Cornelis van Tienhoven

He arrived in New Amsterdam as a Dutch West India Company bookkeeper in 1633 on the same ship as the new director of the colony, Wouter van Twiller.

[3] Dutch explorer and patroon David Pieterszoon de Vries later included a description of the slaughter in his journal: ...infants were snatched from their mother's breasts, and cut to pieces in sight of their parents, and the pieces thrown into the fire and into the water; other sucklings were bound to boards, and cut and struck or bored through, and miserably massacred, so that a heart of stone would have been softened.

The right to establish a local government, however, was granted, and van Tienhoven became New Amsterdam's first official schout-fiscael although he had acted in this capacity for many years.

Van Tienhoven went to great lengths to keep the relationship a secret, but when the affair became known, he smuggled Liesbeth aboard ship and returned to New Amsterdam.

Liesbeth is said to have only discovered that van Tienhoven was married with three children when his wife Rachel met the ship at the dock.

[1] On September 15, 1655, while Director Stuyvesant and most of the garrison were on the Delaware River conquering New Sweden, New Amsterdam was occupied by several hundred Munsee warriors.

Councillor Nicasius de Sille in a letter to Hans Bontemantel, a director of the West India Company wrote: "...the community and the householders who have sought refuge here, call for revenge and murder against the fiscal [van Tienhoven] and two or three others, whom they loudly proclaim by name to have been the only cause [of the attacks].

"[5] The directors of the West India Company also concluded that van Tienhoven was to blame: "Whoever considers only his last transaction with the savages, will find, with clouded brains, filled with liquor, he was the prime cause of this dreadful massacre."

In March 1656, the directors ordered Cornelis van Tienhoven and his brother Adrean dismissed due to "manifold complaints.