Gegevens betreffende den bodem van Sumatra’s Oostkust — Data concerning the soil of Sumatra’s East Coast — is a soil-survey monograph by F. C. van Heurn, a chemical engineer who had been attached for some years to the Avros research station at Medan. The book is cited by Broersma in Verkenningen in Atjeh for its judgement on the soils of Tamiang.
The Tamiang Judgement
Broersma quotes Van Heurn’s verdict on page 103 of the soil-survey: the tertiary hill-land of Tamiang differs from the mountains of the same formation in that its surface consists mainly of clays and clay-stones, while the marls and sandstones which elsewhere appear as sandy hills are here in the minority. The sandy patches are as unfruitful as the sandy tertiary soils of Bengkalis, but the clays, ‘bij behoorlijke drainage voor Europeesche cultures voortreffelijke eigenschappen te bezitten’ — with proper drainage possess excellent properties for European cultures. Broersma comments drily that Van Heurn does not say how the clays have proved those excellent properties: ‘dat hebben bewezen, zegt de schrijver niet. Door de nu bestaande aanplantingen misschien? Maar dan is het bewijs van te weinig omvang.’ The implication is that the great hopes once held for Tamiang as a planting-country had proved too high.
Significance
The soil-survey is one of the standard works on the agricultural geology of the Oostkust van Sumatra in the early civilian period and is regularly cited for the disappointing performance of the Tamiang and Langsa plantation-groups in the years around 1920.
See Also
Source
Gegevens betreffende den bodem van Sumatra’s Oostkust enz., by F. C. van Heurn, scheikundig ingenieur, verbonden aan het Avros-proefstation te Medan (n.d., c. 1923), p. 103. Cited in Verkenningen in Atjeh by Dr. R. Broersma, p. 8.