Long previous to this time, and in the year 1640 the entire and general Indian title, both to the land and the sovereignty, of all the territory of southeastern Westchester and Connecticut as far east as the Norwalk Islands inclusive, had been obtained for the Dutch West India Company by purchase by Governor Kieft, through Cornelius van Tienhoven, from the Siwanoy Indians.* Richbell however was the first white man to purchase the individual right of the local Indian owners to the lands at Mamaroneck.

He was an Englishman of a Hampshire family of

- Time, blasting, and a succession of dams, have obliterated the original ledge, but the, remains of the reef can still be seen.

^It has been stated that " Mamaroneck" meant " the place of rolling stones," but for this I can not find any authority. There are not rolling stones anywhere about Mamaroneck either in the river or the town, though both abound with rocks in si<u, in the language of the geologists.

^ I. Brod. 290, II. Albany Records 78, 147, II. Hazard 273, I. OX'all. N. X. 215.

t

MAMARONECK.

Southampton or its neighborhood, who were merchants in London, and who had business transactions with the West Indies and with New England. He was in Charlestown Massachusetts in 1648 according to Savage's Genealogical Dictionary, and he appears in an Inventory of the estate of Robert Gibson of Boston, as owing the estate S&£ on the 8th of August 1656. Prior to 1657 he had been in St. Christopher's Island in the West Indies. In 1657 he entered into a business partnership in Barbadoes, then the centre of the English trade with the West Indies and North America, being at that time, as it is now, an English Island. The severe and oppressive English Navigation laws the scope of which Cromwell had enlarged, and which he strictly enforced, drove many Englishmen at that period to embark in a contraband trade, a trade which increased in the next century to so great an extent in North America, that the severe measures adopted by the English Government to suppress it in the latter part of that century proved to be one of the strongest, if not very strongest of the causes of the American Revolution. ^ At Barbadoes the following curious and striking agreement was entered into by John Richbell with Thomas Modiford of that island, and William Sharpe of Southampton, to establish on the North American coast a plantation for the carrying on a trade not permitted by the Navigation laws.