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There are no surviving records that inform us as to any
discussions or meetings held regarding the naming of Matinecock
Lodge. We are left with the task of making assumptions based on
what we can learn of the charter members, their interests and
local patterns of naming of places and institutions in the late
nineteenth century.
The first master and guiding force in the formation of
Matinecock Lodge was William Lincoln Swan. Commodore Swan was
also the guiding force in the formation of Seawanhaka Corinthian
Yacht Club. Billy Swan named his local florist business the
Seawanhaka Greenhouses, and since he possessed an avid interest
in the history of the local area it is altogether reasonable to
assume that William L. Swan was the individual responsible for
adopting the name Matinecock Lodge.
Seawanhaka in its various spellings means "island of
shells," sewan being one of the Matinecock Indian names for
wampum. Both Seawanhaka and Matinecock are names derived from
native words which were transliterated by the early Dutch
settlers and appear in many different forms. The natives of the
area had no written language, and we are therefore left with the
spellings given by various groups of settlers that tried to
approximate the sounds they heard and put them into spelling
forms close to the sounds of their own language.
The Indian meaning of Matinecock was "at the hilly
land" and appropriately describes the land areas inhabited
by this group. Their lands generally covered from what is now
Astoria (Queens), east to Setauket and Port Jefferson (Suffolk
County) and south to the central part of Long Island. To the
south were the lands of the Massapequa, Merrick and Rockaway
Indians. Most of the groups that inhabited Long Island have not
been considered tribes but rather "chieftaincies." Each
of these chieftaincies, of which Matinecock was one, included a
number of communities.
The Matinecock communities were located mainly along the bays
and inlets along the north shore and usually contained 20 to 30
family groups. The Matinecocks assisted the first settlers in
their early agricultural efforts. The Indians had been planting
maize (corn) for centuries and were also very adept at harvesting
local shellfish which comprised a considerable part of their
diet.
Garvies Point Museum
The Matinecocks were generally peaceful toward the early
European settlers, but a number of incidents led to hostilities
at various times. Mechoswodt, the chief sachem of Marossepinck,
Sintsinck and its dependencies, signed a deed on January 15, 1639
with some early Dutch settlers that conveyed the entire western
half of Long Island to the Dutch. In the early settlement of
Hempstead the settlers felt that this deed entitled them to all
of the Matinecock lands. The Matinecocks fought this assumption
vigorously as the Hempstead settlers threatened war against the
Matinecocks. The Dutch attacked the Matinecock village of Matsepe
during the winter of 1643-1644, killing more than 120 men and an
unknown number of Matinecock women and children. The Matinecock
sachem, Gauwarowe, then signed a peace agreement with the Dutch
on April 15,1644 agreeing not to support the still hostile Indian
groups of Reckonhacky and Marechkaqieck.
As English settlers began arriving in the 1640's and 1650's
the disputes continued. The English brought with them cattle and
other livestock which frequently overran the unfenced fields of
Indian corn. The trade in liquor with the Indians helped to
demoralize and disorganize them. Some of the Matinecocks
responded by killing English livestock. Sometimes they called for
prohibition of liquor and sometimes for increased trade for
liquor.
By 1650 many of the Indians had already died off from
epidemics of white man's diseases, the effects of wars with the
Dutch, plus continuing battles with their own warring native
enemies. Several of the Indian sachems began supporting the Dutch
in the frequent wars that erupted between the settlers and local
Indian communities. When a group of Matinecocks were accused of
stealing clothing from some settlers at Massapequa, the sachem
Tackapousha expressed his anger by assuring the Dutch that he
would control the Matinecocks and support the Dutch. A few years
later Tackapousha supplied over 40 Matinecock warriors to the
Dutch to assist them in their war against the Esopus in the
mid-Hudson River valley in 1663.
When New Netherland passed into English hands in 1664, the
settlers at Hempstead renewed and stepped up their demands for
the total eviction of the Matinecocks that remained. The men at Hempstead
still felt that the land conveyance of 1639 gave them title to
all of the Matinecock lands. The new English Governor demanded
that the Hempstead claimants prove that the Matinecocks were
party to the 1639 conveyance, which they were unable to do. In a
document dated March 22, 1667 Thomas Underhill, Henry Redocke,
and two other men got the Indian sachem, Tackapouche, to place
his mark defining the Matinecock lands as bounded on the south by
the Hempstead plains, on the west by Muscito Couve (Glen Cove),
north by the sound, and east by "Oyster Bay Bounds."
The Hempstead settlers continued to litigate, and finally in
1676 the remaining Matinecocks sold three parcels of land, each
one mile square, at and around Muscito Couve (Glen Cove) for a
total of 600 guilders of wampum. The last of the Matinecock lands
in dispute were sold to the settlers in 1685.
With the loss of their lands, many of the Matinecocks moved to
join with the Poosepatucks, Shinnecocks and Montauks, which by
the late l600's had negotiated some of their own lands to be used
as reservations. Those that chose to stay in their ancestral
lands settled within small hamlets near the sites of their
earlier villages. Some worked on the English plantations that
began to flourish, some became midwives, and some made and sold
handcrafts of various description. Significant numbers of
Matinecocks became expert harpooners and played a major role in
the success of the Long Island whaling industry. By 1732 the last
remnants of any Matinecock villages disappeared from western Long
Island.
The Matinecocks were a noble people who had lived in harmony
with nature for over a thousand years on Long Island's north
shore. They were willing to share the land with the settlers from
Europe, but the settlers wanted it all. The simple ways of the
Matinecock were no match for the power of the new settlers, and
within a hundred years of the settlers' arrival the Matinecocks
were gone.
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