"Indians found the Dutch couple on the beach...she revived and crawled into a hollow tree...Thomas Hale Streets questioned the time sequence." Daily Register, May 12, 1964
"No one knows how Stout went from Lenape captive to New Amsterdam bride....There is a Facebook community titled 'Penelope Stout Descendants' that has 1,600 members." -Asbury Park Press, Nov. 20, 2017
Did famous Dutch colonial "Indian War" survivor Penelope Stout live to age 110 with over 500 descendants prior to death, or was there an error in historical records?
Historical researcher Dr. Thomas Hale Streets (1847-1925) sheds new light on the truth about Penelope Stout in his short 1897 book titled "The Story of Penelope Stout."
Penelope Van Princis Kent Stout (1622 - 1732) of Amsterdam, Netherlands. She was the first female white settler of Monmouth County, New Jersey. According to History of the Baptists she lived to the age of 110. When she arrived, via shipwreck, in America she and her husband were abandoned on shore by the other passengers and were attacked by a hostile tribe inhabiting the region.
In introducing his book, Streets writes:
"The story of Penelope Stout is one of those thrilling tales of capture and rescue from the Indians-so often associated with the history of the early settlements of our country-which reads more like fiction than reality, and which has been preserved in the memory of her numerous offspring, wherever found, for more than two hundred and fifty years."
About the author:
Thomas Hale Streets (November 20, 1847 - March 3, 1925) was an American naturalist. He served as a surgeon in the U.S. Navy from 1872 and retired in 1909 as the Director of the Navy Hospital in Washington, D.C. He was a veteran of the Spanish-American War. He died in 1925 of heart disease. His works include Contributions to the Natural History of the Hawaiian and Fanning Islands and Lower California (1877).