Philistines at the Hedgerow

by Steven Gaines

  Gardiner also had a reputation as being an apologist for the Indians. To be sure, he wasn’t above surrounding his fort with a lawn of wooden boards through which sharp nails had been driven so any approaching Indians would impale themselves, but he much favored another tactic some found suspect: friendly negotiation. He was one of the few Puritans who believed that the natives were more than pagan beasts, fit mostly for slaughter. For Gardiner, they were misled souls, all God’s creatures, open to redemption but ripe for exploitation. In fact, Gardiner was rather charmed by the Indians’ exaggerated sense of honor and even bothered to learn their language. He was outspokenly against fighting with the local tribes and certainly more furious with the Massachusetts Bay Colony for sending trained mercenaries to butcher the Pequots than he was with the outraged Indians who attacked him in retaliation, shooting him with poisoned arrows, from which he barely recovered.

  The Pequots were a particularly nasty crew, with an army of thousands of bloodthirsty braves who dispatched their victims by force-feeding them chunks of their own flesh and then wore the toes and fingers in a headband. The Pequots were the greatest obstacle to the British in appropriating more land in Connecticut, and so in 1637, despite Lion Gardiner’s protests, the British sent a regiment of soldiers to exterminate the entire tribe. The soldiers set upon them at their encampment at Mystic and turned it into an inferno. They torched the huts and incinerated the braves who stayed inside or shot and hacked to death the old men, women, and children who ran screaming from the burning village. By day’s end nearly the entire Mystic tribe had been murdered, and only a handful of survivors were scattered across Connecticut and Long Island. So shocking and stupidly unnecessary was the obliteration of the tribe, according to Gardiner, that he later wrote a book about it, On Relation of the Pequot Warres.

  A few days after the killing at Mystic, Lion Gardiner was fascinated to learn that Wyandanch, the great sachem of the Montauk, was headed across the sound in a canoe so big that it was paddled by thirty braves. Wyandanch had requested a meeting with Gardiner, who he heard was sympathetic to the Indians’ plight. Among the Algonquin tribes, Wyandanch was considered the big banker, the head of the Indian Federal Reserve. The Montauks had cornered the market on the manufacture of money—wampum—which was made from the plentiful periwinkle and conch shells found along the beaches of the Hamptons. All year long the Montauk squaws strung wampum while the men hunted and fished. They were the richest tribe in the nation, and their wampum was so valued that it was regulated by the English Crown as a means of trading.

  But Gardiner also knew that the Montauks’ great wealth had made Wyandanch a shakedown target: Every time trouble was afoot with another tribe, instead of going to war, Wyandanch paid a bribe. The Montauks had become so well known for paying off the bullies that Long Island was dubbed Paumenoke, the “land of tribute,” by the other Indians. Of all the tormentors of Wyandanch and the Montauks, the Connecticut Pequot tribe had been the worst.

  Wyandanch and Lion Gardiner laid eyes on each other for the first time in the great hall of Saybrook Fort. Gardiner and the soldiers could smell Wyandanch and his men 100 feet away. Hygiene was unknown to the Indians: they never bathed, they were bare-assed, and they wore only a small loincloth over their genitals. They were always nearly naked, even in the bitter New England winter, when they would slather their bodies in a putrid animal grease to help them retain body heat. The chief was a fierce-looking Indian with a tough, muscular body and a burned-umber complexion. He had a flat, moonlike oval face that he kept painted in brightly colored designs of blue and red and yellow. The intricacy of the design, enhanced and modified every day, was of great pride to him, as was the roach of black hair that ran from his forehead down the nape of his neck, the rest being singed away with hot rocks. Around his waist he wore a display of wampum to show his wealth, not unlike wearing a Rolex in the Hamptons today. A pack of young wolves, which his tribe had half domesticated and raised as pets, dogged his steps wherever he went, yapping and nipping at strangers.

