[34] The chief executive officer of a Dutch town.
[35] A port on the west coast of Friesland, where they took the packet to cross the Zuider Zee to Amsterdam.
[36] An important commercial town in North Holland, on the chief point they would pass on the west side of the Zuider Zee.
[37] Margaret Philipse. Frederick Philipse (1626-1702), who in 1674 was listed as the richest man in New York, and later owned the great Philipse manor and was for twenty years a member of the governor's council, had in 1662 married Margaret, widow of Pieter Rudolph de Vries, herself a well-to-do and enterprising merchant. She was the daughter of Adolf Hardenbroek of Bergen, and died before 1692. It is not necessary to accept in toto the diarist's estimate of her.
[38] I.e., if they were not Labadists of Wieuwerd.
[39] The Y (now spelled Ij) is the river or inlet on which Amsterdam is situated. Buiksloot and Nieuwendam are suburban places on its north side.
[40] The Voetians and the Cocceians were at this time the leading theological parties in the Reformed Church of the Netherlands. Gysbertus Voetius (1589-1676), professor of theology at Utrecht, was the pietistic, rigidly orthodox Calvinist; at first favorable to Labadie as to a man of earnest zeal to increase piety in the church, he turned against him as Labadie developed into separatism. Johannes Cocceius (1603-1669), professor at Leiden and one of the chief exponents of the "federal" theology (theology of covenants), represented a school more liberal in tendency and freer in exegesis, though still closely Biblical. Our travellers approved neither group.
[41] A large island at the mouth of the Zuider Zee. Ships outgoing to America would pass between it and the Helder, or extreme north point of North Holland.
[42] The Labadists had dwelt at Altona, in Holstein, then Danish, from 1672 to their removal to Wieuwerd in 1675. Labadie died there.
[43] No doubt the allusion is to Antoinette Bourignon and her conventicles. Mlle. Bourignon (1616-1680), born in Lille, France, was a mystical enthusiast of tendencies not dissimilar from those of Labadie. Like him she wrote much, had temporarily a great vogue, and removed with her followers from place to place—Amsterdam, Schleswig, Holstein, Hamburg, East Friesland, Friesland. Their congregation was at Hamburg when the Labadists were at Altona, close by, and was now at Franeker, not far from Wieuwerd. Efforts had at first been made toward union, but by this time there was open opposition between the two sects. The "assembly of Mr. B." means the conventicle maintained at Amsterdam by a merchant named Bardowitz or Bardewisch. He had been one of the foremost followers of Labadie, had interpreted his discourses into Dutch for those who did not understand French, and when Labadie retired to Herford in 1670 had been left in charge of that portion of the congregation which remained in Amsterdam. There he for many years, without pretending to be a minister, held a conventicle of separatists in his own house.