The year after the voyage of The Blessing of the Bay, the Pequots were slaughtered by British troops at Mystic, an event deplored by an engineer named Lion Gardiner, who had constructed a fort at Saybrook on the Connecticut shore. Gardiner was friendly with the Montauk sachem Wyandank, his ally in the Pequot Wars in the Connecticut River Valley, and in 1639 he paid Wyandank for a fair island, seven miles long and three across, where the north and south forks of Long Island opened eastward to the sea. The Englishman named it Isle of Wight, but later it became plain Gardiners Island.1
The Indians prized fine seawan, or wampum, made from the purple-white shell of the quahog clam and the pink shell of the channeled and knobbed whelks called “winkles.” Competing with the French for Indian furs, the English had developed a steel drill for fashioning wampum from these large “winkles” that were so common in Long Island’s shallows. Since the fisheries looked promising, and since Gardiner had been so well received, a band of venturesome settlers from the Massachusetts Bay Colony debarked in 1640 at what is now North Sea, in Southampton, going ashore from the Great River, the name given by the Blessing of the Bay to the drowned valley between the high glacial moraines of the north and south forks of this great fish-tailed island. The Great River is now Peconic Bay. A few years later, some Southampton settlers joined newcomers from Massachusetts in the founding of Maidstone,2 a name that was changed within the decade to East Hampton Town.3
For assisting the British in the Pequot Wars the warlike Montauks were repaid with the blessings of Christianity, to judge from the fact that “Cockenoe de Long Island,” counselor to Wyandank, was helping a reverend Mr. Eliot translate the Bible into the Montauk tongue within a few years of the first settlements. The pioneer settlers were so few that they avoided disagreements with the Indians, all the more so since the much-diminished Indians served as unpaid labor, and were more serviceable alive than dead. When, in 1649, some local Indians killed Mrs. Thomas Halsey of Southampton while out burning houses in protest against the coerced sale of their lands for rum and trinkets, it was agreed that they must have been put up to it by agitators from the New England tribes, which had earlier plotted to slaughter the East Hampton settlers.4
In the early years, the South Fork towns had little contact with Dutch New Amsterdam, and East Hampton allied itself with the Connecticut Colony in 1647. When the British took over New Amsterdam seventeen years later, the towns were forced to join the new state of New York. Nonetheless—and for three centuries thereafter—the local people maintained kinship with New England, or the Main, which on a clear day was visible as a blue shadow rising beyond the North Fork and its islands. Fishermen from Narragansett, in Rhode Island, worked Gardiners Bay as early as 1665, and Massachusetts settlers continued to arrive, including those Quakers who fled Puritan persecution toward the end of the century, taking refuge on the peaceful and protected place in the mouth of the Great River known as Shelter Island.
In the year of Mrs. Halsey’s death, the bewildered sachems of the Montauk, Shinnecock, and Shelter Island bands had deeded East Hampton to the settlers for twenty coats, twenty-four knives, hoes, hatchets, and mirrors, and one hundred muxes, or steel wampum drills. The covenant specified that the Indians would receive the “fynnes and tales of all such whales as shall be cast up [for religious offerings] and desire that they may be friendly dealt with in the other partes [which they liked to eat].” Because the settlers were still few, the town dealt respectfully with Wyandank; when Gardiner bought ocean-front property in Southampton, Wyandank could still demand that “whales cast up shall belong to me and to other Indians within these bounds.” But Wyandank died the following year, when two-thirds of the remaining Montauks fell in epidemic, after which respectful treatment of the Indians came to an end.
The drift whales stranded on the ocean beach were highly valued, and in the early days these dead leviathans were the common property of the community. Every able-bodied man except Mr. Gardiner and the minister took his part in the hard, dirty work of flensing the blubber and “trying out” the “oyle.” But as the demand for oil increased, the settlers negotiated with the Indians to hunt right whales as they passed along the coast. Unlike most whales, this baleen species floated after it was killed and could be towed ashore; therefore it was “the right whale” to pursue.
