Pieter Johan van Berckel

[4] Van Berckel sent a letter ahead ordering a six-horse carriage, along with two Amsterdam merchants who wanted to invest in the Bank of Pennsylvania.

Van Berckel and the large Dutch delegation had taken fifteen weeks to cross the Atlantic due to bad weather along the coast.

One of the four ships, the warship De Erfprins (launched in 1770 by the Admiralty of Amsterdam) was wrecked 25 miles off Cape Cod.

Handing in his credentials to the Congress of the Confederation was postponed by a day by president Elias Boudinot, a silversmith, to give time for preparations - the ceremony happened on 31 October at Nassau Hall, now the library of the University of Princeton.

On 3 December 1784 Van Berckel arrived in Trenton, New Jersey, then temporarily the US capital, though it lost that position because the southern states preferred a location south of the Mason–Dixon line.