by Mac Griswold
The setup of a native village was equally foreign to the Sylvesters. An Indian visitor who reached the North Peninsula in the summer of 1653, when Grizzell first set foot on the island after her marriage, would have seen an orderly, productive encampment, whose inhabitants frequently shifted their wigwams around within the village, changing locations to find a cleaner site and to leave lice and fleas behind. On occasion, large parties set up campsites for seasonal hunting or fishing trips; wampum and pottery workshops moved closer to sources for shells or clay. By winter, all would have disappeared from the summer village, having migrated inland to the “warme and thicke woodie bottomes.” But the supreme architectural advantage engineered by the Algonquians—mobility—made the English uneasy, since to them such impermanence was the earmark of a savage society, not a civil one. The English found language to express their unease with this Indian vanishing act. Even an observer as well disposed toward the Indians as John Josselyn could write, “I have seen half a hundred of their wigwams together in a piece of ground and they shew prettily, within a day or two, a week they have all been dispersed.” Despite his admiration, Josselyn is asking a question: Could the impermanence of the village reflect some flaw, some lack of solidity, in the society as well?
All the same, Kupperman writes that Algonquians in fact met the standards by which seventeenth-century Englishmen judged a civil society. They had a complex language, government by hereditary rulers, and organized towns. They tilled the soil and providentially stored up food for winter and hard times. English visitors wrote admiring accounts of preservation methods, from smoking lobsters on scaffolds over a slow fire to bagging huge quantities of shelled dried corn and threshed beans in “Indian barnes.” Serving the same purpose as the eighteenth-century root cellar excavated at Sylvester Manor, these “barnes” were underground pits as deep as six feet, lined with clay, grasses, and mats. Once the pit was filled with stores, sand or earth was piled on top to seal it.
“Friendly Joyning”
An Indian garden or field was a movable carpet, changing shape or location as soil became depleted. The fields were cleared by girdling and burning the trees, then chopping the burnt remains and leaving stumps to rot. This was a big job: “All the neighbors, men and women, forty, fifty, a hundred, joyne, and come in to help freely. With friendly joyning they break up their fields.” Unlike an English field or garden, whose whole area would have been cultivated, Indians broke their plantings into small patches about three feet across, almost like raised beds, a custom the English soon followed in their first fields. Nonetheless, English observers who found this practice disorganized and wasteful cited it as more evidence that the Indians didn’t deserve their land.
In summer, women bent over the young corn, piling earth up around the base of the stalks to steady them; bean vines climbed the stalks. (Together, corn and beans supply complete proteins—all nine essential amino acids.) The end of April and the month of May were called “when the corn is set,” or “the planting month.” Shelter Island Indians also planted by the stars: when the Pleiades finished their winter journey across the sky, and disappeared in the first week of May, corn was sown. But there were other planting signs as well: when dogwood leaves were the size of a squirrel’s ear, when the alewives—small Atlantic fish that spawn in the fresh water where they were born, like salmon—choked the streams. June was “the weeding month,” when women got out their clamshell hoes, “not suffering a choaking weede to advance his audacious head above their infant corn, or an undermining worm to spoil [it].” The Pleiades’ reappearance in October signaled the harvest.
Manitoo! God Appears as Men, Women, Birds, Beasts, Fish
The indigenous Americans on Shelter Island were fishermen long before they took up agriculture. Shell middens—deep heaps of discarded shells—lie everywhere along the shore. The waters beyond the creek were more than fishing grounds, however. Out in the deep, the underworld opened to the home of Hobbemok, the god both of death and of everyday life. While Cautantowwit, creator of mankind, remained remote from human affairs but steadily benevolent, Hobbemok was unpredictably present. Even as believers blamed him for misfortune, they called on him for help. In his ambiguity and restlessness, he seems a peculiarly modern god. Cautantowwitt and Hobbemok, cast simply as God and Satan by the English, were both animated by manitou, a highly unpredictable shape-shifting force. “There is a generall Custome amongst them, at the apprehension of an Excellency in Men, Women Birds, Beasts, Fish &c. to cry out Manittoo A God,” wrote Roger Williams.
