Geert Roenhorst

It's a manuscript bond, which means it's sort of written on vellum, actually, at the time.

And what's unusual about this bond is that it still pays interest.

It is old.

And if you just looked at it first, it just looks like an old manuscript.

Although I'm Dutch myself, it wouldn't occur to me at first look that this is actually a Dutch bond.

The language itself was quite different from the way we sort of write and construct sentences today.

So it is actually hard to read.

When we acquired the bond, I actually contacted somebody with the knowledge of medieval Dutch to kind of decipher what the bond was really about.

It's an obligation to pay interest over the equivalent of 1,000 corollas guilders, which was the currency in the mid-17th century in the Netherlands.

The organization that issued it is a water board or water authority.

Their objective was to help defend the country against the water.

If there weren't any system of levees in the Netherlands, half of it would be underwater and a big floodplain.

So these water authorities were these semi-governmental organizations that were set up to kind of organize people to join forces to combat the waters.

So there's a number of reasons why it's incredible.

The first is that the instrument has survived.

If we would have lost this bond, the physical document...

There'd be nothing to present to collect the interest.

So in some sense, that's a miracle.

The second thing is that many of the perpetual bonds that were issued had call provisions, which means that the issuer could at some point raise their hand and says, you know, enough already.

I'm going to just repay my obligations.