The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  In my hands is an untidy late-nineteenth-century manuscript written by Eben Norton Horsford, a layer cake of information about Shelter Island and the Sylvesters that has been stored in an old broken-backed cardboard box. Horsford, the Victorian patriarch on Andy’s library wall, tells his version of the Sylvester Manor story in colorful prose—colorful at least by the standards of modern archaeological and anthropological reports. I’m not sure how much to believe him. When he gets to the Indians who lived on the mound in the seventeenth century, he writes:

  In the account of one of his visits to Sylvester Manor, George Fox mentions that he preached in front of the Manor House, to an audience of an hundred Indians. It must have been comparatively easy to send an invitation to a large body of the native inhabitants of the Island. The visit of Mr. Cushing, of the Ethnological Bureau at Washington, whose researches during his long residence at Zuni have given him an unprecedented skill in tracing indications of Indian occupation, has resulted in a solution of how this may have been. Mr. Cushing finds the long mound East of the entrance to Dering water [the harbor beyond Gardiners Creek], was the site of an Indian village surrounded by a stockade … He also pointed out the path leading from end to end through the enclosure, along which were the sites of wigwams marked by abundance of shells and the dark earth covering the kitchen middens. A spade brought from one of them numerous fragments of pottery, bits of charcoal and bones, grains of corn, etc. The outline of the stockade which enclosed the cluster of wigwams was traceable. At one end of the mound a previous excavation by Dr. N. B. Derby had revealed the presence of Indian skeletons, and marked the site of the Indian graveyard … In times gone by great numbers of flint arrow heads, belts, knives, fragments of pottery, hammers, pestles and an Indian stone pipe have been gathered on the top of this mound … the long ridge looking across the mouth of Dering water toward Greenport, was the site of the stockade village of Youghco, the Chief of the Manhansetts, at the time of Capt. Sylvester’s purchase, and the neighboring landlocked cove the sheltered yard of his fleet of war canoes and fishing craft. The depth to which the trail leading to the spring was worn, points to the occupation of the village site for centuries, and it is not improbable that the grave yard at the Southern extreme of the ridge has served for chiefs and clansmen, sachems and warriors, and their families from a date indefinitely early.

  It all sounds so implausibly complete as a history. The nineteenth century stands in my way at Sylvester Manor, with its confident and conclusive explanations of events and motives. And what about the casual mention of George Fox, the Quaker founder, on Shelter Island? Anything else in the passage is momentarily overwhelmed by the presence of his name. Fox carried his incendiary Quaker doctrine throughout the Caribbean and up through the coastal colonies—that I knew. He was often better treated by the Indians than by his fellow Englishmen. On Shelter Island clearly he drew crowds. In his autobiography and other contemporary accounts, Fox seems like an English version of Passaconway, a man with the power to make the trees dance or to “metamorphose himself into a flaming man.”

  Suzan Smyth is with me in the manor workroom as I set aside my excitement over Fox and puzzle over what Horsford has to say about the Indian village. The descendant of generations of a local Long Island family and the keeper of the history room at the nearby Sag Harbor library, she is also an archaeologist. “Why don’t we go have a look?” Suzan says, nodding toward the North Peninsula.

  As we walk across the land bridge, a blue heron flies over Gardiners Creek. The sky is dark gray; the trees are dripping, the ground is beginning to thaw; rampant bittersweet vines, greenbrier tangles, and blackberry canes fill every open area, making it hard to stray from the track. At the top of the wooded hill we begin to see large windfalls—trees, Suzan says, that were probably downed in the 1938 hurricane. The undersides of the tipped-up root-balls are masses of brownish clay and black topsoil. Suzan says that such dark soil can indeed be a sign of long habitation, where food trash or any organic material has been transformed past compost, back into soil. She scratches one root-ball and a shower of shining things tumbles out. They look eerily white on this dark day. Besides fragments of shell, Suzan identifies a stone projectile point and some chips of stone, known to archaeologists as “flakes,” the debris left over from making the tip of a tool or weapon.