While Indian invention of shore whaling is disputed, there is no doubt that Indian canoes of twenty-five to thirty feet, rigged with harpoons and wood floats, went offshore after whales seen from the beach, and the slim, swift whaleboats of the Europeans may have derived from them. Certainly it seems unlikely that these Englishmen from Kent and Dorset knew how to manage the rude Atlantic surf, not to speak of the perilous techniques of harpooning immense, inscrutable dark creatures of such strength and speed. In 1643 the blacksmith at Southampton had been forbidden to make “harping irons” for the Indians, lest they be used to harpoon English yeomen, but Indian whale crews were conscripted from the start.
According to the earliest account of Long Island, in 1670,5 “Upon the South Side … in the winter lie store of whales … which the inhabitants begin with small boats to make a trade catching to their no small benefit …” The leaders in this “whale design” were Jacobus Schellinger and his stepson James Loper, two Dutchmen who, with the family Van Scoy, had removed to the East End when New Amsterdam became a British colony in 1664, and were paying Indians three shillings a day to go off after whales on their behalf. In 1672 Loper was invited by the new settlement on Nantucket to go there to teach those islanders the shore-whaling industry, but the following year he married Lion Gardiner’s granddaughter and decided to remain in East Hampton Town. By 1675, when he and Schellinger acquired a second whaleboat—the two boats were crewed by twelve Indians from Montauk and Shelter Island—there were seven whaling companies in the two townships, with potworks for trying rendered blubber into whale oil as far west as Wuno’hke, or “good ground” (now Hampton Bay) and at Ketchaponac (now Westhampton).6 Competition for whalemen was already so fierce that young settlers were joining the Indians in the boats; the history of the surfmen had begun.
As late as 1702, a young woman on horseback riding the ocean beach from East Hampton to Mecox counted thirteen whales drifted on shore, in addition to the great herds of leviathans spouting out beyond the bar. Shore whaling reached its peak about 1707, when four thousand barrels of oil were tried on Long Island. Soon thereafter it gave way to ocean whaling in pursuit of sperm whales, as voyages of several weeks were extended for months and years; the era of the Nantucket and New Bedford whalers had begun. By mid-century, when the first wharves were built at Sag Harbor, shore whaling was dying, and young Montauks and Shinnecocks went off as harpooneers on whaling voyages, throughout the great oceans of the world. The more numerous Shinnecocks became first mates, captains, and in one case7 the entire crew of Sag Harbor vessels.
Even before the English settlements, the Indians had been woefully afflicted by white men’s diseases, and encroachment on Indian land and rights had intensified as the settlers expanded and the Indians waned. After Wyandank’s death, little realizing what sale of their ancestral lands might mean—how does one own or sell air, earth, and water?—the band accepted payment for its Montauk lands from the first of this region’s still prosperous line of commercial developers, the so-called Proprietors of Montauk. Thereafter harsh limits were imposed on the people’s seasonal movements from place to place in search of food. By the end of the eighteenth century, they had lost their language and were all but gone,8 together with the forest and wild creatures. In the frenzy of land-clearing that characterized the settlement of the New World, the settlers had obliterated most of the native hardwoods and destroyed much of the wild game; bear, wolf, and bobcat soon disappeared. And yet it seemed that the ocean and creeks and bays were inexhaustible, that the great multitudes of whales and fishes would always return.
Although cattle-raising was the main industry of the early settlements, and meat, hides, and ta
llow the bases of trade, the abundant fisheries were essential to the economy, with important benefits to local agriculture in the form of fertilizer. As a rule, striped bass, cod, salmon, and other species were taken for human consumption and salted or smoked for winter use, while lesser fish were used for hog food or plowed into the fields. Like the Indians, the colonists gained much of their sustenance from the sea, and fishing was ever a winter occupation of the farmers, who used trawl lines9 of baited hooks (strung between two anchors marked by buoys) for the big cod that moved southward and inshore in the cold weather.
Within a few years of the first settlement of East Hampton, a community of fifteen or twenty houses had arisen at Northwest Harbor, facing the New England shore, and from Northwest, after 1700, salt cod were shipped commercially from a wharf built by Abraham Schellinger, master of the sloop Endeavor, which carried furs, whale oil, timber, turpentine, and grain to Boston, returning with European goods as well as West Indian hardwoods and other products. Schellinger, a founder of the community at Amagansett (“place of good water”) and first supervisor of East Hampton Town, was a business associate of Samuel Mulford, who established a second warehouse at Northwest in 1702. Although Schellinger also used Abraham’s Landing,10 which was closer to Amagansett, Northwest remained the main port of East Hampton until the mid-1700s. From this anchorage, well protected from northers and easterly winds, the whaling companies of Sagaponack and Mecox shipped their oil. The casks were carted across to the bay side on a wooded road known as Merchant’s Path, which wanders the scrub oak pitch pine woods to the present day.
