The previous Link article about people who had lived in the Manor House described how Thomas Brinley was an Auditor of the Revenue to King Charles I at the time of the English Civil War in the 1640s. He was seen as a royalist and lost his post, while his family and property were threatened by his disgrace. When the king was beheaded in 1649 Brinley had at least two surviving sons and all seven of his daughters to provide for and part of the solution was found in the New World.

Marriage was of course the only way of life for the daughters and four of them married locally, the first in about 1650. Since their families were baptised and buried at Datchet it is likely that one or more of them may have continued to live in the Manor House. The other three (Anne, Grissell and Mary) had much more adventurous futures ahead.

In 1650 Anne, the eldest daughter was married in Datchet to William Coddington, Governor of Rhode Island. She became his third wife, which may not have been so agreeable to her as it was to her father. Coddington is known to have acted as a sort of guardian and marriage broker to young women and on the couple's return to Newport RI in 1653 they took Anne's younger sister Grissell with them. The eldest son, Francis, also settled on Rhode Island at about the same time where he founded a dynasty of Brinleys, some of whose descendants now visit Datchet in search of Thomas's tombstone. The other surviving son took a different path, becoming a scholar and clergyman at Kings College Cambridge.

At about the same time that Thomas Brinley's career was developing in England, a merchant named Giles Sylvester was chartering ships to trade in tobacco from a base in Amsterdam. We know that Giles came from Somerset and belonged to an extreme puritan sect but his parentage and early life remain a mystery. He married Mary Arnold, whose family had probably moved to Amsterdam from Suffolk in search of religious freedom. This city also provided opportunities for enterprising merchants to trade independently, away from the restrictions of English guilds. Among his wide-ranging foreign interests, Giles was involved in the development of the sugar trade on islands such as Barbados and in the 1640s his son Constant bought plantations there in order to control the Sylvester family's lucrative business from its source.

In their frequent crossings of the Atlantic from Holland or England to Barbados in the West Indies, merchants took advantage of the south-westerly trade winds but travelling home again was harder. They sought protection by following the Gulf Stream northwards, close to the eastern coast of America and making the run back across the open ocean as short as possible. Barbados itself could not produce any of the supplies needed for the journey back to Europe so merchants' provisioning bases were established on the eastern seaboard of America; this circuit is called the 'three-cornered trade' and it developed rapidly as the sugar business boomed.

In 1651 'Shelter Island', between the far eastern points of Long Island, New York, was bought by Giles' sons Nathaniel and Constant as a provisions base for their ships returning to Amsterdam, paying for it with 1600 pounds of muscovado sugar. Then in 1653 Nathaniel Sylvester married the eighteen year old Grissell Brinley from Datchet, presumably through contacts with Coddington, and they established a homestead on Shelter Island by the shore of a deep and protected natural harbour. (Three years later Grissell's sister Mary was married to Nathaniel's brother Peter.)

Their original timber framed house has not survived but its grand 1750 replacement, known as Sylvester Manor, is still almost unchanged; the parlour panelling has only had two coats of paint since it was installed. The extraordinary and exciting thing about the whole settlement is that it has neither been absorbed into a town nor abandoned, but preserved without further development. It has also remained in the hands of almost direct descendants of the Sylvesters down to the current owner who is a feisty lady in her 90s. Equally amazing is that no one ever seems to have thrown anything away, so that sea chests of letters, papers and objects dating back to the 1650s were crammed untouched in a strongroom until the current researchers arrived.

Family stories about Grissell and Nathaniel's arrival on the island tell of a shipwreck and the loss of a great chest containing her fortune. While this is probably an exaggeration, Thomas Brinley with his claim to a royal connection was (and still is) a figure revered by subsequent generations. If it began with a shipwreck, conditions for Grissell and Nathaniel scarcely improved in their early years. They were making a new life in an isolated and very harsh setting, with their closest contact several days away across dangerous sea channels. This was Sir John Winthrop, Governor of the New Haven Colony on the mainland coast of Connecticut, north of Long Island. Among the surviving correspondence between the two settlements is this touching plea from Nathaniel, who says he is:

He went on to ask if Sir John was willing to part with an Irishwoman he had heard was in his employ, to work on business around the house on Shelter Island. Nathaniel was desperate for someone to help Grissell out before the winter. Seven of their children did survive, including a Grissell, a Giles and a Nathaniel, to establish a profitable and comfortable home, estate and business.

From the American point of view Sylvester Manor is a goldmine of early cultural history, important for archaeologists and industrial historians as well as documentary researchers. Indigenous American Indians were already occupying Shelter Island and were employed on the estate, living alongside Europeans without conflict. African slaves were brought in by Nathaniel, to whom slavery would have been part of his experience on Barbados. In 1680 his will listed twenty four Africans to be inherited by Grissell and their children. Even more surprising is the fact that Nathaniel and Grissell were Quakers, giving sanctuary to the persecuted, but saw no contradiction in being devout Christians as well as slaveowners. The great George Fox visited the Sylvesters on Shelter Island, but even he was not an abolitionist; no one was until many years later. This provides fascinating material for the study of Negro slavery in the northern states, since it is mostly associated with the south.

Family memory of Thomas Brinley and Datchet is a strong thread running through the generations. Several mansions in the wider area were called 'Datchet House' (a reference to the village as a whole, not the house next to our church), and enterprising travellers visited Thomas's grave to report back that it did indeed exist and did mention Charles I and II. Following the custom of perpetuating family surnames, the builder of the present house in 1753 was Nathaniel's grandson who was given the auspicious name 'Brinley Sylvester'.