The death of Cornelis de Houtman at Atjeh in 1599 was the killing of the Dutch navigator Cornelis de Houtman — commander of the first Dutch expedition to the East Indies of 1595–1597 — at the court of the Sultan of Atjeh during the De Moucheron expedition of 1598–1600. The attack, which began with poisoned fruits and drinks and culminated in a kris-attack, killed many Dutchmen and made Frederik de Houtman a prisoner for twenty-six months — the captivity out of which the first European Malay dictionary would be composed. It is the first Dutch fatality at Atjeh and the trigger of the long diplomatic and commercial entanglement between the sultanate and the United Provinces.
The De Moucheron expedition
The South-Netherlander of French descent Balthasar de Moucheron, trusting the experience of the De Houtman brothers, took them both into his service on a fleet of two ships. The English pilot John Davis served as pilot “om in opdracht van den Graaf van Essex spionnenwerk te verrichten” — to do spy-work on behalf of the Earl of Essex. The voyage to the Indies took fifteen months. The Madagascar population fled at the reappearance of the rough Dutchmen — this was the second Dutch landing there, the first having already left a bad reputation under De Houtman’s own first expedition.
Arrival at Atjeh, June 1599
The fleet reached Atjeh in June 1599. The good understanding with the Sultan Aloeddin lasted only briefly. The cause of the rupture is not stated in Godee Molsbergen’s account, but the immediate form of the Atjehnese response was unmistakable.
The attack: poisoned fruits, drinks, and the kris
“Met vergiftigde vruchten en dranken, later met een krisaanslag, wilde men van die vreemdelingen afkomen” — With poisoned fruits and drinks, later with a kris-attack, they sought to be rid of these foreigners. There were many dead, “waaronder Cornelis de Houtman” — among them Cornelis de Houtman — and many prisoners, “o.a. Frederik de Houtman” — among them Frederik de Houtman. Godee Molsbergen’s account is laconic, but the explicit mention of two distinct phases — first poisoning, then armed attack with the kris — suggests a coordinated court attempt to be rid of the visitors.
The escape to Pedir and the homeward voyage
The ships that escaped Atjeh made for Pedir, where they beat off an Atjehnese naval attack; they then touched at the Nicobars and, after much misfortune, reached Middelburg in the summer of 1600. De Moucheron suffered heavy losses from the expedition. Davis turned his spy-material to English advantage.
The captivity of Frederik de Houtman
Frederik de Houtman remained a prisoner in Atjeh for twenty-six months. He later interpreted the disaster as a mercy of Heaven: he saw in his captivity “de bedoeling des Hemels … om een beginsel (= begin) te wezen, daar door Gods eer en kennis … onder de Heidenen bekend gemaakt” kon worden — the intention of Heaven to be a beginning, through which God’s honour and knowledge might be made known among the heathen — for which he received “het verstand en de genade van de Maleische spraak” — the understanding and grace of the Malay language. See Frederik de Houtman.
The 1600 attempt at release
When Paulus van Caerden of the second Amsterdam fleet visited Atjeh at the end of 1600, De Houtman came aboard the Dutch ships to warn Van Caerden of an impending attack. He then returned to shore, hoping to obtain the release of his fellow-prisoners, to deliver a cargo to Van Caerden, and to negotiate a contract between the Sultan and the Dutch. All in vain — De Houtman remained a prisoner. See Pigskin parchment letter incident at Atjeh (1600).
Release through the 1601 Zeeland ships
De Houtman’s release finally came thanks to a show of Portuguese force and the 1601 embassy of the four Zeeland ships that bore Prince Maurits’s letter pressing for the prisoners’ freedom. The Sultan Aloeddin — fearing a Portuguese alliance with Djohor against him, and displeased at a Portuguese request to build a Spanish-Portuguese fort on one of his islands — agreed to release De Houtman “en zijn vrouw” (and his wife — for the prisoner’s fidelity to his wife in Holland had made a strong impression) and to compensate him for the material losses he had suffered.
The 1602 return embassy
The Sultan’s three ambassadors — Abdoel Hamid, Sri Mohammed and Mir Hassan — sailed for Europe on the returning Zeeland ships. They reached the Republic in 1602 and were received at Prince Maurits’s siege camp at Grave. See Atjeh embassy to Prince Maurits at Grave (1602).
Significance
The death of Cornelis de Houtman at Atjeh in 1599 is the founding disaster of the Dutch-Atjeh relationship — the event that fixed Atjeh in the Dutch colonial memory as a place of danger and of compulsory apprenticeship. The captivity of Frederik that followed produced the first European Malay dictionary and the first European star-catalogue of the southern sky, and the diplomatic chain that connected the 1599 disaster to the 1602 embassy to Maurits at Grave defined the first phase of Dutch-Atjeh diplomacy.
See Also
- Cornelis de Houtman
- Frederik de Houtman
- Balthazar de Moucheron
- John Davis
- Sultan Aloeddin of Atjeh
- Paulus van Caerden
- Prince Maurits
- Atjeh embassy to Prince Maurits at Grave (1602)
- Pigskin parchment letter incident at Atjeh (1600)
- 1599
- 1600
- 1601
- 1602
- Acheh
- Pedir
Source
Tijdens de O.I. Compagnie, by Dr. E. C. Godee Molsbergen, Oud-Hoogleeraar, Landsarchivaris te Batavia (Amsterdam: N.V. Swets & Zeitlinger Boekhandel en Uitgevers Mij., 1932), chapters XXIII, XXXII–XXXIII (“Sint Thomas. De Madoera-ziekte. Malakka. Het groote kanon in Atjeh”; “Het Kasteel van Verre. De brief op varkensvel in Atjeh”; “Atjehers in het kamp van Maurits”), pp. 81, 114–121 of the numbered-letter sequence.