My Very Own Pirate Connection

It's distant and takes some explaining, but it's all true

I’ve been enjoying Steven Johnson’s Enemy of All Mankind, about the global manhunt for the pirate Henry Every at the end of the 1600s. (I don’t do New Year’s resolutions anymore, because they’re a recipe for disappointment and I’m perfect anyway, but I am determined to read more in 2025.)

Reading Johnson, I was reminded that I have my own connection to pirates, and it’s not just that I’m the author of a kids’ series about them. The connection is from my very own family tree, and it’s a little distant and takes some explaining but it’s all true.

My seventh great-grandmother Tryntje Van Buskirk was born in 1727 and died in 1804, part of a Dutch New York family that had been there since the 1650s. (Tryntje is the Dutch equivalent of Catherine.) She grew up in a farmhouse on Constable Hook, the part of New Jersey right across from Staten Island, which if you’re local you know as the site of a bunch of unattractive oil-industry/power-plant stuff. (Standard Oil bought the land in the 1870s and knocked down the farmhouse in 1906, though a wan little Van Buskirk cemetery is still there.)

Tryntje was a pretty interesting woman who lived during a pivotal era of history: She was married twice, first to Otto Van Tuyl and then to William Douglass, and was the matriarch of a Dutch family and an English one.

I’m descended from William and Tryntje’s daughter Ann, who during the Revolution was one of the most noted belles in Trenton, courted by officers attending balls while quartered at Valley Forge. (At the risk of ruining a good story, not everybody spent the winter shoeless and freezing in shacks.)

Ann (generally known as Nancy), married Charles Simms, a revolutionary officer who later served as the mayor of Alexandria and was a pallbearer at Washington’s funeral. One wonders what her father thought of the match: William Douglass was a Tory who wound up in Nova Scotia after the war, and his Van Buskirk in-laws were infamous Tory raiders.

Because of her connection to Simms, a number of Tryntje’s letters are in the Library of Congress. I’ve read them and they’re thoroughly charming, penned by a Dutch speaker spelling out phonetic English and relating Manhattan news of the day alongside gossip about her odd blended family. (Lest anyone think code-switching is new, Tryntje Van Buskirk and Catherine Douglass were the same person, and Femmtje Van Tuyl and Ann Douglass were sisters.)

Charles Simms deserves his own write-up one day — his descendants love to highlight the connection to Washington, but Simms was a pallbearer because he and Washington were part of the same Masonic lodge, and Washington’s wartime letters to Simms are pretty lacerating about his misplaced priorities and sense of duty.

But this is about Tryntje/Catherine and the part of her family I’m not related to. Her first husband, Otto Van Tuyl, ran a forerunner of the Staten Island ferry, which may have been how he met Tryntje. Otto was the grandson of a man who arrived in America because he’d killed someone in a tavern brawl and been sentenced to death in the Netherlands, and he had two uncles — Otto and Aert — who were honest-to-goodness pirates.

The elder Otto and his brother Aert were both carpenters, and in 1695 they joined the company of the pirate ship John and Rebecca. They wound up in Madagascar, as pirates of the day so often did, and survived an uprising by the locals against the resident pirates. Aert stayed in Madagascar, living the life of a pirate lord and taking a Malagasy wife (or two or more) before vanishing from history after 1714. Otto joined up with Captain Kidd and made enough money taking prizes off the Malabar Coast that he was able to buy his way out of jail when he returned to New York in 1699. Six years later he took to sea again, this time as a privateer, but the Castel del Rey went down not far from Staten Island and that was the end of Otto.

So anyway. I’m not related to pirates, but I do have distant pirate uncles-in-law from Dutch New York. Which is good enough for me.