The last child born to an overstretched family of Utrecht carpenters, he had established his own business through the strategic acquisition of ships whose owners had not anticipated the high cost of repairs required when their vessels returned from long, arduous voyages to sea. For the first year, Lodewijk repaired the damaged ships himself or begged his friends for small gifts of labour. He hired out the finished galleons to whaling crews or merchant captains whose suntanned faces and arms were even darker than his own and whose tales of life at sea swung wildly between amusing and outrageous.

When one man intimated that he expected to make a hefty profit on his next journey east by selling some inferior peperduur to an unsuspecting English trader – and asked Lodewijk if he might consider taking a cut in exchange for incorrectly registering the name of the vessel in Texel’s shipping records – Anna’s father suddenly found himself in the enviable position of possessing more wealth than anyone else in his family ever had before. There was no real moral quandary since no Englishman deserved to be pitied and everybody was guilty of fudging Texel’s shipping records at least once for his own benefit. The outcome meant that Anna’s father had amassed a small fortune by the age of twenty-one. He was soon entertaining offers from the kind of wealthy Amsterdam merchants whose ranks he once aspired to join, including the family of gunpowder heiress Arabella Van de Berg. Their marriage seemed the inevitable fulfilment of God’s plan and the fleet of ships that was once the foundation of his fledgling business quickly multiplied now he could afford to buy fluyts outright instead of repairing damaged ones.