Sound Toll Registers (STR) Online: Link to database
The king of Denmark levied a toll on shipping through the strait between Sweden and Denmark. These records have been conserved for the period from 1497 to 1857 (with some gaps in the first decades). The toll was abolished in 1857, but from 1574 on the series is almost complete and searchable online. The originals can be found in the Danish National Archives (Rigsarkivet) in Copenhagen. The records contains data on 1.8 million passages.
The officials of the tollhouse at Elsinore recorded the following data for each passage including:
1. Date
2. Name and domicile of the shipmaster
3. Port of departure and the port of destination (from the mid-1660s)
4. The composition of the cargo
5. The toll
The STR are an important source for research into trade, transport, production and consumption in Europe, and also into the lives 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 length.