Anthony Janszoon van Salee

Van Salee's former house at the "Turk's Plantation" on Long Island, depicted in 1788. Western Long Island and Coney Island in 1666, two years after van Salee sold his property to Francis de Bruyn or Brown.

Anthony Janszoon van Salee (1607–1676) was an original settler of and prominent landholder, merchant, and creditor in New Netherland, a 17th-century colonial province of the Dutch Republic located on the East Coast of what is now the United States of America. Van Salee was commonly known as Anthony the Turk He may also have had North African or Middle Eastern heritage through his mother—while Anthony's line married into European families (with Vanderbilt and other patrician descendants).

Van Salee and his first wife Grietse were the subject of considerable scandal and litigation in New Amsterdam, leading to his role in the establishment of Gravesend and New Utrecht, as well as other settlements on Long Island.

A theory first posited by a local historian in the 19th century, and repeated widely into the 2020s, holds that Van Salee was the son of Jan Janszoon, who had converted to Islam upon his capture by Barbary pirates. However, the timing renders this impossible. Janszoon was in Haarlem in the year of Van Sallee's birth, while all records indicate that Van Sallee was born in Cartagena, Spain; furthermore the Haarlem birth records are complete and do not record the birth of an Anthony Janszoon van Salee. Under Dutch Reformed naming conventions, Jan Janszoon's firstborn son would have been named Jan.

Early life

Anthony Janszoon van Salee was born in 1607 in Cartagena, Spain. It is possible that he was kidnapped as a child and held as a galley slave on the vessel of Muslim convert Jan Janszoon, which washed ashore in the Netherlands in 1623. The plot was located on the north side of the defensive stockade across Lower Manhattan, along present-day Wall Street. The bouwery was surveyed from Broadway to the East River between Ann Street and Maiden Lane. Van Salee transferred the deed the following year.

By 1639, at the age of 32, Anthony had become one of the largest landholders on the island of Manhattan, as well as a prosperous farmer. His property on Manhattan is included on the Manatus Map of that year.

Initial disputes Between 1638 and 1639, the couple accounted for fifteen of ninety-three recorded court cases. During this period, many private quarrels were brought to the Dutch colonial court. The charges against the couple included petty slander, brought by Anneke and Dominee Bogardus (a minister) after Grietse accused of them of lying; Grietse's display of private parts to the naval fleet, and Van Salee's occasions of drunkenness.

Van Salee was engaged in many legal disputes, which ranged from demands for compensation because his dog attacked the hog of Anthony the Portuguese (described as a black townsman), to charges that he had pointed loaded pistols at slave overseers from the Dutch West India Company. and specifically in the modern sub-neighborhood of Bath Beach, Brooklyn. Van Salee rented goats for the farm from Andries Hudde. This property was popularly known as the "Turk's plantation", He became one of the largest and most prominent landholders on the island, owning the main farm and also a more southerly smaller one to which it was loosely associated, known as "The 12 Morgens". In 1643 his Long Island property was also subject to a raid by the English privateer Seven Stars who stole 200 pumpkins, but abandoned their quest for the hogs on Coney Island after learning that those were owned by Deborah, Lady Moody.

The remains of some of his farm buildings were thought to have been uncovered in 1879. Van Salee's 1643 deed to land in Coney Island was acquired by the Brooklyn Historical Society at auction in 2019.

He was the first grantee of land on Conyne Eylandt (Coney Island). Van Salee helped found Long Island settlements including New Utrecht and Gravesend. In 1660 he founded Boswijck (now known as Bushwick), along with twenty-three other settlers, including free blacks Francisco and Anton.

Return to New Amsterdam In 1643 Van Salee purchased a house on Bridge Street in New Amsterdam, in defiance of the court order excluding him from that settlement. He became a successful merchant and creditor in New Amsterdam, while owning several properties throughout the region. as documented by descendant Robert Bayles of the Market and Fulton National Bank of New York. Van Salee petitioned to have Christian missionaries assigned to new settlements. Once he was fined for housing an English Quaker at his home on Bridge Street, as they were excluded as Dissenters from the English colony; the man was there to repair a Dutch church. but he had died in England. Lady Moody was a widow by 1629, a decade before she left England for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where she lived before settling in New Netherland.

Ethnicity and appearance Van Salee was described as unusually tall, with superior strength. He was known as "a 'Turk'" or "semi-Dutchman from Algiers", some say from Morocco but there were no Turkish influence in territories west of the Moulouya river, of "tawny" complexion. He was credited with the "first dwelling erected by Europeans" in what became New Utrecht, about 1643.

Anthony Van Salee's apparent brother, Abraham Janszoon van Salee, a fellow New Netherland settler who was involved in privateering, was described as a "mulatto", in recognition of his mixed-race ancestry, In court records, Van Salee was noted as "Turk", suggesting that record keepers classified him by appearance or culture. Janszoon was known to be the wealthy heir of a former European native head of state, even if his father was associated with privateering on the Barbary Coast. Gomez notes that historic collections devoted to Bantu-centric history have been similarly unable to reach consensus on his appearance, race, or origin. She was married before to Aelbert Egberts, from Haarlem, a tailor. The couple had four daughters together. They married into respectable colonial commercial families: Eva Antonis, married Ferdinandus van Sycklin, an early immigrant to New Netherland and the namesake for Van Siclen Avenue in Brooklyn. She is an ancestor of Robert Bayles, the last descendant to own Van Salee's Qur'an. According to Van Dyck Roberts, she was baptized. Cornelia, who married William Johnson Sara, married John Emans.

Van Salee's first wife Grietse died in 1669. The widower Van Salee married Metje Grevenraet, an ethnic Dutch woman. He passed his final years at his home on Bridge Street, dying in 1676. Metje was a Quaker who helped Van Salee tolerate the church. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Humphrey Bogart were claimed as descendants in 2011, but genealogical research in 2022 by Christopher Challender Child of the New England Historic Genealogical Society has shown neither of these two figures are Van Salee descendants.