Sound Toll Registers, 1497-1857

From 1497 until it was abolished in 1857 the details of the Sound Toll levied by the Kingdom of Denmark, which actually consisted of several different types of charges, were recorded in registers by Danish customs officials at the fortress of Kronborg that dominated the strait at Elsinore

Maritime nations and towns
Ships from many nations and trading cities made more than a million and a half passages through the Sound from the late fifteenth to the nineteenth century, leaving information on their cargoes in the Toll records. They included of course the Scandinavian countries, Scotland, England and France, the Netherlands (Amsterdam and many others), the German towns of the North Sea (Bremen) and so-called “Wendish” ports of the Baltic coast (Hamburg, Lübeck, Rostock, Wismar, Stralsund). Farther east were the ports of Stettin and Danzig (now Szczecin and Gdansk in Poland), Königsberg (the Russian enclave Kaliningrad), Riga, Reval (now Tallinn in Estonia), Narva, and last but not least St. Petersburg after its construction as a window on the west by the Czar starting in 1703.

Flow of goods
Going from west to east, the main goods carried were salt; wine from France, Iberia and the Rhineland; herring; fabrics; skins and hides; and, increasing in importance in the eighteenth century, “colonial goods”, tropical products from the European colonies in the new world and Africa. Carried from east to west were vast quantities of grain from the plains of Poland and Prussia, especially rye and, growing in importance with time, wheat; wood from the forests of Sweden and Finland, iron and copper from Sweden, flax and hemp, and (linen) fabrics.

Rise and fall
From the sixteenth to the second half of the eighteenth century the Dutch were the leading maritime nation and their trade in bulk commodities with the Baltic, known as the “mother trade”, was fundamental to the prosperity of the country, surpassing the more exotic and well-known spice trade with the East Indies. Later other nations, in particular Great Britain, surpassed the Dutch and in the nineteenth century the growing commercial power of the United States was signaled by the arrival of the first American ships in the Sound records. It was to be the Americans who sounded the death-knell of the Toll, exerting diplomatic pressure to have it abolished, which finally occurred in 1857 after a history spanning some 360 years.

Interest for research
The Sound Toll records have attracted the interest of historians since the late nineteenth century. Much work has been done to extract statistical information from them and publish it in tabular form, such as in the renowned seven-volume series of Nina Bang and Knud Korst, Tabeller over Skibsfart og Varetransport gennem Øresund...., which itself took nearly half a century to realize (1906-1953) and stops in 1783, almost seven and a half decades before the Toll registers end.

While such resources form an invaluable tool for scholarship, their principal object, as Nina Bang herself stated in her preface to the first volume in 1906, was to provide statistics on trade. For that reason she left aside all the other material presented in the toll registers, including above all the very rich materials on the history of the Toll itself. Furthermore, while she was able to furnish information on the ships on a yearly basis; her tables on goods transported were based on ten-year intervals. Writing in the preface to his continuation of Bang’s work in 1930, Knud Korst opined: “it goes without saying that historians may pose questions to which the figures of the Toll published in print will provide no answer; questions that might only be answered by returning to the original texts themselves”

The registers thus remain indispensable for research on a great many questions, such as