Page 27 - Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters
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plete VOC shipping in Asia for the period - and -. Batavia’s daily journals are available from (Chijs -, Colenbrander -, Heeres , Hullu - ). In these documents the dates of arrival and departure of vessels in Batavia are listed, but often they also contain information on VOC voyages between other destinations in Asia. Since this series is not continuous for the whole period some years would consequently be under- exposed in the database. For these years the ‘letters and papers from Asia to the Heren XVII’ (NA .. (VOC) – ) have been used to complement the database. The books with copies of letters sent from Batavia turned out to be a useful source of information on VOC shipping in Asia. Almost all copy-letters contain information on previous correspondence in- cluding when and with what ship these letters were sent. Moreover, the partly transcribed and published ‘General Missives of the Governor-General and Council’ (Coolhaas , , ) contains information on various aspects of the development of the VOC in Asia. This source covers the period -, but often the exact dates and names of the used ships are not included in this printed compilation. This source however provided an efficient entry point and clues to locate the original source. Also primary and secondary sources of other VOC locations in Asia were studied in order to counterbalance the predominant ‘Batavia perspective’. An extraordinary source of information on ‘ships and trips’ are the published daily journals of the castle Zeelandia in Taiwan (Blussé et. al., , , , ). These records contain detailed information on the shipping of this region, especially shipping between Taiwan and the Pescadores and more exact data on ship- ping on the route Batavia-Taiwan-Japan en vv. and the roundtrip Taiwan-Tonkin-Japan-Tai- wan. Information on the exact arrival and departure dates in Japan in Mulder () could be complemented by primary sources in the National Archives (NA .., Factory Japan, ). The extensive description of military activities on the Chinese coast by Groeneveldt () provided data for the database for the period till . Secondary sources provide information on the contacts of the VOC in areas now known as Vietnam and Cambodia (Buch ; Muller ). Information on VOC shipping around the Philippines was found in Sloos () but this study covers only a short period. The same applies for other secondary sources for other desti- nations: Terpstra on the VOC establishment in Patani, Coromandel Coast, the Indian subconti- nent and the Westerkwartieren (Terpstra , , , , ) and also Dunlop () on Persia. These studies cover mainly the development stage of shipping to these destinations. This period coincides with the period that the daily journals of Batavia did not exist or have not survived. This important source provided information for this region for the later period. The starting point for the reconstruction of VOC shipping around Ceylon was the study of De Geer (). Archival research on the VOC shipwrecks in the bay of Galle as part of the Avond- ster project offered more detailed information on shipping between Ceylon and the Indian coasts. Some references to voyages to specific destinations were found in detailed studies based on primary sources in the VOC archive, for example: Ayutthaya in Blankwaardt (), Yemen in Brouwer (), Banda in Chijs (), Borneo in Dijk (), Australia in Heeres (), Mauritius and Madagascar in Heeringa (), Timor in Roever (), Djambi in Wellan (). Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters
