De tocht van Overste van Daalen door de Gajo-, Alas- en Bataklanden 1904 — “The march of Colonel van Daalen through the Gayo, Alas, and Batak lands in 1904” — is a 1939 retrospective article by J. E. Harders, published in the Orgaan van de Nederlandsch-Indische Officiersvereeniging (Organ of the Netherlands Indies Officers’ Association), recording the campaign of Colonel (Overste) van Daalen through the Gayo, Alas, and Batak lands of the central Sumatran interior in 1904. The article is recorded as No. 568 in Van Meurs’s Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 (The Hague, 1940), in the Sumatra chapter, with a cross-reference (“zie bij TICHELMAN, G. L.”) indicating its connection to the work of G. L. Tichelmann.
Author
J. E. Harders published the article in the Orgaan van de Nederlandsch-Indische Officiersvereeniging, the principal professional journal of the Netherlands Indies officer corps — the same venue that carried the Bannink article on the Atjeh-oorlog (No. 550) and the da Costa survey of the Padrie-oorlog (No. 558) in the same year. The choice of venue signals the article’s intended audience: serving and former officers of the Koninklijk Nederlandsch-Indisch Leger (Royal Netherlands Indies Army) with an interest in the campaigns of the preceding generation. Beyond his authorship of this article, Harders is not separately documented in Van Meurs’s survey; the article constitutes his sole identifiable contribution to the 1939 retrospective literature on the Aceh campaigns.
Subject
The article’s subject, as recorded by Van Meurs, is the tocht — the march, the campaign — of Overste (Colonel) van Daalen through the Gajo-, Alas-, and Bataklanden in 1904. The article thus covers the same campaign as the Geusau article of 1939 (No. 566) — the Colonne van Daalen of the corpus’s existing entry — but published in a different venue, the Orgaan van de Nederlandsch-Indische Officiersvereeniging rather than the Indisch Militair Tijdschrift. The double publication of retrospective accounts of the same campaign in two distinct professional military journals in the same year marks 1939 as a year of sustained retrospective interest in the van Daalen campaign, thirty-five years after the event.
Connection to Tichelmann
The cross-reference “zie bij TICHELMAN, G. L.” — “see under Tichelmann, G. L.” — indicates that Harders’s article is connected to, or to be read alongside, the work of G. L. Tichelmann, the Dutch colonial ethnographer and artist who is represented elsewhere in the Sumatra chapter of Van Meurs’s survey by entries on Atjeh glass jugs (No. 625), on Batak antiquities, and on the prehistoric and ethnographic material of northern Sumatra. The nature of the connection — whether Tichelmann contributed illustrations to Harders’s article, or whether the two accounts are companion pieces — is not specified in Van Meurs’s entry, but the cross-reference indicates that the two authors’ work on the van Daalen campaign should be read together.
Place in the 1939 Literatuur-Overzicht
The article is No. 568 in the Sumatra chapter (Hoofdstuk III, Nos. 548–658) of Van Meurs’s survey, where it stands immediately after No. 566 — the Geusau account of the same campaign. The double recording — Geusau in the Indisch Militair Tijdschrift and Harders in the officers’ journal — is a notable feature of the Sumatra chapter of the 1939 survey, and it marks the van Daalen campaign as the retrospective military-historical subject par excellence of the year.
Significance
For AcehWiki, the article is significant as a 1939 retrospective on the van Daalen campaign of 1904, published in the principal officers’ journal of the Netherlands Indies, and as an independent source for the campaign that complements both the corpus’s existing entry (drawing on De Buitenbezittingen and Dispereert Niet) and the Geusau account (No. 566). The cross-reference to Tichelmann indicates a connection to the wider ethnographic and antiquarian work on northern Sumatra represented in the same chapter of Van Meurs’s survey, and it suggests that the Harders article may have included Tichelmann’s illustrations or ethnographic observations.
See Also
- De tocht van Overste van Daalen door de Gajo-, Alas- en Bataklanden (Geusau, 1939)
- Colonne van Daalen naar de Gajolanden en Alaslanden (1904)
- colonne-van-daalen-1904
- gotfried-coenraad-ernst-van-daalen
- G. L. Tichelmann
- In Atjeh opgedolven glazen kruikjes (Tichelmann, 1939)
- Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 (Van Meurs, 1940)
- H. van Meurs
- Gajoland
- Alaslanden
- Bataklanden
- Aceh War
Source
Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 van de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde en Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch-Indië, door H. van Meurs (‘s-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff, 1940), Hoofdstuk III (Sumatra en naburig gebied), No. 568. Citing: J. E. Harders, “De tocht van Overste van Daalen door de Gajo-, Alas- en Bataklanden 1904,” Orgaan van de Nederlandsch-Indische Officiersvereeniging (1939). Zie bij Tichelmann, G. L.