Piet Roos

Piet Roos is a captain and China-trade merchant whose wary consent to Charles Duquet’s marriage to his daughter Cornelia makes him both a family protector and a practical partner in Duquet’s ascent. He reads Duquet’s self-interest clearly, but rather than simply bar the match, he sets conditions that preserve Cornelia’s ties to Amsterdam and connect Duquet to Piet’s ships and commercial network. The resulting family history eventually exposes a distinction Piet’s arrangements could not erase: Duquet’s adopted sons inherited alongside his biological children, but their descendants did not share his bloodline.

Identity and Judgment

Piet appears among the captains and their families at a formal dinner in Amsterdam attended by Duquet. There, Duquet fixes his attention on Cornelia and decides that she will be his wife. The proposed match is therefore first presented through Duquet’s ambitions; Piet’s later assessment supplies the counterweight, shifting attention from Duquet’s intentions to the risks his family would face.

At a coffeehouse, Piet tells Captain Outger Verdwijnen that he dislikes Duquet. Beneath Duquet’s agreeable manner, Piet sees a cold, calculating man devoted above all to his own interests. He doubts that Duquet feels real affection for Cornelia: Duquet’s conversation, as Piet reports it, centers on his wishes, plans, travels, and money, while he shows little knowledge of life beyond personal advantage. Piet distinguishes between ordinary enjoyment of money and what he regards as Duquet’s sinful greed. His objection is not simply that Duquet is an outsider or a poor match; it is that Duquet appears to treat courtship itself as another means of advancement.

Piet also fears that Duquet may be dangerous. Verdwijnen argues that Duquet is nevertheless manageable: low-born, self-made, impulsive, and respectful toward older men, he can be checked by a father who listens rather than adopts an openly adversarial stance. Verdwijnen proposes that Piet use the marriage’s terms to retain influence over Cornelia and her children, while recognizing that Duquet’s money could benefit their commercial interests. Piet is only half convinced, but the exchange frames his eventual assent as cautious negotiation rather than confidence in Duquet’s character.

The Marriage as a Negotiation

Duquet spends another year pursuing the marriage, crossing the Atlantic and courting not Cornelia so much as her father. In Amsterdam in 1711, Piet examines Duquet’s account books in detail, hears his future plans, and asks pointed questions before considering the suit. Duquet proposes a three-way partnership in the China trade among himself, Piet, and Outger Verdwijnen. Piet is willing to discuss the business arrangement, but he treats the marriage as a separate and more delicate matter: he and his wife do not want their youngest daughter, her mother’s favorite, taken away from them.

Piet offers a compromise that gives Cornelia a house in the next street, close to her parents and sister, and makes Amsterdam the home of any children born to the couple. Duquet may live there, or travel between Amsterdam and New France, with a ship and crew supplied for the transatlantic passage. These conditions let the marriage proceed without surrendering Cornelia’s proximity to her family. They also fit the commercial arrangement: Piet’s three ships already serve the China–Japan trade, while Duquet has none and wants access to that network.

Duquet accepts. He privately regards a wife in Amsterdam as a useful blood connection to Piet and Verdwijnen, while leaving him freer of what he considers female interference. He recognizes that he will remain a stranger wherever he lives and accepts that distance as the price of the connection. Piet’s conditions thus protect his daughter’s place near her family while simultaneously giving Duquet the business access he seeks; the same agreement means the marriage is organized around family oversight and commercial advantage, not merely romantic attachment.

Family, Adoption, and Consequences

The prospect of children soon becomes part of the negotiations. Verdwijnen suggests that if Duquet cannot wait for sons of his own, he could adopt boys from the Amsterdam orphanage and let Cornelia choose them, so that she might take a personal interest in their upbringing. The suggestion is mistaken about Cornelia’s committee work: she serves on a committee overseeing a home for aged women, not the orphanage. Still, she welcomes the idea of helping orphans and agrees to choose boys for Duquet’s final decision.

In 1713, Jan and Nicolaus, both nine years old, become Duquet’s sons. Cornelia hopes their schooling and training in manners will influence Duquet as well. Duquet tells them that the opportunity can lift them from poverty and allow them to help build a great fortune, presenting adoption as both rescue and recruitment into his ambitions. Later that year Cornelia gives birth to Outger, named for his godfather, Verdwijnen. Duquet is pleased with his enlarged family, but soon turns to the possibility of finding another poor boy himself in La Rochelle and taking him to New France to learn about its forests. Piet’s marriage conditions and the adoption proposal therefore become part of a household that combines biological and adopted children, and family belonging with Duquet’s business plans.

The later genealogy clarifies the long-term consequence of that mixture. When Lavinia Duke asks whether any descendants of Duquet have been found, R. R. Tetrazinni explains that Nicolaus married Mercy and had three children, including Sedley, Lavinia’s grandfather. Lavinia descends from Nicolaus, one of the adopted sons, and therefore has no Duquet blood. Tetrazinni distinguishes that line from Duquet’s biological children, Outger and Doortje, and identifies the descendants of Outger’s sons Josime and Francis-Outger as the living blood descendants of Duquet. The family’s competing claims make visible a tension built into the household Piet helped establish: Duquet treated adopted boys as sons and divided his goods equally among them, but later heirs could still distinguish inheritance by legal or familial standing from inheritance by blood.

A Link Across Generations

Piet’s influence is most visible at the point when marriage, shipping, and descent become joined. His scrutiny cannot make Duquet affectionate or disinterested, and the evidence does not show Piet’s later life or the eventual course of his business partnership. What it does establish is that he secures a nearby home for Cornelia, keeps her future children within reach of her family, and provides a route into a trade Duquet wants to enter. His wary judgment is borne out by the transactional terms of the match, even as he chooses to make those terms work for his family.

The later appearance of Francis-Outger Sel in Jinot Sel’s correspondence offers a further trace of the genealogy Piet’s arrangements helped set in motion. After the loss of Amboise, Jinot writes to Francis-Outger seeking news of Elise and Josime; Francis-Outger replies from Penobscot Bay, recalling the family’s history and their shared kinship. The letter does not center Piet, but it connects the descendants in Tetrazinni’s account to a living network of relatives. Across these generations, Piet’s role is less that of a patriarch who controls the eventual inheritance than that of the cautious negotiator at the beginning of a complicated family line—one in which adoption establishes real parentage, while blood becomes decisive again when the heirs are counted.