OT: Capt. Billopp & Staten Island

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

Maybe someone can check 19th Century U.S. Newspapers (with the NY Herald)  
and Readex' America's Historical Newspapers for "Billopp" and "Staten  
Island"/"Staten Eylandt"? We need a cite before 1873.
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_http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/nyregion/21mayor.html?_r=1&oref=slogin_ 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/nyregion/21mayor.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) 
That Old Tale About S.I.? Hold On Now 
 
 
By _SEWELL CHAN_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/sewell_chan/index.html?inline=nyt-per) 
Published: February 21, 2007
 
Like the sale of Manhattan to Dutch settlers for $24, it is a historical  
legend that has been repeated time and again: Staten Island became part of New  
York rather than New Jersey, the story goes, because of a sailing contest in 
the  17th century. 
The tale, long a part of local lore, gained currency yesterday at a news  
conference in Prospect Park, where the Brooklyn borough president, Marty  
Markowitz, playfully challenged Mayor _Michael R. Bloomberg_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/michael_r_bloomberg/index.html?inline=nyt
-per)  to a pedal-boat race “for the  right to call Brooklyn a city again.” 
Mr. Bloomberg, who firmly rejected the possibility that Brooklyn might again  
be its own city, as it was before 1898, said, “Staten Island is part of New  
York, rather than New Jersey, because of just such a race.”  
The story, however, is almost certainly apocryphal.  
One version of the legend, cited by the writer John Steele Gordon in a 1985  
op-ed piece in The New York Times, had representatives of the two states  
competing against each other in a race around the island, with “the winner to  
take title.” 
According to another version, cited by The Times in 2002, the Duke of York,  
who took control of the Dutch colony after the British conquest in 1664, 
granted  land west of the Hudson River to New Jersey but left New York in control 
of some  small islands. 
To resolve a dispute over whether Staten Island was “small” and therefore  
part of New York, this version goes, the duke decreed that islands that could 
be  circumnavigated in less than 24 hours were to be considered small. 
Christopher  Billopp, a British naval captain living on Staten Island, took up the 
challenge,  circling the island in just under 24 hours. 
The legend is told to visitors to the Conference House, the house Captain  
Billopp built in Tottenville in the 1670s, according to George Michie, a  
volunteer at the house, which has been controlled by a nonprofit group since the  
1920s.  
A mayoral spokesman, Stu Loeser, said last night that the legend was “a story 
 the mayor has heard many times from Staten Islanders, and one he recalls 
reading  about for years and years.” 
Mr. Loeser, after consulting with city researchers, noted that the tale was  
repeated by J. J. Clute’s “Annals of Staten Island” (1877) and Cornelius G.  
Kolff’s “A Short History of Staten Island” (second edition, 1926).  
But in “The History of a Legend,” a 1948 scholarly essay, Roswell S. Coles 
of  the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences found “no real evidence to 
 assume there is any truth in the circumnavigation story.” Mr. Coles wrote 
that  the first written account of the story he had found was an 1873 newspaper  
article.  
Barnett Shepherd, a former executive director of the Staten Island Historical 
 Society, said last night that he had often heard the legend. But he added, “
It’s  not anything we’ve concerned ourselves about.” 

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