16. 22. Present-day Flushing, New York. Pelletreau, First Book of Records of the Town of Southampton, 49–50. 23. Perhaps the only area in which this practice continues today is jury duty. All residents, inhabitant or simple resident, were potentially subject to certain taxes and community obligations. However, as some benefits and opportunities were available only to inhabitants, certain duties were imposed only on inhabitants. 24. Pelletreau, First Book of Records of the Town of Southampton, 49–50. 25. Records of the Town of East-Hampton, 1: 18–19. 26. While it is not totally clear from the records, it appears that by the end of the seventeenth century, inhabitancy in what had been the early settlements no longer guaranteed the newcomer a share in the undivided lands. By then, new inhabitants had to actually purchase such shares from an individual who possessed proprietor’s rights. However, many new settlements, such as Sag Harbor, during the eighteenth century continued to utilize proprietor’s rights as a settlementcum-capital-venture tool. 27. In only one East End town, Southold, was church membership a voting requirement. 28. Pelletreau, First Book of Records of the Town of Southampton, 66. 29. Ibid., 31–32. 30. Records of the Town of East-Hampton, 1: 70. The South Sea was the open ocean area outside Peconic Bay. 31. Records of the Town of East-Hampton, 1: 71. 32. Ibid., 1: 3. 33. T. H. Breen, “Persistent Localism,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 32(1) (1975), and Wood, The New England Village, 21. 34. Records of the Town of East-Hampton, 1: 388. 35. Pelletreau, First Book of Records of the Town of Southampton, 43. 36. Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians, 20, and O’Brien, Dispossession by Degree, 20–21. 37. Settler towns, as well as the larger colonial entities, were aware of this form of “voting.” Thomas Hooker and his followers exercised that prerogative, as did many other settlers during the seventeenth century. 38. Adams, History of the Town of Southampton, 50, and Alberton Case, Historical Sketch of Southold Town (1876; reprint, Southold, 1931), 7. 39. Case, Historical Sketch of Southold, 9. 40. Abigail Fithian Halsey, In Old Southampton (New York, 1940), 15; Sean Manley, Long Island Discovery: An Adventure into History, Manners and Mores of America’s Front Porch (Garden City, NY, 1966), 96. 41. Halsey, In Old Southampton, 9; David Gardiner, Chronicles of the Town

186 | Notes to Chapter 6 of East Hampton (1871; reprinted, Sag Harbor, 1973), 23; Manley, Long Island Discovery, 36. 42. Records of the Town of East-Hampton, 1: 347; Strong, “Shinnecock Whalers,” 330. 43. Strong, The Algonquian Peoples of Long Island from Earliest Time, 41; Strong, “The Evolution of Shinnecock Culture,” 34; Gardiner, Chronicles of the Town of East Hampton, 3. 44. Everett J. Edwards and Jeanette Edwards Rattray, “Whale Off!” The Story of American Shore Whaling (New York, 1932, 1956), 180. 45. Wood, The New England Village, 21; David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, 1981); David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York, 1989), 36–38. 46. O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland, 1: 96, 131. 47. The majority of the coastal Ninnimissinuok spoke a dialect of the Algonquian language. 48. William Mulvihill, South Fork Place Names: Some Informal Long Island History (Sag Harbor, 1995), 86–87; William D. Halsey, Sketches from Local History (Southampton, 1966), 20–21; William Wallace Tooker, Indian Place Names (Port Washington, 1911, 1962). 49. Mulvihill, South Fork Place Names, 1. 50. Most of these were precontact native thoroughfares. 51. Halsey, Sketches from Local History, 20–21. 52. William S. Pelletreau, ed., Third Book of Records of the Town of Southampton with Other Ancient Documents (Sag Harbor, 1878), 110. 53. Ibid. The 1640 deed between the Shinnecocks and the Southampton settlers permitted the Shinnecocks to retain many of their ancient and traditional rights to hunt, fish, and fowl on the lands turned over to the settlers; hence the continuation, even in 1667, of that traditional Shinnecock custom with respect to hunted animals. 54. In 1666, a similar dispute between the towns of Southampton and Southold arose, cited in Cristoph and Christoph, New York Colonial Manuscripts, 59–63. 55. O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the History of the State of New York, 3: 57–61. 56. Lincoln, The Colonial Laws of New York, 1: 40; Fowler, The Law of Real Property, 13. 57. Hoadly, Records of the Colony and Plantation of New Haven, 27, 200; Hammond J. Trumbull, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, Prior to the Union with New Haven Colony (Hartford, 1850), 402.