  Suzan and I lift our eyes. Any sense of the manor’s quiet isolation in time and space disappears. Through the bare trees we can see Greenport, across the Peconic Bay. Later we will find that on a clear day we can make out a fuzzy line lying above the horizon—the faint landmass of the Connecticut shore. No wonder the Manhansetts prized this mound, like the Sylvesters after them. Algonquians such as the Manhansetts had ancient connections—both of family and trade—that linked them with a broad geography. By canoe and on foot, these networks led them down the Atlantic coast and deep into the interior of the continent. From as far away as the Southwest came some of their great gods, like Cautantowwit, “aloof, impersonal, benevolent,” as John Strong, the most prominent of Long Island’s present-day Indian historians, describes him. Cautantowwitt created the first human being from a piece of wood; his venerated messenger, Conconchus, the crow, gave them corn and beans.

  Pushed by their hopes that at least some of Horsford’s nineteenth-century description of a native settlement may be true, the UMass team excavates the North Peninsula during one of their first field schools in 2001. Their results are both chastening and encouraging. The bad news is that a “wigwam” footprint turns out to be that of a nineteenth-century gazebo. The Fiskes have a photograph of the gazebo, I later discover, taken in the 1870s when the entire North Peninsula was a pasture, with clearer views of Greenport and Connecticut. The good news: on the north shore of the mound, plenty of potsherds give proof of habitation dating back seven hundred years. But if Horsford’s “chiefs, sachems, warriors, and their families” do lie buried here, we haven’t found them. For now, the archaeologists intend to leave them undisturbed.

  Jim’s Drink

  The spot where the Sylvesters settled had been a magnet for centuries. Since prehistoric times, Indians had gathered here. The north side of the mound gave them safety—they could see who was coming. From the beaches they could head out to gather clams, oysters, and scallops, and fish the deep waters for sturgeon. The south side offered land ideal for cultivation and abundant springs. The mound village was probably only a seasonal encampment; in winter they moved into the middle of the island, where trees broke the force of wind and foul weather, and game was plentiful.

  The landscape the Manhansetts knew had received its shape from the last of the glaciers, the Wisconsin, which started moving implacably southward over New England some twenty-two thousand years ago. When paleogeologists use the term “ice-shoved,” they are referring to places like Shelter Island, where the power of the glacier dropped long lines of stone, gravel, and sand: moraines. Except for impressive cliffs that face northwest, the topography has an unfinished, gently lumpy look, as if the shear lines of the pushed-together blobs of earth and rocks have not been completely smoothed over. When the glacier ground its way back up north beginning ten or twelve million years later, it paused several times, leaving stony recessional moraines. The one that marks the glacier’s southern limit forms the Ronkonkoma Moraine, the hilly east-west spine of Long Island’s South Fork that finally runs offshore into the ocean.

  When glacial melting finally slowed down some three to four thousand years ago, the rise in Shelter Island’s seawater level slowed to a fraction of an inch per year. Beaches widened as sand piled up instead of being washed away. Coastal sandbars drifted in to reconnect the tops of morainal deposits, like Ram Island, back to the main island. Marshes thickened and were cut by channels; bogs formed; estuaries were shaped, creating rich intertidal zones that supported the fish and crustaceans that were mainstays of the Manhansett diet.

  The island’s freshwater supply comes from a single source, an upper glacial aquifer that
is recharged only by rain. It seems prodigal that the tidal shoreline of Sylvester Manor is pricked in many places with spring holes where the water from that aquifer seeps upward into the salty bay. In his manuscript, Horsford gives hard-to-follow directions to several springs. One near the land bridge, he says, can be seen only at low tide, among loosely piled stones. When I try to find it at ebb tide, I find no sign of anything bubbling up.

