In a collection of essays concerning the inevitably diverse vicissitudes of the representatives of that phenomenon collectively known as ‘the Company's servants,’ the inclusion of Nicolaas Witsen may come as a surprise. In our democratic age, he undoubtedly would have termed himself a ‘servant’ of the Dutch East India Company; in his own, more hierarchical times, he will have considered himself one of the Company's masters, as indeed he was. Whatever the powers of the Heren XVII may actually have been, Witsen for many years was one of the directors of the Amsterdam Chamber, the Company's most powerful division, and one of Amsterdam representatives to the bi-annual assembly which actually directed the Company's affairs at home, and tried to do so abroad, in its far-flung commercial empire, where other servants often held far greater, and less controlable power.

The Konkani Brahmin Babba Prabhu served the Dutch in Kerala as a merchant, broker and envoy for many years. Nevertheless, the Dutch were divided in their opinion of him. Rijcklof van Goens trusted him in 1663 as a competent merchant, but a year later Hustaert called him a roguish Brahmin. He was alternately praised and blamed, until in 1691, when Hendrik Adriaan van Reede visited Malabar as a commissioner, he was charged with several difficult tasks and was granted rather exceptional privileges. However, after Van Reede's departure pressure was put on him to repay his debts to the Company. Admittedly we can only trace the changing Dutch opinions of Babba and not his opinion of them. No sources other than the Dutch archives are available to us. But they contain a mass of factual information. From these we will reconstruct Babba's relations with the Dutch.

The source material for the history of Catholic missionary activities in the Dutch colonies during the last century is hardly available in much abundance in the mother country. The Dutch archivist and bibliographer, Marius Roessingh, had to make do in his U.N.E.S.C.O. archival guide on Netherlandish Latin American materials with a “memorandum,” in which he signalled utility of the Vatican archives. Another author in the same series, Frits Jaquet, in his second volume on Asia and Oceania, could be more explicit: he pointed to the materials kept in the state archives at Utrecht, in the Catholic Documentation Centre at Nijmegen University, and in various ecclesiastical archives. In nearly all cases, his emphasis falls within the first half of the 20th century. Such is also true with the detailed survey of materials available in the Catholic Documentation Centre that was featured two years ago in Itinerario, with only one important exception: the archive of the apostolic prefecture, later Apostolic Vicarate of Batavia (1807–1949, on microfiche), that obviously forms an essential source for the mission history of the Netherlands Indies.

In the “Concluding Remarks” appended to his journal for 1853–63, published in London in 1866 as Ten Years in Sarawak, Charles Brooke gave his support to the unfashionable idea of miscegenation between Europeans and Asians. The younger nephew of the first Rajah, James Brooke, and heir apparent to the Brooke raj to which he succeeded two years later, his views were of some significance. Accepting that a tropical climate was “not adapted for the permanent residence of Anglo-Saxons,” he proposed that a mixed race could provide Sarawak with a “suitable population.” To support his argument, Brooke cited the observation of Dr W.J. Moore of the Bombay Medical Service that Europeans had not survived as a race after many generations of British rule in India:

Of the numerous pensioners, etc. etc., there is not one single instance – there is not a great-grand-child or grand-child of these pensioners retaining their European characteristics. An infusion of native blood is essential to the continuance of the race. The fact is, for the white man, or his offspring, there is no such thing as acclimatisation in India. Exposure, instead of hardening the system, actually has the contrary effect, and the longer Europeans remain in this country, the more they feel the effects of the vertical sun.

The subject of this article is the fight for the throne in the kingdom of Gowa at the end of the 18th century, during the decline of the Dutch East India Company, a period which also saw the downfall of Gowa and the supremacy of Bone. The sources for the history of this period are twofold: on one hand the indigenous sources, “lontara-bilang” (diaries) and other records in Buginese and Makassarese; secondly, the European writings, principally the archival materials from the Dutch government at Makassar, supplemented by travel accounts and reports of the English. My primary sources are almost exclusively Dutch, namely the papers of the VOC, as they are preserved in the General State Archives in The Hague. To be more precise, these sources may be in Dutch, but in addition to the letters etc. written by Company officials, they also contain translations from documents drawn up by the rulers of Bone and Gowa or other of Asians. Moreover, the governors of Makassar often made use of indigenous sources, both oral and written, in preparing their lengthy memoirs about the state of affairs in their district. In 1736, the High Government in Batavia decided that two accurate genealogical tables must be prepared of the royal houses of Bone and Gowa.

The town of Santa Elena was founded by the Spanish in 1566 and occupied by them until 1587 except for the period August 1576 to July 1577. At one time (1572–74) it was the designated capital of Spanish Florida and the residence of the wife and two daughters and sons-in-law of D.Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, Adelantado of Florida. Its population prior to 1576 had more farmer-settlers than did St. Augustine and its garrison was sometimes larger than that in its better known sister. From those heights it fell into such complete oblivion that only a few scholars knew that it had been located on the southeastern end of Parris Island, and even they were not certain that anything survived save the partial remains of one of its forts.

