Re: Kilted Heathens. To my Scottish ancestors - the Dunlops!
I've got Kraut in me as well. One lived in Germany, and decided one day to answer the call for mercenaries by the Dutch East India Company to the East Indies and Ceylon. We know the name of the ship, ship's captain, the dates of the trip - from Texel, Holland to Colombo, Ceylon. It took six month in 1760. His name was David Hendrik Estrop, he started as a corporal and became a lieutenant, I think he was in for over twenty years - closer to thirty. His descendants are all over Malaysia and Singapore.
Then there is the one from Sint Niklaas in the Flemish or Walloon part of Belgium. He (Franz Van Geyzel) traveled from there to Colombo as well - a century earlier than Estrop. He then married the daughter of a Genoan merchant family - Suzanah Pegalotti. The Van Geyzel descendant and the Estrop descendant then married in the end of the 19th century.
"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value."
Thomas Paine, volunteer in the Continental Army in his The American Crisis.
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