Look down the length of Rodman's Hollow on Block Island's south end and you will see a valley of shrubs and grasses and small trees -- all shades of green -- stretching for nearly a mile to the blue Atlantic Ocean.

The hollow is not the island's hottest tourist attraction. You can walk all morning and not see another person.

But it is lively. You can almost see the wind. As the sea breeze wafts across the open fields, the grasses bend and flow like waves. Songbirds whistle to each other in branches overhead and the surf creates a steady thud as it crashes ashore.

The hollow looks just as it did long ago.

For that, Block Islanders thank one man: Capt. John R. "Rob" Lewis.

A compact man with a cherubic smile and a scholar's recollection of classic poetry and literature, Rob survived the Depression. He captained Liberty ships during World War II when one of every 10 was bombed or torpedoed. And with his wife, Alyce, he raised three children and ran the island's hardware store.

After the intensity of World War II, Rob lived what he called a useful, though relatively quiet life. Three decades later, when his community was most threatened by outsiders looking to turn the fields and the moors into subdivisions and trophy houses, Rob stepped forward.

He didn't do it alone. But no one questions that Rob Lewis conceived the conservation drive that saved Block Island.

UNTIL THE early 1970s, Block Island was a mostly poor community of fishermen and farmers. The biggest public issue Rob had tackled was gambling -- state Rep. Ulysses LaRoche and Sen. Francis J. LaChapelle, both of West Warwick, kept introducing legislation in the General Assembly to bring legalized gambling to Block Island.

Rob was horrified. He knew New England organized crime was based in Providence. He had seen it operating on the waterfront.

Coronet, a popular national magazine, had just published an article about the ways organized crime penetrated gambling activities. Rob ordered a carton of the issue and handed out copies to anyone who would take one.

In 1970, LaRoche, accompanied by a state trooper, went to Block Island to talk to residents about gambling. The islanders made it emphatically clear that they wanted nothing to do with it. He promised to never again introduce the legislation.

For the most part, island life was pastoral. In 1965, The Journal's Sunday magazine, The Rhode Islander, described it as a place where "you can drop out of today and go back to the late 1800s or early 1900s."

The magazine described an era that was coming to an end. Block Islanders, Rob would say, "started to develop a dim awareness of what was happening around here."

Across Rhode Island, and the nation, people were beginning to move from suburbs into nearby rural towns.

Mainlanders started to turn the island into a destination resort, building luxury homes and visiting on their yachts and sailboats. In 1970, for the first time, a new, bigger ferry brought vehicles and visitors by the thousands. Small farms that could scarcely support a family suddenly became attractive as second homes.

The average number of homes built each year rose from 5 in the 1950s to 20 in the 1960s. Land prices were rising. One islander said that when he first went to the island, he could work a month and buy an acre. Now, he said, he could work all year and still not afford one.

In 1971, the town imposed a moratorium on subdivisions and began working on a blueprint for future development.

The town was reacting, in part, to the fact that months earlier, two developers from New York City, Alan Rudolph and Harold Edleman, had approached the New Shoreham Planning Commission with plans to build a subdivision at the entrance to Rodman's Hollow -- the section closest to Cooneymus Road. They had purchased 38 acres for $75,000.

When the developers laid out their plans, most people in town thought Rodman's Hollow would be lost. After all, farm fields and wood lots were being bulldozed to make way for subdivisions everywhere.

But Rob Lewis -- Robbie to his friends, Captain Lewis to newcomers -- chose this slice of Block Island to take a stand.

"The reaction here, you know, among the people, was that they shouldn't be allowed to do it," Rob recalled. "But then people would throw up their hands and say, 'Well, we can't do anything about it.' "

Rob paused, and said, "I wasn't about to accept that, myself."

ROB LEWIS WAS a mild-mannered and self-deprecating man. To understand how he rallied his community, and many outsiders too, requires a look back at his life.

Rob knew exactly where he came from and how his community fit with the rest of the world -- and he had seen more of the world than most.

"Everybody who ever grew up on Block Island always loved this place," he would say. "And I suppose there's always been the feeling that, wouldn't it be nice if it could always remain as we always knew it."

Block Island lies a bit more than nine miles south of Rhode Island's mainland. It is about three miles across at its widest and nearly six miles long. With about 1,000 year-round residents, it has the smallest population in the smallest state.

When Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano saw the island in 1524, he said it was covered with trees and well peopled -- he could see the campfires of Indians all along the shore. The island was occupied by Manissean Indians who called it Manisses, or "God's Little Island." Nearly a century later, Dutch explorer Adrian Block gave the island his name.

In 1660, leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony sold portions of the island to 16 investors from Braintree. Over time, they and their descendants drove out most of the Indians and replaced the trees with a patchwork of small farms.

