The Isle of Nassau—Captain Adraien Blok—Roodt Eylandt—Block Island—Great South Bay—Great South Beach—Jamaica Bay—Hempstead Bay—Fire Island and its Lighthouse—Shinnecock—Quogue-East Hampton—Lyman Beecher—John Howard Payne—Garden City—Jericho—Elias Hicks—Flushing Bay—Throgg's Neck—Willett's Point—Little Neck Bay—Great Neck—Sands Point—Harbor Hill—William Cullen Bryant—Oyster Bay—Lloyds' Neck—Nathan Hale—Ronkonkoma Lake—The Wampum Makers—Mamaroneck—Byram River—The Wooden-Nutmeg State—Brother Jonathan—Greenwich—Old Put's Hill—Stamford—Colonel Abraham Davenport—The Dark Day—Norwalk—Sasco Swamp—Fairfield—Pequannock River—Bridgeport—Phineas T. Barnum—Joyce Heth—General Tom Thumb—Jenny Lind—Old Stratford—Milford—New Haven—Quinnepiack—John Davenport—Yale College—Killingworth—Elihu Yale—Steamboat Fulton—East and West Rocks—The Regicides—Wallingford—James Hillhouse—Savin Rock—Saybrook Point—Guilford—Connecticut River—The Sachem's Head—Thimble Islands—Saybrook Platform—Old Saybrook—Thames River—New London—Groton—Silas Deane—Fort Hill—Pequot Hill—Defeat of the Pequots—Pawcatuck—Stonington—Watch Hill Point—Westerly—Orient Point—Plum Island—Plum Gut—Shelter Island—The Gull Islands—The Horse Race—Fisher's Island—Gardiner's Island—Lyon Gardiner—Captain Kidd and his Buried Treasures—Sag Harbor—Montauk Indians—Money Pond—Fort Pond Bay—Montauk Point and its Lighthouse—Ultima Thule—Isle of Manisees—Block Islanders—Whittier—Palatine Wreck.
THE ISLE OF NASSAU.
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.
THE NORTHERN LONG ISLAND SHORE.
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.
William Cullen Bryant at "Cedarhurst," Roslyn