Frederik de Houtman’s Atjeh captivity (1599-1601) — the two-year imprisonment of the Dutch navigator Frederik de Houtman at the court of the Sultan of Atjeh following the ambush of 11 September 1599 in which his brother Cornelis de Houtman was killed — is the central Dutch-Atjeh episode of the early period of the northern European presence in the Indonesian archipelago. Told at length by Johan van der Woude in his Van der Woude (1948) on the basis of Houtman’s own narrative, the captivity is the principal first-person Dutch account of the Achehnese court before the founding of the VOC in 1602.
The ambush and the capture
When the ambush of 11 September 1599 took place, Frederik de Houtman was captain of the Leeuwin; he and twenty-seven of his men were taken on shore or out of the sloop at Pedir and brought back to Atjeh as prisoners. Cornelis de Houtman had been killed in the cabin of the Leeuw in the same attack. The sultan offered to release the captives in exchange for one of the Dutch ships, but Frederik refused — “datwy geen macht, om een schip noch vant minste daer in was en hadden tegeuen, ende dat wy maer Dienaers, en waren vande schepen, ende degene die het goedt toequamen” — and the two Zeeland ships withdrew. The sultan then put the prisoners to work on his fleet, where they served against Djohor and against the Portuguese at sea.
Houtman’s narrative and its character
Van der Woude draws attention to the unusual quality of Houtman’s account. His Cort Verhale vant ‘gene wederuaren is Frederick de Houtman — “klaarblijkelijk later achter elkaar is opgeschreven, wellicht aan de hand van vluchtige notities” — has “een onloochenbaar accent van echtheid”. Houtman’s steady, deliberate conduct throughout his captivity “dat respect afdwong en dat hij wellicht daaraan het behoud van zijn leven te danken heeft gehad” is the moral centre of Van der Woude’s chapter. The sultan’s repeated pressure on him to convert to Islam — “die niet afliet hem te pressen Mohammedaan te worden” — was resisted with the biblical verse Luke 12:11, “En wanneer zij u heenbrengen zullen in de synagogen en tot de overheden en de machten, zoo zijt niet bezorgd, hoe of wat gij tot verantwoording zeggen of wat gij spreken zult”; Van der Woude treats Houtman’s scriptural stance as the formal explanation of his survival.
The flight from Pedir and recapture
A key episode is Houtman’s flight. In 1600, five of the surviving Dutch captives escaped from Pedir in a prauw and reached Paulus van Caerden’s ships safely. Van Caerden informed the sultan, who magnanimously granted the fugitives their freedom but in return demanded an advance payment on the pepper contract he had signed. Van Caerden unwisely agreed, although the fugitives had already warned him that they had been sent to Pedir specifically to call the Atjeh fleet down on the Dutch. On 30 December 1600, Houtman himself escaped with three companions, having fashioned a sail and oars; their prauw overturned in the surf but they reached Van Caerden’s ship on New Year’s Eve 1601.
Houtman, characteristically, then offered to return to shore to maintain the good relations with the sultan, since the new pepper crop would not be ready for months. The sultan granted him his freedom. But on his return to land Houtman was suddenly arrested on a fabricated charge of theft at the instigation of the sabander of Pedir, chained, and with three companions transported back to Pedir in irons. Van Caerden, fearing that no delivery would follow the money he had advanced, seized pepper from Arab junks at anchor on 12 January 1601 — an act Van der Woude defends as justified under the circumstances, although the Zeeland merchants later repaid the Arab claimants.
Release and aftermath
Houtman remained in irons through the spring and summer of 1601, even as the strategic situation at Atjeh shifted. When the Middelburgsche Compagnie fleet under Hans Huybrecht Tonneman arrived on 23 August 1601 bearing a letter from Prince Maurits and gifts, the sultan — already alienated from the Portuguese by the unguarded behaviour of the Franciscan monk and by Portuguese seizures of Arab ships — changed his posture. He ordered Houtman’s chains struck off (“die hij acht maanden lang had gedragen”) and released him and his surviving companions without ransom. The Zeelanders then dispatched their own embassy to Prince Maurits — the Atjeh embassy to Prince Maurits of 1601 — and Houtman’s captivity was at an end.
Significance
Frederik de Houtman’s Atjeh captivity is, in Van der Woude’s narrative, the principal instance of the early-modern Dutch experience of Achehnese imprisonment and the only extended first-person Dutch account of the Achehnese court in the pre-VOC period. The narrative shaped the Dutch understanding of the Achehnese for decades: Houtman’s steadfastness under pressure to convert became a stock theme, and his description of the sultan’s balancing policy between the European powers provided the empirical basis for the bewindhebbers’ later conclusion that no monopoly could be obtained at Atjeh by treaty alone. The captivity also frames the sultan’s court as the site where the European nations first encountered one another face to face in the Indies — Dutch, English, French and Portuguese factors all present at once in 1601-1602 — and where the policy of “playing the foreigners against each other” that would mark Achehnese diplomacy for the next three centuries was first observed and recorded by a Dutch captive.
See Also
- Houtman brothers’ visit to Atjeh (1599)
- Cornelis de Houtman
- Frederik de Houtman
- Sultan of Atjeh (1589-1604)
- Paulus van Caerden’s Atjeh visit (1600-1601)
- Zeeland Company’s Atjeh mission (1601)
- Atjeh embassy to Prince Maurits (1601)
- Prince Maurits
- Sabander
- Pedir
- Acheh
- 1599
- 1600
- 1601
Source
Coen, Koopman van Heeren Zeventien. Geschiedenis van den Hollandshen Handel in Indië (1598-1614), by Johan van der Woude (Amsterdam: C.V. Uitgeverij v/h C. De Boer Jr., 1948), Hoofdstuk V “Voorgangers, Hollanders en mededingers tot 1614. Atjeh. Djohor. Malaka.” (pp. 109-116).
Cort Verhale vant ‘gene wederuaren is Frederick de Houtman, cited in Van der Woude (1948), Ch. V, n. 3.