The Expeditions against Malacca and Pahang were the celebrated naval and military ventures undertaken by the sultans of Acheh in the seventeenth century against the Portuguese in Malacca and the Malay state of Pahang. C. Snouck Hurgronje mentions them in The Achehnese as the most glorious achievements of the short-lived period of Achehnese prosperity, when the sultanate was still able to project force well beyond its own coasts and to maintain a sort of lordship over the neighbouring seas and harbours.
Historical Context
The seventeenth century was the high-water mark of Achehnese power. Under Sultan Meukuta Alam (1607–1636) and his successors, the port of Banda-Acheh became one of the great emporia of the Eastern trade, and the sultans claimed a monopoly of commerce which they enforced with their fleets. The Achehnese attacks on Portuguese Malacca formed part of the wider Malay-Indonesian struggle against the European presence in the Straits, and were undertaken with the support of the Ottoman and Mughal connections cultivated by the Achehnese court. The attack on Pahang, on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, was one of several punitive expeditions by which the sultans of Acheh asserted their predominance over the Malay states.
Significance
Snouck Hurgronje treats these expeditions as the closing chapter of the truly sovereign activity of the Achehnese sultanate. With their end, he observes, “ended all such glorious expeditions”; the bold seafarers and pirates of Acheh continued indeed to make themselves dreaded along the coasts of Sumatra and among the surrounding islands, but the sultanate was no longer capable of sustained maritime enterprise. The monopoly of trade claimed by the great sultans could in the end no longer be maintained. It was only a few of the dependencies that dared to refuse payment of the tcase — the sultan’s share of the harbour dues — though they managed to reduce the amounts demanded by bargaining.
Legacy
The sums collected by expeditions sent round for this purpose, together with the sadly dwindled harbour dues of Banda-Acheh, formed the principal sources of revenue of the later sultans; much of this, however, stuck to the fingers of collectors and administrators. The slave-traders of Acheh, who were until quite recently the terror of Nias and the adjacent islands, were the direct descendants — in spirit if not in organisation — of the privateers and raiders of the great century. The expeditions against Malacca and Pahang thus stand at the head of a long tradition of Achehnese maritime aggression which the Dutch, when they came to enforce the security of trade and shipping in the nineteenth century, found still very much alive.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.