Atjeh’s attack on Djohor of May 1613 — the Achehnese naval expedition sent by the Sultan of Atjeh’s successor against the kingdom of Djohor, which appeared at the mouth of the Djohor river on 7 May 1613 while the bulk of the Djohor fleet was away at Pahang, took the city of Batoesawer on 6 June 1613 after a brief defence by the small Dutch garrison and the lodge personnel, captured twenty-two of the Dutchmen and brought them back to Atjeh as prisoners, and inaugurated the Achehnese occupation of Djohor that lasted until the rapprochement between the two Malay courts in 1614 — is the closing military episode of the Atjeh chapter of Johan van der Woude’s Van der Woude (1948).
Background: the Atjeh-Djohor-Portuguese triangle
The attack of 1613 was the latest eruption of the long-standing enmity between Atjeh and Djohor that Van der Woude traces back to the 1587 peace between Atjeh and the Portuguese, by which the wingewest of Aru had been transferred to Djohor. Each of the two Malay kingdoms sought Portuguese support against the other; the sultan of Atjeh had sent envoys to Goa in 1598 asking Portuguese help against Djohor, while the sultan of Djohor had concluded his own peace with the Portuguese in 1610 after years of Dutch-supported resistance. The peace of 1610 freed the sultan of Djohor to resume his campaign against Pahang, and it was while the Djohor fleet was at Pahang that the Atjeh fleet descended on the unprotected capital.
The Dutch position at Batoesawer
The Dutch had maintained a factory at Batoesawer, the capital of Djohor, since the mission of Cornelis Pietersz. in 1603 and the second accord of Cornelis Matelieff with the sultan of 23 September 1606. The factor at the time of the attack was Jacques Obelaer, who had succeeded Van den Broeck in February 1609. When the Atjeh fleet appeared on 7 May 1613, the Dutch ship Hope, which had arrived three days earlier to relieve the factor and replenish the factory’s capital, lay at anchor in the river. The Achehnese demanded that the Dutch stand aside; the Dutch refused, in fidelity to the Matelieff-sultan accord, and landed thirty-one men under the factory’s six-man staff to assist the Djohor defence. “Doende daermede die van Atchijn alle mogelijcke affbreuck. Doch dies nietteghenstaande hebben die van Atchijn den 6en Juny de stadt innegecreghen, sijnde haer door die van Joor opgegeven.” Two Dutchmen were killed; twenty-two were taken prisoner and carried off to Atjeh “onder borchtocht van des compagnies goederen”; three wounded men returned to the ship; the rest were missing.
The aftermath and the rapprochement
The prisoners’ fate was bound up with the rapid Achehnese-Djohor reconciliation that followed. Within months the two Malay courts had reached an accommodation: the sultan of Atjeh gave his sister in marriage to the deposed sultan of Djohor — now styled Sultan Sabrang — and sent him back to Djohor with an Achehnese escort of two thousand men to rebuild the destroyed city. The Dutch prisoners were released as part of the rapprochement. Van der Woude notes that “bijna een jaar lang lag de handel nu geheel stil” before the opperkoopman Adriaan van der Dussen arrived at Djohor in August 1614 to negotiate the construction of a fort.
The Dutch role and its limits
The Dutch position at Batoesawer throughout the attack illustrates the limits of the Dutch commitment to Djohor. The fleet of Matelieff had been withdrawn in 1607, the fleet of Verhoeff had been unable to relieve the sultan in 1608 because of contrary winds, and the two ships left at Batoesawer after Verhoeff’s departure in February 1609 had stayed only until November. The Dutch factory survived on the sultan’s sufferance; the Dutch could not defend him against a major Achehnese attack. Van der Woude’s verdict on the Dutch-Djohor alliance is sharp: “ware de vrede tusschen de inlandsche vorsten gesloten, het zou den Hollanders met hulp van beiden weinig moeite hebben gekost Malaka in het Oosten en het Westen te blokkeeren en den Portugeeschen handel op de Noordelijke gebieden te vernietigen.” The Dutch failure to maintain a fleet in Djohor waters in force meant that the strategic opening the sultan of Djohor had offered them — to take Malaka from the Portuguese — was never exploited.
Significance
Atjeh’s attack on Djohor of 1613 is, in Van der Woude’s narrative, the principal instance of the Achehnese projection of naval power against a Malay rival in the period before the Dutch had established a permanent fleet in the Strait of Malaka. The attack also marks the effective end of the Dutch-Djohor military alliance that Matelieff had constructed in 1606: after 1613 the Dutch could no longer count on Djohor as a stable base against the Portuguese, and their attention shifted southward to Jacatra and the eventual founding of Batavia in 1619. The attack is also the principal instance of the Achehnese use of the Dutch prisoners as diplomatic counters: their release was tied to the Achehnese-Djohor marriage alliance of 1614, and the affair showed the Dutch that the sultan of Atjeh’s court was capable of conducting its own regional diplomacy without European mediation. The attack’s aftermath — the rapid Achehnese-Djohor reconciliation, the rebuilding of Batoesawer under Achehnese sponsorship — also marks the limit of the Dutch ability to shape Malay politics in this period, and frames the strategic situation that Coen would inherit as director-general in 1614.
See Also
- Sultan of Atjeh (1589-1604)
- Djohor
- Batoesawer
- Jacques Obelaer
- Cornelis Pietersz.
- Cornelis Matelieff
- Pieter Willemsz. Verhoeff
- Adriaan van der Dussen
- Aru
- Malaka
- Pahang
- Matelieff’s Malaka campaign (1606)
- Verhoeff’s Malaka expedition (1608)
- Acheh
- 1613
- 1614
Source
Coen, Koopman van Heeren Zeventien. Geschiedenis van den Hollandshen Handel in Indië (1598-1614), by Johan van der Woude (Amsterdam: C.V. Uitgeverij v/h C. De Boer Jr., 1948), Hoofdstuk V “Voorgangers, Hollanders en mededingers tot 1614. Atjeh. Djohor. Malaka.” (pp. 132-133).