Malay Documents In The Melaka Records in the British Library

Abstract

In 1964 F.R.J. Verhoeven, then Director General of the National Archives of Malaysia, wrote an article entitled ‘The lost archives of Dutch Malacca’ in which he lamented the apparent disappearance of the c. 2,000 volumes of records which he estimated must have been produced during the Dutch administration of Melaka from 1641 to 1824. Apart from 150 volumes in the National Archives of Indonesia in Jakarta, some fifteen volumes of Church registers now in the National Archives of Malaysia, and a small number of records in The Hague and elsewhere, nothing was known to have survived. It was only with the publication in 1983 of Ian Baxter' listing of series R/9 in the India Office Records that it became widely known that a portion of the archives had been shipped to London early in the twentieth century:The records of the Malacca Orphan Chamber and Court of Justice, R/9, occupy 44 feet of shelving (ninety-eight boxes) at the India Office Records in London. They were donated by the Government of the Straits Settlements to the India Office in June 1927, after lying, neglected, for many years in the basement of the Court House at Malacca. It is only recently (1981) that they have been completely sorted and listed. They comprise thirty-six boxes of Orphan Chamber records, fifty-four boxes of records of the College of Justice, one box of records of the Political Council and seven boxes of miscellanea. For the most part the records are written in Dutch and although they extend in date from 1685 to 1835 the bulk of them relate to the period 1785–1825, i.e. the last years of the Dutch East India Company's administration, the British occupation of 1795–1818 and the second Dutch administration of 1818–25.