Raijah piracy (20 July 1893)

The Raijah piracy was the seizure of, and massacre aboard, the steamer Raijah of the Indische Paketvaart on the night of 20 July 1893, off the north coast of Atjeh near the small statelet of Kerti. Seven men from Pedir, smuggled aboard in the ship’s hold by an Acehnese member of her own crew, rose in the darkness, killed the helmsman, the second mate and the captain, drove the surviving passengers and crew before them in what the account calls een algemeen bloedbad — a general bloodbath — ran the vessel onto the beach, and went ashore with their plunder and five women. Before quitting the ship they stove in the boats they left behind, so that those who afterwards tried to reach the shore drowned. Of the passengers and crew, twenty-four were killed, twelve wounded, and eighteen drowned. The plunder proved almost worthless: the money-consignment the pirates had come for had never been aboard.

The episode is preserved in detail by P. H. R. Beuming, a former non-commissioned officer of the Netherlands Indies Army, who placed it at the close of the introductory chapter of Schetsen uit den strijd op Groot-Atjeh (1911) as, in his words, een enkel staaltje aan te halen van de driestheid der Atjehsche zeeroovers — to cite a single specimen of the audacity of the Acehnese sea-rovers. His narrative is the source of everything recorded below, and its polemical purpose is discussed in the closing sections of this article.

The sea and its reputation

Beuming introduced the affair by way of a long characterisation of the Acehnese as a maritime power. Gelijk de Noormannen eertijds de schrik van Europa waren, zoo ook waren de Atjehers gedurende vele eeuwen de schrik van geheel Sumatra en omliggende eilanden geworden — as the Norsemen were once the terror of Europe, so the Acehnese had for many centuries become the terror of all Sumatra and the surrounding islands. Already in the days when the Portuguese traded with the Indies, he wrote, they were notorious and feared for their bold zeerooverijen (acts of piracy), and many a richly laden merchantman fell into their hands as prize.

The instrument of this reputation was the prauw, the slender, fast-sailing native vessel. Beuming’s account is illustrated by a photograph of one such craft lying in the lagoon at Oleh-leh, captioned as een Atjehsche Handels- of Smokkelprauw — an Acehnese trading or smuggling prauw — with the note that this particular vessel had been brought in and condemned as prize in 1896 because weapons and ammunition were found aboard her, destined for Panglima Polem. In these light, swift boats, Beuming wrote, the Acehnese went to the surrounding islands to trade; but not seldom weapons and ammunition were smuggled in with them, and if a favourable opportunity presented itself at sea, dan ontpopt zich de vreedzame handelaar in een vreeselijke zeeroover — then the peaceable trader unmasked himself as a terrible sea-rover.

With weergalooze driestheid — matchless audacity — they had even carried out landings with their raiding-prauws on the coast of nearby Malakka, plundering the coastal places and carrying the inhabitants away with them as slaves. Atjeh had thus, in Beuming’s characterisation, marked itself in earlier centuries as een echte roofstaat — a true robber-state — and possessed great influence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The diplomatic frame

Beuming traced the Dutch predicament directly to this maritime record. In consequence of the numerous acts of piracy, he wrote, the Netherlands bound itself in 1824 towards England to reach an arrangement with the Sultan of Atjeh for the security of trade and navigation — while preserving Atjeh’s independence. Such an arrangement was first concluded in 1857, but it brought the Dutch not a step further, because the relation between the Dutch and the Sultan remained continually strained and hostile.

The essential difficulty, in his telling, was that the Netherlands Indies government kon geen afdoende middelen aanwenden ter beteugeling van den zeeroof — could apply no conclusive means to the curbing of piracy — because Atjeh’s independence had to be respected. That obligation was lifted by the Sumatra Tractaat concluded with England in 1871, by which England renounced its claims on Atjeh and received in exchange the Dutch coast of Guinea. When all attempts to bring the Sultan to better views by diplomatic means failed, and it was learned that envoys of the Sultan had been at Singapore with the consuls of America and Italy to seek help against the Dutch, the forbearance of the Netherlands government was at an end, and on 26 March 1873 war was declared on the Sultan of Atjeh.

This chain of reasoning — piracy to treaty obligation to war — is Beuming’s own, and the Raijah narrative is deployed as its final proof; see Beuming’s account of the origin of the Atjeh-oorlog and the Atjeh-oorlog generally.

The state of the war in 1893

By the year of the Raijah affair the Dutch position had contracted severely. Beuming recorded that through a succession of unfavourable influences under successive governors, the Dutch were by 1892 masters only of een kleine terreinstrook buiten Kota Radja — a small strip of terrain outside Kota Radja — secured by a chain of posts of permanent bentings (forts), connected to one another by a steam tram. This was the geconcentreerde linie, the concentrated line, within which the Dutch garrison sat while the coast beyond remained effectively beyond their control. The Raijah was steaming along precisely that coast.

The ship and her voyage

The Raijah was a steamer of the Indische Paketvaart. On 20 July 1893 she left Oleh-leh, the port of Kota Radja, bound for Penang by way of Segli, Telok Semawé and Edi — the ordinary coasting run along the north coast and round to the east, calling at the open ports of the scheepvaartregeling, the shipping regulation by which the Dutch controlled which Acehnese roadsteads vessels might enter.

