Appendix C: North Atlantic merchants in Hamburg

The following table presents a selection of the most important North Atlantic merchants from the records of the Confraternity of St Anne of the Iceland Merchants in Hamburg, who have been selected according to the following criteria: schaffer, treasurers and elderman of the confraternity; membership in the societies of England and Scania merchants; and holders of a licence for the Icelandic or Faroese trade. As the goal is to capture those persons who were actually active in the North Atlantic trade, persons who are only known as procurators and scribes of the confraternity have not been included. Procurators only show up in the middle of the seventeenth century, when ships to Iceland and Shetland were normally no longer recorded, and scribes were usually not active in the trade. Sources: SAH 612-2/5, 2 vol. 1 (15330000HAM00); Piper, Verzeichnis der tätigen Mitglieder; Krüger, Namensverzeichnis der Englandfahrergesellschaft; Namensverzeichnis der Schonenfahrergesellschaft. Additional sources have been mentioned in the footnotes. Note that Piper has identified people with similar names as different individuals on the presumption that members of the confraternity were not allowed to hold an office twice (e.g. Asmus Schulte, Laurens Schroder). This is not in all cases supported by the data in the donation register, so in some instances I have considered people with similar names to be the same individuals. With regards to the column “activity in the North Atlantic trade”, it should be noted that the donation register in most cases does not specify the function of a person on board the ships listed. In these cases, I have assumed that the merchants on board can be identified by their making of significantly higher donations, usually more than ten fish, one mark or one Reichstaler. This general classification fits very well with evidence from other sources, and with the lists in which the function of the persons on board is specified, but in individual instances, this approach might result in some incorrect identifications. The data in this table therefore provide a rough overview of the careers of these persons, but for their activity in individual years, the donation register itself should be consulted. Moreover, donations that cannot be connected to an actual journey have been ignored, as these do not give information about the commercial activity of those making the donations.