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The Settler and the Sachem

Lion Gardiner finds a 3,000-acre island for his home and forges a friendship with Wyandanch

By Steve Wick | Staff Writer

The Pequot War behind him, Lion Gardiner took the first step into his new life and into Long Island history.

For reasons not known today, Gardiner decided that he would not return to England once he had completed building a fort at the mouth of the Connecticut River. As spring awoke in 1639, he began searching for a home for his wife and their baby son, David.

``I have always understood that Lion began his search by visiting islands,'' said his 20th-Century descendant, Robert David Lion Gardiner. Paddling away from the Connecticut coastline, Lion Gardiner visited the islands of eastern Long Island -- Fishers Island, Plum Island, and then Shelter Island. But none suited his needs.

``He needed fresh water and these islands did not have streams,'' Robert Gardiner said.

There was another island, called by the Montaukett Indians Manchonat, or the Island of Death, most likely because many Indians had died there during an epidemic. It was the easternmost island in the archipelago enclosed by the North and South Forks of Long Island. When Lion Gardiner paddled around that island, he was struck by its shape.

``He thought it resembled the Isle of Wight, in England,'' Gardiner said. ``When he walked over it, he found it had magnificent forests, saltwater ponds and freshwater streams that he could dam and use for his livestock.''

Gardiner had found his new home. Early in May, 1639 -- four years after he and his wife, Mary, had sailed from Europe -- Gardiner sat down with the Algonquian Indians who lived near the island and bought all 3,000 acres. From Gardiner's point of view, anyway, it was a real-estate purchase. In exchange for a place as magnificent and untrampled as any great estate in his native England, Gardiner gave the Indians a quantity of cloth, a gun, gunpowder and ``a large black dog.'' To the Indians, who had no understanding within their culture of selling land, it may have been little more than an agreement to share the beautiful island with the Englishman.

The deed for the island contains Gardiner's signature and has the mark of the ``sachem of Pomanocc,'' a man identified as Yovawan. Pomanocc is an Algonquian word that is untranslatable today; a linguist earlier in this century believed it meant ``Island of Tribute.'' In buying the island for his small family, Gardiner had created the first English settlement on eastern Long Island. Soon after settling on the island, his daughter, Elizabeth, was born -- the first English child born in what is now New York State. Gardiner's purchase was later ratified when he received a grant from King Charles I of England.

Historians say Gardiner's acquisition of the island -- which he called the Isle of Wight before giving it his own name -- could not have taken place without the consent of Wyandanch, the Montaukett Indian Gardiner met in the aftermath of the Pequot War. Wyandanch, whose people had been under the thumb of the Pequots, befriended Gardiner after their destruction -- the enemy of his enemy was indeed his friend.

``Wyandanch's role in the transaction is not recorded, but he undoubtedly was the one who brought the two parties together,'' writes scholar John Strong in ``The Algonquian Peoples of Long Island From Earliest Times to 1700.''

Wyandanch had made the deal possible. Gardiner would later return the favor in dramatic fashion.

In the spring of 1653, a party of Niantic Indians attacked Wyandanch's village on Montauk Point, killing more than 30 in a place known for years after as ``massacre valley.'' Prisoners were taken, one of whom was Wyandanch's daughter. To get her back, Gardiner traveled to Rhode Island and paid a handsome ransom.

Just what the circumstances of the daughter's kidnaping were are not known today. David Gardiner, Lion's descendant, wrote in 1840 that she was grabbed on her wedding day and her intended husband was killed. Indian history scholar John Strong has written that there is nothing in the records that supports that account.

The bond between the Indian and the Englishman seemed genuine. Based on appearances, it was a true friendship, one that was depicted -- apparently by Wyandanch -- in a number of deeds for large tracts of land the Montaukett sold to Gardiner. On these deeds, Wyandanch drew stick figures of two men, one an Indian, the other an Englishman.

One of the deeds was for a huge tract of land in modern-day Smithtown, which Wyandanch conveyed to Gardiner in the aftermath of his daughter's return to Montauk. On that deed, the stick figures are holding hands. Near the end of his life, Gardiner would be the largest landowner in Long Island history -- nearly 100,000 acres.

No European ever got so much from any Indian as Lion Gardiner got from Wyandanch.

Last summer, a day rich in history, descendants of both men met. Robert David Lion Gardiner and Robert Cooper, a descendant of Wyandanch who lives in East Hampton, traveled together to Gardiner's Island. There, they talked about the friendship between their ancestors.

``They were blood brothers,'' Gardiner said.

``I believe that, too,'' Cooper said. Both men were sitting on a bench overlooking a saltwater pond on the island.

``When Wyandanch died, Lion wrote a letter to a friend in Connecticut and said his heart was broken, his best friend was dead,'' Gardiner said.

When Gardiner got up from the bench, he said to Cooper, ``Why don't you walk with me?''

``I'll walk with you anywhere,'' Cooper said, smiling.