Background
Hendrik Caspar Romberg was the son of Zacharias Romberg, a bookprinter/seller on Spui in Amsterdam.
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Hendrik Romberg
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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.
lieutenant seems he was good-looking had an affair with a Japanese prostitute.
He was the Opperhoofd, head of VOC trading post, during four discrete periods:
27 October 1782 – August 1783
November 84 – 21 November 1785
21 November 1786 – 30 November 1787
1 August 1789 – 13 November 1790
Romberg traveled five times to Edo. In an unknown year he attended a theater performance in Osaka.
In April 1787 he presented the lord of Satsuma a sweet wine from Jurançon. In 1788 he met with Shiba Kōkan, interested in Western painting, and technique.
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. In the off-years, he spent time in Batavia, which was at that time the VOC headquarters in the East Indies.
The registers also listed him as chief warehouseman and paymaster.
