Page 215 - Dutch Asiatic Shipping Volume 1

daghregisters are present, therefore other sources have been tapped for the period after 1682. Since in a few cases there still appeared to be queries or gaps in the data, the journal held in the Arsip Nasional at Jakarta has been consulted incidentally.19
Another source, also published and therefore easily accessible, is provided by the Ge- nerale Missiven van Gouverneurs-Generaal en Raden aan Heren XVII.20 These missives which, as already indicated, offer a survey of the political, military and commercial situa- tion of the trading posts in Asia, begin as a rule with an enumeration of ships arrived and departed since the previous letter, while often in the final paragraphs further details of the homeward bound fleet are mentioned. Thanks to the index of ships' names in these publications it is possible to find details of, for instance, the fate of the ships. For the preparation of the Lists in volumes II and III five volumes of this publication were available, with Generale Missiven for the period 1610 to 1697.
From these two great source publications a large number of data on Dutch-Asiatic shipping in the seventeenth century could therefore be drawn; nevertheless research into documents dispatched from Asia and the Cape in the VOC archives remained necessary for this century also. These writings have been collected into a number of sets in the archives of the Amsterdam chamber. Thus a set has been compiled of the copy-resolutions of the Gouverneur-Generaal en Raden, and also of the copies of letters sent by the Hoge Regering to the various trading stations, the so-called Bataviaas Uitgaand Briefboek. The documents received from the Cape have also been placed in a separate set, and there is a set of documents concerning the trading post in Canton from the period in the eighteenth century when a direct link was maintained with China. But the most comprehensive set is that of the Overgekomen Brieven en Papieren (Letters and papers received). This set runs in the new archive arrangement from VOC 1053 to VOC 3986, in the old arrangement, which was used in the list of sources, from KA 965 to KA 3877. Around 1620 this is a matter of two large folio volumes per year, at the end of the century there are ten of them and in the second half of the eighteenth century the size has expanded to twenty to thirty volumes per year.21
Yet, in spite of their bulk, these OBP's do not form for the researcher an impenetrable amorphous mass of paper. In the Amsterdam chamber the papers received from Asia were each year put into sets according to a fixed pattern. The first set or sets of each year contain documents sent from Batavia - the Generale Missiven, missives addressed to the directors of the Amsterdam chamber, as well as numerous letters, reports and accounts about trade, shipping and other matters concerning the rendez-vous. Next come letters received from the other trading posts with a direct link with the home country, including items received via the land route from Ceylon and the trading posts in India and Persia. Finally the OBP's are filled with copies of letters sent from the various settlements to Batavia, the so-called Bataviaas Inkomend Briefboek. The sets are all provided with a
19 Microfilms of these dagregisters after 1682 are now available in the Algemeen Rijksarchief in The Hague.
20 W. Ph. Coolhaas (ed.), Generale Missiven, eight volumes on the period 1610-1729 ('s Gravenhage 1960-1985). The set has been published in the series of the R.G.P. (104, 112, 125, 134, 150, 155, 164, 193). The series is to be continued by J. van Goor.
21 For contents and meaning see also Roessingh, Sources, 79-80 and Slot, 'Archives in the Nether- lands on Indonesian history'. In the inventory of the VOC archives and also in Roessingh, Sources, 79, the dagregisters are mentioned under a separate heading in the archives of the Amsterdam chamber, but this does not mean that a separate series or set is present: in as far as there are fragments of the dagregister present in the Amsterdam chamber's archives, they are part of the set of OBP's.