www.soundtoll.com

The Sound Toll Registers (STR) are the accounts of the toll which the king of Denmark levied on the shipping through the Sound, the strait between Sweden and Denmark. They have been conserved (with gaps in the first decades) for the period from 1497 to 1857, when the toll was abolished. From 1574 on, the series is almost complete.
The STR are being kept by the Danish National Archives (Rigsarkivet) in Copenhagen.

The STR contain data on 1.8 million passages. The officials of the tollhouse at Elsinore recorded of each passage in principle the following data:

• the date
• the name of the shipmaster
• the domicile of the shipmaster
• the port of departure
• the port of destination (from the mid-1660s)
• the composition of the cargo
• the toll

The STR are an important source for research into trade, transport, production and consumption in Europe, amd also into the lifes of the shipmasters in the merchant marine. They are among the most important serial sources of the economic and maritime history of the Netherlands and Europe. A large portion of the commodity transport within Europe went via the Sound. The STR contain data on that exchange for a period of more than three and a half centuries. There is no other source for the European shipping and trade which covers a period of that lenght.

A pdf file with a concise source criticism of the STR is available here.