The Bandjir flood of Kota Radja (December 1874) was the eight-day inundation of K. Radja and all the riverside posts of the Dutch establishment by the Atjeh-rivier and the Kroeng Daroe, which in the last days of November and the first days of December 1874 overflowed their banks after the heaviest rains in living memory, drowned the ground-floors of the hospital barracks, spoiled vast quantities of vivres, munitions and clothing, dissolved all the salt in the magazines, and forced more than five hundred sick soldiers to be carried at the double to higher ground in the middle of the Kraton.
The rain
In the last days of November and the beginning of December 1874 it rained day and night with unbroken violence. More rain fell in a few days, Borel records, than in the entire previous year. Both the Atjeh-rivier and the Kroeng Daroe overflowed. For eight days K. Radja and all the riverside posts — Marine-benteng, Penajoeng, Pakan Atjeh — were heavily stricken. Water rose to the roofs of the hospital barracks; many barracks were abandoned, and the troops bivouacked on the wal-gang of the parapet under fierce rain. For the first days no soup or hot food could be cooked. All the salt in the magazines dissolved; vast quantities of vivres, clothing and munitions were spoiled.
The sick
More than five hundred sick had to be rushed on the first day to higher ground in the middle of the Kraton, “in aller ijl.” The damage to the health of the troops was, in Borel’s view, worse than the material loss: sickness and death rates climbed ontzettend in the weeks that followed. The dwangarbeiders (convict labourers) and coolies suffered worst.
Borel’s verdict
Borel’s verdict is sharp. The calamity, he writes, could have been avoided if the Kraton buildings had been built on piles, as the Atjehneezen themselves built. The Dutch, by constructing ground-floor bamboo barracks on a flooded river plain, had constructed their own disaster. The bandjir was the proximate cause of the cholera catastrophe of February 1875, in which nearly five hundred would die in the K. Radja ambulances alone, and of the decision — finally taken in early 1875 — to move all ambulances to the grass plain of Pantej Perak on the right bank of the river.
See Also
- Kota Radja
- Atjeh-rivier
- Kroeng Daroe
- Marine-benteng
- Penajoeng
- Pakan Atjeh
- Pantej Perak
- Cholera catastrophe at Kota Radja (February 1875)
- Generaal Pel
- 1874
Source
Onze vestiging in Atjeh, critisch beschreven, by G. F. W. Borel, Kapitein der Artillerie. ‘s-Gravenhage: D. A. Thieme, 1878. pp. 219–223, 254–256.