Notes to Chapter 6 | 187 58. B. Fernow, ed., Documents Relating to the History of the Early Colonial Settlements Principally on Long Island (Albany, 1883), 561; Prime, The History of Long Island, 61. 59. Pelletreau, Second Book of Records of the Town of Southampton, 357. 60. W. L. Grant and James Munro, eds., Great Britain Privy Council Colonial Series, 1613–1688, vol. 1 (London, 1908), 579–580. 61. George Rogers Howell, The Early History of Southampton, Long Island, New York with Genealogies (Albany, 1887), 57. 62. Benjamin F. Thompson, History of Long Island from its Discovery and Settlement to the Present Time, vol. 1 (Port Washington, 1962), 228. 63. Papers of the New Haven Colony Historical Society, vol. 2 (New Haven, 1877), 28 64. Ibid., 210–217. 65. Suffolk County was the newly created county in which the East End towns were located. 66. New York Documentary History, “Papers Relating to Suffolk County,” 3: 363–366. 67. Ibid., 3: 372–373. 68. Pelletreau, Second Book of Records of the Town of Southampton, 357. 69. Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 184–185; O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees, 16–22; Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 149–150. 70. John Winthrop became a party to Farrett’s Patent through a 1641 codicil added on the back of the original document. The “Winthrop codicil” acknowledged the need for some form of Massachusetts’ sanction or acknowledgment of the Long Island settlement and agreed that Winthrop would be the ultimate arbitrator between Stirling and the Southampton undertakers of the patent’s terms and conditions. 71. Trumbull, The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut Prior to the Union With New Haven, 566. 72. Ibid. 73. Pulsifer, Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, 10: 15; Dunn et al., The Journal of John Winthrop, 633–634; and Isabel MacBeath, The New Haven Colony (New Haven, 1934), 53. 74. Pulsifer, Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, 10: 15–17. 75. O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the History of the State of New York, 3: 37. 76. Wood, A Sketch of the Several Towns on Long Island, 10. 77. Hazard, Historical Collections, 2: 170–172. Prime, The History of Long Island, 61. 78. Pulsifer, Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, 10: 18–21.

188 | Notes to Chapter 6 79. Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society (Hartford, 1932), 24: 17. 80. Ibid., 24: 16. 81. O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the History of the State of New York, 3:199. 82. Pelletreau, Second Book of Records of the Town of Southampton, 357. 83. Innes, Creating the Commonwealth, 28.

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Index

Alexander, William. See Stirling, Earl of Algonquian language, 16, 157n.8; names and words retained, 139, 141–42; settlers fluent in, 78, 81 Aswaw, 74 Atlantic America, 2, 9, 15, 33, 34, 47, 54, 55, 61, 62, 63, 80, 81, 83, 109, 113, 115, 117, 130, 131, 134, 144, 146, 148, 156n.8 Atlantic world, 1, 2, 6, 32, 34, 66 Barentsz, Pieter, 28, 38, 39 Batchellor, Reverend Stephen, 98, 99 Block, Adriaen, 24, 39 Block Island, 31, 58, 62, 101, 119, 122 Block Island Indians, 21, 31, 62 Blommaert, Samuel, 24 Bradford, William, 4, 20, 40–43, 50, 63, 70, 100 Bradstreet, Simon, 120, 121 Brookhaven, 126, 135 Boundary crossers. See Liminality Boundary disputes, 142, 148, 149 Canonicus, 19, 31, 69, 70 Cleeves, George, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94 Cockenoe-de-Long Island, 80, 81, 96, 122, 123, 173n.97 Collicut, Richard Sergeant, 122, 180–181n.44 Communities of interest, 2, 20, 31–34, 38, 40, 43–45, 47, 48, 54, 90, 91, 148

