[2] Sources comment admiringly on Jan Poel's ability as a linguist: he had undergone a commercial training in Leiden and was fluent in Dutch, Russian and German.
The Duke had been born in Kiel and spoke very little Russian which explains why he drew his friends from St. Petersburg's German expatriate community.
It was a mark of the friendship between the Dutch born merchant and the future Tsar that the Duke became Piter Poel's Godfather ("Patenonkel").
The new Tsar now invited his friend, Jan Poel, to look after his estates in southern Holstein, and to supervise his pet project there, which involved the construction of a canal.
His widow, remembered in history as Catherine the Great, spent the next 34 years building up Russia and denigrating the reputation of her late husband.
Following the death of his friend, the Tsar, Jan Poel hurriedly closed down his business activities in Arkhangelsk and moved his young family to Hamburg where he had contacts in the merchant community.
[1] He was encouraged in his pursuit of a university education by his sister Magdalena,[2] who herself had been in a somewhat restless marriage with Adrian Wilhelm Pauli, another member of the Hamburg merchant class, since 1776.
He joined a social circle that also included the pioneering physician Johann Reimarus and the merchant Georg Heinrich Sieveking.
The project survived Sieveking's early death in 1799 and Matthiessen's divorce in 1801,[11] but the house at Neumühlen as sold in 1811 and Poel set up a home in Teufelsbrück a few hundred meters further downstream.
[3] Between 1816 and 1822 he lived together with Caspar Voght at house in Flottbek, another settlement on the western fringe of Altona, and it was here that on 18 October 1821 his wife died following a two-day illness.
[3] After the same of the Neumühlen house, his subsequent homes continued to provide a social hub for the Hamburg elite, with Poel himself at the heart of things.
[3] Four years after he was widowed his elder sister Magdalena, with whom he had always been close, fell ill and he rushed to her home in Bückeburg to take his leave of her, but arrived too late.