A firm believer in family business ties, he brought his son, Laurens, his brother-in-law, Steven Gerard, and his nephews, Hendrick and Louys Trip. A protégé of Hugo Grotius, Dirck Graswinckel, also accompanied them to provide legal advice. The twenty soldiers who had provided security on the trip from Amsterdam camped out by Josh Modi's crucible steel plant and the rest of the party had rooms at the Modi inn. After several days of talks and sightseeing they found themselves at Bart Kubiak's foundry and cupola furnace. "So how did you get the kind of cast iron you needed?" Louis de Geer asked. Josh Modi translated. "We had to do a three-way deal," Bart said. "We had cast iron from the suppliers outside Grantville, but it wasn't of the quality needed to build steam engine cylinders. The local blast furnaces already had contracts to supply pig iron to their customers. So we offered to sell our pig iron to their customers at a slight discount if the blast furnace owners provided us with cast iron using coke for fuel, which we brought to them.
