The first white man who sailed upon Long Island Sound was the bluff old Dutch navigator, Captain Adraien Blok. Desirous of adventure and spoil, he built upon the shore of the Battery, in 1614, the first ship ever constructed at New York, a blunt-pointed Dutch sloop-yacht of sixteen tons, which he named the "Onrest." The four little huts he had upon the shore to house his builders and crew were among the first structures of the early Manhattan colony. Fitting her out, he braved the terrors of the Hell Gate passage and started on a voyage of discovery on Long Island Sound, which he explored throughout. He found the mouth of the principal river of New England, the Connecticut, and coasting around Point Judith, entered Narragansett Bay, and cast anchor before an island with such conspicuously red-clay shores that he called it Roodt Eylandt, or the Red Island, on which Newport now stands. Then he ventured out to sea and found the bluff shores of Block Island, to which he gave his own name. Sated with exploration and loaded with spoil exchanged with the Indians, he then returned to New York and told of his wonderful adventures. His was the first vessel, manned by white men, known to have sailed upon the "Mediterranean of America," as Long Island Sound is popularly called. This grand inland sea is generally from twenty to thirty miles wide, and is enclosed by Long Island, the ancient Isle of Nassau of the Dutch, stretching for one hundred and thirty miles eastward from New York harbor, and being likened to a fish lying upon the water. It has a generally bluff northern shore along the Sound, and the southern coast, which is low and level almost to the eastern extremity, lies nearly due east and west, the island finally breaking into a chain of narrow peninsulas and islands facing the rising sun. The southern border is a continuous line of broad lagoons, separated from the Atlantic by long and narrow sand-bars. The chief lagoon is the Great South Bay, eighty miles long, fronted by the curious formation of the Great South Beach, stretching its entire length, and from one to five miles wide. Upon the outer beaches, and within the lagoons, are a succession of noted seashore resorts. Eastward, beyond Jamaica Bay and Rockaway, is Long Beach, and behind it Hempstead Bay. Then come Jones' Beach and Oak Island, with Massapequa, Amityville and Lindenhurst behind them. Then we are at Babylon and Bayshore, with the Great South Bay fronted by Fire Island, and beyond it the long sand-strip of the Great South Beach. The famous lighthouse of Fire Island, the guiding beacon to New York, one hundred and sixty-eight feet high, is flanked by summer hotels, and its flashing electric light of twenty-three million candlepower is the most powerful on the Atlantic Coast. The Great South Bay spreads far eastward past Patchogue to Moriches, and then comes Quogue and the Hamptons, where the level land rises into the Shinnecock hills. At the eastern extremity are Amagansett and