The Manhansetts believed that they inhabited a three-layered circular cosmos—sky, earth, and underworld—supported and connected by a giant cedar tree. Possessed by manitou and aided by fasting, tests of physical endurance, incantation, music, and dance, human beings could penetrate mystical depths and heights. At the outer edges of the earthly world—whether inhaling the thick smoke of a ceremony or fishing on the long ocean swells past Montauk—a person could step across the threshold into mythic time and place.
How much the Manhansetts revealed of their beliefs to the Sylvesters—or how much the Sylvesters wanted to hear about “heathen” practices—is debatable. John Updike wrote that “description solidifies the past and creates a gravitational body that wasn’t there before. A background of dark matter—all that is not said—remains, buzzing.” The first Sylvesters lived their lives against that buzzing sound.
Mâuo: A Lament
The story of that early life when power hung in the balance between Native Americans and Europeans is as hard to put together as a pot in a thousand pieces. First of all, the disastrous loss of population meant that Indian New England was changing so fast that it is almost impossible to describe it except as a dissolving point on a trajectory: of the roughly ninety thousand Indians in the Northeast alive in 1600, nine-tenths had died by 1650 of epidemic diseases such as smallpox and measles, diseases that were entirely new to them. While the regional native population shrank to 9,000, the total of English inhabitants had already swelled to 18,500 by 1640. Even though Indians regrouped their decimated societies and reshaped their territorial boundaries and alliances after 1650, the psychological dislocation and disempowerment caused by the devastating losses increased the sense (among colonists as well as natives) that God had deserted the Indians.
Eastern Long Island’s Indians never had their own early European chroniclers as did New England’s: no William Bradford, no John Winthrop Jr., nor any of the host of lesser-known observers who recorded so many details of Algonquian life. Above all, they had no Roger Williams (1603–1683), the reporter I trust the most. The son of an English shopkeeper, Williams was a protégé of the brilliant jurist Sir Edward Coke and a highly respected scholar in England—what we might call a public intellectual. Only four years after Williams came to Massachusetts in 1631, the Bay Colony’s Puritans kicked him out. While Williams is best known popularly for stating that civil authorities had no right to persecute their citizens over their differing religious beliefs (a basic tenet of the argument against the union of church and state), the reasons for his banishment were as much political as theological. Massachusetts feared the unwanted attention from the crown and authorities in England that Williams’s strident insistence that the colony separate publicly from the Church of England would bring. Politically canny, the Bay oligarchy preferred to keep their heads down on this subject. Williams also loudly held that Charles I had no right to confiscate Indian land—thus denying the validity of the colony’s precious patent. Massachusetts wasted no time in banishing him; Williams headed for the friendly Narragansetts, in Rhode Island.
In his A Key into the Language of America, published in 1643, a sort of Christian guide and Algonquian phrasebook (he spoke the language), Williams draws sympathetic and acutely observed portraits of the Narragansetts “from their Birth to their Buriells.” Williams called his Key an “Implicite dialogue.” Some entries read like cheerful Berlitz exchanges: coming into an Indian village by night, W
illiams asks Yo nickowemen? or “Shall I sleep here?” and receives the answer Wunnegin, cowish: “Welcome, sleepe here.” Sometimes a single word can describe the wrenching cultural shift under way even as he wrote; in the section titled “Of Buying and Selling,” Williams observes “Cuppaimish I will pay you … is a word newly made from the English word pay.” When the team excavated a Spanish “cob,” a roughly milled bit of silver, from the jumble of European roof tiles and ceramics in the midden, they found one side incised with an angular drawing, a potent Native American religious emblem: a thunderbird. The European power of money—silver—had been rephrased in another language.
The spoken language throughout southern New England was Algonquian. Most speakers, from whatever nation, could understand one another. Discovering this was a relief; I felt easier about pulling details from Williams and other Rhode Island and Massachusetts sources. Connections ran across Long Island Sound, so that Algonquians in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and the Cape were the neighbors, not those surrounding and north of New York City. (The shortest distance across the Sound is about ten miles, while New York City is eighty miles from Shelter Island by car.)
