Written in Dutch, this legal document records New Amsterdam Governor William Kieft’s 1639 land grant of 100 morgens (200 acres) of land to Anthony Jansen Van Salee on western Long Island just north of Coney Island. Land deeds and conveyances are plentiful in the BHS collection, but this one is unique because of its recipient. 

Anthony Jansen Van Salee (1607–67)—also called Anthony from Salee or “Anthony the Turk”—was the first known person of Muslim origin in the Americas. His story casts new light on the history of Dutch New Amsterdam and exemplifies the immigrant experience that has shaped New York City and Long Island for centuries. New research is only beginning to shed light onto the many diverse Long Islanders whose histories are emerging from obscurity.

People of color were central to the development of New Amsterdam from the beginning. Founded in 1624 as a colony of the Dutch East India Company, the first enslaved Africans were imported to present-day New York just a year or two later. Enslaved laborers tilled agricultural fields, worked on ships as part of the critical fur trade, and built the new settlement’s essential infrastructure: its wharves, mills, roads, and fortifications. 

Upon Van Salee’s arrival in New Amsterdam at the end of 1629 with his wife, Grietje Reyniers, government officials described him as a “mulatto” or as the “Turk” in their records, a direct reflection of his skin color and mixed ancestry. Anthony’s father, Jan Jansen, had been a Dutch privateer; his mother a Spanish Moor. Although there is no direct evidence to prove that Van Salee practiced Islam in the New World, his mixed ancestry and religious heritage eventually brought him and his wife into direct conflict with their New World neighbors, shaping the family’s future in New Amsterdam.

By 1638, the couple had established their own bouwery (farm) just north of the city wall, known today as Wall Street. That year, Everadus Bogardus, dominie (or minister) of the Dutch Reformed Church, sued Van Salee for unpaid debts towards Bogardus’ salary. Accusations of dishonesty from both sides turned into a grudge that blossomed into fifteen civil suits in the next year. The escalating conflict drew forward more community members, many of them friends of Bogardus, with testimony challenging both Anthony’s and Grietje’s conduct and character. To defame the couple, some accused Grietje of lasciviousness and even prostitution. 

Ultimately, overwhelmed by testimony documenting the “various troubles” the coupe had caused the community, Governor Kieft made the unusual decision to banish them from the jurisdiction of New Netherland. Although New Amsterdam’s diversity and supposed “religious tolerance” is widely celebrated, the Van Salee’s story is illuminating. Their difference was only marginally tolerated until they directly challenged the state religion and authority.

Van Salee nevertheless came out ahead. Governor Kieft approved his request for land on New Amsterdam’s far frontier on the southern tip of western Long Island. With their 200 acres, Anthony and Grietje were among the first European landholders in the area of New Utrecht and Gravesend, where they thrived. Their four daughters went on to marry into prominent merchant families. Today, members of the Vanderbilt family trace their lineage to Anthony Van Salee and Grietje Reyniers.

Research into Anthony Van Salee’s New Amsterdam has contributed to the belief that the Dutch embraced cultural diversity and religious tolerance and can be credited with laying the groundwork for the United States’ later constitutional freedom of religion. However, the lived experiences of individuals like Van Salee and other “religious dissenters” tell a different story. 

The Dutch Republic did not endorse religious coercion, but the Reformed Dutch Church was the official, state-sponsored religion in New Amsterdam. When individuals of other faiths worshipped publicly, they inadvertently challenged the authority of the church and thus, the state. These challenges led state officials to persecute certain communities or banish them from Manhattan. Once removed, many dissenters like Van Salee put down roots in the colony’s Long Island frontier.

In 1645, just two years after Governor Willem Kieft signed Van Salee’s land deed, Van Salee had new neighbors: English noblewoman Lady Deborah Moody and her followers. Moody was an Anabaptist, a member of a radical Protestant sect that believed, among other things, that baptism should only be bestowed upon consenting adults, not children. Those beliefs led to Moody being forced to flee England in 1639, and, in 1643, being forced to abandon the the Massachusetts Bay Colony. 

