The first white man who sailed upon Long Island Sound was the bluff
old Dutch navigator, Captain Adraien Blok. Desirous of adventure and
spoil, he built upon the shore of the Battery, in 1614, the first ship
ever constructed at New York, a blunt-pointed Dutch sloop-yacht of
sixteen tons, which he named the "Onrest." The four little huts he had
upon the shore to house his builders and crew were among the first
structures of the early Manhattan colony. Fitting her out, he braved
the terrors of the Hell Gate passage and started on a voyage of
discovery on Long Island Sound, which he explored throughout. He found
the mouth of the principal river of New England, the Connecticut, and
coasting around Point Judith, entered Narragansett Bay, and cast
anchor before an island with such conspicuously red-clay shores that
he called it Roodt Eylandt, or the Red Island, on which Newport now
stands. Then he ventured out to sea and found the bluff shores of
Block Island, to which he gave his own name. Sated with exploration
and loaded with spoil exchanged with the Indians, he then returned to
New York and told of his wonderful adventures. His was the first
vessel, manned by white men, known to have sailed upon the
"Mediterranean of America," as Long Island Sound is popularly called.
This grand inland sea is generally from twenty to thirty miles wide,
and is enclosed by Long Island, the ancient Isle of Nassau of the
Dutch, stretching for one hundred and thirty miles eastward from New
York harbor, and being likened to a fish lying upon the water. It has
a generally bluff northern shore along the Sound, and the southern
coast, which is low and level almost to the eastern extremity, lies
nearly due east and west, the island finally breaking into a chain of
narrow peninsulas and islands facing the rising sun. The southern
border is a continuous line of broad lagoons, separated from the
Atlantic by long and narrow sand-bars. The chief lagoon is the Great
South Bay, eighty miles long, fronted by the curious formation of the
Great South Beach, stretching its entire length, and from one to five
miles wide. Upon the outer beaches, and within the lagoons, are a
succession of noted seashore resorts. Eastward, beyond Jamaica Bay and
Rockaway, is Long Beach, and behind it Hempstead Bay. Then come Jones'
Beach and Oak Island, with Massapequa, Amityville and Lindenhurst
behind them. Then we are at Babylon and Bayshore, with the Great South
Bay fronted by Fire Island, and beyond it the long sand-strip of the
Great South Beach. The famous lighthouse of Fire Island, the guiding
beacon to New York, one hundred and sixty-eight feet high, is flanked
by summer hotels, and its flashing electric light of twenty-three
million candlepower is the most powerful on the Atlantic Coast. The
Great South Bay spreads far eastward past Patchogue to Moriches, and
then comes Quogue and the Hamptons, where the level land rises into
the Shinnecock hills. At the eastern extremity are Amagansett and
Montauk. It is a long coast, fringed with lights to point the
mariner's way into New York harbor.
They tell us that when the "Onrest" came into the Sound there were
thirteen tribes of Indians on Long Island, and that it was the mint
for the aborigines, these tribes being the great makers of wampum, the
Indian money, for which its beaches and bays furnished the materials.
The Montauks, on the eastern end, were the most formidable, and were
usually carrying on wars with the Pequots, across the Sound in New
England. Out on Shinnecock Neck is the reservation where live the
small remnant of the Shinnecock tribe, there being barely a hundred of
them, each family in a little house on a little farm it tills. Around
Jamaica Bay once lived the Jameko tribe, all now disappeared. At
quaintly named Quogue, Daniel Webster used to go fishing and bathing.
The hill tops of the Hamptons have perched upon them the picturesque
old Dutch windmills which are so attractive to the artists, and at
East Hampton still stands the venerable gabled house where lived Lyman
Beecher in his earlier ministry, and where his elder children,
Catharine and Edward Beecher, were born. Here also passed his boyhood,
before he began wandering over the earth, the author of _Home, Sweet
Home_, John Howard Payne, his father being the village schoolmaster.
Payne's quaint little shingled cottage is East Hampton's most sacred
memorial. The inhabitants of East Hampton are so much in love with
their healthy home, which dates from 1648, that on its two hundred and
fiftieth anniversary, celebrated in 1898, the announcement was made
that they "like East Hampton in a thick fog better than any other
place in full sunshine." Eastward from Jamaica, in the western centre
of Long Island, are Creedmoor, the noted rifle range, Hempstead, where
the New York troops were mobilized in 1898 for the Spanish War, and
Garden City, the model suburban town laid out by Alexander T. Stewart,
containing a handsome Episcopal Cathedral. Not far away is Hicksville,
and to the northward the ancient town of Jericho. This was a tract
bought from the Indians by Robert, the brother of Roger Williams, in
1650, which afterwards became a place of Quaker settlement, and here
lived and preached for sixty years the famous Elias Hicks, the founder
of one of the Quaker sects. He was an opponent of war and of slavery,
and rode all over the country as a missionary preacher.