Kaart van het Oorlogstooneel — full title Kaart van het Oorlogstooneel, de Vaarwaters en vereischte Kustlichten voor den Wereldhandel, “Map of the Theatre of War, the Waterways and required Coastal Lights for World Trade” — is a folded map that accompanied the anonymous Dutch pamphlet Beschouwingen over Atjeh en onzen oorlog met dat rijk by Een Ooggetuige, published by Van Meurs & Stufkens in Rotterdam in the 1880s. The map set out the Atjehnese coast, the waterways around it, and the positions at which coastal lights were held to be needed for world trade, and was designed to support the author’s argument on the strategic and commercial value of Atjeh.
Content and purpose
The map was issued as a folding plate inside the Beschouwingen over Atjeh en onzen oorlog met dat rijk. Its full title — Kaart van het Oorlogstooneel, de Vaarwaters en vereischte Kustlichten voor den Wereldhandel — sets out the three things it was designed to show: the theatre of the Atjeh War on shore; the waterways — including the Strait of Halakka and the approaches to the Atjehnese coast — through which world shipping passed; and the coastal lights (kustlichten) that the author held to be required for the safe navigation of those waterways. The map thus served a double purpose: it allowed the reader to follow the military geography of the war, and it allowed the reader to follow the author’s argument on the shipping routes and the lighting of the coast in visual form.
The map and the pamphlet’s argument
The map is one of the elements that gives the Beschouwingen its character as a practical contribution to the strategic debate on the Atjeh War. The author’s central argument is that the Netherlands should not abandon Atjeh, but should instead settle the country on a firmer footing — with better roads, better coastal lights, and a clearer plan for the civil administration of the Atjehnese interior — and that the Atjehnese coast, properly lighted and buoyed, could serve as a station for world shipping on the great sea-route between the Suez Canal and the Far East. The map, by setting out the waterways and the required coastal lights in visual form, allowed the reader to judge that argument at a glance.
Places shown
The map shows the northern tip of Sumatra, the Strait of Malacca, the Strait of Halakka between the Atjehnese mainland and Pulau Weh, and the Atjehnese coast with its principal places — including Panton Laboe and other points named in the pamphlet. The map likewise shows the wider setting of the Atjehnese theatre in relation to the sea approaches to the archipelago, including the Sunda Strait and the Lampong districts in the south of Sumatra, which the author discusses in connection with the sea approaches to Atjeh.
Significance
The Kaart van het Oorlogstooneel is significant within the AcehWiki corpus as a contemporary cartographic document of the Atjeh War. It belongs to the body of Dutch cartographic material on the Atjeh War — including the map of Groot-Atjeh and other maps issued with contemporary accounts of the war — and is notable for its emphasis on the coastal lights and waterways rather than on the military positions alone. The map’s framing of the Atjehnese coast as a station for world trade, and its argument for the lighting of the coast, place it within the wider nineteenth-century debate on the sea approaches to the archipelago, of which the Suez Canal — opened in 1869 — was the decisive modern fact.
See Also
- Beschouwingen over Atjeh en onzen oorlog met dat rijk
- Een Ooggetuige
- Van Meurs & Stufkens
- Aceh War
- Strait of Halakka
- Strand Malaka (Strait of Malacca)
- Sunda Strait
- Sabang
- Panton Laboe
- Map of Groot-Atjeh
- Rotterdam
- 1880s
Source
Beschouwingen over Atjeh en onzen oorlog met dat rijk, door Een Ooggetuige, met een Kaart van het Oorlogstooneel, de Vaarwaters en vereischte Kustlichten voor den Wereldhandel (Rotterdam: Van Meurs & Stufkens, [c. 1880s]). Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, shelfmark 1830 C17 2611 / 1830 0947 8285.
Note on the source text. The surviving copy of the map was digitised and processed through OCR (Nemotron-OCR v2). The OCR output of the map legend is partially legible. The article above reports the title and purpose of the map as stated on the title-page of the pamphlet and in the legible portions of the map legend.