At Thanksgiving it seems appropriate to think about eastern Long Island’s very first land flip, which began 383 years ago when the Manhanset Indians of Manhansack Aha Quash A Womak were robbed of the place we know today as Shelter Island.
It began in 1638 on the British calendar. Unkechio, sachem of Pammanocks and Manhansack Aha Quash A Womak (or Monhansake, as shortened in the old deeds), passed possession of the island to James Farrett, who then further acquired a claim to its title from another sachem, Monhangoly.
Farrett’s employer, William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, had given him leave to “buy” the island from its rightful inhabitants, having himself obtained a claim to nearly all of Long Island from King Charles I. Farrett may have visited the island, Stirling never did.
On May 18, 1641, Farrett flipped the island to Stephen Goodyear of New Haven. The price in goods was equated to 15 Pounds, 13 Shillings, plus a promise of “bills for ninty five pounds” to be paid over time. In turn, Goodyear received his claim to “a certaine smalle island called Monhansacke” that contained a house, 18 hogs, six goats, and “all rivers woods uplands meadowes harbours and crekes.”
Goodyear sat on his investment for about 10 years before flipping it to four merchants active in the sugar trade (read: enslavers). Thomas Middleton, Thomas Rouse, Constant Sylvester, and Nathaniel Sylvester paid him with 1,600 pounds of unrefined sugar known as muscovado. This represented a lot of money — a year of Harvard tuition at the time cost 35 to 43 pounds of sugar.
I don’t know if Goodyear ever made good on his total of 115 pounds of goods promised to Unkechio and Monhangoly. Even if he did, he made money on the deal, when he sold the island for about 140 pounds’ value in sugar to the Sylvester consortium, a fair profit, too, for 10 years of doing nothing.
The four men’s plan was to raise livestock and crops and fell timber to supply the sugar plantations run by Constant Sylvester on Barbados, and presumably to any other buyers who emerged. It worked, and for 12 generations, descendants of Nathaniel Sylvester and his wife, Grizzell, lived on Shelter Island along with some descendants of the African people they enslaved and descendants of the native Manhansets.
One apparent Manhanset listed in a Sylvester account book some years later had the nickname Turkeyman. Why he was called that, I don’t know, but he was paid for a full day in the fields.