Hendrik Caspar Romberg

Hendrik Caspar Romberg (bapt. 11 October 1744 – 15 April 1793)^[1] was a Dutch bookkeeper, merchant-trader and VOC Opperhoofd in Japan.

A meeting of Japan, China, and the West, by Shiba Kōkan

Life

Hendrik Caspar Romberg was the son of Zacharias Romberg, a bookprinter/seller on Spui in Amsterdam.^[2] Hendrik was baptized not in the opposite Lutheran church, but at home.^[3] In 1763 he traveled to Batavia in East Asia with the Dutch East Indies Company (or Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC in Dutch). Ten years later he was appointed in Deshima as bookkeeper. Romberg spent more than ten years in Japan. It seems he was good-looking and had an affair with a Japanese prostitute.^[4]

He was the Opperhoofd, head of VOC trading post, during four discrete periods:

• 27 October 1782 – August 1783^[5]
• November 84 – 21 November 1785
• 21 November 1786 – 30 November 1787
• 1 August 1789 – 13 November 1790

Romberg traveled five times to Edo.^[6] On 1 May 1789, he attended a theater performance in Osaka.^[7][8] In April 1787 he presented the lord of Satsuma a sweet wine from Jurançon.^[9] In 1788 he met with Shiba Kōkan, interested in Western painting, and technique.^[10] Romberg's account of the Sangoku-maru is a scant record of the brief attempt by the Tokugawa shogunate to create a sea-going vessel in the 1780s. The ship sank; and the tentative project was abandoned when the political climate in Edo shifted.^[11]

In the off-years, he spent time in Batavia, which was at that time the VOC headquarters in the East Indies.^[12] The registers also listed him as chief warehouseman and paymaster.^[13]