Long Island Indians had been shielded from direct dealings with Europeans by the dominant Connecticut Pequots, who extracted tribute from them in exchange for protection until 1637, when Pequot power was extinguished following an escalating series of New England colonial demands to avenge the deaths of two English traders. The struggle culminated in genocide. English-led forces and some Indian allies attacked a stockaded Pequot village in Mystic, Connecticut, and set it afire; a massacre and an ensuing bloody pursuit killed off most of the tribe’s warriors. Those men who survived, including the boys, were sold to the West Indies as slaves. The women and girls were sold by lot to the victorious and eager New Englanders, setting a precedent on Long Island as well for Indian slavery that would last until the nineteenth century, notwithstanding ineffectively enforced legislation against it as early as 1679. “Pequot” was outlawed as a tribal name, and those Pequots who survived were absorbed into other Indian communities. Such total extermination was new to the Indians. The effects of the Pequot War also reverberated through the marriage of Indian women who found partners among enslaved Africans, increasing the mix of races already begun.
The Manhansetts, who had stayed out of the Pequot struggle as much as possible, weighed the outcome and sent tribute to the English a few weeks after their final victory. Previous to this conflict, the decades of Pequot protection, uneasy and difficult as they had been for the vassal nations, may have led Long Island Indians to assume that the English would also abide by the treaties they negotiated, which they did not. Early land sale agreements required European goods and sometimes currency—such as Old Peter Minuit’s “twenty-six dollars and a bottle of booze” for the island of Manhattan—in exchange for wampum to seal the terms of the deal. Contrary to what Rodgers and Hart wrote, however, wampum and hatchets and desirable “trade cloth” were treated by the Indians as ceremonial offerings that didn’t represent actual property values, but were considered to pave the way for alliances. Like the seals on English government documents for the English, exchanging gifts acted as acknowledgments of agreement over rights. To the English, on the other hand, such gifts confirmed the transfer of ownership, or, more precisely, complete control of the land.
Wampum beads—small polished purple and white hand-drilled cylinders made from two species of shellfish that thrived almost exclusively in Long Island Sound—were the original big attraction for the English besides land. Wampum had originally been so sacred it was handled only by sachems, but it gradually became a currency that spurred the growth of the European fur trade, the first exchange commodity. Wampum has been found as far north as Maine and westward to the Ohio River. Coastal Algonquians such as the Montauketts and Manhansetts were in a sense enslaved by the need to produce more and more wampum and to pay more and more tribute, first to their Pequot overlords and then to the English. After Europeans began to manufacture wampum with steel drills, inflation eventually took its toll. By 1661, wampum was no longer legal tender in Massachusetts, for example, where it had been institutionalized in 1637 as currency at a rate of six beads for a penny.
Long Island’s wampum supply, fertile soils, and many harbors drew English settlement by the 1640s. Miantonomi, a Narragansett sachem from Rhode Island, prophesied in 1641:
ye English … Say brothr to one anothr, So must we be one as they are, othrwise we shall be all gone shortly, for you know our fathers had plentie of deare, & Skins, our plaines weare full of dear as also our woods and of Turkeies, and our Coves full of fish and foule, but these English having gotten our land, they with Sithes cut downe ye grass, and with axes fell the trees their Cowes & horses eat ye grass, and thr hoggs spoyle our Clambanks, and we Shall all be starved …
The supply of desirable land was soon exhausted, as Long Island measures only 113 miles long and 23 wide at its widest point. There were no distant forests and fields for Indians to retreat to. Miantonomi’s prediction, and his plea for unified resistance, came true. Algonquians of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts did band together in 1675 to wage what is called King Philip’s War, undertaken to force the colonists out of America. By then, the East End tribes were too divided and weak to join in. They had already lost. Mâuo, indeed.
