The fifth question asked:
Do references listed in Danvers’ manuscript occur in JKJ de Jonge’ s work Opkomst van het Nederlandsch Gezag in Oost-Indie? If so, could Danvers have sourced material from the same original records used by De Jonge?
In answer to the first part of question 5, no references listed in Danvers’ manuscript (Danvers, 1895b) have been identified in De Jonge’ s work (De Jonge, 1862-1888).
In answer to the second part of question 5, yes, Danvers sourced some of the same original records that De Jonge used. Danvers’ research project in the VOC Archives
(see chapter 5) undertaken during the years 1893-1895, resulted in the collection of over 2,646 handwritten transcriptions59 of VOC original documents from the years 1609-1700. Danvers continued his project by having the Dutch language
transcriptions translated into English. The researcher’ s analysis of the data concluded that the documents in Danvers’ Dutch Records at The Hague “ The First Series”
Letters from India were sourced from Overgekomen brieven en papieren uit Indie aan de Heren XVII en de kamer Amsterdam, 1614-1700 [=Letters and papers received from Asia by the Heren XVII and the Amsterdam Chamber]. This analysis compared the document description collected from Danvers’ volumes with the description contained in the 1992 Inventory of the VOC Archives (Meilink-Roelofsz, 1992). The results of this analysis can be seen in Appendix 2, showing a partial match of the documents Danvers’ researched compared with those in the 1992 Inventory of the VOC Archives. That the order of the volumes can be compared proves Danvers maintained the order of the volumes discerned in the VOC Archives during his investigations from 1893 to 1895, and kept that same order for the documents he had selected for transcription.
Danvers did source material from the same volumes that De Jonge used, but Danvers’
method was to first go through each of the volumes of the series Letters and papers received from Asia by the Heren XVII and the Amsterdam Chamber and prepare a working list from which he then selected the documents he wanted transcribed. In this way, Danvers was able to discern that some of the volumes had been rearranged, making the following note on 1 Oct 1894 between vols. I-III (1670) and vols. I-IV, 1669-70 “ Some of the books are in their original state and have not been
re-arranged by Mr. De Jonge and others” (IOR/I/3/86, 1893-1895, p. 30) [see also the researcher’ s transcription in Appendix 1, page 3].
Danvers annotated the particular documents on his working list which had already been published by De Jonge (see Appendix 1, page 1, entry for 1612 - Vol. III and Appendix 1, page 3, entry for 1669-70 - Vol. III – Bantam). Danvers’ working list (transcribed in Appendix 1) shows that volumes before 1670 followed a pattern of being numbered in each year only, whereas, after 1670, the volumes carried a
59 IOR/I/3/1–IOR/I/3/106, Dutch Records at The Hague, series 1, 2 and 3 (106 volumes) India Office Records, British Library.
consecutive volume number as well as the yearly volume number. The subtleties of this numbering can be seen when an analysis of Danvers’ working list is performed (see Appendix 1; and in chapter 5).
Danvers’ work to create an artificial collection relevant to the EIC Archives by copying relevant documents from the VOC Archives clearly marks him as an archivist who was an active shaper of the collection upon which he worked. He is an exemplar of high standards of both historical research and archival documentation, in that he carefully recorded his sources and commented upon where and how the source documents had been arranged. He also provided a separate formal written account of the relevance of the documents he selected (see chapter 5) from the VOC Archives (Danvers, 1895b). This thesis is the first to set out the significance of his work; it has filled a gap in the description of the EIC Archives, using archaeological archivology to analyse and document the original source and arrangement of Danvers’ collection.
The research undertaken on Danvers’ work has matched his collection with its source in the VOC Archives, demonstrating that they are one and the same.
Appendix 1 provides a summary of the volumes searched by FC Danvers and WR Bisschop during the years 1893-1894 at the Rijksarchief, The Hague; from their notes in their “ working list” in BL: IOR I/3/86 Dutch Records at The Hague v.86. The original working list consists of 119 pages, listing all of his source volumes in the VOC Archives. The summary in Appendix 1 also contains a transcription of Danvers’
notes with his comments clearly showing his awareness of De Jonge’ s work.
Appendix 2 records the results of the researcher’ s analysis comparing the documents Danvers’ viewed with the 1992 Inventory of the VOC Archives (Meilink-Roelofsz, 1992). This research was able to match some of the volumes Danvers listed in his working list with the 1992 Inventory of the VOC Archives because Danvers had maintained the order of the volumes from which the transcribed VOC documents originated.
The researcher’ s investigations at the British Library produced a preliminary inventory listing the 2,646 documents Danvers had copied - a 298-page document. While too big to be included as a print appendix to this thesis, this draft finding aid is available for publishing at a future date and sample pages are included as Appendix 6.