The island is often described as porkchop-shaped, but if you cock a map to the left, another image is apparent. It looks like a bird, with Sandy Point at the north end becoming the beak, nearby Sachem Pond an eye, and the broad south end, running from Dickens Point to Southeast Point, a rump of tail feathers.

The bird image is much more fitting, because for much of the last century, Block Island was known for its birds and their annual migrations.

ROB COULD readily trace his roots to the first member of his family who came to the island, his great-grandfather Jesse Lewis, who bought more than 100 acres in 1817. Jesse Lewis and his wife raised five sons and a daughter. One after the other, the children left the island. Three became masters of square-rigged sailing vessels.

Finally, Jesse told his youngest, William, that he would give him the farm if he stayed. William accepted. He lived for 96 years and wrote his autobiography at age 85.

William had three sons and two daughters. One son, Ray, built the National Hotel and became a state senator. The farm was divided among the three boys, each of whom passed his portion along to his sons. One of the three, Rob's father, Clarence, passed his portion of the farm to Rob and Rob's brother, Bill.

Rob Lewis was born on March 2, 1918, in the same room of the Lewis farmhouse where his father and grandfather were born -- on a knoll overlooking Rodman's Hollow.

Rob spent his childhood milking cows, bottling milk, haying and attending a one-room schoolhouse.

The family grew sweet corn for the island hotels. They had three horses, a pair of oxen, pigs and a machine shop. The floor joists in the farmhouse and the barns were deck beams from wrecked ships. The cow barn was built with lumber that had washed ashore.

The house was warmed with coal from a shipwreck, and a generator salvaged from a sunken schooner supplied electricity.

Lacking a safe harbor until the 1870s, Block Island never enjoyed the wealth that whaling brought to Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. Block Islanders went to sea or worked their farms. Either way, they were close to nature, Rob would say.

One of his favorite places was a field of daisies so bright that on moonlit nights, they seemed to glow.

Rob was part of the first generation of Block Islanders taught by Elizabeth Dickens, known as the "Birdlady" of Block Island.

Dickens encouraged each student to keep track of all the birds he or she saw, as she did. Dickens recorded her observations nearly every day for 51 years, leaving an indelible influence on the island's children as well as the world of professional birders.

ROB LEWIS came of age during the Depression. No one on the island had money, he recalled, but no one went hungry either.

Neighbors shared eggs, milk and fish. They dug peat for fuel.

After one shipwreck, Rob recalled seeing local men "fishing" cases of canned goods from the water with their swordfish harpoons. The labels had washed off, he said. So for a while, no one knew what was for dinner until the can was opened.

The Depression was brutal for island fishermen. In 1932, the price of lobster dropped to 16 cents a pound, down from a previous low of 30 cents. Swordfish sold for 10 cents a pound. One fisherman set a price of 4 cents a pound for his rock cod, and got no offers. Instead of making $50 to $70 a day, the fishermen were lucky to get $3 or $4.

In his senior year of high school, Rob joined other island children at the new consolidated school that came with central heat and indoor plumbing.

During lunch breaks, he would walk down to Old Harbor, where the double-ended island fishing boats were moored alongside sleek, high-speed rumrunners. Rob worked on one of the two-man fishing boats that were still catching lots of swordfish within sight of the island.

In 1934, Rob became the first member of his family to go to college. He enrolled at Rhode Island State College, which would later become the University of Rhode Island. He had wanted to go to a maritime academy, but his family couldn't afford it.

He enrolled in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps and studied for a year, but didn't enjoy being, as he put it, one of the "la-la boys."

At the end of year, he dropped out and went back to Block Island to fish.

Months later he was offered a job as a cadet with American Export Lines, which operated a fleet of merchant vessels.

He was launching a career that would take him around the world and put him in harm's way many times. Of the war years, Rob didn't offer many details. He told a reporter once, "What could you do? Just be thankful for what you got."

HIS UPBRINGING and his years at sea had taught Rob Lewis about the importance of doing a thing right, and of taking a leadership role when survival was at stake. Those attributes stood him well in the early 1970s, as he faced down developers seeking to buy his community.

Rob began to organize his neighbors.

"It was clear to Dad that he would have to lead the effort," said Rob's older son, Keith. "He and others decided to start a local organization to buy and preserve open space. That was a big deal in those days -- thinking that a small town could take on mainland developers, that a tiny community could shape its destiny. And many didn't believe that a fledgling organization could raise large sums of money."

Rob borrowed language from a land trust in New Canaan, Conn., to create, in 1972, an organization he called the Block Island Conservancy. It and the Sakonnet Preservation Association were the first two land trusts in Rhode Island.

