The married couple Samuel de Marez (1632-1691) and Margaretha Trip (1640-1714) came to live here in 1679. They both had families with huge fortunes. Samuel descended from nobility and Margaretha’s father and uncle, Louis Trip (1605-1684) and Hendrik Trip (1607-1666), made a fortune as arms suppliers. During the 1660’s the VOC and WIC were the Trip company’s largest buyers. In addition to using weapons as a means of defence and offence, the WIC regularly used guns as a trading tool for enslaved people in Africa. This all contributed to Louis Trip’s wealth rising from 46.000 to 600.000 guilders in just 26 years.

Around 1719, Gideon Boudaen (1686-1744) rented this building. He was a representative of the city Utrecht in the chamber of the VOC in Amsterdam. Before this appointment, he had however, already worked for the VOC. Initially, he was sent to the East Indies (modern-day Indonesia) to tackle corruption amongst VOC officials, but he quickly rose in rank. He worked in Surat, Batavia and Japan. He returned to the Republic in 1716 as the commander a returning fleet of the VOC, which was a high honour at the time.

Forty years later, Jan van Voorst (1716-1775) bought the home. Van Voorst was a former director-general of Elmina. This was a coastal settlement in modern Ghana that played a big role in the Transatlantic slave trade, the slave fortress ‘Elmina’ was located there, which was also the seat of the WIC director-general on the Gold Coast. Enslaved people were forcibly brought to the Elmina castle from the inlands of Africa to be held and sold to traders who would ship them to the Americas, where they were forced to work on plantations. Jan van Voorst, as director, oversaw these procedures. In 1764, he personally shipped 275 people to Suriname where they were sold for 103.939 guilders (around 2.6 million euros today). A year later, he would come to live at Janskerkhof 13. He renovated the building into the style that you see today using money he made through slave trade.