Most of these papers, relating to the day and hartsinck families, came into my possession after the death of my father (the Rt. Honble. Sir john day); on one of them, in the handwriting of his father (captain john day) was a request that the documents should be taken care of as they may be interesting and perhaps even useful to my children, or even children's children. In addition to taking care of them I desire to make known their contents to other members of the family. With this object I have made a précis of all the documents: to have reproduced them in full and in the original language — many are in Dutch — was, having regard to the Scope of the work, impracticable. In translating and condensing there is, I am aware, a danger of not always giving the true meaning of a passage and of occasionally omitting something, which others might wish to see, but I have endeavoured to err on the side of giving too much rather than too little.
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