The Whale Hunters of Montauk: Long Island's First Reservations
By Margaret Ellsworth Hathaway
Length4h 9m
About this audiobook
A New York judge ruled in 1910 that the Montaukett no longer existed as a people. The families in his courtroom had lived at the eastern end of Long Island for as long as anyone's grandmothers could remember.
The first chapter opens on the bluff at Montauk Point, where a man watches a right whale blow as she works west along the shore. He does not shout. His people did not hunt the great whales from boats; they watched and waited, because a whale that stranded on the south shore meant food, light, oil and rope, the difference between a hard winter and a survivable one. Their towns, from the Montaukett at the tip to the Shinnecock on the bay and the Unkechaug and Corchaug farther west, were bound together by marriage, treaty and a shared Algonquian tongue.
Then the English came, and the whale became an industry. Montaukett and Shinnecock men crewed the shore boats and later the deep-water ships, while deeds, leases and appointed guardians narrowed the ground they lived on: the bargain struck by the sachem Wyandanch, the Shinnecock lease of 1703, the summer people who arrived after the oil and the whales ran out.
The judge called them extinct. The book gives the last word to the families still living in whaling country, and to the long fight to be recognized as what they had never stopped being.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length4 hrs 9 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 19, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: The Headland at Dawn
2Chapter 2: The First Sail
3Chapter 3: Wyandanch's Bargain
4Chapter 4: The Shore Whalers
5Chapter 5: Shinnecock, 1703
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6Chapter 6: Deeds and Guardians
7Chapter 7: The Deep-Water Trade
8Chapter 8: The Oil and the Whales Run Out
9Chapter 9: The Summer People
10Chapter 10: The Court That Declared Them Extinct
11Chapter 11: The Long Fight Back
12Chapter 12: Still Here, Still Whaling Country
13About the Author
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