  Although the Pequots had been his tribe’s lifelong enemy and he was well rid of them, Wyandanch was just as disquieted about the white men’s ruthless power to obliterate an entire tribe in a single day. The Indian’s opening gambit with Gardiner was “Are the English angry with all Indians?” to which Gardiner replied, “No, only Indians who kill Englishmen.” Wyandanch suggested they make a deal. The English would not kill his tribe, and in return he would make a vow of friendship and goodwill to the English. He would pay tribute with wampum—and incidentally keep him abreast of the Indian plots and treachery against the white men. In effect, Wyandanch was buying himself the protective services of Gardiner in return for snitching on other Indian tribes. Gardiner had one condition; he said the only way he could trust Wyandanch was for the chief to bring him the heads of any Pequots who had managed to escape to Long Island from Mystic. A few days after Wyandanch returned to Montauk, a package arrived at Saybrook Fort: the severed heads of five Pequots in a sack. Wyandanch and Gardiner had a deal.

  They were unlikely buddies, the opportunist British engineer who spoke in Elizabethan English and the proud Indian chief who ate with his hands and believed in black magic. At Wyandanch’s insistence, Lion Gardiner became the Hamptons’ first weekend guest when he stayed overnight in Wyandanch’s Montauk lodging, a twenty-by-thirty-foot rectangular wigwam heated by a fire in the middle. Wyandanch and his houseguest slept head to toe on a hard wooden bench with the rest of Wyandanch’s family along the perimeter. Gardiner discovered Wyandanch to be a loving husband and doting father. He had married an Indian queen, a princess of the Algonquins, with whom he had a daughter, Heather Flower, famous among the Indian tribes for her great beauty. The Montauks turned out to be a gregarious tribe who enjoyed gossip and visiting with neighbors. They took full advantage of the splendors of the South Fork and moved the location of their village from season to season, spending the summer closer to the cooling breezes of the ocean, the winters in the protection of the forest. Although Gardiner got used to the Indians’ smell and total lack of hygiene, he could never accept that Wyandanch was exposed. “How can you go around bare?” Gardiner asked Wyandanch when he knew him well enough. Wyandanch, who couldn’t understand why Gardiner refused to paint his face, said, “You go around with your face bare all winter, don’t you?”

  When Gardiner turned forty, he wanted to settle down and build his fortune. He toured several potential homesteads with Wyandanch, settling upon an island between the arms of the North and South Forks that the Indians called Manchonake, “the island of death,” after a battle between the Montauks and the Pequots so fierce that not a man was left standing on either side. The island was virtually prehistoric, a world untouched by civilization, except for a tobacco crop that the Montauks had once planted and which still grew wild. Gardiner told Wyandanch that he wanted to buy the island, but Wyandanch didn’t understand what selling the land meant. The land was the Indians’ universe, like the stars in the heavens—it couldn’t be transferred. But the chief was eager to please his white friend, and the island was a small part of the vast holdings of Wyandanch, so he “sold” it for a gun, a few bottles of rum, a black dog (the first dog the Indians had seen that wasn’t a wolf), and ten cloth coats. Now Gardiner was doubly happy: he would have his own island, and the Indians would no longer be bare.

  He named the island the Isle of Wight, but it would always be known as Gardiner’s Island. He was careful to obtain a grant from the British Crown for five pounds a year. He lived there in feudal splendor, bringing with him from Connecticut a staff of workers and farmers to run his own private fiefdom. Over the generations there were sometimes as many as 100 servants on the island at a time; although these helpers were called his “tenants,” they were really his vassals. Their labor was complemented by hundreds of black slaves called “bound boys” who lived in long, low quarters that had a pharmacy at one end where laudanum was made to keep them stoned and submissive. A man giv
en to certain pretensions, Gardiner’s coat of arms was plastered on everything, including the buttons of the servants’ uniforms. It was also on Gardiner’s Island in 1641 that Gardiner’s wife gave birth to his daughter, Elizabeth, the child whom Robert Gardiner referred to ad nauseum as the first English child born in the state of New York.