Community membership and identity, 3, 29, 31, 32, 40, 43–45, 51, 59, 61–63, 65, 77–79, 80–82, 94, 128, 130–136; inhabitancy,132, 134–138, 185n.26; town admission, 130, 135; volunteerism, 62, 63, 78, 79, 99, 115, 131–135, 144, 146, 150, 151 Connecticut, 30, 41–45, 47, 49, 54, 59, 60, 70, 71, 74, 76, 93–95, 97, 119–121, 143, 145, 147, 149–151 Connecticut River, 26–29, 38, 39, 41–44, 58, 76 Connecticut Valley, 26, 43, 44 Council for New England, 47–54, 87, 91, 96, 104, 126; charters and patents, 48, 50, 88, 89, 92; colonizing enterprises, 50, 51; disbanded, 53, 87; goals of, 48, 50; Great Patent, 48, 50; members, 48; organized, 48 Curchaugs, 17 Curler, Jacob Van, 42 Davenport, John, 60 Davenport, Captain Richard, 71 Denton, Daniel, 17 D’Ewes, Simonds, 57 Diplomacy, 2, 28–29 Disease. See Epidemics Duke of York, 113, 128, 143–145, 148 Duke’s Law, 113, 143 Dutch: boundary dispute with English, 148, 149; charters and deeds,

205

206 | Index Dutch (Continued) use of, 35, 36, 41, 105, 110, 149; claims, 35, 97, 103, 104, 149; Dutch settlements, 3, 27, 35, 38, 42–46, 55, 62, 78, 89, 90, 97, 104–108; confront Southampton undertakers, 103–107; English colonies, relationship with, 28, 32, 35–37, 39–44, 55, 87, 97, 105, 119, 148, 149; English settle under, 46, 108; English settlers under, 104, 148, 149; explorations of, 24, 25, 39; merchants, 4; New Amsterdam, 38, 105, 106; New Netherland, 34, 35, 38–40, 43, 105, 108, 144, 149; New Netherland conquered, 143; policies of, 32; Ninnimissinuok, relationship with, 27, 28, 39, 103, 109; Pequots, relationship, 28, 29, 39–41; relationship with English, 36, 37, 42–44, 55, 97, 119, 144, 148, 149; States General, 35; trade, 29, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 55; treaties and deeds with Ninnimissinuok, 39, 41–43, 110, 149 Dutch West India Company, 24, 27, 28, 34–36, 39–42, 110 Earthquakes, 98–100 East End settler communities: agricultural practices, 139; boundary disputes among, 127, 128, 142; dispute with Duke of York, 143–150; English settlements on, 114, 119; economic opportunities, 135, 137, 132; political connections to southern New England, 147; rely on Indian title, 126, 127, 142; town organization, 131; water resources, 137, 139, 140. See also English settler communities; Long Island; and specific towns East End native communities: agricultural practices, 158n. 12, 181–182n.51; divisions among, 16,

17; epidemics, 76; Hammond Jr.’s death, 58, 73; isolation of, 3, 5, 16, 24, 25, 32; language, 1; location of, 16; political organization, 17, 25, 65, 66, 75; reassess traditional policies, 16, 32, 33, 57–59, 65–71, 82, 83; population, 16; relations with English settlers and colonies, 9, 15, 16, 24, 32, 66, 68, 69, 71–80, 82, 83, 117, 118, 120; relations with Pequots, 3–5, 21, 22, 24, 26, 27, 57, 58, 61, 66–71, 74, 118, 120, 171n.61; reject Indian alliances, 71–73, 82, 117, 119; relationship to other Ninnimissinuok, 16–17, 23, 69; traditional life, 17, 140; transfer Manchonake Island, 74–76; treaties and deeds, 110, 111, 113–118, 122– 126, 179n.4; use of treaties and deeds to preserve traditional life, 122–127; wampum producers, 3,25–27, 124; water and related resources, 17, 124–26, 137, 138, 158n.12 East Hampton deed, 123–126, 138 East Hampton, 119, 123, 127, 140, 142–144 Eliot, Reverend John, 122 Elkens, Jacob, 27, 36 Endicott, Captain John, 58 England: Crown, 38, 47, 49, 52, 53, 93, 128, 141; Parliament, 38; Privy Council, 52, 53 English settler communities, 131; agricultural practices similar to Ninnimissinuok, 81, 139; differences among, 32, 38, 42–48, 55, 62, 63, 100; labor shortages, 132; military tactics, 33, 57, 64, 67, 70, 111; enclosing and fencing, 38, 39; militias, 67; Ninnimissinuok relationship with, 57, 63, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74, 76, 81–83, 118; relationship with Dutch, 36, 37, 42–44, 55, 97, 105–108, 119, 148, 149.

