Page:Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (IA journalof535419091910roya).pdf/277

 A Letter of Instructions from the East Indian Company to its Agent, circ. 1614.

With Notes by W. G. MAXWELL.

Among the Cottonian manuscripts in the British Museum is a letter of instructions from the East India Company to its principal agent in the East India.

The manuscript consists of nineteen pages and is regis- tered as "Cottonian Manuscript, Otho E. VIII. ff. 231-240 (ink foliation)." There is no date to the letter, but Mr. W. Noel Sainsbury the editor of the "Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, East Indies, China and Japan 1513-1616" assigns to it, with a query, the date 1614. In this case the addressee would be John Jourdain, who was in that year the East India Company's principal agent in the East and who resided at Bantam, some sixty miles north of the present city of Batavia.

It will be noticed that in the manuscript there is a refer- ence to the date 1620 as the date of Raja Api's death. This, if correct, would of course make the date suggested by Mr. Sainsbury impossible. I think however that there can be no doubt that 1620 is a slip of the pen for 1610. In one of the notes which I have appended to this article, I show that the account of Raja Api is identical with that given by Peter Will- iamson Floris, who gives the date as 1610. Floris was one of the merchants of the company's seventh voyage in 1611, and the writer of this letter [which gives such "descriptions and intelligences as he has been able to gather from the advises given by the company's factors"] almost certainly had Floris' letter before him.

This manuscript was partially destroyed by fire in 1731, some three lines being consumed at the head of each leaf. The recurring omissions in the transcript mark the places.