The Hastings letter incident of 1786 — the receipt by Warren Hastings, former Governor-General of Bengal, of a discourteous reply from the then sultan of Acheh to an expression of goodwill — is cited by C. Snouck Hurgronje in the introduction to The Achehnese as one of the early European experiences that defined the impossibility of normal diplomatic relations with the sultanate. Together with the Fullerton memorandum of 1825 and the testimony of Captain Francis Light, it served to fix in the British mind the conviction that no treaty with Acheh could be effective without a substantial military force.
The Incident
In 1786, Warren Hastings received from the then Sultan of Acheh a discourteous letter in reply to an expression of goodwill. The incident is mentioned by Snouck Hurgronje in the same paragraph as the testimony of Captain Francis Light, who in that same year pointed out to the Governor-General of Bengal that a settlement at Pulau Pinang (Penang) possessed greater advantages than one on the Achehnese coast. Light’s letter, quoted in full by Snouck Hurgronje, runs:
“Acheen is a good road but no place of security against an enemy there. The country is fertile beyond description and very populous. The inhabitants rigid and superstitious Mohammedans, sullen, fickle and treacherous. To form a settlement there of safety and advantage, a force sufficient to subdue all the chiefs would be necessary.”
The Hastings letter incident thus belongs to the same body of British experience as the [Treaty of 1819 with “Johor Allum as king of Acheen”] — concerning whom the Chairman of the Company wrote to Bengal on 4 August 1824: “that chief, so far as we can collect from your correspondence, not having possessed an established authority in the country which he assumed to represent, has never been in a situation to maintain the relations into which he entered.”
Historical Context
The incident took place against the background of more than a century of European attempts to establish friendly relations with Acheh — attempts that, as Snouck Hurgronje observes, “were overridden in the most insulting way.” The arrangements which the British East India Company made with Acheh at the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century for the establishment of friendly relations “were overridden in the most insulting way”; this can be verified, Snouck Hurgronje notes, by reference to the recent essay of P. H. van der Kemp on the treaty made with Acheh by Raffles in 1819, in which long extracts have been quoted from the archives of the India Office.
Legacy
The Hastings letter incident is one of a series of frustrations that defined the European view of Acheh throughout the century preceding the first Dutch attack of 1873. The experience of Hastings in 1786 was confirmed by Captain Light in the same year, by James Price (who preferred Penang to the port of Acheen “as being more healthy and entirely free from that oppression, war and confusion which have ever distressed and at length driven out every European nation who has attempted to settle there”), and by Governor Fullerton in 1825. The same experience was eventually acquired by the Dutch themselves, after a long struggle, when the Achehnese war taught them what Hastings and Light had known from the first: that no treaty with the sultan of Acheh could be effective without “a force sufficient to subdue all the chiefs.”
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.