He recruited neighbors of all ages and backgrounds as directors. Rob was president. Weldon Dodge, another lifelong Block Islander, was vice president. Herbert S. Whitman, president of the Town Council, was secretary. Luella A. Ball, mother of the future First Warden Martha Ball, was treasurer. Adrian J. Mitchell, a young highway worker, was assistant treasurer.

"I always felt that it was important to get a good cross section of the community represented, and a diversity of points of view," Rob said. He wanted to get "everybody to work for the same goals, rather than have factions competing with each other or antagonizing each other."

Historian Robert M. Downie later determined that every one of those directors, either directly or through relatives, eventually donated land for conservation.

Rob also started raising money. Among the first he solicited were his older children, Keith and Nancy. Though both were just out of school, each gave their father $1,000.

Keith said Rob also sent out his first SOS. For mariners, SOS is the Morse code signal for distress. On Block Island, Rob distributed bumper stickers that read: "SOS -- Save Open Space."

He also started writing letters. At least twice a year, he wrote eloquent notes telling the community what the conservancy was doing, soliciting donations and new memberships, and exhorting people to join in what was a very important, but very uphill battle.

In his first letter, which island teenagers stuffed into 1,500 envelopes, Rob wrote that he wasn't opposed to orderly development, as determined by the local population to be in the best interests of the island.

"We are, however," he wrote, "against the ruthless, selfish, exploitative, short-sighted over-development which ultimately would bring the island to ruin. We would like to save something of the island's natural beauty, attractiveness and freedom, which, after all, are its greatest resources and the reasons people come here."

Rob concluded with a quote from the poet William Wordsworth about the dangers of giving "our hearts away." He offered a direct message to the developers:

"I earnestly plead with those who are relentlessly pursuing the courses of development, speculation, etc., to spare this lovely spot which the Indians chose to call 'God's Little Island.' I would plead that you consider now what you would finally gain in the end when it is all over."

MANY OF THE wealthy outsiders who were buying up Block Island property looked down their noses on the islanders and considered them provincial, Rob felt. Little did they know that Rob and many other island mariners had traveled the world.

In his early years at sea, Rob survived the Spanish Civil War, sailed the last American merchant vessel out of the Mediterranean Sea as war broke out across Europe and evaded German submarines as he sailed again and again across the Atlantic Ocean with huge cargoes of bombs, tanks and ammunition.

Before World War II, while his ships were being unloaded, Rob went to an opera in Genoa, Italy, visited the Leaning Tower of Pisa and toured ruins in Carthage, Pompeii and Rome.

Though his visits home were brief, he managed to be on Block Island when the 1938 hurricane wiped out the fishing fleet and knocked down most of the barns.

He met a young woman in New York named Alyce Burt and married her in 1941, after a courtship that was interrupted for months at a time by his voyages. Alyce had never eaten swordfish, lobster or fresh tuna until she visited Rob's family on the island.

As the war progressed, and many ships were sunk and crews lost, Rob was promoted through the ranks.

He was just 25 when he was promoted to captain and assigned a vessel. A Providence Journal photographer and reporter accompanied him on his first sea trial out of Boston, in the summer of 1943. Rob was the youngest skipper in the merchant marine. (The following year, a childhood friend, Evan Dodge, became a master at 24, breaking Rob's record.)

Shortly after The Journal's story ran, when Rob was preparing to leave on his first voyage as captain, Alyce found a book of the poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the Old Corner Bookstore in Boston. It included "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," which she knew Rob loved.

Inside the cover, Alyce inscribed the words of Psalm 27 asking the Lord to strengthen the heart "Though war should rise against me."

While many Rhode Island communities grew with new military bases or shipbuilding, Block Island's population shrank. Fifty-eight men -- one-fourth of the adult population -- were in the armed forces.

Block Islanders refused to cooperate with the State Council of Defense, which wanted to evacuate the island's population to protect the people from possible German attack. The Germans would be fools to waste ammunition on a target so lacking in military objectives, they argued. It would make more sense, they said, to evacuate mainlanders to the island.

THE WAR took its toll on Rob.

In a letter to his mother in 1945, he wrote: "Personally, I have had more than enough of this war. For three long years now, I have suffered constantly from a severe nervous strain. There has been no relief whatsoever from it, and I am all in."

In December 1942, Rob went ashore in Liverpool, England. He was lonely. The trips had been harrowing. The port had been badly damaged by bombing.

He managed to see a new movie, Holiday Inn starring Bing Crosby. It featured the new song "White Christmas."

"It was rather sad," Rob said later. "And it made me feel even lonelier."

It was his fourth Christmas away from Alyce, and his seventh away from Block Island.

Rob made it home in 1946 for the birth of their first child, Keith. He returned late the following Christmas Eve. It was the first Christmas he and Alyce had shared in the eight years since they met.

