The pigskin parchment letter incident at Atjeh of 1600 was a diplomatic fiasco during the visit of Paulus van Caerden’s fleet to Atjeh at the end of 1600. At the solemn reception of the Sultan by Van Caerden, who was to deliver gifts and a letter from Prince Maurits, a Portuguese monk present at the court pointed out to the Sultan that the letter — written on parchment made from the skin of the unclean pig — could not lawfully be touched by a Mohammedan. “Zoo miste’s Prinsen brief zijn doel” — So the Prince’s letter missed its mark. The incident is the source of the chapter-title of chapter XXXII of Godee Molsbergen’s Tijdens de O.I. Compagnie: “Het Kasteel van Verre. De brief op varkensvel in Atjeh.”
Background: the second Amsterdam fleet, 1599
At the end of 1599 two Amsterdam fleets sailed out, independently of each other: one under Pieter Both with Van Caerden as Vice-Admiral, the other under Jacob Wilkens with Cornelis van Heemskerck as his second. Both founded a factory at Bantam. Van Caerden then visited Sumatra’s Westkust (West Coast) and, at the end of 1600, Atjeh.
The audience and the Portuguese monk
At the solemn reception of the Sultan Aloeddin by Van Caerden, who was to deliver gifts and a letter from Prince Maurits, a Portuguese monk was present. The monk drew attention to the fact that the letter was written on parchment made from the skin of the unclean pig — “het vel van het onreine varken” — which a Mohammedan might not lawfully touch.
The intervention was a classic act of Iberian diplomatic sabotage: the Portuguese, hostile to the Dutch intrusion in the Asian trade, used their familiarity with Islamic law to turn the Sultan’s religious scruples against the Dutch embassy. The Sultan, naturally, could not accept the letter. “Zoo miste’s Prinsen brief zijn doel.”
The De Houtman warning
The pepper trade likewise did not go smoothly. Frederik de Houtman — long a prisoner in Atjeh since the disaster of 1599 — came aboard Van Caerden’s ship to warn him 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.
Van Caerden’s reckless conduct
Van Caerden’s expedition was further disfigured “door roekeloos optreden tegenover de inlanders” — by reckless behaviour towards the natives — in particular over the recovery of an advance paid to the Sultan. His conduct, Godee Molsbergen writes, made “den Hollandschen naam in den Archipel gehaat” — the Dutch name hated in the Archipelago.
The consequences were concrete. Neutral Moors (Mooren) whom Van Caerden had wronged obtained, after a lawsuit, 50,000 realen in damages — a staggering sum. The case set a precedent the Dutch would later have to live down.
The 1601 Zeeland ships and the resolution
When the four Zeeland ships returned to Atjeh in August 1601 bearing Prince Maurits’s letter (this time in Spanish, and presumably not on pigskin), the Sultan was conciliatory. Van Caerden’s clumsy conduct was “naar genoegen met den Sultan besproken” — satisfactorily discussed with the Sultan — and the Sultan sent three ambassadors on the returning ships: Abdoel Hamid, Sri Mohammed and Mir Hassan. See Atjeh embassy to Prince Maurits at Grave (1602).
Significance
The pigskin parchment letter incident of 1600 is the first recorded European diplomatic fiasco at the Atjeh court — a textbook example of how a small material detail (the parchment’s origin in pig-skin) could, in the hands of a hostile third party (here a Portuguese monk), defeat an entire embassy. The incident is also a measure of how thin European knowledge of Islamic sensibilities still was at the turn of the seventeenth century: the Dutch had sent a letter from their Prince to a Mohammedan Sultan on the very material most calculated to give offence. The 1602 embassy that resolved the affair would be far more carefully choreographed.
See Also
- Paulus van Caerden
- Sultan Aloeddin of Atjeh
- Prince Maurits
- Frederik de Houtman
- Atjeh embassy to Prince Maurits at Grave (1602)
- Death of Cornelis de Houtman at Atjeh (1599)
- Pieter Both
- 1600
- 1601
- 1602
- Acheh
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), chapter XXXII (“Het Kasteel van Verre. De brief op varkensvel in Atjeh. Bali en Holland één! Van Neck’s reis in 1600”), pp. 114–118 of the numbered-letter sequence.