Following her expulsion from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Moody traveled to New Amsterdam, where Kieft contingently welcomed her. He allowed her to settle in the colony, on 7,000 acres of land on the frontier, on the southwestern tip of Long Island. There, Moody established the settlement of Gravesend, the only one of the six original European settlements on western Long Island not founded by Dutch settlers. Gravesend was also the first American settlement to legislate religious freedom in its founding charter.

Moody likely opened Long Island to another controversial religious group, the Friends of God, more commonly known as the Quakers. Rejecting all sacraments, liturgies, and paid intermediaries like priests, the Quakers believed that all of the faithful were spiritual equals before God. Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant used their public proselytizing to banish the first group of itinerant Quaker preachers from Manhattan when they arrived in 1658.

The Quakers crossed the East River, where they found an ally in Lady Moody and a foothold for their faith on Long Island. In the coming decades, the Quakers established Meetings in Gravesend, Jamaica, Oyster Bay, and Shelter Island, and gained followers. In the process of creating Quaker communities, they also attracted the ire of Governor Stuyvesant, who banned colonists from welcoming any Quakers into their homes. In 1657, the small Quaker community in Flushing, Queens, fed up with the Dutch government’s continued persecution, signed the Flushing Remonstrance, demanding the right to practice their religion freely.

Petitions like the Flushing Remonstrance should be seen as precursors to the United States’ constitutionally protected freedom of religion, not just the “tolerant” policies of New Amsterdam and other colonies.

When they crossed the East River in 1639, Anthony Van Salee and his family were among the first European settlers to establish permanent homes on Long Island, New Amsterdam’s neighboring frontier. The first purchase of land in western Long Island had taken place just three years earlier, by Dutch West India Company officer Jacob Van Corlaer. 

More people followed. The Dutch government approved the incorporation of several towns: Gravesend (1645), Breucklen (Brooklyn, 1646), Flatlands (1647), Flatbush (1651), New Utrecht (1657), and Bushwick (1660). Van Salee’s land eventually fell near the two most southernmost villages, Gravesend and New Utrecht.

The lands that individuals like Van Salee claimed as their own were not unoccupied. Long Island was part of the territory of the Lenni Lenape, American Indian communities who called the island Sewanhacky and lived along its waterways. Little information survives today about Lenape life in the 1600s. Limited archaeological evidence and European accounts, which must be scrutinized with a critical eye for bias, provide few details about their lives.

Dutch Labadist priest Jasper Danckaerts visited New York and Long Island in 1679, part of an extensive journey across North America in search of a potential location to establish his religious sect. He kept a detailed dairy of the trip, beginning from the moment of his departure from Holland, at 4 a.m. During the journey across the Atlantic, Danckaerts became acquainted with some New York residents, including Gerrit Cornellissen Van Duyn, who made introductions for Danckaerts in Manhattan and Long Island when they arrived in September 1679.

Invited into an American Indian longhouse, Danckaerts recorded with interest details of the building’s structure and the family dynamics and meals. His accounts also include glimpses into the misunderstandings that had devastated the Lenape population by the end of the century. Danckaerts noted conflicting understandings about land ownership between Van Duyn’s brother-in-law and the local Lenape from whom he had purchased “the whole of Najack.” Jacques Cortelyou, Van Dun’s brother-in-law, considered himself the sole owner of this land. His indigenous neighbors continued working certain farm plots, a sign to them that the land was communal. On a visit to a neighboring Indian settlement, Danckaerts saw many children sick with smallpox, “the most prevalent disease in these parts, and of which many have died.” We know now that the Lenape did understand the power of land purchase, but they did not realize the reach of English and Dutch power and their control over these land deals.

By 1684, mere years after Danckaerts’ visit to the region, the last of American Indian land in Brooklyn had been “transferred” to European settlers by American Indian sachems. Loss of land, European diseases, and warfare decimated the American Indian population by the late 1600s, reducing it to perhaps one-thirtieth of what it had been in the 1630s.

