Strength -- "Pirates of the Caribbean" Version
For 2023, I’m writing responses to the 52 Ancestors in 52 Days prompts provided by Amy Johnson Crow on her ”Generations Café” website and Facebook page.
I think everyone who studies family history knows stories of strong ancestors who triumph in situations that we cannot even imagine. It was hard to select one story to tell today. However, I decided to write about my 9th great-grandfather Johannes Theodorus Polhemius (1598-1676), whose story illustrates the triumph of strength over adversity. Here’s how his story goes:
After training as a minister at Heidelberg University in the early years of the 17th century, Johannes served a church in the Palatinate during the 1620s, marrying and having at least one child there. The record is mute on his life for the next decade; he re-emerges in 1635, when he is appointed by the Dutch West Indies Company to serve a church in the New Netherlands settlement in eastern Brazil. This was one of three anchors for Dutch settlement in the Western Hemisphere; the others were in New Amsterdam/New York and in the Caribbean.
In 1643, at the age of 45, Johannes married Catherina Van Werven, a 15-year-old Dutch girl living in Recife. They had four children in Brazil between 1644 and 1649 before their lives were turned upside down in the 1650s. In 1653, the Dutch lost their Brazilian colonies to the Portuguese. In 1654, the new Portuguese rulers gave the Dutch three months to convert to Catholicism and become Portuguese – or to leave. Catherina took her children to Amsterdam, in part to collect Johannes’s overdue wages from the Dutch West Indies Company.
At the same time, Johannes sailed on a Dutch trader bound for New Netherland (New York) to minister to the Dutch people on Long Island. It is safe to say, I think, that his journey did not go as expected.
First, his ship encountered a Spanish Privateer (a government-licensed pirate ship). Which took the Dutch ship, its sugar cargo, crew, and passengers, to the Cape Verde Islands off the African coast. I’m not sure how long they were held, but when he was released, the ship that carried him and 23 Portuguese/Brazilian Jews (?) was again pirated by a French man-o-war. The French ship, the St. Charles, arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654.
Johannes was installed as minister in the Dutch town of Midwout – now known as Flatbush, Brooklyn. He was the first minister of the Dutch Reformed Church there. Within a couple of years, Catherina and their children joined him there (having been uncertain about his fate while they were separated). They went on the have three more children while they were living in New Amsterdam. I am descended from their oldest daughter Adrianna. I think it’s interesting that my 8th great-grandmother was born in Brazil. Who’d a thunk it?
I am drawn to this story for many reasons – but, primarily, I love the fact that it has led me to a deeper understanding of the complexity of the settlement of the American colonies. One of the first facts I knew about my ancestry while I was growing up was that my mother’s ancestors were early settlers of Dutch New Amsterdam. Her birth surname – Workman – was the anglicization of her ancestors’ surname Woertman (or Wortman). I can trace my other lines back to colonial New England and colonial Virginia, but I like this connection to a lesser-known settlement. Johannes Polhemius’ 4th great-granddaughter, Elizabeth Bilyeu, married James Workman in Tennessee in 1826. James and Elizabeth are my 3rd great-grandparents.
What a story!
What a great story!