The Company's paperwork, in English
The Dutch East India Company wrote to Amsterdam for two centuries. The Nationaal Archief holds the letters, GLOBALISE transcribed them, and nobody had translated them. This is that translation, with every passage tied back to the scan it came from.
This is machine transcription translated by machine. No human has read it. Treat any passage as a finding aid that points at an image, and read the image before you rely on it. The provenance note says where it is weakest.
What you can read here, and what you can download. This reader holds 652 inventories across eight series, chosen for the regions with the heaviest correspondence, and shows the Dutch and the English side by side. The complete archive goes further: all 6,893 inventories and 4,786,035 pages, the whole of the Company's surviving Overgekomen brieven en papieren. It is too large to serve as a parallel reader, so it ships as files.
Series
| Series | Inventories | Pages |
|---|---|---|
| Cape | 108 | 57,928 |
| Ceylon | 68 | 49,265 |
| Coromandel | 73 | 48,040 |
| Malabar | 82 | 47,126 |
| Surat | 95 | 45,550 |
| Persia | 37 | 43,398 |
| Japan | 49 | 42,131 |
| Bengal | 51 | 27,544 |
| Surat / Persia | 3 | 1,413 |
| Coromandel / Bengal | 1 | 1,128 |
| Coromandel / Ceylon | 1 | 753 |
| Surat / Malabar | 1 | 343 |
| Ceylon / Bengal | 1 | 288 |
Where to start
Search is the way in. Names in these records were spelled by ear, so the modern
form often misses: the Raja of Benares is Bolwantsing, Ghazipur is
Paziepoer, Chunar is Chunagoor. Search the Dutch spelling as well as
the English, and try single words before phrases.