Anthony Van Corlaer

Although the Spuyten Duyvil Creek episode is sometimes repeated as fact or "legend", the character of Anthony Van Corlaer is a fictional one,[1] and there is no historical record of such an occurrence preceding the novel's publication.

de Vries of an unnamed boisterous and pugilistic trumpeter who interrupted the banquet dinner celebrating his August 1636 departure from Fort Amsterdam, physically fighting with both Andries Hudde and Jacobus van Corlaer when they protested his playing.

In Irving's story, Peter Stuyvesant, having learned of an English expedition on its way to seize the colony, ordered Van Corlaer to rouse the villages along the Hudson River with a trumpet call to war.

[10] Irving also wrote the most popular account of the trumpeter's last deed, including the witness statement (which he claims to disbelieve) of Van Corlaer being seized by "the duyvel, in the shape of a huge mossbonker".

[11] This has led some modern readers, unaware that Irving's work was a parody of history, to suggest that Van Corlaer was killed by a bull shark.