Kapoer baroer — Malay kapur barus, Dutch kamfer, English camphor of Barus — is the crystalline camphor (Dryobalanops aromatica) of Barus on the west coast of Sumatra, the great west-coast emporium whose product gave its name both to the Malay kapur (“lime, chalk”) — by extension, the bahasa kapoer (“lime-language”) of Malajoe — and to the office of the Gouverneur du Royaume de Baarros in the Atjehnese fleet of 1539. It is, in De Roo de la Faille’s reading, the principal trade-good whose name underlies the bedekte taal register of Malay-Javanese historical geography.
The product
Kapoer baroer — crystalline camphor of the Dryobalanops aromatica tree — was, from antiquity, the principal product of Barus on the Sumatran west coast, and the great west-coast emporium’s claim to fame. The Bataks, Rouffaer noted (citing the Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indië), called Barus Djaoe roema — which Rouffaer read as “Maleier, eigenlijk Javanenwoning” (Malay, properly Javanese-dwelling), but which De Roo de la Faille decodes as the Djaoe-wa Ta-roema of the Sumatran Overwal — i.e. as the Taroema of the chronicle tradition, the ancestral land of the Djawaka.
The Gouverneur du Royaume de Baarros
Alleredin Mahomet, the commander of the Atjehnese fleet of 1539, held, Pinto records, the office of “Gouverneur du Royaume de Baarros” — i.e. governor of Barus on the Sumatran west coast. The combination of fleet command, royal kinship, and the governorship of Barus marks, in De Roo de la Faille’s reading, the breadth of the sultan of Atjeh’s design in 1539: not merely to chastise a single neighbour but to bring the whole circuit of Sumatran coast, west and east, under Atjehnese command — and so to close the Strait of Malacca to Portuguese shipping.
The bahasa kapoer
The “lime” (kapoer) of Barus camphor is, in De Roo de la Faille’s reading, the kapoer of the bahasa kapoer — the “lime-language” of Malajoe that Marco Polo noted as the “peculiar language” of the east-coast places he visited. The same kapoer underlies the kapoer of the *Melasaké pampang|Melasaké pampang]] allegory — the “lime” of the allegorical tree whose roots stood in the air — and the kapoer of the kapoer-gala-gala caulking of Pati Oenoes’s fighting-junk of 1513.
Significance
For AcehWiki, kapoer baroer is the principal trade-good whose name underlies the bedekte taal register of Malay-Javanese historical geography — the camphor of Barus that gave its name to the bahasa kapoer of Malajoe, to the Atjehnese fleet’s governorship, and to the kapoer of the Melasaké pampang allegory. Its identification with the Taroema of the chronicle tradition also marks it as the principal west-coast landmark of pre-Atjehnese Sumatra in Arabic, Chinese and European trade record.
See Also
- Barus
- Alleredin Mahomet
- Atjehsche vloot
- Atjeh-Aroe War (1539)
- Bedekte taal
- Bahasa kapoer
- Minjak tanah
- Melasaké pampang
- Taroema
- Marco Polo
- Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java
Source
Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java, by P. de Roo de la Faille (Den Haag: Maart 1954), chapters “Mendez Pinto op Sumatra” (pp. 7-12) and “Melasaké pampang” (pp. 38-42).