The visit of Colonel O’Hallaran to Pedir in 1820 was the unofficial call made by the colonel on Sultan Jauhar Alum at his place of exile on the north coast of Acheh in the early summer of 1820, when the troopship Pinang — outward bound from Penang to Calcutta — called midway at Pedir. The episode is preserved in Van der Kemp’s article through a letter from a fellow-passenger published in a Penang newspaper of 2 June 1820.
Background
By 1820 the situation in Acheh had settled into the unstable equilibrium established by the Raffles-Coombs commission of 1819. Sultan Jauhar Alum, having been recognised by the British as the lawful sultan and put in possession of the arms and money stipulated by Article 8 of the treaty of 1819, had failed to establish himself at the capital and continued to reside at Pedir on the north coast. The pretender Syf ul-Alum had nominally submitted at Telok Semawé but had in fact continued his robber life, and the real power at Acheh itself lay with the federal authority of the Three Sagis. The Penang newspapers, in the hands of the partisans of the late Governor Bannerman, had begun to make merry over the inflated results of Raffles’s mission; and the Asiatic Journal complained that “the object of some partisans at that island [was] to depreciate the acquisitions in territory and influence which Sir Stamford Raffles has effected for the Company.”
The Visit
In the middle of 1820 the troopship Pinang, outward bound for Calcutta, called at Pedir, and Colonel O’Hallaran went ashore to pay his respects to Sultan Djohor. A fellow-passenger, writing from Penang on 2 June 1820, recorded the scene in a letter to the local press. The colonel’s ideas of a sultan, the correspondent observed, were of course founded on the nabobs of Lucknow and other great princes of India; accordingly he “landed here in state shortly after our arrival.” His surprise and embarrassment were “rather amusing” when he saw “a poor creature surrounded only by a set of half starved chooliahs sitting in a wretched common atap house.” The king, however, “behaved with much civility, and talked a great deal about his future plans and operations.” He said — which the correspondent scarcely credited — that the late commissioners had, by their treaty, promised to send him immediately from Penang a lac of rupees and a large supply of military stores, and that his prime minister had gone to receive them. He applied to the officers of the 20th regiment for book-drill, saying he was going to raise a corps of 600 men, and that the moment his military stores arrived he intended to march with his great guns in front, all along the sandy beach from Pedir to his good city of Acheen.
Significance
The correspondent predicted that the Sultan “will never be able to execute one half of his present intentions” — a prediction that, as Van der Kemp drily observes, proved entirely correct. The colonel’s visit is recorded by Van der Kemp not for its diplomatic weight (it had none) but for the light it sheds on the practical hollowness of the Acheh treaty. The sultan who had been recognised by Raffles and Coombs as the lawful ruler of Acheh sat in a wretched atap house at Pedir, surrounded by half-starved Chuliahs, talking wildly of marches he could never make. The correspondence also illustrates the partisan press warfare between Bannerman’s friends and Raffles’s supporters at Penang — a warfare in which the Asiatic Journal deplored the misuse of a free press “if it be suffered to degenerate into an organ of jealousy, and an engine of counteraction between the Company’s own servants.”
See Also
- Colonel O’Hallaran
- Sultan Jauhar Alum
- Pedir
- Acheh treaty of 1819
- Raffles-Coombs Acheh commission
- Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles
- Captain Coombs
- Colonel John Alexander Bannerman
- Three Sagis
- Sultan Saif ul-Alum
- Penang
- Calcutta
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.