CAPE COD GEOLOGY 



209 



CHAPTER IV 



GEOLOGY OF BLOCK ISLAND 

 By J. B. Woodworth 



HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY 



Block Island, or New Shoreham, lies off the coast of Rhode Island, from 

 10 to 16 miles southwest-by-south of Point Judith. Its southwest point is about 

 15 miles northeast of Montauk Point, on Long Island, and its eastern coast is 

 about 37 miles west by south of Gay Head, the western extremity of Marthas 

 Vineyard. The island is about 6 miles long from northeast to southwest and in 

 its southern broader part is about 4| miles wide from east to west. (See Plate 29.) 



Block Island was known to the aborigines as Manisses, a name preserved 

 in Whittier's poem on the wreck of the Palatine. Verazzano gave the island 

 the name of Claudia in 1624, as certain early maps testify. After the island was 

 explored by Adrian Block, the Dutch navigator who visited this coast in 1614, 

 the name Adrian's Eyland was placed for a time on Dutch maps. Later the 

 surname of the old navigator became the name of the island. In 1672 a town 

 charter granted to the island by the Rhode Island Assembly provided that the 

 ' 'said town of Block Island . . . shall be called New Shoreham, otherwise Block 

 Island." The English village name, New Shoreham, which appears in numerous 

 records and on maps of the island, attests the English settlement of an island 

 that once lay within the territory of the Netherlands in the New World. 



As the English settlement of the island was followed by certain changes 

 in its features and life that are related to the surficial geology and to certain 

 geological conditions that are now in part effaced, it seems well to relate briefly 

 the history of the island. 



When Endicott's expedition visited Block Island in September, 1636, it 

 ' 'was all overgrown with brushwood of oak," according to Winthrop's History 

 of New England, but there was no good timber on it. Winthrop reports that 

 the island was said to be about 10 miles long and 4 miles broad, and full of small 

 hills. We may safely assume that the length thus given was too great, even if 

 we make allowance for the loss of the small island at Sandy Point, on the north 

 shore, and for the retreat of the cliffs on the south shore. In the 280 years since 

 this estimate was made, the south shore, if we assume that it has retreated 3 

 feet a year, would have stood about 900 feet south of the present Mohegan 