Index | 207 See also Land; and names of specific English towns and colonies Epidemics, 26, 30, 44, 74–76 Familist, 98, 99 Farrett, James, 54, 92, 94–97, 103, 105, 106, 113 Farrett’s Patent, 96, 103, 104, 107, 114, 115, 146 Fenwick, George, 61 Fresh River. See Connecticut River Fur trade, 25–28, 38–41 Gallup, John, 31 Gardiner, David, 125 Gardiner, Christopher, 52, 167n.79 Gardiner, John, 78 Gardiner, Lion: arrives in Massachusetts, 60; background, 59; boundary crosser, 61, 62, 66, 77, 78, 80–83; correspondence with Winthrop, Jr., 79, 81; criticizes Massachusetts, 15, 77, 78; buys Manchonake Island (Gardiner’s Island), 74–76, 80, 83, 116; Gardiner’s Deed, 92–95, 117; identity, 61, 62, 65, 77, 78; life in Holland, 60, 62; military service, 59–60; protests Pequot War, 61–64; Pequot War, 63–66; relationship with Wyandanch, 15,64–67, 74–77, 117–119, 126, 127; Saybrook Fort, 15, 61, 63–66, 77–80. See also Wyandanch Gardiner, Mary, 60, 61 Gibbons, Edward Major, 64, 66 Good Hope (House of), 28, 29, 41–45 Gookin, Daniel, 19 Gorges, Sir Ferdinando, 47, 49–54, 88 Gorges, Robert, 50, 51 Grandees, 2, 47, 51, 53, 55, 60, 87–91, 97, 108, 126, 143, 155n.5 Hammond, William, Jr., 27, 57, 58, 73, 82 Hammond, William, Sr., 57, 58

Hartford, Connecticut, 28, 41, 118, 147 Hobbard, Josiah, 127, 128 Holland. See Dutch Hooker, Reverend Thomas, 44–47, 54, 60, 95, 147 Howe, Daniel, 100, 101 Howell, Arthur, 81 Howell, Edward, 100, 101, 135 Hudson River, 36, 38, 39, 97 Identity. See Community membership and identity Indian, Nat, 127, 128 Indians. See Ninnimissinuok; and individual community names Inhabitancy. See Community membership and identity Ipswich, Massachusetts, 46 James I, 48, 87 James, Reverend Thomas, 81, 120 Keetasontimoog. See Sachems and sachemship Kennebec River, 39 Kennebec trading station, 39, 41 Kieft, William, 107 Kieveet’s Hook, 41 King Philip’s War, 157n.1 Laet, Johan de, 24 Land: conflicts over, 41, 43–47, 103, 105–108, 110, 127, 142, 148–150; conflicting perceptions of, 6, 38, 43, 45, 89, 94; diplomatic use of, 7–9, 21–23, 75, 117, 118, 121, 141; dual sovereignty, 126, 127; Dutch perception and use of, 35–37, 43, 45, 87, 126; English property system, 90, 111, 112, 126; English settlers reject English property system, 88–90, 92, 102, 111–113, 126, 128, 132; English settlers’ perceptions and use of, 6, 7, 36–38, 43, 45, 62, 88–91, 97,

