Meticulously researched and vividly written, Yale historian Alan Mikhail’s Newcomers: The Story of Anthony and Grietje and the Founding of New York is the story of a poor, newly married couple who left Amsterdam behind and played an important role in the establishment of what became New York City. When Anthony and Grietje Jansen van Salee left Europe in the 1630s, they were planning a fresh start in New Netherland, the first Dutch colony in North America, and they were certainly not unique in that regard. As Mikhail shows in his illuminating history, “the story of Anthony and Grietje’s New York before it became New York embodies much of what would become the city’s mythos as a place of reinvention and recreation, where immigrants changed names and religions and forged bonds across ethnic and racial lines.”
From the couple’s arrival in New Amsterdam, they were subject to bigotry and stereotyping. The mystery of Anthony’s ethnicity is a central part of the story. He was known as Anthony the Turk, though reports conflicted about his parents’ heritage, and he was misidentified as Muslim throughout his life, despite consistent indications that he was a Christian. In any case, his apparent multiracial heritage made other colonists suspicious. The limited official sources in these early years—including multiple court cases—tell us mostly what others said about the couple, who apparently brawled with their neighbors over property disputes and the animals they owned. Grietje was maligned because of her history as a barmaid and occasional sex worker in Amsterdam, and she “bore the brunt of her tiny, stark religious community’s anxieties about its honor culture.” She responded to accusations of slander, public indecency and even murder with explosive defiance.
In 1639, Anthony and Grietje were cast out from Eden, exiled from the colony to the frontier of Long Island. But ever plucky and adaptable, they thrived with more property and resources—much of it seized from the area’s Indigenous Canarsie people—and maintained an ever-expanding farming operation. Land disputes with both Native Americans and English roiled the area and Anthony’s life, but he continued to amass wealth. After Grietje died, Anthony returned to Manhattan as one of the richest men in 17th-century New York.
While Anthony and Grietje’s notoriety appears to be somewhat earned, Mikhail shows that the myth of Anthony being Muslim colored most every interaction he had. Mikhail depicts the couple’s toughness, adaptability and fortitude in order to tell a story that complicates the accepted narrative of America’s origins: “For centuries,” Mikhail emphasizes, “much of colonial American history was portrayed as Puritan purity, a story that relied on banishing from the narratives of America much of the messy violence and maligned figures that formed it.” To understand the reality of North America’s colonization—and, indeed, our nation’s nascency—we must dig into these narratives. Eye-opening, engaging and fascinating, Newcomers does just that.