.....Also centered on a woman, interestingly enough, was a cause celebre which made a wide public aware of the Dutch. Anneke Janse, her husband Roelof, their two small daughters, and Anneke’s sister and their mother, a midwife, all apparently from Norway, were among the first settlers of Rensselaerswyck in 1630. But Roelof, a seaman, did not prosper as a farmer, and his women folk disposed of quantities of household goods -- quite possibly in the Indian trade -- so the family left the Patroon’s service in 1634 before the completion of their contract. But Roelof died in 1636, soon after they settled on a farm in Manhattan, and in 1638 Anneke married Domine Everardus Bogardus. Soon after this marriage she became involved in a colorful incident in which some of her husband’s political opponents caused her to be arrested for indecent exposure in the streets of New Amsterdam. Anneke’s defense was that while passing the blacksmith shop -- the seventeenth century equivalent of a gas station as a male gathering place -- she merely tidily lifted her skirts to keep them out of the filth which had accumulated in the street. This defense was accepted, and the incident illustrates one use to which sensation-starved frontier colonists put their courts and also the the earthy humor and broad practical joking which was often a feature of Dutch civic controversy. Thereafter Anneke became the mother of four Bogardus children, in addition to her five by Roelof Janse. After her second husband’s death at sea, she went to Fort Orange to live with her married daughter and “make a living” --presumably at the fur trade, since this was the principal occupation of the town. At her death in 1663 she left a modest estate, of which part, which descended to her four surviving children by Roelof Janse, was the 62 acre farm on Manhattan Island which she had inherited from him.

It was this farm which, over two centuries later, made Anneke famous. After a number of transfers, the land became the property of Trinity Church, and, with the rise in property values on lower Manhattan, immensely valuable. But in one of these transfers, one of Anneke’s minor grandchildren had inadvertently been omitted from the deed. His descendants discovered this fact about 1750, and between then and 1847 sued repeatedly and unsuccessfully to break the church’s title to the land. In spite of these legal defeats, the myth would not die; another suit was instituted in 1909, and in the next quarter century the cause attracted much publicity. Lawyers, genealogists, and promoters who scented an opportunity to make a fast buck thereupon started searching for all the living descendants of Anneke Janse, who turned out to be more numerous even than descendants of the passengers on the Mayflower. Finally, the Legislature passed a special act quieting the title and forbidding any further suits, on the grounds that similar irregularities would have called most titles dating from the seventeenth century into question. It also became clear that if the heirs had won, there would be so many of them that the share of each, even in the vast wealth in dispute, would have been less than the contributions many of them were induced to make toward the expenses of litigation.

In the course of this litigation, there grew up an even more astonishing legend about Anneke’s origins. All the evidence now available indicates that she and her husband were both ordinary people, born in Norway (though perhaps descended from Dutchmen in the Baltic trade). The legend, however, made Anneke out to be the granddaughter of William the Silent who had displeased that prince by her insistence on marrying a commoner; nevertheless, he placed her share of his fortune in trust for her descendants in the seventh generation. This fortune was reputed to have accumulated to the sum of 100 million dollars in the early twentieth century. It is difficult to see how this story gained credence in the face of its glaring inconsistencies, but this mythic fortune was as glittering as the other, and only very recently has a patient genealogist finally dispelled the last shreds of it. According to this myth, Anneke’s father, a son of William the Silent by a secret marriage, was named Wolfert Webber, and a New Netherlander of this name (from whom Irving doubtless derived his character) was her brother. It has now been proven, however that this Wolfert Webber and his father of the same name, a respectable Amsterdam wine merchant, had no connection with either William the Silent or Anneke Janse.