This category consists of general administrative documents relating to merchant shipping, seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. There are papers relating to the Board of Trade and other bodies of central administration, the earliest being a sixteenth-century 'kalendar of schedule of the shipping...which have been taken by the enemy and lost at sea within the three years last past'; there is also a report of the Board of Trade and Plantations on the Royal African Company, 1708. Also included are documents relating to the East India Company and shipping companies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including a deed of agreement of the Ship Owners Mutual Protection Society, 1855. There are also seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century documents relating to Customs, including a clearance certificate of 1803 and quarantine regulations, 1804.