by Mac Griswold
By the time I returned to the manor, Alice was searching for a way to memorialize him. Andy, who had loved his family papers so dearly, had also loved archaeology. Fortuitously, I had just hired Gresham O’Malley, a graduate student at the New York Botanical Garden, to make measured drawings as illustrations for my article, a narrow look at the manor’s Colonial Revival garden history. While Gresham and I tugged on strings and tape measures and yelled at each other across the hedges, he told me about his digger brother-in-law, Professor Stephen Mrozowski of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who had excavated at Jamestown and other seventeenth-century sites in Virginia and New England.
As Gresham talked over our sandwiches about his brother-in-law’s excavations, Alice realized this might be the way to keep Andy vividly close to her. The methodology of an archaeological dig struck us both as a way of continuing Andy’s dig among his papers—and with the same intention to discover things and make connections. Later, I asked Gresham if he thought Steve would like to visit, maybe even consider Sylvester Manor as a project.
On a drizzly winter day, Steve drove up with his wife and kids, absolutely prepared, he later told me, to say no, but as we walked toward the house, he bent down and, from among the pebbles on the back drive, picked up a piece of creamware pottery and then a piece of eighteenth-century blue and white porcelain. Then he met Alice, who with her characteristic mix of down-home style and ceremony offered Pringles in a silver bowl as just the right pre-luncheon hors d’oeuvre. That clinched the deal.
Field archaeology requires squads of people, wads of money, and a lab to process the “finds.” Alice soon funded a research center at UMass in memory of Andy. Ruddy, balding, and bearded, invariably dressed in shorts, T-shirt, and sandals, and often visibly excited by what he found, Steve came to the manor with a preliminary team in the summer of 1998. Fieldwork would continue for eight more years.
Steve is a historical archaeologist, which means he studies the recent past, not prehistory. Although historical archaeology is sometimes also described as the study of cultures that have a written record, ironically, in the Americas, it has proved most effective at revealing the lives of those who had little chance to enter that record because they were illiterate: native and enslaved people and the poor—laborers, factory workers, common soldiers, migrant workers. Steve, like others in his field, was digging to expose what James Deetz, who was considered the world’s foremost historical archaeologist until his death in 2000, called “the spread of European cultures throughout the world since the fifteenth century, and their impact on and interaction with the cultures of indigenous peoples.” On Shelter Island, Steve’s team focused on the Indians of the East End, both before Europeans arrived (the “pre-contact era”) and after, as well as on traces of the voiceless Africans.
Although Alice encouraged and cheered Steve’s endeavors, she was hunting primarily for ancestors and real estate. She wanted to find Nathaniel’s lost grave and authenticate the location of the vanished “First House.” Buildings—even long-gone ones like this one—have a special place in American history: appearing so solid and reassuringly tangible, they are also roosts for folklore and speculation as well as repositories of the facts and dates from which we imagine we have built “the past.”
Shovel test pits (archaeology’s first marks in the soil at any excavation) mark the eight years (1999–2006) of archaeological summer field schools at the manor by the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Steve’s eight summer field schools undoubtedly will prove to be only the first phase of excavation on the incredibly rich site. He and his team came with the intention of unearthing what they called a multicultural Northern provisioning plantation that dates to the earliest days of European settlement on the Eastern Seaboard. Calling a farm in the North a “plantation” startled me, as did the concept that such places were specifically set up to provision West Indian sugar plantations powered by slaves. Steve’s digs would unearth the often voiceless “conversations” that had taken place on Shelter Island between Europeans, Indians, and Africans, struggles over power and the use of space revealed by artifacts and the faint, multilayered evidence of fences, roads, and buildings.
Once the UMass team started, the Sylvesters’ ease as travelers and merchants would also become visible as artifacts were teased out of the ground: English and European ceramics of every description, coins of five nations, Dutch clay pipes and bricks, a German silver stickpin, pounds and pounds of Caribbean coral, stockpiled as a vital ingredient for making mortar. Evidence of an enormously wide and adventurous world of people on the move rose up from beneath the manor’s green front lawn, so smooth and settled.
