Leiden is the place Outger Duquet chooses as a home and scholarly destination after decades in the colonies, and where he is invited to join the university faculty. His departure shifts the Duquet family’s center of gravity away from the Penobscot Bay house: Outger leaves that house and its contents to his daughter Beatrix, while his move helps reveal that the adopted sons who carry the family’s business name are not Charles Duquet’s blood descendants.

Outger’s Destination and Ambition

During a family visit to Holland, Outger explains that he plans to go to the University of Leiden to meet natural-history scholars with whom he has corresponded for decades. They know him under the invented name Etdidu, which he devised by arranging the alphabet in a circle, selecting letters opposite those in his surname, and reversing their order. He admits that his correspondents would not recognize him by his ordinary name, but does not explain why he has kept his identity concealed.

His interests range well beyond botany. Outger names New World flora, Indigenous artifacts and ceremonies, weather peculiar to Penobscot Bay, mathematical problems, and an invention aboard the ship among his subjects of study. He expects to spend at least a year in Holland and considers making his home either in Amsterdam or Leiden. His sister Doortje’s interest in natural history might make her home suitable; alternatively, he hopes to stay with Leiden’s scientists if they approve his invention. He anticipates that some may dismiss him as an ignorant colonial, yet insists that he possesses knowledge they lack.

From Colonial Isolation to the University

Outger’s plan to leave is viewed very differently by the people around him. Bernard Duke regards his interests and secret scholarly name as signs of eccentricity, while Jan hopes Outger will remain in Holland permanently so that Duke & Sons can finally obtain the great pine table in the Penobscot Bay house. Nicolaus, by contrast, recognizes in Outger a resemblance to isolated woodsmen whom the company calls “woods-queer”: people whose solitude and dangerous work have left them unsettled. The disagreement makes Leiden more than a change of address. It represents a possible passage from the colonial margins into a learned community, although Outger remains uncertain whether that community will accept him.

The family’s visit also shows the competing pressures around his departure. Outger’s sister Doortje is introduced to the assembled relatives, and the gathering includes the adopted sons and their descendants. Outger leaves for Leiden with a trunk of papers; Cornelia is the only one described as unhappy at his going. The family’s attention soon turns back to business, as Bernard dismisses Nicolaus’s proposed investments and worries that Duke & Sons has lost dike contracts to stone suppliers and may suffer further losses if shipbuilding does not improve.

The Letter That Reorders the Family

Outger’s academic prospects become definite in a letter sent from Leiden. Cornelia tells the family that he has been invited to join the university faculty and will send for his possessions once he has found a furnished, well-staffed house. In a separate letter to Bernard, Outger states that he will not return to the colonies or to the Penobscot Bay house. He denies the family’s hoped-for claim to its great table and declares that the house’s contents belong to his daughter, Beatrix Duquet, who is living there.

The letter supplies family history that the company’s heirs have not known. Outger says Beatrix’s mother was a Passamaquoddy woman who helped him study Indigenous beliefs and practices. He says she died while he was responsible for their daughter, whom he educated, and that he has told Beatrix the contents of his letter. He may return to visit her, but will not stop in Boston on those trips. Leiden thus marks a separation from the household as well as a professional beginning: Outger makes his daughter, rather than the colonial company, the inheritor of the Penobscot property.

Blood Descent and the Meaning of Inheritance

Much later, Lavinia Duke learns from the investigator R. R. Tetrazinni that Charles Duquet’s three sons, Nicolaus, Jan, and Bernard, were adopted. Charles treated them as sons and divided his goods among them, but Lavinia’s descent from Nicolaus gives her no Duquet blood. Charles’s legitimate children with Cornelia Roos were Outger and Doortje. Doortje’s line ended with her unmarried son Lennart Vogel; Outger’s daughter Beatrix remained in Maine after her father moved to Leiden.

Tetrazinni reports that Beatrix married Kuntaw Sel and had two sons, Josime Sel and Francis-Outger Sel. Their grandchildren are, he says, the only living bloodline descendants of Charles Duquet, and therefore the rightful heirs if blood relationship is the governing test. He has not yet established the names and locations of those descendants. His conclusion contrasts legal and familial inheritance with biological descent: the adopted lines hold the fortune, while the Sel descendants possess the blood connection. Outger’s move to Leiden and his decision to leave the Penobscot house to Beatrix are crucial links in that later genealogy, even as the dispute over who has the stronger claim remains unresolved in the evidence presented.

A Place in the Novel’s Geography

Leiden connects several scales of the family story. For Outger, it offers the prospect of recognition by natural-history scholars after a long life in the colonies and an extended correspondence conducted under an alias. For the Duke family, his departure interrupts an imagined transfer of the Penobscot house’s contents. For later generations, it helps locate the separation between the adopted commercial dynasty and Beatrix’s line, whose descendants are eventually identified as Charles Duquet’s surviving blood heirs.

The novel’s treatment of Leiden therefore makes a European university more than a destination on Outger’s itinerary. It is the setting for a change in status that the family can neither fully understand nor control: Outger leaves the colonial household, secures a scholarly appointment, and assigns its property to a daughter whose descent will later challenge the assumptions behind the family’s inheritance. The location’s significance lies in these linked departures, claims, and discoveries, not in any detailed depiction of the university itself.