Cattails and Phragmites
A dirt track runs along an earthen causeway built to carry farm equipment across the Upper Inlet to the big flat north fields of Sylvester Manor, closing off the large freshwater spring that fed it. Most of the inlet has become a brackish marsh, overgrown with phragmites, the invasive, non-native common reed. But since the causeway isn’t quite watertight, a thread of fresh water supports a thin trail of cattails weaving through the taller phragmites. Common cattails, which grow only in fresh water, can’t compete with phragmites, whose rhizomes, often fifty feet or more in length, flourish in both fresh and salt water and choke out other species. Those cattail stragglers are losing the ecological battle here in the Upper Inlet.
I find myself studying these reeds because I’ve left the manor house to clear my head after reading early Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano’s description of his encounter with Rhode Island Indians in 1524. Gliding along through his overwhelming description of that meeting, I feel the beauty and power of the Indians as Europeans first saw them. These were not the violent and drunken people Nathaniel Sylvester complained about in 1672 after he had paid their wages for years in hard cider and West Indian rum, or the romanticized “red men” that Eben Horsford imagined two hundred years later. Verrazzano’s Algonquians were utopian figures. They were pagan demigods, stepping out of ancient myth to embody a Golden Age:
Before entering [a harbor], we saw about twenty small boats full of people, who came about our ship, uttering many cries of astonishment … Among them were two kings more beautiful in form and stature than can possibly be described; one was about forty years old, the other about twenty-four, and they were dressed in the following manner: The oldest had a deer’s skin around his body, artificially wrought in damask figures, his head was without covering, his hair was tied back in various knots; around his neck he wore a large chain ornamented with many stones of different colors. The young man was similar in his general appearance. This is the finest looking tribe, the handsomest in their costumes, that we have found in our voyage … They exceed us in size … their faces are sharp, and their hair long and black, upon the adorning of which they bestow great pains; their eyes are black and sharp, their expression mild and pleasant, greatly resembling the antique.
“Two kings”: to me they represent Youghco and Wyandanch. On my way back to the house, instead of gazing across the phragmites/cattail battle in the marshy inlet, I look down into the big spring on the other side of the causeway, a shallow hole about forty feet in diameter thickly surrounded by wineberries and blackberries and weeds. Standing in the middle are about a hundred more cattails, sil
ent and brown and completely unexpected. I stop breathing for some long seconds. I am looking at a remnant population of the increasingly rare cattail. Maybe I hadn’t noticed them before, or maybe the extremely wet spring has given them the extra inch of fresh water they needed to germinate and flourish? They must have been there for months. Walking to the fields so often, I must have passed them many times.
I imagine the Indians often existed just like this for the first Sylvesters: always present, but only sometimes visible. Sometimes they were powerful, then powerless; sometimes dangerous, then accommodating and friendly: sometimes needed, and sometimes desperately wished—or legislated—away. The Indians, for their part, must sometimes have come into full view only when they wanted to be seen. I snap out of my vision and see just a bunch of cattails, bulwarked for the time being, by fresh water and the causeway, from invasive rhizomes and extinction.
3
AMSTERDAM
Earth, Water, Fire
By 2000, the UMass team has excavated hundreds of yellow bricks, whole and in fragments, from almost every section of the dig that has now pockmarked the lawns on all sides of the manor house. The archaeologist Paul Huey, the “brick man from Albany,” once visited and said that there was more yellow brick at Sylvester Manor than at all the Dutch sites he had dealt with in New York State put together. “Yellow” is a relative term here: these small bricks, about 1.5 × 2 × 6 inches, range in color from dun to ocher to a soft honey to a dispirited salmon. Their color indicates where they were made: in Gouda, of clay dug from the bed of the IJssel River (“Eye-sel”). High-fired bricks have a hard surface that withstands wear when they’re laid as pavers and a density that prevents rising damp from seeping into their core. Many of these bricks, however, are creased, dented, torqued out of shape because the IJssel clay was worked while still soft or the firing temperature was too high or low. Shelter Island’s acid soil has eaten away at the glaze until the surfaces look like sliced meat loaf on a cafeteria steam table.