208 | Index Land (Continued) 111, 112, 115, 127, 128, 174–175n.10, 177n.62; English towns restrict use of, 38, 102, 132–134, 183–184n.6; freeholders and fee simple, 7, 112, 131, 133, 156n.8; feudalism, 49, 50, 52, 55, 111, 112, 126; lawsuits over, 53, 127–128; lease of, 127, 128; native and settler practices intersect, 102, 115, 126, 127, 130, 136, 138–142, 146, 147, 150, 151; Ninnimissinuok use and perceptions of, 7, 8, 21–23, 90, 91, 114, 115; usufruct, 23, 115, 122. See also Dutch; East End native communities; East End settler communities; Long Island; Gardiner, Lion; Wyandanch; and names of individual deeds and treaties Land acquisition: Atlantic American property system, 90, 91, 93, 95, 108, 112, 113, 144, 146; charters and patents, 41, 43, 46, 47, 54, 91–93, 142, 144; land recording system, 90–92, 112, 113, 178n.2; native title, 7, 89, 110, 118, 126–129, 142, 146; peopling and planting, 7, 36–38, 43–46, 89, 91, 93, 95, 103, 105, 110, 112, 113, 146, 174n.6, 179–180n.19; touching and trading, 35, 36, 41, 43, 45, 91; transformation to property, 7, 90–92, 111, 112, 114, 146; treaties and deeds, 41, 91–93, 99, 110, 111, 113–118, 120–126, 179n.4; treaties and deeds required, 110, 113–115, 138. See also Dutch; East End native communities; East End settler communities; Long Island; Gardiner, Lion; Wyandanch; and names of individual deeds and treaties Lechford, Thomas, 25 Liminality, 2, 59, 61, 62, 66, 68, 77, 78, 80–82, 120, 131, 168–169n.6

Long Island: Dutch settlements on, 6; English settlements on, 5, 6, 87, 94, 98, 106; English interested in, 25, 92, 93, 97, 101, 160n.45; boundary disputes, 127, 148–150; geographic location of, 1, 52; indigenous groups on, 1; invaded by Ninigret, 71, 72; Pequots on, 22, 57, 58, 67–69, 122; resources of, 25; strategic location, 24, 92. See also East End native communities; and names of individual towns and communities Long Island Sound, 3, 15, 24, 25, 27, 31, 32, 39, 48, 54, 57, 58, 72, 97, 98, 101 Low Countries, 49, 59, 64, 169n.9 Ludlow, Roger, 70, 74 Lynn, Massachusetts, 46, 96, 98–103, 108, 114, 148; religious problems in, 98–100 Mahicans, 38 Manhassets, 1, 17, 64, 93, 120 Manhattan Island, 27, 36–38 Martin, John, 90 Mason, John, 51–53 Mason, Captain John, 70, 74 Massachusetts Bay Colony: arrive in region, 41; attitudes about Ninnimissinuok Indians, 37, 116, 121; relationship with Dutch, 42–45, 97, 106, 107; relationship with Narragansett, 22; relationship with Pequots, 29–31, 61, 62, 116; threatened by Council for New England and grandees, 51–53, 88, 89. See also English settler communities Massachusetts General Court, 91, 96, 97, 100, 101, 113, 120 Matnowesuonckanes. See Ninnimissinuok Miantonomi, 19, 23, 31, 68–70, 72 Missinnuok. See Ninnimissinuok Mohegans, 3, 23, 32, 69, 71, 72, 97, 120

