Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

year by the Hoge ende Secrete Raad (High and Secret Council) in Recife. 21 The generale
missiven consisted of a single letter over the signatures of all four councilors, with references in
the text to a number of supporting documents that were enclosed and lettered alphabetically.
These supporting documents ranged in substance from reports on diplomatic or military missions
to memoranda on the state of finances and inventories of medical or military supplies; they also
included transcriptions of the daily minutes of the council and copies of important
correspondence. All of these documents were listed in order on a register, as were letters
addressed to the individual chambers of the company or to the Heren XIX by subordinate
councils responsible for finance, justice, and other matters. Separate from these, and given a
register of their own, were documents that listed the names of the dead, soldiers licensed to
return to the Netherlands, slaves delivered to Brazil, and the more prosaic receipts and
inventories that accompanied the loading and unloading of goods from warehouses and ships.
Much like the annual letters of the Jesuits, the generale missiven were organized into a hierarchy
of documents that could easily be sorted and delegated to the appropriate officials at home. 22
There were important ways in which it might be in the council’s interest to misrepresent
information, and on any given topic private correspondence might have offered information of
which the council was unaware, but the generale missiven was still the most complete, synthetic
available portrait of affairs in the colony, and thus served as the basis on which the company's
directors formulated official policy towards Brazil.
21 Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624-1654; Wätjen, O Dominio Colonial Hollandez no Brasil: Um Capitulo da
Historia Colonial do Seculo XVII. These letters mimicked the format of similar letters sent annually from Batavia by
servants of the VOC. Gaastra, The Dutch East India Company.
22 Friedrich, “Government and Information-Management in Early Modern Europe: The Case of the Society of Jesus
(1540-1773),” 547.
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