  It was an isolated existence on the island, to say the least, and dangerous as well, exposed on all sides to surprise attacks from marauding Indians and later from pirates too. But life on the island could also be idyllic, and its natural bounty of venison, fowl, shellfish, and tobacco made Gardiner rich in trade. Fourteen years went by as Gardiner and his family prospered, years marred only by the ongoing byzantine plots of the Connecticut Indians, foiled time and again by Wyandanch’s subterfuge. The aging Montauk sachem had become a trusted ally over the years, but his friendship with Gardiner had also made him reviled by the tribes of Connecticut, who justifiably branded him a traitor.

  In 1648 Wyandanch excitedly reported to Gardiner that nine white men had “planted” themselves down around the mud hole east of Georgika’s pond—this is, of course, Town Pond of today—and were cutting down trees and digging holes to build houses. Wyandanch’s braves wanted permission to kill the strangers, but Wyandanch told them that they must not kill white men except in self-defense and that he would consult with Gardiner about what to do. Gardiner made some inquiries and learned that the nine men were a disgruntled offshoot of the families that had settled Southampton eight years before. John Hand Sr., John Stretton Sr., Thomas Talmadge Jr., Robert Bond, Daniel Howe, Robert Rose, Thomas Tomson, Joshua Barnes, and John Mulford had come twenty miles east to start a new community because Southampton had already grown too congested for their taste. They complained that within one year eleven families who lived there had grown to twenty-five. They intended to start their own community that they were going to keep from getting too crowded by giving every landowner veto power as to who could buy in after them: “Noe man shall sell as no one wants” was the way the town charter put it. This new town was to be named Maidstone, after their ancestral village in Kent, England.

  Seizing the moment, Lion Gardiner presented himself to the group of nine men as the only authorized real estate broker for the Indians—as well as the muscle behind the promise that the settlers wouldn’t get scalped in the middle of the night. Gardiner brokered a deal whereby Wyandanch sold the nine men 30,720 acres of land—the land from present-day Town Line Road in Sagaponack all the way out to the tip of Montauk—for twenty coats, twenty-four mirrors, twenty-four hoes, twenty-four hatchets, twenty-four knives, and one hundred little drills for making wampum called muxes. Thrown into the deal was an arrangement that the Indians, who knew it would take the settlers two or three years to put in their own crops, would sell them enough corn, squash, and beans to get them through their first few winters. They would even teach the white men how to use the oily menhaden fish as fertilizer.

  In return, Lion Gardiner would never have to lift a finger in the town again, neither grinding grain nor collecting whale blubber for oil. He was exempt not only from labor but from onerous town planning board rules as well, the only man in town allowed to have front steps down to the street. He was entitled to his own chapel and his own mass at church, and he could appoint the minister. He was also tax-exempt, and his sole obligation to the government was to present one sheep to a representative of the Crown on every May 1.

  The restrictive settlement policy of Maidstone’s founding fathers was the first of many land-conservation plans to fail in the Hamptons. “Noe man” was ever voted unacceptable, and within a year of the “planting” of the town, the nine original families had burgeoned to thirty-four and its name had been changed to East Hampton. Many of the thirty-four were refugees from the isolation of Gardiner’s Island who longed for life in a larger community. Eventually, in August 1653, Lion Gardiner himself moved off the island, mostly for safety from Indians and pirates, and built himself a fine house smack in the center of town, as well as one for his beloved daughter, Elizabeth, just across the street.

  The same month that Gardiner moved to the village with his family, Wyandanch’s own beloved daughter, fourteen-year-old Heather Flower, was to be married to the young sachem of another tribe at a wedding feast held in Montauk. It was the biggest Indian social event in years, and all the tribes under Wyandanch’s subjugation sent sachems and braves as emissaries. It took the Montauks weeks to prepare for the celebration. A knoll was cleared in the forest, where a feast of roasted fowl and fish was served. Later the bride was lifted in the air in a litter entwined with garlands of flowers and carried down to the beach, where a giant bonfire was lit.

