Page 220 - Dutch Asiatic Shipping Volume 1

of the voorcompagnieën, up to 1720. For the years 1614 to 1713 Valentijn added date and place of departure from Asia and the value of the cargo.34 Clear and comprehensive, though covering a short period only, from 1707 to 1734, is the list of 'Schepen uijt Indien geretourneert anno..' in a booklet handwritten around 1735, kept in the Algemeen Rijks- archief (Aanwinsten XXVI, 94, 1902). This booklet carries on the spine the caption 'Ba- tavia', but resembles more a manual for directors. It provides an explanation of the procedures for the appointment of directors, and describes the attentions required in receiving the delegates from the States-General - and their wives! - for the verification of the four-yearly accounts. But it also contains a number of lists and tables of which the one of homeward bound ships is valuable for our purposes. In this list the name of the ship is given, with year of construction and length (i.e. the rate), value of cargo with chamber of destination, and also the date of departure from Asia, calling at the Cape and arrival home. Moreover the names of commander, vice-commander and rear-admiral are given for each returning fleet.
Finally, a list in the Hope collection indicates also the value of the return cargo of each ship. Thomas Hope, director from 1755 and representative of stadholder Willem V with the VOC from 1766 to 1770, collected as energetically as Hudde did 70 years earlier, a vast amount of statistical material on the Company's trade and finance. Included in this is a list of returning ships and value of cargoes, with separate mention of the value of tea carried for private merchants, covering the years 1691 to 1762. Hope was interested in the proceeds from the imported goods, so this list does not contain data on the ships' voyages. Losses at sea are recorded however, and for each year the gross profits - sales minus purchase value - are calculated.35
In all the above lists and tables, and therefore in the Lists in volumes II ands III of this publication, the value of the return cargoes is given in confirmity with the invoices made out in Batavia, Ceylon and elsewhere. This means that no conversion has taken place of the 'light' money, employed in Company bookkeeping from about 1660 to the mid-eigh- teenth century, into the 'heavy' money current in the Netherlands.36 Neither did the directors practise such a conversion, for the value of imports did not figure in the chambers' accounts and thus could not create confusion. Y et the value of import cargoes is recorded in the resolutions of the Heren Zeventien, again to keep a check on the distribution over the chambers. In the liquidatieen egalisatie again the amounts stated in Asia are adopted.37 Of course the directors had to take this difference in monetary values into account in calculating the returns or gross profits.
The archives of the VOC, understandably, contain few data on shipping of the voorcom- pagnieën. In addition, the serial sources in the archives for the first years of the VOC's own shipping are far from complete and the OBP's of the early period are much less systematically classified than was the case later in the seventeenth century. These shortfalls
are compensated for by the availability of ships'journals and travelogues from the early stages of the Asia trade. In the series 'Werken van de Linschoten-Vereeniging' a number of journals and other documents of early expeditions have been published: they are, for the period of the voorcompagnieën, the first and second Schipvaart (0001-0004), the early Zeeland enterprises (0005-0007,0008-0009,0046-0050), the voyage of Mahu and De Cor-
34 Valentijn, Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën, vol. I, 217 et seq. 35 ARA,coll. Hope, KA8403.
36 For 'light' and 'heavy' money see preceeding p. 185.
37 De Korte, Financiële verantwoording, 44.