The Submission of Toekoe Moeda Daoed in August 1879 was the voluntary surrender of Toekoe Moeda Daoed, the chief who exercised authority at Selimoen on the Atjeh-rivier and had hitherto been known as one of the most stubborn enemies of the Dutch arms in the Atjeh-oorlog, together with the other chiefs of the Selimoen country. Opened by a letter borne by the blind priest Habib Machmoed to the Dutch authority at Indrapoeri on 30 July 1879 and completed on the ground at Selimoen on 14–15 August 1879 — where Toekoe Moeda Daoed, a great white flag held above his head, came out to meet both the column of Majoor Lubeck and the column of Luitenant-Kolonel Gerlach — the submission delivered into Dutch hands “the last refuge of the insurgents” and closed the Selimoen expedition. It is narrated, as eyewitnesses, by W. Cool and G. B. Hooijer in Eene schoone bladzijde uit Atjeh’s geschiedenis (1889), pp. 52–58, and more briefly by De Bruyne (De geschiedenis van Nederland in onzen tijd, 1912).
The letter of 30 July 1879
On 30 July 1879 two Atjehers with a white flag presented themselves to the Dutch authority at Indrapoeri, as envoys of a blind priest, Habib Machmoed by name, who with twenty-five followers waited outside the fortification and was the bearer of a letter from some chiefs — among whom Toekoe Moeda Daoed — offering their submission to the Governor and military commander and declaring that they would exhort their people to return from the mountains and the woods to the kampongs. By another letter, addressed to Toekoe Kadli, the latter’s mediation with the Governor was invoked in the words that became celebrated: “The great misfortune, brought by the war upon the three sagis of the land, makes me decide to offer my submission.” It was under the impression of the presence of the strong column at Lamtoba, Cool and Hooijer record, that these negotiations with Atjehnese chiefs from the Selimoen country had been entered upon; but since they did not proceed to the Militaire Bevelhebber’s satisfaction, Generaal van der Heijden resolved to cut the knot with the sword, and ordered the march to Selimoen — the march order of 11 August, “in order to hasten the somewhat protracted negotiations.”
14–15 August 1879: the white flag at the dry slokan
Toekoe Moeda Daoed had in fact already submitted on 14 August 1879, voluntarily presenting himself to Majoor Lubeck, whose column from Indrapoeri had reached and occupied Selimoen that day after its sharpest fighting at Lampisang, and promising to go with him to Kota Radja; hostages had therefore not been demanded of him. The next morning the column of Gerlach, having fought its way over the mountains past Kepaja Doewa and Lepong-Bajoe, drew near to Selimoen at about nine o’clock: from the kampongs along which it marched the people streamed out with women and children, and everywhere the white flags were stuck out. Then across the distance the marchers heard the tones of the Wilhelmus van Nassauwen — the band of Lubeck’s column, already in possession — “and a thundering hurrah went up from the voorhoede… In the place of the Wilhelmus van Nassauwen coming to us from Atjeh’s interior, that soil now resounds again only with the la ilaha illa’llah.”
Near the kampong the column was awaited by Toekoe Moeda Daoed with a numerous retinue. On the far side of a dry slokan (water-channel) he stepped forth from behind the brushwood while a great white flag was held above his head. “Although his clothing was in nothing remarkable, and he wore above the wide, dark, silken Atjehnese trousers only a white jacket, yet everything in him marked the supreme head. Not great of stature, without beard or moustache, light-yellow of complexion, with great dark eyes, straight nose, firmly closed mouth, he stood there awaiting the column-commandant with calm dignity.” Luitenant-Kolonel Gerlach, who now took the general command, concurred in Lubeck’s dispensation: no hostages were asked.
The bivouac in the kampong
Because the population had remained in the kampong, Toekoe Moeda Daoed requested, and it was proclaimed to the marching column from section to section, that no one might leave the bivouac to be taken in, and that all contact of soldiers and coolies with the population must be prevented. Majoor Lubeck, through the mediation of Controleur Kamp allotted to his column, had given Toekoe Moeda Daoed hope that the bivouac of the second column also would be pitched wholly outside the kampong; but this Gerlach did not allow, judging that in view of the great fatigues undergone and likely still to be undergone his soldiers needed better lodgings — “which the conqueror surely also had the right to demand.” Against this Toekoe Moeda Daoed made no objections.
