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Amsterdam merchants had chartered on May 19, 1611, a ship, the “St. Pieter,” skipper Cornelis Rijser, to trade furs with the Indians. The merchants were Arnout Vogels, Leonard and Francois Pelgrom. The ship was manned by 13 persons. It has been thought that Block sailed on the St. Pieter. Could he have been one of the tree supercargoes on that ship or one of the thirteen men? This has not been proven as yet but presumed. We do know however, that Block made his first voyage to the Virginias in 1611, taking the north-west route (sailing from Terra Nova, Nova Francia towards the Hudson.) There is no knowledge of the existence of a company named the Van Tweenhuysen Company in 1611. It was Leonart, Steffen and Francois Pelgrom who later formed a company with Hans Hunger and Lambert van Tweenhuysen (all Amsterdam Lutherans) to carry out the fur trade in the Virginias. We don’t seem to know the name of that company even though the New Netherlands Company superseded it in 1614. The researcher Simon Hart named it, in 1959, the Van Tweenhuysen Company for convenience sake only.