Besides her ordinary cargo, the ship was said to carry something more. According to rumour — volgens geruchten — there was a large sum of money aboard, intended for the controleur at Edi, the civil administrator of that district. It was a rumour of the kind that travelled easily along a coast where every port call was watched, and it did not need to be true to be acted upon.

The seven from Pedir

The rumour was sufficient, in Beuming’s phrase, for seven men of Pedir om een plan op touw te zetten — to set a plan afoot — to make themselves master of ship and cargo. Pedir lay on the north coast west of Telok Semawé; its people had a long-standing reputation in Dutch accounts for exactly this kind of enterprise.

The plan turned on the complicity of a man already aboard. At the moment of the ship’s departure from Telok Semawé — with the vessel about to stand out from the roadstead and the attention of the officers taken up with getting under way — the seven well-armed robbers were smuggled aboard op een behendige wijze, in an adroit manner, by an Acehnese belonging to the crew, and stowed away in the hold among the cargo. Beuming does not name this man, and does not record what became of him.

Seven armed men therefore lay concealed below decks as the Raijah cleared Telok Semawé and turned eastward along the coast toward Edi, and no one on the bridge knew they were there.

The night

Beuming’s account of what followed is the fullest passage in his introduction, and he narrates it as a scene. When in the evening all on the ship lay in deep rest, and slechts het eentonig gestamp der machine de stilte verbrak — only the monotonous stamping of the engine broke the silence — one of the seven came up on deck.

He did not strike at once. He went to the man at the wheel and struck up a conversation with him, asking whether the ship was in the neighbourhood of Kerti. Kerti, Beuming explains for his readers, was a small statelet on the north coast of Atjeh lying eastward of Telok Semawé; this stretch of coast appeared to the conspirators the most suitable for their plan — close enough to run the ship ashore and disappear inland, and far enough from any Dutch post to make pursuit unlikely.

The helmsman answered that it was. It was the last thing he did. Nauwelijks had de roerganger het bevestigend antwoord gegeven, of hij werd plotseling overvallen en met een rentjong afgemaakt — scarcely had the helmsman given the affirmative answer when he was suddenly set upon and despatched with a rentjong, the Acehnese dagger or kris, which Beuming glosses for his readers in a footnote.

The bridge

With the wheel unattended, the bandits ran for the bridge and fell upon the second mate, a Mr. Alexander, who had the watch. He resisted: Beuming records een kort handgemeen, a short hand-to-hand struggle, before he too was killed. With the helmsman and the officer of the watch both dead, the ship was running blind along a lee shore in the dark.

The bloodbath

What followed Beuming calls simply een algemeen bloedbad, a general bloodbath. Al wat hun in den weg kwam, werd overhoop gestoken — everything that came in their way was stabbed down. The killing was not selective; it swept the decks.

The captain, asleep below, heard the tumult and came up. He had barely appeared on deck when he received two thrusts in the belly. He turned and fled back to his cabin, and was still able to close the door behind him — but he died shortly afterwards, alone behind it. Beuming does not give his name.

The panic aboard, he wrote, was onbeschrijfelijk — indescribable — and the ship was now wholly delivered over to the robbers.

The engine-room

Two groups survived by different means. The European engineers saved themselves by shutting themselves into the engine-room, below the waterline and behind a door the pirates evidently did not force. They stayed there, hearing what happened above them, for as long as the pirates remained aboard.

A part of the crew was less fortunate, and was geprest — pressed, compelled — to help the robbers further. It was with this coerced labour that the last act was carried out.

The beaching

The ship was run onto the beach. Whether the pressed crew were made to steer her in or to work the engines, Beuming does not say; but the Raijah was deliberately driven ashore on the Kerti coast, which had been the object of the question put to the dying helmsman hours before.

The bandits then went ashore with their booty — and with five women, taken from among those aboard. Beuming records their abduction in a single clause and says nothing further of their fate.

The empty prize

The plunder, Beuming observed drily, zal wel erg tegengevallen zijn — must have been a severe disappointment. The money-consignment for the controleur at Edi, the rumour of which had set the whole enterprise in motion, had not travelled with the Raijah at all. It had gone with another vessel, the Hok Canton. Twenty-four people had been killed for a cargo that did not contain the thing the killers had come for.

The scuttled boats

The cruellest detail of the affair comes last in the sequence. A part of the passengers, seeing the pirates gone and the ship aground, also wished to get ashore. They took to the boats that had been left aboard — and thirteen people died in the attempt, because before quitting the ship the robbers hadden de aan boord achtergelaten booten lek geslagen, had stove in the boats left behind, holing them so that they would not swim.

The reckoning

Beuming gives the totals in a single sentence: of the passengers and crew, twenty-four were killed, twelve wounded, and eighteen drowned — 24 gedood, 12 gewond en verdronken er 18.

