The Shahbandar of Atjeh (sjabbandar, sjahbander, harbour-master; in Joh. Langhout’s discussion also the root of the havenkoningschap, “harbour-kingship”) was the harbour official of the Atjehnese ports under the sultanate — the officer who received the first Dutch visitors (1599) as well as the main actor of the mid-seventeenth-century port régime, whose “geldzucht” (greed) Langhout blames for the recurring collapse of Dutch-Atjehnese trade relations, and whose thirst for exclusive harbour domains starved the interior of the realm.
The sjahbander of 1599
At the first Dutch anchorage in the roadstead of Atjeh (July 1599), it was “de Sjahbander, ofwel havenmeester” (“the Shahbandar, that is harbour-master”) whose visit to the Dutch ships preceded the poisoning of the crews and the attack that killed Cornelis de Houtman and 68 sailors — the hostile frame being set, as Langhout reports, by Portuguese instigation (see De Houtman brothers’ voyage to Atjeh (1599-1600)).
The harbour-master régime of 1640–1651
After the restoration of friendship (1640), the successor of Iskandar Muda was “a young prince’s son, without experience”, and “for de sjahbanders in Atjeh was het feit, dat de nieuwe Soeltan de kinderschoenen nauwelijks ontgroeid bleek, een welkome aanleiding om de havengelden zoo hoog mogelijk op te voeren en enorm hooge havenrechten te eischen” — a welcome occasion to raise the harbour dues as high as possible: in name the young Sultan wielded the sceptre, but in fact it were the sjahbandars. By driving up the harbour dues they swelled their incomes, and the possibility arose that the Hollanders would in that way be expelled from their roadsteads; their greed was the cause that concluding new and confirming existing relations had to remain behind — the deterioration that ended in the murder of the Hollanders of 1651 and the blockade.
The havenkoningschap
Discussing why all centralizing endeavours of the sultans failed, Langhout gives the harbour-kingship a structural place in Atjeh’s constitution: “het ‘havenkoningschap’, dat voor de betrokken vorsten groote financieele voordeelen opleverde, een groote rol gespeeld heeft” — the kingship over the harbours, producing great financial advantages for the princes concerned, while “de binnenlandsche aangelegenheden eenvoudig aan haar lot werden overgelaten” (“the interior matters were simply left to their fate”): the harbour-kings had their eye ever fixed on an extension of their power toward other harbours, and to this striving the interior was sacrificed — or at most satisfied with the few edicts that were never complied with. The edicts themselves regulated the trade confined to the chief places and defined the advantages of that trade for some officials established in the chief places (see Edicts of the Atjehnese sultans).
Significance
Together with the zelfbestuur reading of Atjeh history (see Zelfbestuur and Wingewest), the sjabbandar/havenkoning complex served Langhout as the institutional explanation of why no regulated trade or administration could strike root in pre-1873 Atjeh — the contrast with the customs and harbour order which the colonial state later imposed through the scheepvaartregeling and the company harbour of Sabang.
See Also
- Edicts of the Atjehnese sultans
- Murder of the Hollanders and blockade of Atjeh (1651)
- Zelfbestuur and Wingewest
- Acheh
Source
Vijftig jaren economische staatkunde in Atjeh, by Joh. Langhout (The Hague: N.V. Boekhandel v/h W. P. van Stockum & Zoon, 1923), pp. 10, 13–14, 22–23.