Isaac Commelin, Begin ende Voortgangh

Begin ende Voortgangh van de Vereenighde Nederlantsche Geoctroyeerde Oost-Indische Compagnie, the Beginning and Progress of the Dutch East India Company, is the first history of the Company in the form of a collection of voyages. Compiled by Isaac Commelin (1598 to 1676) and published at Amsterdam by Johannes Janssonius in 1645 and again in 1646, it gathers twenty-one journals of the voyages that founded the Dutch presence in Asia: Houtman's first voyage of 1595, Van Neck and Van Warwijck, Spilbergen to Ceylon, Verhoeff to Banda, Van den Broecke to Arabia, Le Maire and Schouten round Cape Horn, and the Nassau fleet of L'Hermite, among others.

The two oblong quarto volumes are illustrated with hundreds of engraved maps and plates, many of them the first printed images of places in the Indian Ocean and the East Indies. The collection is often broken up, so that the separate voyages circulate as small books of their own.

Our collection holds the complete work in a contemporary binding and several of the voyages separately.