On June 23, 1677,[78] Cockenoe appeared before Governor Andros and Council at New York, in behalf of the inhabitants of Hampstead, who were having trouble with the Indians in their neighborhood, regarding land laid out by him in 1657, twenty years before, to which I have previously referred. At the same council he interpreted the speech of Weamsko, the Sachem of Seacotauk in Islip, who claimed the Nesquak [Nissequogue] lands; also the speech of Swaneme, who pretended to own the land called Unchemau [Fresh Pond] near Huntington. In the copy from which this has been taken he is called Checkoamaug, an evident error of some transcriber.
We find him occasionally employed by the proprietors of Montauk, especially in the year 1682, when he is "paid 9s for keeping the Indian corne,"[79] and as much "for burneing Meautauk,"[80] which was done every spring to free the land from underbrush and weeds.
The years are now rapidly fleeting, and Cockenoe is advancing in years with the settlements. The power of the Montauks is a thing of the past; they exercise no control over the rest of the Long Island Indians, who convey land without the assent of the Montauk Sachem. As most of the younger generation of the natives can speak English, probably as well as he, there is no necessity for him to interpret. He is now about the last of his generation still exercising the right as a member of the house of the Sachems, in the councils of the clan; and, on August 3, 1687,[81] he unites once more with the members of his tribe in the Montauk conveyance to the inhabitants of East Hampton: "For all our tract of land at Mantauket, bounded by part of the Fort Pond, and Fort Pond Bay west; the English land south by a line from the Fort Pond to the Great Pond ... to the utmost extent of the Island from sea to sea," etc., and then he retires from our view forever on the records of the past.
At the time of making this deed, half a century had elapsed since the conflict on the hills of Mystic—fifty eventful years in the history of our Colonies. If he was twenty-five years of age when he parted from Eliot in 1646 or 1647, he had then reached threescore years and five; not by any means an aged man, but, for all we know, he may have lived for some years afterward.[82]
There may be other recorded facts relating to his life which I have overlooked, or they may lie buried in the time-stained archives of other Long Island and New England towns—inaccessible, undecipherable, and unpublished—which some future historian may unfold and bring to light.[83] The seeds of knowledge planted by Eliot on the fertile field of this native's mind bore good fruit, even if his preceptor did write at an early day he knew not what use he then made of it. For the part he took in the rise and development of our settlements—a life work, unparalleled by that of any other Long Island or New England Indian—he deserves to be enrolled upon the page of honor.
And now, amid the rolling hills of Montauk, which he loved so well, and within sound of the everlasting murmur of the mighty ocean, which he so often heard, in a grave unmarked and unknown,[84] he sleeps to await the resurrection morn. A scarred and battered fragment from nature's world—a glacial bowlder, typical of the past—should be his monument[85]—on one side a sculptured entablature, inscribed:
"To the Memory of a Captive in the Pequot War, the first Indian Teacher of John Eliot; A firm friend of the English Colonists; Cockenoe-de-Long Island."