Long Island and Rhode Island. In 1609, the English navigator Henry Hudson explored the harbor and purportedly landed at Coney Island. Adriaen Block followed in 1615 and is credited as the first European to determine that both Manhattan and Long Island are islands. Native American land deeds recorded by the Dutch from 1636 state that the Indians referred to Long Island as "Sewanhaka" ("Sewanhacky" and "Sewanhacking" were other spellings in the transliteration of Lenape). "Sewan" was one of the terms for wampum (commemorative stringed shell beads, for a while also used as currency by colonists in trades with the Lenape), and is
Hackensack people Purchase agreement in Pennsylvania, and Treaty of Easton. The British were trying to gain control of lands they had "acquired" from the French after the French and Indian War (1754-1763), and the Native Americans were trying to prevent further European encroachment into their territory. Today Lenape groups are dispersed around the United States. Hackensack people Hackensack was the exonym given by the Dutch colonists to a band of the Lenape, or "Lenni-Lenape" ("original men"), a Native American tribe. The name is a Dutch derivation of the Lenape word for what is now the region of northeastern New Jersey along the