Wallabout Bay

The Wallabout was first settled by Europeans when several families of French-speaking Walloons opted to purchase land there in the early 1630s, having arrived in New Netherland in the previous decade from Holland.

His daughter Sarah was the first child born of European parentage[3] in New Netherland, and Rapelje later served as a Brooklyn magistrate as well as a member of the Council of Twelve Men.

A feudal system of land tenure was suspended in 1638, and the small settlement became a colony of freeholders: after a ten-year period of paying the Dutch East India Company a tenth of their yield, colonists would own their farmland.

On June 5, 1665, Barent Jansen Blom, an immigrant from Sweden and progenitor of the Blom/Bloom family of Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley, was stabbed to death by Albert Cornelis Wantenaer, allegedly in self-defense.

In a couple of weeks or so, the Harbor Police always finds ten to two dozen over there – suicides, bastard babies, old barge captains that lost their balance out on a sleety night attending to towropes, now and then some gangster or other.

[11]Gabriel Furman, in his Notes Geographical and Historical, relating to the Town of Brooklyn, in Kings County on Long-Island (1824),[12] traces the name from the Dutch "Waal bocht" or "bay (or bight) of the Walloons", referring to the original French-speaking settlers of the local area.

Another theory ascribes it to the River Waal, an arm of the Rhine, an important inland waterway in the Netherlands, long referred to as "inner harbor" which would speak to the geographic position of the bay.