Matteo Vitale

Anthony Jansen van Salee and Grietje Reyniers were never supposed to become founders of America. He was rumored to be a Muslim corsair’s son from Morocco. She was a sharp-tongued barmaid condemned as a whore by the settlers of New Amsterdam. Together, they arrived in seventeenth-century Manhattan as outcasts fleeing poverty, scandal, and the violent Atlantic world of pirates, religious wars, and empire. Instead of disappearing into history, they helped create it. From the muddy streets of Dutch New Amsterdam to the dangerous frontier of Gravesend, Brooklyn, Anthony and Grietje battled ministers, neighbors, colonial authorities, and the brutal realities of frontier survival. They fought for land, status, and belonging in a colony built on trade, conquest, and fear. Along the way, they became entangled in the violent expansion of colonial America, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and the creation of racial identity in the New World. As Anthony transformed from suspected outsider to wealthy landowner, the family’s descendants would eventually enter America’s elite circles—including connections to the Vanderbilts and President Warren G. Harding. Blending biography, Atlantic history, piracy, colonial New York, religion, race, and survival, The Turk and the Whore uncovers the forgotten lives of two rebels who reveal the raw, multicultural, and deeply conflicted origins of America itself. Perfect for readers of colonial American history, narrative nonfiction, early New York history, and untold stories of America’s founders.