The Sag Harbor seaport was constructed in 1730 at the head of Northwest Harbor, and in 1786 a Sag Harbor vessel, the America, Captain Daniel Havens, put into New London with three hundred barrels of oil from the South Atlantic; a century of Sag Harbor whaling had begun. A few years later the first British and American vessels rounded Cape Horn into the Pacific, and the first local whaleman to make this voyage was Captain Jonathan Osborn of Wainscott,11 master of the Union. Osborn was “Long Tom Coffin” in a whaling novel by James Fenimore Cooper, a sometime Sag Harbor resident who was part owner of his vessel. In the next seven decades, more than one hundred ships were fitted out in the port of Sag Harbor, which served both East Hampton and Southampton townships, and many men from local families—Havens, Bennett,12 Lester, Loper, Miller, King—served on the crews.
In 1790 Sag Harbor became New York State’s first customs port; its original Long Wharf, built in 1808, served the main commerce in salt cod and whale oil. The Havens family, which had settled on Shelter Island before 1700, developed one of the many shipbuilding enterprises on the East End, using timber from the remnant forests of Montauk and Hither Hills, and ships from the East End fished cod and halibut on Georges Bank and the Nantucket Shoals, carrying the picturesque ricks of stacked-up dories; the banks dory was later adapted to the haul-seine fishery off the ocean beach. From 1815 to 1825, Sag Harbor was a principal port of the Atlantic coast, with a fleet of sixty whale ships, many of them carrying Indian harpooneers, and a lighthouse to guide the ships to port was constructed in 1839 at Cedar Point, at the mouth of Northwest Harbor.
But already the whales were much diminished, and the California Gold Rush, then the Civil War, disrupted the commerce, as petroleum found in Pennsylvania replaced whale oil with kerosene as fuel. By now, the last forests had been stripped from the hills (a 250-acre tract on Gardiners Island is the last stand of ancient white oak forest on the East End), the Peconic shipbuilding industry had died, and much of the eroded land—bare poor pasture for more than one hundred years—had returned to wood lots.
With the decline of whaling, the shipping tonnage declined, too. The last whale ship, the Myra, sailed in 1871, and never returned. Ten years later the old Customs House (to this day one of the loveliest buildings on the South Fork) was closed. Where the Long Wharf stands today, at the end of Main Street, was a graveyard of stranded and derelict hulks called Rotten Row.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Greenport Village, on the North Fork, where the railroad arrived in 1844, was the fishing, packing, and shipping port for the East End, and the steamer Shinnecock carried salt cod and smoked eels from nearby Orient to New York City. Additionally, Greenport had prospered from an early decision to transfer its investment from the dying whaling industry to a new fishery for the deep-bellied bony member of the herring family called the menhaden, the bountiful “bony fish” or mossbunker first reported by the Blessing of the Bay. Since the end of the eighteenth century, menhaden had been taken with community haul seines and used as fertilizer in the fields; now they were sought primarily for “bunker oil,” as large ocean-going steamers, using purse seines, harvested this fish in immense amounts to be processed in factories ashore. The menhaden haul seines now fell into disuse, but a few of the seine gangs persisted, using smaller seines to catch striped bass, shad, bluefish, sturgeon, and other species in the great longshore migrations off the ocean beach.