Within the first year of the dig, my own path became clear. I asked Alice if she would agree to my writing a three-century history of the place that would include not only information from the documents but also some of the excavation results, and the day-to-day processing of the finds. For several years, however, “reading the landscape” of the manor as a landscape historian meant spending most of my time studying old letters, deeds, and other papers, hoping for clues to what had happened on the ground. The paper trail led me to many places where the Sylvesters had lived, worked, or merely visited. Meantime, out of doors, sticking up everywhere through the surface of the present were genuine landscape history question marks such as a garden gate to nowhere and a curious six-inch level change running across a meadow.
Steve and I had much to learn from each other. He, too, delved into the written history of the place, and he found, tucked away in the vault, a precious 1828 map of the existing house and its outbuildings that I had missed. And I discovered the thrill of thinking about this place as a dig site that sometimes supported the written evidence, sometimes proved it wrong. This island, Manhansucke Ahaquatzuwamocke—translated from the Algonquian as “island sheltered by islands”—was thickly inhabited by the Manhansetts before the Sylvesters settled it as part of a larger business project that foreshadowed modern global capitalism. It was a system born in what a new cadre of scholars term “the Atlantic World,” a restless, constantly evolving web of ship-born connections, not the isolated New World of settlement that Andy—and many historians before him—had considered to be the core of early American history. Money—how the Sylvesters made it, married it, lost it, kept it over three centuries—is also part of the tale. From their Atlantic World mercantile beginnings, Nathaniel’s descendants would become colonial—and then American—lawyers, magistrates, revolutionaries, soldiers, government officials, speculators, and scientists. They also continued to farm, although it was never their sole occupation.
From a contract Nathaniel and his partners had drawn up in 1652, it was clear that the four had initially envisioned the island not only as a place to raise livestock for the Caribbean market but also as a trading post for the exchange of goods with the Indians and with Europeans: the Dutch in New Amsterdam, for instance, or the Swedes, who had colonized Delaware, or with anyone else who was staking a claim in what was still essentially very contested territory in the 1650s. Nathaniel, younger than the three others, and with his fortune still to make, became the resident partner. Archaeology would show that his settlement evolved restlessly over almost thirty years, with buildings being moved, demolished, and rebuilt as needed. His polyglot establishment circled the same spot by Gardiners Creek, like a dog circling its bed before finally lying down.
So a big question now arose for me: Who exactly were those first Sylvesters? Andy and Alice knew that Nathaniel and his brothers and sisters, children of English expatriates, were born and raised in Amsterdam, but that was it—why they lived there and for how long, why and how they left, seemed relatively unimportant to them. The Dutch information coming out of the soil didn’t connect with the eighteenth-century American colonial landscape I walked through every day. How could I write a book about these implacably disconnected fragments of an older Atlantic World?
I found funding for a Dutch graduate stud
ent to hunt down references to the family in the Netherlands. She located thirty-three precious Sylvester documents in the Amsterdam notarial archives. Transcribed and translated from the seventeenth-century Dutch, they charted the birth and growth of a far-flung trade network in which men like Nathaniel and his five brothers spent more time afloat than ashore. Their canny merchant father, Giles, remained in Amsterdam, the center of their operations. Demonstrably fluent in Dutch as well as English and powered by a fierce mercantile drive, these Atlantic adventurers operated with ample credit, relying on kinship and contacts to manipulate the levers of power—and injustice.
Shelter Island was hardly unique as a provisioning plantation. There were scores of such ventures along the coast of New England long before the monster establishments of the South were created. Nathaniel employed a heterogeneous force of indentured servants, enslaved Africans, and nominally free but virtually enslaved Indians. They shaped white oak timbers into staves, which he shipped south to the Caribbean to make barrels, the indispensable containers of the day. They bred and broke horses that were sent to carry sugar from mill to port. The grain they grew would feed man and beast. They butchered, salted, and casked cattle, sheep, and hogs, which were also shipped south to feed the hundreds of slaves who powered the sugar operations of the Sylvesters and their partners—and any other West Indian planters to whom they could sell their goods. Sugar, rum, and molasses came back to the manor or went to New England or Amsterdam or other European ports. There, sugar in its various forms was converted into cash to buy manufactured goods of all kinds to send back to New England and the Caribbean.
