Pg. 120- (Pirates and Smugglers) - Distance from the seat of authority, nearness to a growing centre of trade and exchange, and a sheltered coast, indented with numerous harbors, all conspired to make Long Island one of the great American centres for eighteenth-century smuggling. The traders were far more skillful than the lawmakers in adapting themselves to the peculiarities of the western environment.

The people of the eastern villages early found another means of gain, and one hardly to have been expected of the worthy Puritans who set out from old and New England to build their homes and to worship God in the wilderness. They were, however, subject to a strong temptation. Long Island stretched its narrow length far to the eastward of New York. Scores of miles of almost trackless forest separated the people of Peconic Bay from those at the mouth of the Hudson. For the villagers even of Southold the Connecticut shore was but a hazy line on the northern horizon. The days at the close of the seventeenth century, when piracy was at its height, Long Island had an important part in piratical ventures. "I understand," wrote Bellomont in 1699, "that about 30 pirates came lately in the east end of Nassau Island and have a great deal of money with them; but so cherished are they by the inhabitants that not a man of them is taken up. Several of them I hear came with Shelly from Madagascar... I too hear that Captain Kidd dropped some pirates in that Island... They write from New York that Arabian gold is in great plenty there." These days were, indeed, far removed from those when the people of Long Island labored "only to get bread and clothing, without hopes of ever seeing a penny of monies." It is not strange that the gentlemen who had brought about the change came to be known, not as "pirates," but as "privateers."

To the energetic Earl of Bellomont, governor of the province of New York, it was hard work, trying to clean out the pirates' nest at the eastern end of the Island. He wrote to his superiors in England, recounting that Rayner had landed at the eastern end of Long Island with a chest of treasure "valued at fifteen hundred pounds," but had been seized by the sheriff. In 1699, after Bellomont had became governor, a pirate ship from the East Indies was brought to the east end of Long Island and sunk between that Island and Block Island. Its treasure, concealed on the latter, was recovered and confiscated by the governor of Rhode Island. In 1699, the great Kidd was apprehended in New England and sent home to face a jury and the gallows. Bellomont secured possession of one of Kidd's crew who had been aboard the pirate's sloop at the east end of Long Island and who had carried off treasure to the value of about L5000. He was sent to England with his chief. The eighteenth century was not many years old when the period of romance for "Nassaw Island" came to an end. The people of the "Pirate's nest" at the eastern end, save for a little smuggling, settled down to the prosaic business of earning an honest living.