In 1773 the director of the VOC factory in Canton, A.F. l'Heureux, requested permission from Gentlemen Seventeen to return home. He was already seventy years old and wrote: ‘It is hard and discouraging for an honest and faithful servant to find that Divine Providence had afflicted him with illnesses incurable in these parts… It is hard and discouraging for such a one to find himself deprived of his reward, perhaps the last reward for all his labour And may there not be other reasons that force us, however unwillingly, to quit these lands and the service of Your Excellencies? Are there no ties with our society, no ties forged by nature, or are we tied wholly and solely to the Company?’!.

In recent years there has been a growing stream of criticism concerning too easy acceptance of conventional wisdom in scholarly approaches to Third World countries, and a number of studies have examined the intellectual lineages of attitudes and concepts. Edward Said's work on Orientalism, evaluations of the colonial function of much anthropology, new looks at Marxist approaches to Asia and Western perceptions of Islam together form a powerful warning against assumptions that we actually know what we are talking about. The problem is, of course, that false images are not arbitrary creations, but grow out of certain traditions and their purposes in certain politico-economic contexts. While the concept of “region” is relatively innocuous, and lacks the ideological centrality of notions such as “oriental despotism,” “caste and tribe,” “the village” or even “adat”, it is nonetheless worth remembering that regional studies also developed within a certain intellectual and political climate.

In the many letters written by princes in the Indonesian archipelago to the Governor-General of the Dutch East India Company at Batavia, the relative status.is expressed in the address. Titles that are used range from “friend and ally” to “father” and “grandfather,” reflecting the formal relationship that had been laid down in the contracts. The address shows the position of the VOC occupied during the greater part of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The Dutch East India Company, though a large bureaucratic apparatus, was approached in a personified way. The formal distance to the Governor-General was expressed in terms derived from daily social life. It also makes one realize that a trading company had become an Asian ruler. In the Indonesian archipelago the VOC constituted an important political power.

The Life of Jaques de Couttre, or in its original title, La Vida de Jaques de Couttre, Manuscript no. 2780 of the Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid and dated 1640, is in a parchment quarto of 268 leaves with versos, or about 110,000 words, including an appendix of some pertinent documents after the autobiographical narrative ends on fl. 247. The language of the narrative is Castillian; two of the appended documents are in Portuguese, a third, Jaques' death certificate, in Latin; while another; a judicial verdict exonerating Couttre, is translated from the Portuguese and printed. The author is given asi “Esteban de Couttre, son, Cavalier of the Order of Santiago,” but the first lines of the text modify this authorship by explaining that the son is merely responsible for “placing (the text) in the order in which it is.” Because the whole narrative of his father's life is told in the first person singular, it is reasonable to assume that Esteban has done little more than to arrange his father's autobiographical sketches and effect the division into books and descriptive chapter headings which are features of the manuscript. The title page is elaborately ornamented with an architectural drawing and coat of arms, while its verso contains another, larger, family shield. The writing is that of a professional scribe. This might suggest that publication was contemplated.

In 1790 the Dutch East India Company was in a bad way. The Fourth Anglo-Dutch war had had disastrous consequences for the Company, and it had not been able to recover from them. At the end of the accounting year 1789–90 debts in the Netherlands amounted already to f 91.1 million. The deficit in that year alone had been f 11.3 million. In Asia the capital was still f 23.5 million, but the losses nevertheless amounted to nearly f 13 million.1 In 1788 the States of Holland had given f 21 million in aid, on the basis of a plan for reform, but it was clear to everyone that this situation could not continue.

Gustav Nachtigal is assuredly the most neglected, and the most unjustly so, of the major European travellers in Africa. On February 18, 1869, he set out from Tripoli, travelling southwards towards Bornu, just west of Lake Chad; he re-emerged from the African interior almost exactly five and a half years later, on August 10, 1874, at El-Obeid in what is today the Republic of Sudan. Of this marathon journey, Nachtigal left an account of correspondingly epic proportions, Sahara and Sudan. Published between 1879 and 1889, partly posthumously (Nachtigal died in 1885), the German text totalled some 2,000 pages. This rather daunting length, Nachtigal's somewhat rococo, even Doughty-esque style, and the lack for almost a century of a complete translation into any other language, have not dislodged him from the bibliographies of scholarly books about the area, but they have certainly limited the number of times he appears in footnotes. Yet the range of his interests is encyclopaedic. A qualified medical doctor, whose training had included some study with Professor Rudolf Virchow, one of the fathers of modern anthropology, at Wiirzburg, he had a keen sense of scientific precision in observation and description. He had lived, and practised medicine, for several years in North Africa, chiefly in Tunis, thus gaining a familiarity with at least Muslim Africa, and a command of Arabic. He continued to make his medical skills and supplies as widely available as possibly throughout his travels.