Everette T. Rattray "South Fork, The Land and People of East Long Island"    This is a story that I found about the Vail family in the above mentioned book.  The first paragraph is quoted and spelled exactly as the book has it.  I have tried to write the rest of it in my own words, report fashion.  "The "great Cannow" over which "Waindanch SACHEM of Meantaquit," Lion GARDINER's great friend, sued one Jeremy VAILE in 1658 must have been such a one. (speaking about log canoes that are similar in hull conformation to a whaleboat.) According to a depositition in the East Hampton Town Records, GARDINER "heard" that the canoe was coming to his island, where he had lived since before there was an East Hampton, called for "them that were in the house to follow me and I mett my sonn and good man VAILE coming up and I asked them whie they pulled not up the Canow and they said it was time enough and I called them to goe to gett it up and we all went & could doe nothing and then we went agen & she was full." The canoe had filled, something that can happen to any boat left on a leeshore when the water is choppy. It had been damaged. It was mended by      putting two pieces at "the end of her" The court found for Wyandanch ( "ared man"), and awarded him ten shillings plus court costs of one pound, one shilling. The author suspects that the reason Sachem and his men had not pulled up their canoe, was that it had drifted over unoccupied, cast loose through carelessness or "evil design." The author figures that young David GARDINER, who twenty-two years earlier had been the first European child born in Connecticut, no doubt got a parade-ground tongue -lashing from the old soldier, Lion (GARDINER), whom the youth and the man could never please. It was certainly one of the few instances in which a red man went to a white man's court and got satisfaction.  There are stories about the Whalers, of which the Vails apparently were apart of, but this seems to be the only mention of a Vail, by any spelling. Joyce in CA http://www.geocities.com/jarmscoop