Captain Canning’s mission to Acheh of 1814 was the visit undertaken by Captain Canning on behalf of the government of Calcutta to the court of Sultan Jauhar Alum of Acheh, for the purpose of arranging safe trade. The mission is chiefly remembered for the highly insulting reception it received from the sultan and his court — a reception that discouraged the government of Penang from active intervention in Achehnese affairs for the next several years and that, by souring Anglo-Achehnese relations, indirectly prepared the ground for the Raffles-Coombs commission of 1819 and the Treaty of Pedir (1819).
Background
Since 1802 the sultanate of Acheh had been torn by the Acheh succession dispute between Sultan Jauhar Alum and the opposition party that would, in mid-1815, install the pretender Syf by means of Said Hussein’s expedition. The government of Pinang had been entrusted with the supervision of Achehnese affairs since the cession of Penang in 1786, but had no particular reason to intervene in the dynastic dispute.
In 1814 the Calcutta government dispatched Captain Canning to Acheh “to arrange for the security of trade.” The mission took place in the closing years of the British interregnum in the Dutch East Indies, while the Netherlands was still under French occupation and the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 13 August 1814 had not yet been concluded. British authority in the region was exercised from Bencoolen and Penang without serious rivalry.
The Insulting Reception
The mission met with what Van der Kemp characterises as “a highly insulting reception” from Sultan Djohor and his court. Van der Kemp’s reference to the Asiatic Journal (vol. IX, p. 404) preserves the principal record. The treatment was of a piece with the insults offered to earlier British emissaries — most famously the sultan’s letter to Warren Hastings of 7 November 1786 — and confirmed Captain Francis Light’s earlier judgement (15 February 1786) that the Achehnese were “rigid and superstitious Mohammedans, sullen, fickle and treacherous.”
Consequences
The insult offered to Canning discouraged the British from any active intervention in Achehnese affairs until the Coombs mission of 1817–18. The government of Pinang had, Van der Kemp notes, “no special reason to intervene,” and chose not to do so when, in mid-1815, Said Hussein’s expedition installed Syf as rival sultan. By the time the question of recognition could no longer be avoided, the dispute had become entangled with the larger Anglo-Dutch rivalry in the archipelago and with Raffles’s alarm at supposed Dutch overtures to Sultan Jauhar Alum at Pedir.
The insulting reception of Canning is also referenced in the later British record: in the Asiatic Journal (vol. IX, p. 40) Van der Kemp notes a passage observing that the 1819 commission required from Jauhar Alum “an apology for past insults and outrages committed against the British nation” before any negotiation could be opened — an apology which the sultan eventually provided and which the commissioners judged sufficient.
See Also
- Acheh succession dispute (1802-1819)
- Captain Canning
- Sultan Jauhar Alum
- Captain Coombs’ first Acheh mission (1817-1818)
- Raffles-Coombs Acheh Commission (1819)
- Treaty of Pedir (1819)
- Sultan of Acheh’s letter to Warren Hastings
- Said Hussein’s expedition to Acheh (1815)
- Captain Francis Light
- Acheh
- Penang
- Calcutta
- Bengal
- Bencoolen
Source
Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819, by P. H. van der Kemp, in Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, 6e Volgr., Deel VII (1900), pp. 159-239. Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit, LS.08781.