American founding fathers of color like Anthony Van Salee broaden our understanding of the first generation of European immigrants to North America. Their lives also contextualize American history within the broader history of globalization in the 1600s. 

Anthony “of Salee,” born in northern Morocco, reached New Amsterdam in 1629, but global influences reached colonial America through more than just the movement of people and knowledge. Consumer goods also tied these frontier communities to the world through long-distance social and economic connections.

This dagger and scabbard, part of the LIHS (now BHS) collection since 1885, may have once belonged to Peter Stuyvesant (1612–72), last Dutch governor of New Amsterdam. In the late 1800s, the potential connection to a powerful male historical figure made this object valuable enough to save despite a lack of evidence to support the story. Today, the dagger’s ability to link colonial America to a diverse global economy is more compelling.

Wear on the dagger’s curved blade and the Turkish inscription indicate it was once part of a yatagan, a curved Turkish short sword. In the 1600s and 1700s, the powerful Ottoman Empire was renowned the world over for its technological prowess in mining and metalworking. The blade’s history indicates it was later altered by New York City silversmith Hugh Wishart, who worked in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Therefore, the dagger in its current form was likely not Governor Stuyvesant’s, who died in 1672.

The faded inscription on the dagger’s blade is the likely inspiration for the apocryphal connection to Stuyvesant. It reads something akin to “this sword…will take the revanche…of the enemy.” Prior to the dagger’s donation to LIHS, someone must have translated the inscription and assuming Stuyvesant, assuming that he harbored a desire for revenge for his “stolen” colony. 

Fanciful story or not, the dagger’s blade provides evidence of the global movement and exchange of people, knowledge, and goods that shaped the culture of the Americas.

Anthony Van Salee’s 1643 land deed is definitive proof that Muslims have been a part of American life since before the nation’s founding. From Dutch New Amsterdam to the present day, Muslims, whether born in the United States or newly arrived, have lived, worked, and prayed in Brooklyn, shaping life in the borough. Until recently, however, the stories of Muslims in Brooklyn have been hidden from public view, this gap in knowledge perpetuating the marginalization and erasure of Muslim experiences from the national narrative of the United States.

In 2017, Brooklyn Historical Society launched Muslims in Brooklyn, a two-year, multi-faceted public history project designed to highlight the stories of Brooklyn’s Muslim communities. The project contextualizes Muslim stories within the broader history of the borough. More than fifty oral histories, collected by BHS over the course of the project, reveal the nuanced lives of narrators and the depth, diversity, and significance of Muslim communities in Brooklyn, past and present.

BHS’s Muslims in Brooklyn project connects compelling histories to real people, humanizing the stories of Muslims in Brooklyn and promoting empathy. Above all, Muslims in Brooklyn helps dismantle the false and dangerous stereotypes of Muslim Americans as foreign “others” that have taken root in today’s fractious political climate. Explore the oral histories collected for Muslims in Brooklyn and reconsider the broader history of Brooklyn and America through the lens of their voices and experiences.

Kobir Chowdhury was born in 1974 in the Sylhet district in Bangladesh. He immigrated to the United States in 1991 and settled in East New York, where he worked in real estate and banking. Chowdhury attended Masjid Al-Aman in East New York and began to take on leadership roles at the mosque in the 2010s, including serving as an advisor to the executive committee and as president of the mosque’s board. See this narrator’s full biography and oral history.

Rabia Ahsin was born in 1991 in the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn. While studying political science at Brooklyn College as an undergraduate student, she joined the Islamic Society of Brooklyn College as well as with the Muslim Women’s Educational Initiative, both of which were targeted by the New York City Police Department for religiously motivated surveillance by an undercover officer while Ahsin was a member. She also became an outspoken activist against human rights abuses, including protesting with the school’s newly formed Students for Justice in Palestine and focusing her studies on surveillance in New York City. She went on to work as a special education teacher at an all-girls’ secondary school. See this narrator’s full biography and oral history.