Makes me wonder how much the author himself learned about the Dutch East India Company. I suspect very little, if anything. Something about these exercises reminds me of junk food: empty calories and all that...
> Surely more than if they read nothing at all because most of it would be tedious drudgery of minimal value.
It's an archive. It's all "tedious drudgery" until you figure out the value.
Sometimes figuring out the value means reading things until notice something, which could be a pattern or something dispersed.
Wether there is enough info to reconstruct usable data is unknown to me but it feels like a good experiment someone could try.
Remember that even junk food is more food than junk and you can survive on it for years.
For example with enough information about ship stores/rationing we can learn about how many ships they had, their travel patterns, a whole map of when they were where, the men involved and their whole history.
Alternatively, if there are suspicious gaps then you might find traces of reports that have been deleted, cross-referencing those to ships/officers that didn't report in as usual you might be able to track them to find out more information, etc.