Index | 209 Mohegan-Pequot, 16 Montauketts, 3, 4, 16, 17, 24, 74, 93, 94, 117, 119–121, 123, 124, 126, 127, 138, 139 Montauk proprietors, 127, 128 Mulford, James, 136 Mulford, Samuel, 145, 146 Moshup, 124, 125. See also Whales and whaling Mystic, Connecticut, 15, 41, 64, 66–68 Names and naming, 141–142 Narragansetts, 3, 5, 6, 19, 22, 23, 26–29, 31, 32, 38, 41, 67–70, 72, 76, 97, 119, 123; take Montauketts hostage, 119, 120 Natawanute, 43 Native and settlers practices (similarities): agriculture, 139, 140; land perceptions of, 142, 145; names and naming, 141, 142; sea resources, 138–140, 145, 146. See also Land New Amsterdam. See Dutch New York Colony, 113, 143, 147, 150; colonial assembly, 145. New Haven Colony, 49, 71, 97, 121, 147, 149, 175n.25, 178n.84 New Netherland. See Dutch Niantics, 6, 23, 26, 72, 73, 94, 97, 117 Ninigret, 6, 72, 73, 76, 83, 94, 117, 119–121, 127 Ninnimissinuok: community membership and identity, 78, 79, 146; common people (missinnuok), 19–22, 25, 134; definition of, 16, 155–156n.6; conflicts among, 23, 26, 27, 29, 30–32; divisions and differences among, 17, 18, 23, 25, 26, 69, 70; hunting and hunting grounds, 23, 123; kinship relations, 17, 19, 21, 22, 25, 171n.62; language, 16, 18, 157n.8; location of, 16; land use and rights to,

21–23, 123, 124; matnowesuonckanes (those with no name), 21, 22, 115, 134; political organization, 17, 18, 20, 21, 25, 70, 78; population of, 76; relationship with Dutch, 28, 39–41, 103, 109; resource diversity, 17, 18, 124, 125, 137; stratification among, 18, 20, 21, 25, 115; territoriality, 17, 22, 23, 114, 115; traditional ways among, 17, 33, 124; tributary relationships, 8, 21, 22, 26, 146, 171n.62. See also Land; Land acquisition; Sachems and sachemship; and names of individual native communities Nova Scotia, 48, 50, 87, 95 Nowedonah, 9, 173n.97 Ogden, John, 137 Oldham, John, 22, 160n.45, 27, 29–31, 58, 62, 75 Outmigration, 44–47, 51, 80, 95, 98, 100–102, 108, 139, 148 Patrick, Daniel Captain, 67, 68, 70, 101 Peconic Bay, 74 Penhawis, 103 Pequots: alliance with Dutch, 28; flee, 57, 58, 67, 68; conflicts with Massachusetts, 29–31, 61, 62, 116; conflict with Dutch, 28, 29; conflict with Narragansetts, 28, 29, 31, 32; John Stone, 29; land of, 97, 98; Long Island, 58, 65, 67, 68; power of, 26, 30, 41, 162n.76; sold into slavery, 33, 57, 70; swamp fight, 63, 70, 71; tributaries of, 3–5, 21, 24, 26, 27 Pequot War, 1, 15, 22, 27, 29, 31–33, 57, 63, 64, 82, 94, 97; relationship with Massachusetts, 61, 62, 116; swamp fight, 63, 70, 71; tributaries to, 97 Peters, Hugh, 60, 71, 79

210 | Index Pharaoh, George, 78 Plymouth Colony, 20, 21, 32, 38–45, 47, 49–51, 62, 63, 90, 100, 121; relationship with Dutch, 39–44, 63 Pniesesok. See Sachems and sachemship Poggatacut, 1, 19, 64–67, 74–76, 80, 118, 120 Prudence Island, 22 Powwow, 76, 125 Property ownership. See Land; Land acquisition Puritans, 45, 52, 59–61, 70, 76, 78, 79, 90, 99, 100, 104, 115 Pynchon, John, 58 Quashwam, 19 Quo Warranto, 47, 53 Rasieres, Issak de, 4, 24–26, 39–41 Rosier, James, 125 Sachems and sachemship: ahtaskoaog (principal men), 8, 18, 75, 80, 122; appearance of, 18, 20, 25; authority and role of, 9, 19, 20, 21–23, 25, 26, 30, 115, 126; definition of, 155n.3; dual sachemship, 19; hereditary nature of, 19, 25, 26; keetasontimoog (Great Sachem), 72, 74, 82, 119; pniesesok (under sachem), 18; redistribution, 20, 125, 139; sachemship, 18, 22, 73–74; symbolic role of, 20 Saltonstall, Richard, 54 Samp, 139 Sassacus, 32, 58, 67, 68, 70, 71 Saybrook Fort, 1, 15, 59–62, 64–66, 77, 79, 94 Saye and Seale, Lord, 60, 168n.93 Seed, Patricia, 35, 156n.19, 163n.12, 164n.15 Shells. See Wampum Shinnecocks, 3, 4, 17, 23, 24, 80, 96, 116, 117, 121–123, 126, 127, 139, 142

