Th e passing of a way o( life is elegiacal/y e1•oked in William M. Dal'is' s porrrair of a schooner srranded on rhe heach our side Por/ Jefferson. She was on her way our a hundred years ago, as railroad and sreamhoar took 01 •er. Bur rhis was nor rhe end ofsail on Long Island Sound!
Mystic area westward to Southport, and slaughtered there. On the south shore there was no real resistance from tribes accepting European overlords in place of Indiim ones. To these original Americans, the Sound was not a barrier, but a fecund, endless Iy renewed source of food and recreation and a grand avenue of communication. Historians in recent years have determined that cultural patterns, as reflected in local dialects and artifacts, ran in a few broad bands across the Sound, rather than along its shores, so that a Montauk at the east end of Long Island was more closely related to hi s nei ghbor across the Sound in Connecticut than to the Canarsies in western Long Island . Thi s pattern persisted under the European settlement, as the Dutch settled Brooklyn and Flushing, at the west end of Long Island, and the English colonized the east end, led by such dynastic founders as Lion Gardiner. This remarkable man , sent to Saybrook at the mouth of the Connecticut River as a so ldier, believed in peace. He acquired Gardiner ' s Island in 1639 from the Montauk chieftain Wyandanch , and went on to found East Hampton and other towns in eastern Long Island. Wyandanch also gave Gardiner land in central Long Island in gratitude for hi s securing the release of the chieftain' s daughter from marauding Narragansetts of Rhode Island . One Indian record refers to him as " the most honorable of the English nation here about us." From the beginning , European colonists had to go back to the sea they had staggered ashore from so eagerly. This was necessary to sustain their culture, through books and plowshares that had to come to them by sea, and most important, perhaps , the fertilizing exchange of ideas, without which any culture fast ossifies. The Sound, as the Dutch traveller John de Laete noted as early as 1636, was a natural conduit for these vital traffics . " Most of the English who wish to go south to Virginia to South River [the Delaware] or to other southern places pass through this river [as he persisted in calling Long Island Sound] , which brings no small traffic and advantage to the city of New Amsterdam. " New Amsterdam, for the reasons he gives, was in short order invaded by the English and renamed New York in 1664. This was a relatively peaceful transition . But war came to the Sound in earnest a little over a century later in 1776. As a vital artery of coastal trade, the Sound was a very active theatre of conflict in the American Revolution. The British, having taken New York in the summer of 1776, easily controlled all Long Island. Dissident Patriots skipped across to the Connecticut shore, from where they mounted continuous harrassing attacks on British shipping from the 16
shelter of the Norwalk Islands. The British occupied and fortified Duck Island, then a more considerable island than it is today , to interrupt Yankee passage along the Connecticut shore. Spies were smuggled across the Sound, notably the Connecticut schoolteacher Nathan Hale, who was caught and executed in New York after having heen smuggled ashore in Huntington , in western Long Island. A good deal of clandestine trade went on as well between opposing sides, and undoubtedly some double-dealing. An amusing example of the latter was related by Col. Benjamin Ta llmadge , who had left his native Setauket, on Long Island ' s north shore , to serve the Patriot cause. His mi ss ion was to interrupt what was called "the London trade." He captured many of the trading boats, but one day heard that the armed sloop Shudham, appointed to suppress the trade, was actually engaged in carrying it on'. Tallmadge accordingly went to Norwalk £!nd boarded the sloop when she came in . Going below with the skipper, " I informed him of my suspicion s and errand." Unimpressed with thi s, the Captain weighed anchor and made sail , standing out to sea, " with a smart wind at the northwest" bearing them toward Lloyd 's Neck , where the British fleet lay. Tallmadge informed him that for carrying him over to the enemy, " by our martial law, he exposed him se lf to the puni shment of death. " In the upshot, the Captain gave in , put the sloop about, and sailed back to Norwalk Harbor, where: "As soon as he came to anchor down at Old We ll s, so called, the Captain went ashore in his boat, and I never saw him again." Opening the hatch , the Colonel found the British goods he expected, and had them condemned for the benefit of the Patriot cause. This was in the last winter of the war, 1782-3, with the Patriot cause clearly in the accendant. Otherwi se, this merry romp might have had a less merry ending. With peace, the anomaly of a Sound divided down the middle ended. As in Indian times , the Sound served as a conduit, not a barrier. So true was this that Robert MacKay of the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, tells us that some of the greatest finds of crockery from the Brown Brothers pottery in Huntington, in western Long Island , were in the Connecticut River towns-and a centuryold view of the place shows us the reason in the presence of a heavily canvassed schooner 'lying at the pottery wharf, a vessel shoal enough to cross the sandbar at the entrance to the river on the opposite shore. Nursery of Seamen Thomas Fleming Day, a rare yachtsman at home equally in the open sea or in a favorite backwater, made it his business to SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1989