ABSTRACT
Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple ... who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appeareth? for he is like a refiner’s fire, and like fullers’ soap. [Malachi 3:1-3]
I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire. [Revelation 3:18]
Gold Tried in the Fire
Tany crossed the English Channel successfully and at an unknown date arrived in the United Provinces, perhaps ‘to call the Jews there’.1 Like the Quaker missionaries who also made the crossing, Tany doubtless found it difficult to communicate with the indigenous inhabitants. He may, in addition, have encountered magistrates unsympathetic to his message. At some point he made his way to Brielle, a port on the island of East Voorne that had formerly been garrisoned by the English. How long he remained there is uncertain. About December 1659, perhaps influenced by events in England such as the removal in October of the reinstated Rump Parliament by military force, Tany seems to have taken passage in a little boat. He was said nearly nineteen years later to have been accompanied by one Captain James, but it is not known if this was Captain William James who in 1655 had infuriated the Spanish by seizing a ship laden with hides in the West Indies, afterwards docking at Amsterdam where he intended selling some of them.2 Then under the date 26 December 1659 the newsbook Occurrences From Foreign Parts reported:
In a Letter from the Brill [Brielle] unto Mr. Henry Jessey, written by Mr. Peter Serarius ’tis certified that John Tanni as he was called here, or Ram Johoram as he lately called himselfe, was cast a way in his passage in a ship as he came from the Brill for London.3
