Background
Van Ilpendam apparently belonged to a well-to-do family of Haarlem, whose name appears on the records of that city as early as 1444. He himself, however, came from Leyden and was probably the Jan Jansen van Ilpendam.
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Jan Jansen Van Ilpendam
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In May 1633, Jan Jansen sailed as supercargo on the yacht Pernambuco for Brazil, where, in 1635, at the taking of Porto Calvo, he was captured by the Portuguese. Returning to Amsterdam in the summer of 1636, he was appointed on September 4, by the West India Company supercargo on the ship Rensselaerswyck, a privately owned vessel, which arrived at Manhattan on March 4, of the following year. He was still at Manhattan on August 5, 1637, when the ship made ready to return to Holland but seems shortly afterward to have been appointed commissary at Fort Nassau.
In the spring of 1638, Willem Kieft, the newly arrived director general of New Netherland, sent Jan Jansen to the South River to protest in due form against the action of Peter Minuit in erecting there the arms of the Queen of Sweden; two years later, Van Ilpendam made a similar protest to Peter Ridder, the new Swedish commissioner, but in spite of these protests, his relations with the Swedish remained friendly. He assumed a more aggressive attitude toward the English, however, when, in 1641, some Englishmen of New Haven formed a Delaware Company and through their agents bought lands on both sides of the river, at the Varkens kill and on the Schuylkill.
In 1644, some Boston merchants obtained a charter to trade on the Delaware River and Kieft once more ordered Van Ilpendam to protest against them, instructing him "rather sink the English ship than to let it pass the fort". On all these occasions Van Ilpendam seems to have acted with diligence and discretion. In 1645, however, he was accused of fraud and summoned to appear at Manhattan. The case against him was investigated by Cornelis van der Hoykens, the public prosecutor, from whose findings it appeared that Van Ilpendam had "grossly wronged the Company, both in giving more to the Indians than the ordinary rate and in other instances specified in the complaint, affidavits and in his accounts". The Council thereupon, on February 8, 1646, ordered him with his papers and the fiscal's complaint to be sent to Amsterdam by the first ship, to defend himself before the directors of the Company.
He died, apparently, not long after his departure from New Netherland, since on August 16, 1647, his second wife, Catalyntje van Strassel, gave a power of attorney to Jan de Laet for a settlement of his accounts.
Achievements
Connections
In 1616, at Delft, he married Judick Hame. His second wife was Catalyntje van Strassel.