Sinnecox. See Shinnecocks Southampton, 96, 98, 108, 114, 123, 127, 133, 135–139, 142, 143, 147; part of Connecticut, 178n.84 Southampton Company. See Southampton undertakers Southampton undertakers, 100–104, 107, 114, 133; confront the Dutch in Cow Bay, 103–107 Southampton Covenant, 101–104, 107, 133–135 Southampton deed, 116–118, 121–123, 186n.53 Southold, 113, 121, 139, 143, 147, 154, 178n.84 Squa sachem, 17, 19, 68–72, 76, 159n.20 Stanton, Thomas, 119, 120 Stirling, Earl of, 46, 48, 52, 54, 80, 87, 88, 91–96, 104, 106–108, 144 Stirling Patent, 52, 87, 88, 94, 96, 97, 103, 108 Stone, Captain John, 27, 29–31, 58, 61–63, 65, 78 Stoughton, Israel, 68, 69, 71, 72, 82 Southern New England, location of, 155n.2 Sunksqua. See Squa sachem

Tatobem, 21, 27–29, 38, 39, 42 Taxes, 135, 145 Treaty of Hartford, 96, 149 Uncas, 19, 21, 23, 63, 72, 120 Underhill, John, 1, 5, 29, 64, 92, 101 United Colonies of New England, 118, 120, 121, 149, 150 Van der Donck, Adriaen, 17, 18, 25 Van Tienhoven, Cornelis, 105 Vere, Sir Horace, 59 Verrazzano, Giovanni da, 18 Volunteerism. See Community membership and identity

Index | 211 Wampum, 3–6, 20, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 38, 39, 41, 71–74, 92, 120, 124, 156n.9, 164n.22 Warwick, Earl of, 51 Warwick Patent, 51, 53, 54 Weston, Thomas, 51 Whales and whaling: drift whales, 136–138, 140; communal activity, 124, 125, 137, 140; deeds and treaties for, 123, 126, 138; licenses, 137, 138, 146; private companies (whale design), 137, 138, 145; natives’ traditional privileges to, 123, 126, 138; rituals and practices pertaining to, 124–125; sacred stories about, 124; towns’ traditional privileges to, 137, 138, 145, 146; techniques, 124, 140; whale watch wards, 136, 137, 140 Williams, Roger, 18, 19, 21–23, 47, 68, 69, 71, 72, 89, 125, 138 Winslow, Edward, 21 Winthrop, John, 4, 22, 25, 29, 31, 32, 37, 46, 47, 52–54, 57, 58, 88, 90, 91, 95–97, 100, 102, 103, 106–108, 123, 144

Winthrop, John, Jr., 54, 60, 61, 72, 77, 79, 81, 94, 119, 120, 143, 147, 150 Wood, William, 23 Wyancomb, 113 Wyandanch, 15, 16; ambitions of, 73, 74; appeal to Connecticut, 74, 120; at swamp fight, 71; boundary crosser, 75, 81, 83, 123; conflict with Narragansetts, 119; conflict with Ninigret, 72–74, 119; drift whale rights, English, alliance with, 72–80, 120; great sachem, 119; land sales and deeds, 75, 82, 126, 127, 138; ransom of daughter, 119, 120; relationship with Lion Gardiner, 15, 64–77, 117–119, 126, 127; relationship with Pogattacut, 19, 64–66, 72, 74; sachemship, 65, 66, 73–76. See Gardiner, Lion Yeanncock, 23 Youghco. See Pogattacut Young, Daniel, 154 Young, John, 121, 143

About the Author

Faren R. Siminoff received her Ph.D. in American history from New York University and is Assistant Professor of American History at Nassau Community College. She also holds a law degree from Syracuse University College of Law and has specialized in Native American land claims.

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