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Here's is the origin of Yankee according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. (Interesting source.)

Yankee

1683, a name applied disparagingly by Du. settlers in New Amsterdam (New York) to English colonists in neighboring Connecticut. It may be from Du. Janke, lit. "Little John," dim. of common personal name Jan; or it may be from Jan Kes familiar form of "John Cornelius," or perhaps an alt. of Jan Kees, dial. variant of Jan Kaas, lit. "John Cheese," the generic nickname the Flemings used for Dutchmen. It originally seems to have been applied insultingly to Dutch, especially freebooters, before they turned around and slapped it on the English. A less-likely theory is that it represents some southern New England Algonquian language mangling of English. In Eng. a term of contempt (1750s) before its use as a general term for "native of New England" (1765); during the American Revolution it became a disparaging British word for all American native or inhabitants. Shortened form Yank in reference to "an American" first recorded 1778.

Here's another. Source

The Earliest usage of Yankee cites from the 1680s. It was a nickname used among the Dutch pirates of the Spanish Main. There were pirates named Yankee Dutch (1683), Captain Yankey (1684), and Captain John Williams (Yankee) (1687). The next earliest reference is an estate inventory from 1725 listing a slave named Yankee.

During the French and Indian war the British General James Wolfe, hero of the battle of Quebec, took to referring derisively to the native New Englanders in his army as Yankees. He is attributed with the first recorded usage of the term for general Americans and it was derogatory.

The word "Yankee" seems to have often been a term of contempt throughout history. Still is.

Good to see you again, rb....

I liked your etymological footwork very much, your cites go back farther than anything I'd ever seen previously and leave open only the mystery about whether it's originally "Janke"/"little John" or "Jan Kaas"/"Cheesehead".

I might add, that Anglo-Dutch privateering stations were truly binational efforts and their remains show the presence of nationals of both England and the Netherlands. I attended a lecture some 20 years ago, that I think I told you about on some other thread, in which some apparent plague graves were discovered in Houston and tentatively associated with one of the unlocated privateering plantations on the Gulf of Mexico that battened on the Spanish silver fleets.

By the way, these privateering stations were indeed "plantations" in the original sense of the word as it was meant by the Portuguese and Spanish, viz., a farming outpost operated as both safe haven and ship-chandling station for the early voyages of trade and exploration. The island of Fernando Poo, off the African coast near the mouth of the Congo, is usually cited as the first such, and it was to keep that plantation in labor that the slave trade with the African kingdoms on the mainland (already in business for generations) first went offshore.

Thanks for the good post, I promptly copied it and sent it to a cousin-in-law (who happens to have been born Dutch and is now on her third nationality).