Sylvester Manor is the earliest of the Northern provisioning plantations to survive in such complete form. I learned that it has an integrity few others possess, retaining its original water access, land, architecture, and documents. But the larger interest collects around the American—the human—polarities that the place displays: the slave burial ground and the Quaker cemetery, the impulse to exploit versus the exceptionalist city-on-a-hill resolve that we could start over in the New World and this time do it right. The house and its landscape are where these opposites meet. Wrestling with the Sylvesters’ problems of good and evil means wrestling with ours: What drives us to the crucial moment when one force overcomes the other? Interpreting the sketchy personal data available, taking historical events into account and making character judgments, I found that this question loomed over the full range of centuries and cultures at the manor. My answer would be very different from Andy Fiske’s.
Telling the Tale
Andy had told me his version of the story as he had received it from his nineteenth-century forebears, the first people to look back at their history as history. For them, the house, its landscape, and the carefully preserved contents of the vault were what mattered. What I found mesmerizing in the vault were the fleeting references to what Andy’s family historians didn’t value: the stories of generations of slaves. As I wrote, the outlines of slavery in New England, of which Shelter Island was considered a part for the first century of settlement, began to take shape for me. Despite much recent scholarship, it’s still a history that is harder to grasp than that of the plantation slavery system in the American South. This is partly because slavery did indeed take a different and less overtly vicious form here. Because the numbers of slaves were fewer and the labor arrangements and tasks more varied, the Northern system seemed at first to offer a greater range of freedom and choice. But whether it was crueler or kinder, Americans ceased to know anything about it.
By contrast with the rubbed-out actuality of Northern slavery, I found that many of the places people had left to come to Shelter Island exist weirdly unchanged. In Banda, near the Volta River in Ghana, where slave coffles once crossed on their way south to the slave castles of the Gold Coast, a rural life continues: field after field of cassava, outdoor cooking fires flickering, children dancing and shrieking in the last minutes of daytime play, yam stew and peace under a neem tree as the light fades and the earth cools. The steep thatched roof of the replica of an Asante fetish shrine museum in Besease still guards a mediating spirit, an obosom, who resides in a tree in the courtyard. On Barbados, Constant Plantation continues to be planted in sugar. (The local telephone directory lists hundreds of people named Sylvester.) In sleepy little Charlton Adam, in Somerset, the tithe barns and meadows that Nathaniel’s father left when he emigrated to the Netherlands still stand. Nathaniel would have no trouble recognizing the houses I saw along Amsterdam’s Singel Canal, where he lived. In London, and in Datchet, near Windsor, I walked among the landmarks of Grizzell Brinley’s childhood.
As I arrived back on Shelter Island from travels in Europe, Africa, and Barbados, the unusual name of one of the manor’s first Africans, Semonie, jumped out at me again and again from the pages of later local church records on Long Island. Someone carried this precious name down the generations. At the manor, archaeologists unearthed huge animal bones and the unbroken top half of a Manhansett pot from a slaughter pit beneath the lawn. A garden set aside for the slaves to cultivate as their own was discovered only inches under the brambles. The heron, the red-winged blackbirds, and the deer of Shelter Island appeared—and still appear—at the secret time of day when flowers of the imagination open, pale as X-rays.