  * * *

  Every day I’m at the manor, I walk my dogs. In fine weather, Jim and Ruby lie patiently leashed under some spruces, waiting for the big event. Sometimes we go along the low shore bank so they can get excited about the Canada geese, who rarely respond. Most of the time, neither dog will go down into the water—Irish terriers are convinced they will melt if they get wet. But sometimes in the spring, Jim will pad through the mud, hunting frogs. Today it’s a full-moon low tide, with barely a skim of wetness over the foreshore. Jim lowers his head. He’s drinking from the creek. Jim is too smart to drink salt water. Is he drinking from Horsford’s spring? I scoop up a small handful of water; it is muddy but fresh. The almost invisible flow—the merest shimmer of movement—makes its way among the small, dark stones, sheeting the surface. The Manhansetts, who knew every inch of Shelter Island’s coastline, would have been familiar with Jim’s spring. At least on this one, Horsford got it right.

  Youghco Resists, Wyandanch Assists

  Youghco (d. 1653), sachem of the Manhansetts, Wyandanch’s kinsman and a leader recognized by European colonists and Indians alike as powerful throughout Long Island, lived on Shelter Island. In June 1651, apparently without consulting Youghco or any other Shelter Islander, Nathaniel and his partners purchased the property from Stephen Goodyear of New Haven. Thirteen months later, perhaps as Nathaniel was beginning to clear and build, Youghco sent a representative to the New Haven Colony court in Hartford. (Shelter Island was nominally under New Haven’s jurisdiction.) He complained that he and his people were “threatened to be forced off the said island, and to seek an habitation where they can get it,” that they had never envisioned being “deprived of their habitation there,” and that they had never sold their land. An accomplished translator, Checkanoe, who was also a Manhansett, may have been responsible for the sophisticated prose of this document, which predicts what would be the eventual result of countless treaties between Europeans and Indians. The Manhansett petition arrived in court on September 2, 1652, only eighteen days before the partners signed the twelve articles of agreement setting out the plan for their new venture.

  The backstory of the Manhansetts’ complaint dates to 1637, when Charles I issued the first English patent for Long Island and all the adjacent islands to William Alexander, Earl of Stirling. Stirling’s land agent, James Farrett, took as his commission Shelter Island and nearby Robins Island (where the Manhansetts also lived) and sold both to Goodyear before returning to England. By the time Goodyear made his deal with the partners, English colonists feared that New Amsterdam was secretly arming Long Island’s Indians for war against them. Anxious to keep Youghco as an ally, New Haven’s authorities required the partners to purchase the island a second time.

  Six months later, in March 1653, Youghco met with Nathaniel to officially ratify the transfer of the island with an Indian deed and an English ceremony. Nathaniel, perhaps in a good dark coat and breeches for the momentous occasion, would have advanced to meet the elderly man, who would die only a few months later. From contemporary accounts I can gather more about Youghco’s appearance than Nathaniel’s on that day. As chief sachem of Long Island, Youghco carried himself royally among his followers, as did one earlier Virginian leader: “For though hee hath no Kingly Robes … nor dayly Guardes to secure his person … yet doe they yeeld all submissive subjection to him … going at his command, and comming at his becke.” If he wore face paint for this important moment, his characteristic sharp cheekbones and prominent nose would have set the angles for the stripes of pigment. Most of his hair had probably been plucked from his head, face, and body, and what remained on his head was probably gathered into a wuchechepunnock, “a great bunch of hayre bound up behind,” or possibly a muppacuck, a long lock hanging down. By the 1650s, some Indian men had begun to favor European cloth mantles and coats instead of furs and deerskins, or cloaks “made of the fairest feathers of their Neyhommauog, or Turkies, which commonly their old men make; and is with them as Velvet is with us.” A breechcloth, leggings, and moccasins still completed a standard Algonquian outfit, with neck pendants and a belt of wampum added to honor ceremonial events or to denote rank.

  What one commentator said about the Jamestown Indians also offers a vivid impression of coastal Algonquians in those years: “They are a very understanding generation, quicke of apprehension, suddaine in their dispatches, subtile in their dealings, exquisite in their inventions.” Roger Williams of Rhode Island, discussing the local Indians’ taste in English cloth, added an observation on their temperament. He wrote that rather than admire “Cloth, inclining to white,” they preferred “a sad [dull or sober] coulour without any whitish haires, suiting with their own naturall Temper, which inclines to sadnesse [meaning what we think it means regarding temperament].”

