NOTE. THE author of the following Memoir was one of the founders of the New York Historical Society, and its President during a period of eleven years. He was a native of New York, born June 21, 1746, and graduated at King's (now Columbia,) College in 1765—studied the profession of the law, and settled at Red Hook, Dutchess county, in 1772. During the revolution, he took an active and conspicuous part in favor of whig measures; was a member of the first legislative assembly of the State, elected in 1777, and during the same year was appointed attorney general, which office he held until 1787. He was one of the six representatives from New York in the first Congress, remaining in office until 1794. He was thence called to the bench of the Supreme Court of the State, in which office, Chancellor KENT has said of him that "he did more to reform the practice of that court, than any member of it ever did before, or ever did since." In 1801, he was appointed chief judge of the second circuit United States Court for New York; but by a change of the judiciary system which fol、 lowed in 1802, he was deprived of the office. Not long afterwards, he removed to Jamaica, Long Island, where he resided during the rest of his life. "Here (says Chancellor KENT,) he continued to be blessed with a protracted old age, 'exempt from scorn or crime,' and that glided in modest innocence away.' His writings never received the attention which the good, contained under a forbidding exterior, justly demanded; for by his constant efforts to attain sententious brevity, he became oftentimes obscure. This great and good man survived all his contemporaries, and seems to have died almost unknown and forgotten by the profession, which he once so greatly adorned." He died at Jamaica, 24th August, 1833, at the age of 87 years. * See Sketch of the Life of Judge Benson from the pen of Chancellor KENT, in Thomp son's Long Island, ii. 487. MEMOIR.* THE subject of this Memoir, if so it may be termed, will be NAMES; chiefly names of places, and further restricted to places in that portion of our country, once held and claimed by the Dutch by right of discovery, and by them named New Netherland; to be described, generally, as bounded on the east by the Connecticut, and on the west by the Delaware, and a space in breadth, adjacent to the farther bank of each, the extent of it not now to be ascertained; but, doubtless, as far as was judged needful to secure the exclusive use of the rivers. Held by right of discovery-a right gravely questioned by some, and furnishing matter for wit and pleasantry to others; because, with deference to both, not justly apprehended by either. An understood conventional law between the maritime nations of Europe, to prevent interferences otherwise to be apprehended, that the discovery of territory should enure to the benefit of the sovereign by whose subjects made. The benefit, where the territory inhabited, a right, in exclusion of other sovereigns and their subjects, to purchase, from the uncivilized occupants, the soil; their right to which recognised by the Dutch in the first instance, and afterwards by the English on the surrender of the colony to them, in 1664, and ever regarded by both, with the best faith. No grant to their own people without a previous Indian purchase, as it was termed-no purchase without a previous license for it-the sale under the superintendence of an authorised magistracy, in quality as guardians for the Indians; and hence complaints from them of injury, either from their own mistakes or from imposition in the purchasers, rare, notwithstanding we meet with a part of the consideration not more definitely expressed, than as consisting of "some handsful of powder." If asked, whence the inducement in selecting the subject, a mere research, furnishing little to please, perhaps less to instruct? my answer will simply be, that nothing relative to the history of COUNTRY-the soil that gave birth -"the place of our FATHERS' sepulchres"—" the paternal seats, our unceasing desire it may be granted us ourselves to die there," was never with others, and I trust will never be with us, wholly uninteresting. The English, when speaking of their country, call it England; when speaking of it with emphasis or emotion, at times, Old England; still only its name on the map-the Dutch, when speaking of their country, always by a name peculiar to themselves, HET VADERLANDT, the Father Land. The order to be observed, will be generally the primitive Indian, and the subsequently successive Spanish, Dutch, and English names. * As authorities, among others, a reference will be understood to be to the THEATRUM TERRARUM ORBIS, of Ortelius, surnamed the Ptolemy of his time, published in 1572; the NIEWEE WERLDT, New World, of De Laet, published in 1625, and the same work in Latin, published in 1633; the Beschryvinge van NIEUWE NEDERLANDT, Description of New Netherland, by Van Der Donck, after a residence here of some years, published in 1656; and the BRANDENDE VEEN, a burning pile of turf, a collection of sea-charts, with notes, by Roggeveen, published in 1675; all of them, it must be admitted, imperfect, and in very many instances erroneous, but probably not more so than others, who, at the same period, attempted the geography, and to borrow the appellation just cited, of this, to them, New World; from necessity, however, those named must serve as guides, aware, at the same time, that while we follow, there must still be a reliance on our own circumspection. INDIAN NAMES. It may be a question, whether the Indians had general names for large tracts of country? The Five Nations, or, as heretofore, not unusually distinguished by us, our Indians, as residing within our jurisdiction, the Mohocks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, and the Senecas, had * See Note III. no general name for their domain, or the parts of it, although separated by duly definite limits, the distinct property of each. The extensive, and, as relatively to them, south and southwestern region, including at least a portion of the Carolinas, they designated by referring to their general name for its inhabitants, the country of the Flat-Heads. They waged war with them, and it would seem implacably 80. Returning home from one of their expeditions, they brought off, to replace those lost from among themselves in their fights, a whole people, the Tuscaroras, incorporating them into their confederacy as the sixth nation, and assigning them lands for residence, but withholding the power of alienation. On the other hand, there is abundant reason to believe, that, inland, every distinct space, scarcely more extensive than a neighborhood, and, on the coast, every river, bay, and cape, and every island, its contents not more than to serve as the abode of a single tribe, had a distinct name. Of the places on the coast, Tybee, Ocracock, Hatteras, Roanoke, Currituck, Chesapeake, Chingoteague, Squan, Nevesink, Rockaway, Nantucket, with its secondary Muskegut, are those only still known to our mariners by their Indian names. Montock, it is true, is Indian, but the appropriation of it, as a name for the extreme eastern point of Long Island, is by the English, and probably since the reign of Queen Anne, the point appearing on a chart of the coast, dedicated to her son the Duke of Gloucester, without a name. It is the name of the peninsula denoted in a petition to the government in 1680, for a license to purchase it from the Indians, "as a tract eastward of Easthampton, called Montauck;" and we find it at the same period called Montaukett, and its sachem formally claiming, before the governor and council, a right, and as by conquest, to sell the lands as far west as Mattinicock. The peninsula is within the limits of the town of Easthampton; the whites, the appellation generally in use with us, when intending to distinguish between ourselves and the Indians, exercising only a modified right of property, the right of pasturage; the remnant of Indians still there enjoying the exclusive right of culture. The tribe was known as the Mattowas, or Mattowaks, or Mattouwax, all of which, however differently spelt or pronounced by the whites, doubtless purport the same name; but whether the tribe took their name from the place, or the place took its name from the tribe, is a question from which it behooves me to refrain. As of |