2
LIVING WITH THE INDIANS
Blood and Magic
It was still an Indian world when Nathaniel and Grizzell set foot on the island in the early 1650s. And yet among the several hundred documents that I’ve looked at so far, perhaps only a dozen—mostly land treaties and account books—deal directly with the Indians who lived here, with how they lived before the Sylvesters came, with how they lived both with the Sylvesters and with the Africans. The Manhansetts, the Algonquians of Shelter Island, and their neighbors, the Montauketts, Shinnecocks, Corchaugs, and other peoples of the East End of Long Island, thought of themselves as members of the Ninnimissinuok, or, loosely translated, “the people who lived in Southern New England,” which for them and for the Sylvesters included most of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Long Island, and the islands in the Sound. On Shelter Island they reveal themselves as sharp silhouettes, flickering by the fiery light of the complaints and grievances that make up most of their sorry colonial history. Every once in a while the light is bright, as when the Grand Sachem of Long Island, Wyandanch, the English colonists’ ally, comes to Shelter Island from his Montauk home to witness a land deal. His signature is two stick figures: two men clasping hands in friendship, a white man and an Indian. It is the mark of a man who believed that the compacts he signed would hold.
The politics, the dance of alliances and betrayals, the astonishing bloodshed, the unspoken threats of violence on both sides, are all integral to a complete view of unfolding events in New England in the early 1650s. But it’s hard to determine who was more violent, more “savage,” the English or the Indians. “The confrontation between the American Indians and the English colonists is almost always presented as a meeting between admirable but extremely primitive people and the representatives of a vastly superior culture,” writes historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman. To right the comparison, just think of the criminals’ heads lawfully displayed on London Bridge until they rotted that were an accustomed sight in Grizzell Brinley’s England, or of the wartime massacre of every single man, woman, and child in the Dutch town of Naarden by the Spanish duke of Alba’s son in 1572, a bloodbath still remembered fifty years later when Nathaniel was a little boy.
What brings the general acceptance of violence closest to peaceful Shelter Island for me are the severed Indian “fingers and thumes,” thirty of them, that were offered to William Coddington, Grizzell’s brother-in-law, then governor of Rhode Island. These bloody digits were the gift of the Narragansett sachem Canonicus, who wished to ally his people with the Newport colony by proving his warriors’ ability to disarm or dispatch native enemies of the English. Almost as eye-opening as the tribute itself is Codd
ington’s calm, matter-of-fact tone in a letter to Massachusetts governor John Winthrop: “Pesecus [another sachem] nore Canonecus have not sent unto me sence I rejected a present of 30 fingers and thumes…” This terse postscript doesn’t say whether Coddington’s refusal sprang from disgust or, more likely, political expediency. It illustrates the casual acceptance of violence as part of daily life that we know existed as a threat during Nathaniel and Grizzell Sylvester’s decades on the island. Even though an uneasy peace held throughout their lifetimes, they lived with a background of fear, calculating that blood would be spilled again as the balance of power between natives and Europeans wavered.
Wyandanch, sachem of the Montauketts of eastern Long Island, came to Shelter Island to witness a sale document in 1658 for what we now call Lloyd Neck in Huntington, Long Island. He signed with his mark, the figures of two men clasping hands in agreement.
Kupperman says colonists feared not only Indian military attacks “but also that the Indians might use magic against them. They and the Indians believed in a world peopled with supernatural forces which could affect their lives.” Algonquian accusations of witchcraft were taken seriously enough to be heard in English courts. The Salem witch trials, late in the seventeenth century, demonstrate forcefully that the colonists believed as much in the supernatural as any Indian who believed that the Pennacook sachem, Passaconway, a powwaw, or priest, could “make water burn, the rocks move, the trees dance, metamorphose himself into a flaming man.”
To the North Peninsula
I’m at my desk in a ground-floor back bedroom at the manor, studying the family papers. Outside, winter’s bareness exposes the mound north of the house, across the Upper Inlet, the part of Gardiners Creek spanned by the land bridge. Leafless trees frame the curve of the mound, a low hill that blunts the north wind shaking the old house. I watch the track crossing the stone bridge and disappearing into the woods. The mound, which the archaeologists call “the North Peninsula,” seems remote, mysterious. I turn back to the papers, hoping to find more about the Indians who lived here.