  In the absence of alcohol, the celebrants spent hours working themselves into a frenzy of delirium by screaming and contorting their faces, a ritual to ward off the evil gods from the wedding party. Deep into the night they spun and screamed by the heat of the fire, until they were exhausted to the point of collapse. It was then, out of the darkness, that they were set upon by Narraganset braves, who with lightning speed butchered with spears and knives more than thirty exhausted Montauk. They sadistically stabbed to death Heather Flower’s bridegroom before her eyes and then sliced off his scalp and took it with them as a prize. They also took Heather Flower herself, along with fourteen other women in the bridal party, much to her father’s torment.

  Ninigret, the Narraganset chief, announced that he would not kill Heather Flower; instead, he was holding her for ransom. He wanted 700 fathom of wampum—more than 50,000 beads, a fantastic sum in those days, even for a rich Indian like Wyandanch. Unable to ante up so many beads, he turned to Lion Gardiner, whose daughter was almost exactly the same age as Heather Flower, for help. Gardiner agreed at once to loan Wyandanch the rest of the ransom. He also bravely insisted that he himself undertake the dangerous task of retrieving Heather Flower from Ninigret, lest the treacherous chief murder Wyandanch and keep the ransom. Vowing to his friend that he would bring the girl home, Gardiner set out on a perilous journey. Accompanied by only a few armed men, he went first by small sloop to Connecticut and then by horse and on foot deep into the Narragansets’ territory. There was no word from Gardiner for more than a week, until one afternoon his sloop appeared on the Long Island Sound horizon, Heather Flower and the fourteen members of her wedding party safely in his care.

  The old Indian chief was wild with gratitude and expressed his thanks by giving Lion Gardiner a gift so generous that it is almost incomprehensible: the 90,000 acres of Long Island from Southampton to Brooklyn. In the written deed for this gift, Wyandanch dictated about Lion Gardiner: “In our great extremity, when we were almost swallowed up by our enemies… he appeared to us, not only as a friend but as a father… in giving us his money and his goods, and ransomed my daughter and friends.” Wyandanch signed the deed with a stick-figure drawing of himself and Lion Gardiner holding hands. To mark this friendship, the Montauks held a great ceremony, at which the two men cut their fingers and became blood brothers.

  The intrigue, murder, and bloodshed between the Montauks and Narragansets went on relentlessly for ten more years. Yet it wasn’t genocide that eventually killed most of the Indians, but disease. In 1658 a pestilence of measles and smallpox, against which the Indians had no immunity, killed two-thirds of them. One of the few survivors was Wyandanch himself, who lived through the plague only to be poisoned at the hands of one of his own kind, probably an Indian who could no longer bear his allegiance to Lion Gardiner and the dominance of the white men. At Wyandanch’s death, a grief-stricken Lion Gardiner wrote in his diary, “My friend and brother is dead. Who will now do the like?”

  Wyandanch’s grave has never been found, but it is somewhere beneath the streets and fields of East Hampton or Montauk.

  More than 300 years and many generations of Gardiners later, the 90,000 acres Lion Gardiner received from Wyandanch has been sold off, traded, or squandered, until now all that is left in the hands of the Gardiner family
are the house in East Hampton and the spectacular, unreachable island in the bay.

  Gardiner’s Island

  ROBERT GARDINER leaned into the wind as he steered his mahogany boat, Laughing Lady, into the chop. In the distance, Gardiner’s Island was a small crescent of green. “There’s Lion’s Head!” Gardiner shouted, the sea stealing the rest of his words from the air. He pointed starboard at a rock erupting into Gardiner’s Bay that perhaps, fancifully, might look like the head of a lion. He was wearing the same navy blue blazer and baby blue leisure pants, with a salmon-colored dress shirt and white collar. “Of course, it’s all very well to say how wonderful it is to own an island,” he shouted to his passengers. “What people don’t understand is how expensive Gardiner’s Island is to keep up. People have no idea. It costs nearly two million dollars a year to run. So when people say to me, ‘It must be so wonderful to own an island,’ well… wonderful, yes, but you have to be able to afford it.”