The capture of a British brig by Tunku Pakih in early 1818 was a maritime incident at Acheh that helped shape the conditions under which the first Acheh mission of Captain Coombs was conducted. A few days before Coombs arrived at the Acheh roads, Tunku Pakih of Pedir — known in the Dutch text as toekoe Packie — overhauled a brig sailing under English colours.
The incident was raised by Coombs with the Achehnese chiefs upon his arrival. According to Van der Kemp, the chiefs expressed indignation at the scandal and undertook to call Tunku Pakih to account. Their promise appears to have been purely formal, since no action followed; the chiefs’ ready assurances were a typical feature of Achehnese diplomacy, in which appearance and substance were easily parted. The episode was nonetheless of diplomatic consequence, for it formed one of the outrages against the British flag for which Sultan Jauhar Alum was later required to make an apology before the Raffles–Coombs commission would open formal negotiations with him at Pedir in 1819.
The capture also exemplified the anarchic condition of the Sumatran coast in the years before the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824. Tunku Pakih, who appears in Van der Kemp’s narrative as a zeeroover of considerable local standing, was at once a servant of Jauhar Alum’s cause and an independent operator whose depredations complicated the sultan’s relations with European powers. His death at the hands of the Shahbandar of Acheh in 1819 would clear the way for the Treaty of Pedir, but the brig incident itself remained, in British memories, one of the outrages that the 1819 treaty was meant to remedy.
See Also
- Tunku Pakih
- Captain Coombs
- Captain Coombs’ first Acheh mission (1817-1818)
- Raffles-Coombs Acheh Commission (1819)
- Treaty of Pedir (1819)
- Death of Tunku Pakih
- Acheh
- Pedir
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.