Anthony Jansen van Salee, better known as “Anthony the Turk,” was one of the most colorful characters in New Amsterdam, the Dutch colony that later became New York City.

The son of a Dutch pirate and a Moorish woman, he fought constant legal battles with his neighbors, one of whom denounced him as “a rascal and a horned beast.” In 1639, after an ill-advised feud with the religious leader of the fledgling settlement at the tip of Manhattan, he and his wife — a reputed prostitute known for her salty tongue (and her habit of measuring clients’ endowments with a broomstick) — were banished.

Like others pushed out of Manhattan in later centuries, Anthony — considered the first known person of Muslim descent to settle in America — just moved across the East River, and before long had secured a grant of nearly 200 acres of farmland near the wilds of Coney Island. And one afternoon last month, the recently rediscovered deed for t he mother of all Brooklyn real-estate scores came home.

It arrived at the Brooklyn Historical Society’s stately headquarters in Brooklyn Heights in an unassuming brown package , fresh from Christie’s, where the historical society bought it in October for $27,500. Upstairs in the library, a small group gathered as Maggie Schreiner, the manager of archives and special collections , placed the package on a low shelf used to store fire-insurance atlases and gently sliced it open.