The submission of Saif ul-Alum at Telok Semawé in 1819 was the formal act of submission made by the pretender Syf ul-Alum — known in the Dutch sources as Syf — to the Raffles-Coombs Acheh commission immediately after the conclusion of the Treaty of Pedir (1819) with Sultan Jauhar Alum. Van der Kemp treats the submission as the third, and emptiest, of the three diplomatic acts by which the commission sought to settle the Acheh succession.
Background
By the spring of 1819 the Acheh succession dispute had produced two rival sultans: Jauhar Alum, the old legitimate sultan, established at Pedir on the north coast, and Syf ul-Alum, the pretender, who had been driven from Acheh itself and had taken up his residence at Telok Semawé on the East Coast. The commission sent from Penang under Sir Stamford Raffles and Captain Coombs had instructions to ascertain which of the two parties predominated in the state, and to negotiate with the ruling party. After lengthy deliberation at Penang — in the course of which Governor Bannerman had wished to await the decision of the Bengal government, and Raffles had objected that the Dutch would otherwise forestall them by contracting with Jauhar — the commission chose Jauhar Alum and concluded with him, on 22 April 1819, the treaty of Acheh.
The Submission at Telok Semawé
No sooner was the treaty signed than the Sultan was put in possession of the arms and the bills on Penang to the amount of 100,000 rupees stipulated by Article 8. The commission then steered to Telok Semawé — Van der Kemp’s phrase is om een hartig woord aan sultan Syf te zeggen, “to say a sharp word to Sultan Syf” — and required him to renounce his claims to the throne. Syf replied that he submitted. With this undertaking the commission was content.
Worthlessness of the Submission
The undertaking, Van der Kemp observes, was “as worthless as Jauhar’s treaty.” In July 1819 Syf was still writing to the governor of Penang as Sultan of Acheh, and he continued his robber life unpunished. The brief notice of the submission is therefore introduced by Van der Kemp to underline his recurring theme: that the diplomatic achievements of the Raffles mission — the treaty with Jauhar, the submission of Syf — were purely paper transactions that altered nothing on the ground. Syf’s further career — his raids on the East Coast, his flight to Calcutta, and his eventual retirement on a pension at Penang (see Syf’s flight to Calcutta and Syf’s pension at Penang) — only confirmed, in Van der Kemp’s reading, the insubstantial character of the submission that had been obtained at Telok Semawé.
See Also
- Sultan Saif ul-Alum
- Sultan Jauhar Alum
- Telok Semawé
- Acheh treaty of 1819
- Raffles-Coombs Acheh commission
- Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles
- Captain Coombs
- Colonel John Alexander Bannerman
- Acheh succession dispute
- Pedir
- Syf’s flight to Calcutta
- Syf’s pension at Penang
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.