In the winter of 1880–1881, the Norwegian gill net, or set net, was used to good effect for cod off the ocean beach and later came into year-round use throughout the bays. Amagansett men “set fykes [portable basket traps] and they occasionally fish with seines for striped bass and other species on the Atlantic side”13 or “Backside,” as the early boatmen named Long Island’s rough Atlantic shore, a hundred miles of ocean coast, from Montauk to the Hudson, without a navigable inlet, much less safe harbor. In spring and summer fykes might be set for the diamondback terrapin (or torpin) of the saltwater estuaries and the snapping turtle (or torp or torrop) of freshwater ponds. But most of the farmer-fishermen harvested menhaden and other scrap fish for the fields; food fish were for home consumption and local barter. Although small quantities of fish (packed in ice blocks cut from winter ponds) were shipped to Greenport, commercial fishing was negligible on the South Fork until the railhead at Bridgehampton was extended to Montauk; the year was 1895, more than a half century after the train had come to Greenport. Sturgeon and sturgeon roe, or caviar, were among the first products shipped directly from the South Fork to New York; another popular export was the black sea bass, which remains today the preferred fish in Chinese restaurants.
In 1882, ocean whaling by bunker steamer was attempted by Captain Joshua Edwards on the Amagansett; the one whale caught was towed to New York for exhibition. Subsequently, shore whaling was resumed as an incidental occupation by the farmer-fishermen, led by the Wainscott Osborns, the East Hampton Dominys—better known as clockmakers and woodworkers—and “Cap’n Josh,” now a white-bearded patriarch who “went off” for the last time on February 22, 1907, in the whaleboat of his son, Cap’n Sam. The right whale taken on that date was the huge creature later suspended from the roof of the great hall in the American Museum of Natural History; another killed by Oliver Osborn the same day was the last whale taken by that Wainscott family.14
The inshore whales were already uncommon, and the round-bottomed whaleboats, narrow, elegant, and swift, dried out and rotted in the sheds back of the beach. The last whale killed, in August 1918, off Napeague Coast Guard Station, by an Edwards and Dominy crew that included descendants of James Loper, was towed fifteen hours around Montauk Point to Promised Land and tried out at the menhaden factory, producing some thirty barrels of oil that found no market.
In December 1921, a small right whale sighted off Southampton Coast Guard Station was unsuccessfully pursued by a whaleboat crew under Captains Sam and Everett Edwards and a dory crew under Felix Dominy (both crews were towed west by power launch), but the cry “Whale Off!” had brought such small response from the local villagers that Cap’n Evvie wondered later “what the matter was. Am I growing old or are times changing?”
2.
The Early Surfmen
A lifelong fisherman whose family came here more than three centuries ago is Milton Miller, born in 1915 in a small cottage back of the Amagansett dunes at the ocean end of Atlantic Avenue, where several whale h
ouses and fish shanties once stood. The Millers were the earliest settlers on Accabonac Creek, also called the Springs. Though the several Miller clans claim an English origin, Milt believes that the first Millers, or Mullers, were Dutch, and that they were here before the English colonists from Massachusetts; their descendants include that Captain Sylvester Miller of Amagansett who sailed around the Horn in pursuit of whales between 1829 and 1845 and recorded in his log that this life was “rugid.” On his mother’s side, Milt’s great-grandparents were Lopers, descendants of that first James Loper who made a local industry of shore whaling.
In a Puritan community that at first feared and later despised the Indians, Milt Miller’s ancestors on both sides claimed a long tradition of friendship with the native people, who had aided the first Millers to survive in a sod-roofed dwelling built into the steep slope south of Louse Point until a simple farmhouse could be completed; traces of that “soddie” were still present in Milt’s boyhood. The Loper clan, too, welcomed Indian friends at their tables and under their roofs. A descendant of one of the last sachems of the Montauks, Stephen Pharaoh, or Talkhouse, and his wife would stay at the Loper house at the east end of Amagansett when they came off Montauk. One day he found Milt’s Great-Grandmother Loper dying of the dropsy—her sister had died the day before—and saved her life with an herbal medicine made from a red-berried ground plant known as deerfeed.1 The recovered child was subsequently befriended by the sachem’s daughter, whom Milt knew as Aunt Maria (Mo-RYE-ah), and Milt himself was “a grown boy before I knew that she was no relative to the family. But it didn’t make any difference as we all showed her the greatest respect and love as we did Granny.” Milt still recalls the two old ladies in their shawls, sitting in rockers and taking snuff as they talked happily of days gone by. At the age of about eighty-five, the two friends “went to the happy hunting ground together, and I’m sure they wanted it that way.” Aunt Maria’s second husband was a black man named Banks, and her children “married into the black people in Freetown in East Hampton, because they got an awful raw deal off of these Englishmen around here.”