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HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES.

ship started.”[1] Willem Streypers wrote over to his brother Jan on the 20th of 2d mo. 1684, that he was already on Jan's lot to clear and sow it, and make a dwelling, but that there was nothing in hand, and he must have a year's provision, to which in due time Jan replied by sending a “Box with 3 combs, and 3———, and 5 shirts and a small parcel with iron ware for a weaving stool,” and telling him “to let Jan Lensen weave a piece of cloth to sell, and apply it to your use.” In better spirits Willem wrote Oct. 22d, 1684: “I have been busy and made a brave dwelling house, and under it a cellar fit to live in, and have so much grain, such as Indian Corn and Buckwheat that this winter I shall be better off than what I was last year.”[2]

Other emigrants ere long began to appear in the little town. Cornelis Bora, a Dutch baker, whom Claypoole mentions in association with Telner, and who bears the same name as a delegate from Schiedam to the Mennonite convention at Dordrecht, arrived in Philadelphia before Pastorius. David Scherkes, perhaps from Muhlheim on the Ruhr, and Walter Seimens and Isaac Jacobs Van Bebber, both from Crefeld, were in Germantown Nov. 8th, 1684. Van Bebber was a son of Jacob Isaacs Van Bebber, and was followed by his father and brother Matthias in 1687. Jacob Telner, the second of the six original Crefeld purchasers to cross the Atlantic, reached New York after a tedious voyage of twelve weeks' duration, and from there he wrote Dec. 12th, 1684, to Jan Laurens of Rotterdam, that his wife and daughter were “in good health and fat,” that he had made a trip to Pennsylvania, which “he found a beautiful land with a healthy atmos-

  1. Seidensticker's Pastorius in the Deutsche Pioneer, vol. ii. p. 176.
  2. Streper MSS.