Category	Number
Killed	24
Wounded	12
Drowned	18

The relationship between the thirteen who died attempting to reach the shore in the holed boats and the eighteen recorded as drowned is not made explicit in the text; the thirteen are most plausibly counted within the eighteen, but Beuming does not say so, and the arithmetic of the disaster cannot be reconstructed with certainty from his account alone. Named victims are few: the second mate Alexander is the only individual identified by name, while the helmsman and the captain — the first and third to die — appear only by their functions.

The rockets and the Madura

After the sea-rovers had departed, the engineers came out of the engine-room onto a ship that was aground and full of dead. Beuming records that they gave distress signals by means of vuurpijlen (rockets) — die door vuurpijlen noodseinen gaven — fired into the night over the Kerti coast.

They were seen. The warship Madura was in the neighbourhood, dat oogenblikkelijk hulp verleende — which immediately rendered assistance. The presence of a Netherlands man-of-war close inshore on that stretch of coast is itself a comment on the state of Acehnese waters in 1893: the navy was there precisely because the coast was not secure, and it arrived only after everything had already happened.

Beuming’s use of the episode

Beuming closed his introduction with the narrative and drew from it exactly the conclusion he had built the chapter to support. Met dit staaltje is zeker wel afdoende de vermetelheid der Atjehers in ‘t licht gesteld — with this specimen the temerity of the Acehnese has surely been sufficiently brought to light — en kan men zich eens een voorstelling maken, tot welke daden dit volkje in staat is — and one may form a conception of what deeds this little people is capable of.

The judgement is the author’s own and belongs to the polemical frame of his introduction, whose declared object was de ware oorzaak van den Atjeh-krijg — the true cause of the Atjeh war. The narrative functions in his text as the closing exhibit in a case for the necessity of the war: piracy makes a treaty obligation, the obligation makes a war, and the Raijah proves that the piracy was real. Read as evidence rather than as argument, the account is a report of a specific criminal act by seven named-as-Pedirese individuals and one accomplice in the crew; the generalisation from those eight men to dit volkje, this little people, is Beuming’s inference and not a finding of his narrative. No Acehnese account of the affair is recorded in his text, no judicial proceedings are mentioned, and the perpetrators are never said to have been caught. See Beuming’s account of the origin of the Atjeh-oorlog.

Significance

The Raijah affair is significant on several distinct levels. As an event, it was one of the deadliest single acts of piracy recorded on the Acehnese coast during the Atjeh-oorlog, with a death toll — forty-two dead by killing and drowning together — exceeding that of many of the land engagements described elsewhere in Beuming’s own book.

As evidence of conditions, it illustrates the limits of Dutch maritime control in 1893, two decades into the war: a scheduled mail-and-passenger steamer of the Indische Paketvaart, running between recognised open ports under the scheepvaartregeling, could be boarded at a Dutch-supervised roadstead, captured at sea, and beached on the coast, with a Dutch warship near enough to see her distress rockets but not near enough to prevent any of it. The complicity of an Acehnese crew member points to the same difficulty from the other direction — the piracy of the north coast was not external to the shipping system but able to operate from inside it.

As a historiographical object, the passage is a compact example of how the Dutch colonial literature of the war constructed its justification, moving from an individual atrocity to a collective characterisation of a people, and it is chiefly for this reason that the episode was still being retold in 1911, eighteen years after the event, in a pamphlet published for the benefit of a convalescent home for state officials.

Source

Schetsen uit den strijd op Groot-Atjeh, met speciaal vervaardigde kaart en toepasselijke photo’s, bewerkt door P. H. R. Beuming, oud-onderofficier van het Ned.-Indische Leger (Amsterdam, December 1911; uitgegeven ten bate van het te stichten Herstellingsoord voor Rijks-Ambtenaren). Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, Br N 82-144, pp. 6–11.

Acknowledgement of sources. The material in this article derives from Schetsen uit den strijd op Groot-Atjeh, met speciaal vervaardigde kaart en toepasselijke photo’s, bewerkt door P. H. R. Beuming, oud-onderofficier van het Ned.-Indische Leger (Amsterdam, December 1911). Dutch passages are quoted in the original with an English rendering. All characterisations of the Acehnese as a people reproduced above are the author’s own and are attributed to him in the text.

Note on the text. The Dutch is quoted from a machine-readable transcription of the pamphlet in which a number of scanning errors are present (for example betengeling for beteugeling, centonig for eentonig, achtergelaton for achtergelaten, handelnar for handelaar, Smokkelpranw for Smokkelprauw, and noodscinen for noodseinen). Obvious errors of this kind have been silently corrected to Beuming’s evident intended spelling; no wording has been altered. Beuming names only the second mate, Alexander; the captain and the helmsman are identified in his text by their functions alone, and the names of the seven perpetrators, of the Acehnese crew member who smuggled them aboard, and of the five women taken ashore are not recorded.

tags	event, piracy, aceh, 1893, shipping, noordkust, pedir, atrocity, narrative, keureutoe, paketvaart, zeeroverij
aliases	Raijah piracy (20 July 1893), Raijah piracy, seizure of the steamer Raijah, Raijah affair 1893, kaping van de Raijah, piracy of the Raijah, Raijah massacre, the taking of the Raijah, Raijah outrage, the Kerti piracy, massacre aboard the Raijah

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