ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the principal steps taken by the VOC's executive committee of seventeen directors, the Heren XVII, to ensure that the company's accumulation of corporate intelligence was secure, efficient, and of most practical use. Taking up Miles Ogborn's suggestion ‘to interpret not only “travel writing” but also “how writing travels”’, it discusses how texts generated by acts of travel and which described foreign places should themselves be seen as itinerant objects whose material form shaped their function as information-carriers. If the general outlines of the VOC's information management system are fairly well-known, a comprehensive survey of its development and functioning has been prevented by the sheer size of the Company's archives and the longevity and complexity of its operations. By the 1620s, VOC agents typically resided for extended periods of time in one of a growing number of geographically dispersed trading factories, managed as part of administrative units (governments and directorates) that were overseen from Batavia.
