The steamboat entering Long Island Sound from New York, after passing
Hell Gate and crossing Flushing Bay, emerges from the strait of East
River between Throgg's Neck and Whitestone. Upon the end of Throgg's
Neck, the jutting point has the graystone ramparts and surmounting
earthworks of its ancient guardian, Fort Schuyler. Thrust forward from
the Long Island shore, as if to meet it, is the protruding headland of
Willett's Point, the Government torpedo station. Here also is an old
stone fort down by the waterside, with the extensive ramparts of a
modern fort on the bluff above. These are the defensive works
commanding the approach to New York from Long Island Sound. In the
neighboring havens are favorite anchorages for yachts. Beyond are the
expansive waters of the Sound, and far off southward, thrust into the
land, are the deep recesses of Little Neck Bay, made famous by its
clams, and protected to the eastward by the curiously bifurcated
peninsula of Great Neck. The northern Long Island shore is very
irregular, and rises into hills. Bold peninsulas and deep bays form
it, the surface being corrugated into hillocks and valleys, and
penetrated by narrow, shallow harbors. The waves of the Sound have
eroded the shores into steep and often precipitous bluffs of gravel,
sometimes rising a hundred feet above the water, where narrow beaches,
strewn with boulders, border them. At Sands Point is a great peninsula
protruding in high sandy bluffs, and behind it is the highest mountain
on Long Island, Harbor Hill, rising three hundred and fifty feet above
the village of Roslyn, at the head of the deeply indented
Hempstead Harbor, where lived at his home of Cedarmere, for many
years, William Cullen Bryant, who now sleeps in the little cemetery.
[Illustration: _William Cullen Bryant at "Cedarhurst," Roslyn_]
Oyster Bay is deeply indented into the land to the eastward,
surrounded by villas and attractive homes, and beyond protrudes the
broad, high headland of Lloyds' Neck. This was strongly fortified by
the British in the Revolution, and King William IV., then the youthful
Duke of Clarence, was at one time an officer of the garrison. It was
attacked and captured by the Americans who came over from Connecticut
in 1779, the garrison being taken prisoners. Subsequently the British
again took possession, and the French from Newport attacked them in
1781, but were repulsed. The hero of Oyster Bay is Captain Nathan Hale
of Connecticut, whose statue stands in New York City Hall Park. He had
been sent by Washington in 1776, across the Sound, to examine the
British defenses of Brooklyn, and, returning, was captured by some
Tories at Oyster Bay, and the next day hanged in New York as a spy.
Though but twenty-one years old, he met his fate bravely, saying: "I
only regret that I have but one life to give for my country." The
British destroyed his farewell letters, the provost-marshal saying
"that the rebels should not know they had a man in their army who
could die with so much firmness." Oyster Bay was bought in 1653 from
the Matinecock Indians by a Pilgrim colony from Sandwich,
Massachusetts, and a treaty made at Hartford established it as the
boundary between the Dutch of New York and the English of New England.
To the eastward are Huntingdon, Setauket and Port Jefferson, popular
resorts, and inland are Jerusalem and Islip, the latter settled and
named in the seventeenth century by emigrants from old Islip,
Oxfordshire, England. Here is the famous Ronkonkoma Lake, so named by
the Indians from the white sand of its shores. It is a pretty sheet of
fresh water among the forests, about a mile in diameter, of great
depth, and has neither inlet nor outlet, though its surface level
regularly rises and falls every four years. Here lived the chief
wampum makers, the Secatogue and Patchogue tribes. Their wampum mainly
consisted of the thick blue part of clam shells, ground into the form
of bugle beads, and strung upon cards a foot long.