Rockaway Bay was a great resort of the Indians for the purpose of manufacturing _wampum_ or _seawan_, the money of the native Americans. Numerous shell beds now line the shore where the manufacture was carried on. The navigators must have therefore landed on Rockaway Beach, where the shore-line meets the narrow and barren outer-bar, which for over seventy miles separates the ocean from the bay, or lagoons, behind it. Still coasting along, the keen Verrazano went ashore again near Quogue or Bridgehampton, where he found the place full of forests of various kinds of woods, but not as odoriferous as those on the Jersey shore; the country being more northerly and colder. Here the Indians again fled into the thickets, as the white men approached, but the Frenchmen saw many of their boats, made of a single log twenty feet long and four feet wide, hollowed out with sharp knives and axes. After remaining here three days, the navigators departed, running along the coast in a northerly direction, sailing by day and dropping anchor at night. At the end of a journey of a hundred miles they found a very pleasant place, indeed, where a large river, deep at its mouth, ran into the sea between high cliffs upon either side. The explorers proceeded up the curving stream in a boat and soon found themselves surrounded by the redskins in canoes, these natives being dressed with bird feathers of gay colors. They came towards the Frenchmen, joyfully, and emitted great shouts of admiration. The sailors ascended the river for about half a mile, “where,” says Verrazano, “we saw a fine lake about three miles in circumference through which were passing many canoes of the red men.” But a violent wind sprang up, so that the explorers had to return to their ships, “leaving the land,” continues Verrazano, “with much regret, as the hills there showed minerals.” The navigators had entered the river Thames, the vessel being anchored well within Fisher’s Island, where many a steam-yacht would afterwards cast its anchor, while the sailors would watch the rival crews of Yale and Harvard, as they battled for supremacy on the waters of the shimmering stream. But the navigators would not remain to make friends with the Indians, and, weighing anchor, sailed eastward, where they saw an island, triangular in form, distant about ten miles from the mainland, full of hills and covered with trees. Judging from the fires which they viewed along the shore, the Frenchmen considered it to be thickly inhabited. This was Block Island, but the sunburned explorers called it Louisa Island, after the mother of King Francis the First, of far distant France.