They bought a small house on Block Island, just outside Old Harbor, overlooking Crescent Beach. Rob and the owner agreed on a price of $3,000.

Before the deal was completed, someone on the mainland offered $3,500, but the owner turned it down, saying he had a deal with Rob. "People kept their word in those days," Rob said.

Rob kept sailing, now on long trips around Africa to India. In his last year at sea, he was home only three nights.

It's not clear how Rob reached the decision to give up the sea. Keith doesn't recall any precise moment when his father was suddenly home. Rob didn't elaborate during their long talks.

In an interview years later with The Journal, Rob said simply, "I quit going to sea in order to be at home and raise my family. I felt that's the most important thing in life -- raising your family."

There were no jobs on Block Island. The fishing fleet had been decimated. Rob had no interest in farming.

When Alyce suggested he buy the town hardware store, Rob was not enthusiastic. "That was completely alien to me and unnatural." Foreshadowing the future, Rob couldn't afford to buy the building. But he did buy the business and would run it for three decades.

"We couldn't meet the competition of the outside money," Rob said. "The building was beyond our reach."

Thirty-two years later, in 1984, outside money put him out of business. "Someone comes along with plenty of money and takes a fancy to the building, and we're out. We're thrown out," Rob said.

Those three decades lacked the drama and adventure of the one that preceded them, but Rob did what he believed he should do: he came home to be with his family.

He put up a blackboard in the kitchen and each week asked one member of the family to write something inspiring. One of his choices was an excerpt from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," a tale of the horrible fate that strikes a vessel on which a seaman kills a majestic bird, an albatross:

In the evenings Rob played the piano and the accordion and serenaded the children until they fell asleep.

EVERY DAY Rob would take long walks on the beach -- barefoot until the temperature dropped below 43 degrees, according to Keith, who never knew why 43 was the magic number.

Rob served as chairman of the town school board and gave graduation speeches that were heartfelt, although far more religious than what would be acceptable today.

At Keith's graduation in 1964, Rob told the six graduates that he didn't see any conflict between science and religion. "Religion is a search for God wherein is found also truth. Science is a search for truth wherein is found God."

The next year, he encouraged the 10 students in his daughter Nancy's graduating class to always do their best. "There is some task which each one of you is better qualified to fulfill than anyone else in the world. This is a fascinating challenge! Every worthwhile human effort, however humble, is, in the eyes of God, important and worthy of perfection."

Rob was incredibly proud of his children. Keith followed his father's footsteps into the merchant marine. He graduated from the Maine Maritime Academy. Nancy went directly from Block Island's tiny school to Vassar College and graduated with honors. David, graduating in a class of 11, went to Harvard, and he too graduated with honors.

IN THE FALL of 1972, The Block Island Conservancy had the Rodman's Hollow property appraised at $109,000. The conservancy offered that amount to the developers so that it could buy and protect the land.

The developers turned it down. Less than two years after they bought the land, they wanted to more than double their $75,000 investment. They demanded $165,000.

As much as he believed in individual rights, Rob also believed in the common good. Citing a state law that allows communities to take private land for recreational purposes, Rob recommended that the town take the land by eminent domain.

In March 1974, the Town Council voted to condemn Rodman's Hollow. The town would take ownership of the land and pay the developers fair market value.

"It was a very nice moment," Herbert S. Whitman, a Town Council member and conservancy secretary, told The Providence Journal at the time. "The Town Hall was crowded with people. It was a lovely moment."

The conservancy alone offered $27,250 -- money raised in donations that ranged from 5 cents to $10,000. Combined with matching state and federal grants, the total offered to the developers was $109,000.

The developers sued for more money.

The legal wrangle continued for years. Finally, on the eve of a trial, the two sides agreed to split the difference between the appraised value and the developers' demand and settled on $137,000. The developers still made a tidy profit on their $75,000 purchase price.

Rob was delighted.

In his next letter to the community, in 1976, Rob described how he had been guiding a television documentary crew through Rodman's Hollow when four deer appeared.

"The deer bounded across the clearing -- not fleeing in fright, or in flight, but gamboling happily, just as one might see in a Walt Disney fantasy where such creatures gambol happily about."

Rob said that some might attach symbolic significance to the scene. But to him, he wrote, it meant that, as Christmas approached, "Peace on Earth" meant "peace to all the earth, and to all of the creatures thereof."

His efforts paved the way for the purchase and protection of much of the rest of Rodman's Hollow in the ensuing years -- piece by piece.

But the battle for Block Island was just beginning. Virtually the entire island was in private hands and a target for acquisition by outsiders.

"We are a small island fighting for our life," Rob wrote.