Page 14 - Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters

 The database and methodology Introduction The database was necessary in order to provide the systematic mechanism through which to fulfil the purposes of this study, and to bring into sharper focus the hitherto obscured story of Dutch shipping in Asia. As previously explained, the vehicles of the Dutch expansion and their organisation are the central theme of this study. Little systematic research has been carried out on VOC shipping in Asia during the first half of the th century. This study will be a contribution towards closing this lacuna in our knowledge of the period -. That systematic work on intra-Asian shipping has not been undertaken previously is partly understandable owing to the proble- matic nature of many of the available sources. For example, the VOC maintained a separate set of administrative records for Dutch-Asiatic shipping, the so-called Uitloopboeken, which was the basis for the Bruijn, Gaastra and Schöffer (-) work; the VOC’s intra-Asiatic shipping activities, however, have to be reconstructed from a wide range of administrative and other sources (like correspondence and daily journals of the trading posts). A few problems were encountered in constructing a consistent and systematic database for the voyages in Asia. The VOC organisation was strongly centralised and most of the adminis- trative documents studied relating to intra-Asian trade passed the desks of the bureaucrats in Batavia. The elaborate administration was very useful in the reconstruction of this network; however, one had to be aware that not every ship sailed through Batavia and not every destina- tion was recorded in Batavia’s administrative records. To address this problem and to fill in some of the gaps in information wherever possible, the administrative records of other VOC trading posts were also taken into account. Fig. .: Schematic structure of the databases: (a) VOC vessels, (b) voyages The main database consists of two primary structures: the database of ships that lists the VOC vessels that were both identifiable and in the service of the VOC, and the voyage database that contains data on departure and arrival destinations. A unique identification number has been assigned to every ship and every voyage in the database. In addition, the ships database con- 