  Dispossession was a step-by-step process. When Youghco gave Nathaniel a “turfe and twige,” the clump of island soil and a branch that “according to the usual custom of England” signified the consummation of a land sale, the sachem “with all his Indians that were formerly belonging to said island … did freely and willing depart.” Nathaniel was becoming a landowner for the first time; it’s not at all clear what the ritual meant to Youghco. Certainly the ceremony illustrates an important metamorphosis: common land was becoming private property. British law and custom superseded Indian tribute ceremonies, in which gifts of wampum had sealed treaties and deeds over rights and use. In any case, after this formal ritual had taken place, many Indians either remained on the island or soon returned. But as their hunting and fishing grounds were lost to colonial occupation, they became ever more dependent on trade goods such as cooking kettles, hatchets, shoes, cloth, and above all liquor. Shelter Island was not only home, but also a place where they found employment as a permanent underclass of servants, slaves, and freemen. They worked as messengers, butchers, whalers, field hands, whalers, domestics, and livestock herders and handlers. For some, the island seemed preferable to a mainland taken over by growing numbers of white households and controlled by stringent and unfamiliar English regulations. At least on Shelter Island, there was only one family and one law—the Sylvesters’—to contend with.

  Even before he officially relinquished the island, Youghco had understood that his world would be very different with Europeans in it. Unlike Wyandanch, he resisted. Lion Gardiner, the Sylvesters’ near neighbor, Wyandanch’s friend, and his close collaborator in many land deals, later wrote that when Wyandanch asked the elder sachem to hunt down Indians who came to Shelter Island who were accused of killing colonists or of plotting against the English, Youghco either refused, enabled the fugitives to elude capture, or helped prisoners to escape. (English courts routinely sentenced Indian offenders to death without regard for tribal codes of justice.)

  Visiting

  At the Manhansett settlement, wigwams were dwarfed by forest giants, forebears of the oaks and hickories still here today. The rounded roofs followed the curves of their frames: arched saplings, usually black locust or red cedar, strong yet supple, whose fire-hardened tips were stuck firmly in the ground. Red maple saplings tied to them on the inside braced the structure. Woven mats or laboriously flattened bark were lashed onto the frame with bark or root ties. Pine resin sealed the tie holes. The early New England chronicler William Wood said wigwams “deny entrance to any drop of rain, though it come fierce and long, neigther can the piercing North winde finde a cranny.” Elliptical or circular in plan, household wigwams were small—the largest only fifteen by twenty feet in diameter. Calabashes, carved wooden implements, nets, baskets, woven bags, bows st
rung with animal sinew, and arrows of elder wood hung on walls and tent rafters, alongside a wealth of dressed skins, some painted in bright vegetable colors.

  The hearth was in the middle of the floor, vented through a hole in the roof for smoke—very like the arrangement in many English houses before “the Great Rebuilding” of the sixteenth century, which introduced fireplaces set against an outside wall. Daniel Gookin, who served Massachusetts Colony as Indian commissioner for more than three decades (1652–86), writes that he had often stayed overnight in wigwams and had always found them to be as warm as any English house. (This comparison was easy to make in favor of the Indians, given the rudimentary heating in seventeenth-century houses all over Northern Europe, where firewood was beginning to run short, especially for the ordinary man.)

  Indian domestic fires burned day and night, just as they did in any colonial household. By night, on wide raised platforms circling the central fire in the wigwams, the Indians slept on sweet-smelling woven reed mats heaped with furs and skins—otter, beaver, bear, lynx, deer, raccoon, fox. The soft mesh of darkness was often interrupted: some woke to sing, or sit upright out of their sleep and murmur, startled, from a dream. Sometimes there was a lament—mâuo—sorrow for the dead. Not that nighttime in Amsterdam, the African Gold Coast, or London was any less noisy. But the comforting, expected blanket of night sounded different to the newcomers. Huge bonfires also lit up the night sky from time to time, signaling festivals and feasts, meetings and attacks. The meanings of the fires were clear to the Manhansetts and the other coastal Indians, but again, not to foreigners.