This name, _Cheekanoo_, _Cockenoe_, _Chickino_, _Chekkonnow_, or _Cockoo_,--no matter how varied in the records of Long Island and elsewhere, for every Town Clerk or Recorder, with but a limited or no knowledge of the Indian tongue and its true sounds, wrote down the name as it suited him, and seldom twice alike even on the same page,--finds its parallel sounds in the Massachusetts of both Eliot and Cotton, in the verb _kuhkinneau_, or _kehkinnoo_, "he marks, observes, takes knowledge, instructs, or imitates";[18] hence, "he interprets," and therefore indicating by a free translation "an interpreter or teacher"; this word in its primitive form occurs in all dialects of the same linguistic family--that is, the Algonquian--in an infinite number of compounds, denoting "a scholar; teacher; a thing signified; I say what he says, _i. e._, repeat after him," etc.[19]
These I may call inferential marks by the wayside, and with what is to follow are surely corroborative evidence strong enough to enable me to assume that I am on the right trail, and that "_Cheekanoo_" and John Eliot's young man were one and the same individual. In its acceptance it becomes obvious that he must have been so termed before the date of the East Hampton conveyance, while still with Eliot in Massachusetts. Indian personal names were employed to denote some remarkable event in their lives, and having been a teacher and an interpreter of Eliot's, and continuing in the same line afterward, which gave him greater celebrity, it was natural that he should retain the name throughout his life.
A little over two weeks after the East Hampton transaction, by a deed dated May 16, 1648[20] (O. S.), _Mammawetough_, the Sachem of _Corchauge_, with the possible assistance of our interpreter, who, it seems to me, could not have been dispensed with on such an occasion, conveys _Hashamomuck_ neck--which included all the land to the eastward of Pipe's Neck creek, in Southold town, on which the villages of Greenport, East Marion, and Orient are located, together with Plum Island--to Theophilus Eaton, Stephen Goodyeare, and Captain Malbow of New Haven. This is known as the Indian deed for the "Oyster Ponds," and while _Cheekanoo's_ name does not appear on this copy of a copy, for the original has long been lost, it is possible that it may be disguised in the name of one of the witnesses, _Pitchamock_.