Duquet and Cornelia’s marriage

Charles Duquet and Cornelia Roos’s marriage joined an ambitious trader to a Dutch family whose ships and capital could advance his plans. Negotiated over a year with Cornelia’s father, Piet Roos, it was at once an intimate union and a calculated business connection: its terms placed Cornelia and their children in Amsterdam, while leaving Duquet free to travel and pursue commerce. The family it established would later expose a fault line between adopted inheritance and blood descent.

Courtship as negotiation

Duquet’s cross-Atlantic courtship lasted another year, and its decisive conversations were not with Cornelia but with Piet. In Amsterdam in 1711, Piet examined Duquet’s account books, heard out his plans, and tested his answers before permitting the marriage. Duquet proposed a three-way China-trade partnership linking himself, Piet, and Outger Verdwijnen. Piet found that commercial proposal workable, but treated the marriage as a separate question: he and his wife did not want to lose their youngest daughter, who was especially close to her mother.

Piet’s conditions made the family connection concrete. Cornelia would remain in Amsterdam, where he would give her a pleasant house on the next street, near her parents and sister. Any children would live with their mother there. Duquet could live in Amsterdam too, or travel between Amsterdam and New France; Piet even offered a ship and crew for the transatlantic passage. The arrangement offered Duquet access not only to a wife but to the Roos family’s trade network, while keeping Cornelia and the prospective children within her parents’ reach.

A marriage shaped by commerce

Duquet accepted. He considered a Dutch wife in Amsterdam useful as a link to Piet Roos and Captain Verdwijnen, while imagining that her distance from his own life would leave him less exposed to domestic influence. He also recognized the personal cost: wherever he lived, he would remain a stranger. His assent thus carried both calculation and a willingness to pay for the commercial connection.

The wedding was marked by a feast and drinking that continued for days. Captain Verdwijnen gave the couple a set of silver forks, newly fashionable eating implements. Duquet praised them publicly but privately took the gift as a reproach to his still-rough table manners. He preferred the coffee mill and the rich tapestry presented by his father-in-law. The contrast between the formal polish expected of him and his own judgments sits alongside the broader terms of the union: marriage drew him into a household and trading world whose customs he had not fully acquired. Cornelia did not speak for a week; what she eventually said was known only to the two of them.

Children, adoption, and succession

Within eighteen months, Cornelia had given birth to a daughter and a premature stillborn son. Duquet remained preoccupied with the lost boy and with the sons he believed he needed to secure his future. Captain Verdwijnen proposed adoption as a practical answer: Cornelia could choose boys from an orphanage, then oversee their education while Duquet trained them for business or the sea. Cornelia agreed to find boys, though the home she served was for aged women rather than the orphanage Verdwijnen had named.

In 1713, she selected Jan and Nicolaus, both nine years old. Duquet made them his sons and arranged for their schooling and instruction in manners, including the kind of conduct Cornelia hoped might influence him as well. He presented adoption to the boys as an opportunity to escape poverty and help build a great fortune, drawing on his own account of having risen from a poor childhood. Later that year, Cornelia gave birth to a healthy son, Outger, named for his godfather, Outger Verdwijnen. Duquet was satisfied, but the family now included sons whose claims rested on different grounds: two adopted boys and a biological child.

The marriage’s later significance

The distinction between those family lines became consequential long after the wedding. In recounting Charles Duquet’s descendants to Lavinia Duke, R. R. Tetrazinni explained that Duquet had adopted Jan and Nicolaus, as well as Bernard, and had left his goods to the boys in equal parts. Lavinia descended from Nicolaus, not from Duquet by blood. Tetrazinni contrasted that adopted line with the later biological descendants of Cornelia and Charles through their children Outger and Doortje, tracing Outger’s line through Beatrix Duquet and her sons, Josime and Francis-Outger Sel. He identified the grandchildren of those sons as the surviving blood descendants, while arguing that the adopted lines had a stronger claim to the fortune.

That later dispute gives the marriage a significance beyond its initial commercial bargain. Piet’s conditions had kept Cornelia and her children close to Amsterdam, while Duquet’s decision to adopt enlarged the family through deliberate choice. Together, those choices created the very ambiguity that later generations would have to confront: whether family inheritance belongs chiefly to those raised and named as children, or to descendants connected by blood.