Amsterdam links Charles Duquet’s ambitions to the family life he tries to build around them. The city first receives him as a wealthy but still self-conscious opportunist, dressed in borrowed signs of refinement; it later becomes the home of Cornelia Roos and their children, and finally the destination of a family voyage that ends with Bernard Duke’s burial at sea before the travelers can return to Boston.

Courtship and Commercial Bargaining

At a formal return dinner in Captain Outger Verdwijnen’s Amsterdam house, Duquet arrives in finery, wearing an uncomfortable wig and ivory teeth. The company includes Outger and Margit Verdwijnen, Piet Roos and his family, and Piet’s daughters Josina and Cornelia. Duquet notices the Guangzhou table Outger had bought for Margit, a reminder that the city’s domestic interiors are tied to overseas trade. Margit’s contrasting glances seem to strip away Duquet’s costume and expose the calculating opportunist beneath it. His ill-fitting teeth restrict him to soup and gravy, making the performance of gentility physically awkward as well as financially useful.

Duquet responds to Margit’s judgment by directing his attention toward Cornelia. He decides she will be his wife, and the thought of resistance stirs the predatory ambition the narrative associates with his inner tiger. The match is not simply a romance: it is a choice made in the same acquisitive spirit with which he approaches business and opportunity.

Piet Roos and Outger Verdwijnen discuss the proposed match in their favorite Amsterdam coffeehouse. Piet distrusts Duquet’s cold self-interest and doubts that he has genuine affection for Cornelia. Outger concedes the roughness of Duquet’s outlook but stresses his wealth and capacity to command large sums. He advises Piet to protect his daughter by keeping her and any children in Amsterdam, while turning the marriage into a source of commercial leverage. The proposed alliance would join Duquet’s money to the captains’ ships and China-Japan trade connections.

Duquet spends another year pursuing Cornelia’s father as much as Cornelia herself. In 1711, in Amsterdam, Piet carefully examines his account books and questions his plans before considering permission. Their negotiations produce a proposed three-way China-trade partnership among Duquet, Piet, and Outger. Piet’s conditions also make the city a safeguard for his daughter: he offers Cornelia a house of her own near her parents and sister, and expects any children to live with her there. Duquet may live in Amsterdam or travel between it and New France, but the family is not to be carried off to his colonial household at will.

The tapestry in Piet’s house gives the negotiation a predatory image: a hawk stoops on a heron that lies on its back, its claws raised in defense. The inscription, Exitus in dubio est, means that escape is in doubt. Duquet’s sympathies lie with the hawk. The image sharpens the imbalance beneath the civil terms of the agreement: Piet uses family residence and partnership conditions to constrain Duquet, while Duquet recognizes possession of a house as another prize to claim.

A Household Built in the City

In Amsterdam, Cornelia agrees to help choose orphan boys for Duquet to inspect and adopt. She is involved with a committee for a home for aged women, not the orphanage, but welcomes the chance to do a good turn. In 1713, Jan and Nicolaus, both nine years old, become Duquet’s sons. Their schooling and lessons in manners begin immediately; Cornelia hopes that good conduct might rub off on Duquet as well as shape the boys.

Duquet has prepared a speech for the children. He presents their new circumstances as a chance to escape poverty and help build a great fortune, invoking his own rise from the slums. His welcome is therefore both an offer of opportunity and an introduction to the business-minded household he intends to create. The adopted sons are not only family: he imagines them within the work of extending his commercial power.

Later that year Cornelia gives birth to a healthy son, Outger, named for his godfather. Duquet is pleased, but business soon calls him back toward Boston and New France. Even as he leaves Amsterdam, he extends his plan for sons: on the way to La Rochelle he imagines choosing another poor, promising boy from the streets, someone like his younger self, to take to New France and train in knowledge of its forests. The city’s household thus becomes one part of a wider project of family-making, migration, and business succession.

Return and the Changed City

In 1758, amid war between France and England, a party of six Dukes—Bernard, Nicolaus, Jan, Outger, Piet, and George Pickering—crosses from Boston to Amsterdam aboard the Dutch merchant frigate Bladwesp, carrying Duke & Sons cargo of dike timbers. Bernard had hoped to stop at La Rochelle for business, but the danger of wartime travel rules that out. Sedley stays behind in Boston with his critically ill wife, Eugenia, and their newborn son, James.

The travelers arrive in Amsterdam on a bright January morning. Outger’s borrowed berlin, with marine-blue enamel, gold-lettered doors, and yellow-clad coachman, stands out on the wharf; Bernard jokes that it looks like a blue teapot with a canary on its spout. The scene places the returning family amid conspicuous urban movement and commercial comfort, but the city is not simply a familiar homecoming. Amsterdam has grown so large that its crowded port and streets shock Jan, Bernard, and Nicolaus. Jan can barely understand the street slang, though its sounds awaken painful nostalgia.

The city’s scale and atmosphere divide the travelers’ responses. Bernard remembers the stale canal odor, wet cobbles, and clouded sky, and finds the pollarded willows ridiculous after years among the northern forests. He feels that he belongs neither in Amsterdam nor in the place he has left. In Cornelia’s house, however, a half-remembered hunting painting—a huntsman raising a horn—stirs a buried sense of familiarity. The painting offers a small, personal point of continuity in a city transformed by time.

Jan experiences the return differently. At fifty-four, he is arrested by the light, the long horizon, and the subtle clouds. Rather than visiting Cornelia or Doortje, he wants to look at the sky, whose shifting forms seem to manifest his private inner changes. Amsterdam reopens the past without restoring it: the landscape is recognizable, but the returning men no longer fit their childhood home in the same way.

Business, Loss, and the Limits of Return

The visit exposes the weakening of the family’s established trade. For two decades Duke & Sons has supplied heavy timbers for Dutch dikes, but the ship-boring teredo navalis has reached Holland in the bottoms of cargo ships and damaged the dikes. Builders now import stone, and the company has lost several municipal contracts. Bernard also worries that a failure of shipbuilding in Boston will bring further losses. Nicolaus sees attractive investment opportunities in Amsterdam, but Bernard dismisses them in favor of attention to their own market; the city is a commercial opening to one brother and a distraction from urgent exposure to another.

Amsterdam also brings Jan close to a life he has not previously pursued. Bernard notices him wandering through polders and along dikes, studying the sky, looking at small houses with purchase agents, and entering a shop that sells pigments and canvas. The city’s clouds and light have become more than scenery: they draw Jan toward painting and toward the possibility of a different life, even as Bernard prepares to leave.

That hoped-for departure is overtaken by illness. Bernard becomes feverish and comatose after the party has left Amsterdam; beside his bunk stands the hunting picture of the man lifting a horn, now charged with the recognition that Bernard will not get home. Three weeks out from Amsterdam, he is buried at sea. Nicolaus reaches Boston and finds a ship soon to depart for Amsterdam, sending word to Jan, Piet, and George Pickering and demanding their immediate return. The journey that began as a commercial visit thus ends with Amsterdam as the point of departure from which the family receives news of death and is summoned back.