|
John Seaman was an Englishman, born about 1611 in Seaford, a coastal town in Sussex. He came to America in the summer of 1630, one of the Puritans in the Winthrop Fleet. He was briefly at Watertown, Connecticut, and then in New Hampshire in 1631-2 as part of John Mason and John Winthrop’s efforts to establish settlements there. From there he went to Wethersfield, Connecticut, on the Connecticut River, and then to Stamford, edging Long Island Sound.
On the night of May 26, 1637, during the Pequot War, and under the command of Captain John Mason, he led a company of English settlers in the Mystic massacre, when the English and their Narrangansett and Mohegan allies set fire to a Pequot village near the Mystic River in Connecticut. Between four and seven hundred villagers had lain sleeping there that night, mostly women and children. The attackers blocked both exits of the palisade fortress, and shot any people who tried to escape. All of the villagers there that night were killed.
In 1643-44, he was one of the first settlers at Hempstead, and in time became one of the largest landowners, obtaining a deed in 1657 from the Massapeague, Merrick and Rockaway Indians for twelve thousand acres “from Sea to Sea.” He was one of the company of men who in 1658 met with Cockenoe, an Indian interpreter of Long Island, as they bargained with other Indians to lay out the bounds for the town of Hempstead, that it might last, said accounts at the time, for a very long time. In 1666, he and his sons also settled the village of Jerusalem South in the town of Hempstead, at a place that the local Meroke tribe called Massapeague, “The Great Water Land.” Today, the village that once was called Jerusalem South, and later also Seaman’s Neck, is now the village of Seaford, at the edge of Oyster Bay, the name being changed in the 19th century to honor the place where John Seaman was born.
John Seaman was married twice – first to Elizabeth Strickland, who bore him four daughters and a son, and then to Martha Moore, who bore him four sons and seven daughters. Sometime around the year 1680 he and some of the members of his family, Puritans until then, became Quakers, members of the Society of Friends.
|