Thus at ten o’clock the bivouac was taken in at the kampong’s edge on a very suitable point on the right bank of the Selimoen river. Some houses that had served as lodging for the fugitives of the XXII and XXVI Moekims were, with Toekoe Moeda Daoed’s consent, placed at the troops’ disposal for the making of shelters and as firewood; the ambulance was set up in a roomy and airy space obtained by taking away the outer and inner walls of an Atjehnese house. In one of the dwellings pointed out for demolition, some sick were found still left behind: they proved to have smallpox, and that house was spared further — “who knows how much material of other infected houses had already been used! Time there was none to investigate this.” The chief of the staff in haste made ready a pencil-note to carry to Generaal van der Heijden, by the first departing transport, the glad and so anxiously awaited tidings of the submission of Selimoen — the despatch upon whose outcome, as the book recalls in a footnote, Gouverneur-Generaal Van Lansberge’s hesitations and final vindication turned. Order was at once put upon the use of the river: posts marked off the bounds — drinking- and cooking-water and the kitchens above, then the officers’ bathing-place on the yellow-white sand in the glass-clear shallow water, then that of the soldiers, then the stretch for the coolies and chain-gangers, the latrines furthest downstream.
In the afternoon Toekoe Tjoet Hadjet, commonly called Toekoe Ajer Alang, a brother of Panglima Polim, came into the bivouac to offer his submission.
16–17 August: the departure to Indrapoeri
On the next morning, 16 August, the bivouac of Gerlach sent out at six o’clock one and a half company under Kapitein Van Rijn with all available coolies (about five hundred) to forage at Ajer-Alang, the etappe-post halfway to Indrapoeri; four wounded and thirteen seriously sick were evacuated with it, the officier van gezondheid Nöckedved (a Dane) accompanying the transport through to Indrapoeri and returning the same evening to Ajer-Alang; and the suburbs were found planted everywhere with white flags, the population seeking counsel and help for the many sick in the kampongs. In the evening at about ten o’clock some shots were fired on Majoor Lubeck’s bivouac, which lay eight hundred paces off, behind the hills, near the Atjeh river; a section of infantry was posted on a dominating hill between the two camps, and the firing presently ceased.
On the morning of 17 August Majoor Lubeck, having waited a couple of hours for Toekoe Moeda Daoed — “a time of great tension” for the Major, who in his report to the General had promised to bring this chief with him to the Kraton — marched back to Indrapoeri with Toekoe Moeda Daoed, Toekoe Ajer Alang and some retinue, being everywhere received by the population in the most peaceable manner. The general narratives preserve the tableau of those days: “The return march to Indrapuri resembled a triumphal procession. Everywhere the population showed a peaceful disposition; in all kampongs, even on the commanding hills, white flags were planted; the troops, accompanied by the chiefs who had come in submission, were awaited in the kampongs by men, women and children, and provided with refreshments; all enemy bentings were abandoned.”
The fugitives to Reng-Reng
Those who refused to give up the fight were no longer at Selimoen. From Toekoe Moeda Daoed’s own information, his brother Massa-an, Panglima Polim, Toekoe Radja Koeala, the Iman Longbattah and other prominent hostile chiefs had still been assembled at Selimoen on the day before the columns’ arrival and had deliberated in the missigit (village mosque) on what stood before them; seeing the impossibility of defending Selimoen, they had fled to Reng-Reng, in the VII Moekims of the landscape of Pedir, which lay amid wildly overgrown mountains and could be reached only after three day-marches. Luitenant-Kolonel Gerlach thought earnestly, that day, of marching thither on his own responsibility; but after long deliberation with his staff he abandoned the enterprise, in view especially of the weariness of the troops and the carriers, the great number of sick, the perhaps insufficient supply of vivres and the heavy return march still to be made, which by the General’s order had to go back along the same route over Lamtoba — with the footnoted confession: “Had the return march through the Atjeh valley, along the same route thus as that of the column Lubeck, been permitted, our advice would certainly have been different.” “Who knows what course the history of the Atjeh war and our establishment on North Sumatra would have taken,” the eyewitnesses muse, “had the decision fallen otherwise… But our troops, exhausted still more by new exhausting marches, could also have come to grief, as later at Batoe-Iliq against strong mountain positions near Samalangan defended with the despair of desperation, whereby the success of the latest victories could have been wholly lost.”
Significance
The submission of Toekoe Moeda Daoed was the act by which the conquest of Groot-Atjeh was completed: with the most stubborn chief of the interior come in and the irreconcilables fled beyond reach across the Pedir border, there was, in Van der Heijden’s phrase in the day-order of 5 September 1879, no longer an enemy in the field, and “geheel Groot-Atjeh” stood “ten onder gebragt.” The eyewitness account preserves the terms on which the submission was made — no hostages demanded of a chief who had come in voluntarily, the population left in its kampong, the sick of the enemy tended — and thereby also the moral the book draws from it: that the submission was the fruit not of the sword alone but of a policy in which a man like Toekoe Moeda Daoed could surrender without humiliation.
See Also
- Toekoe Moeda Daoed
- Selimoen Expedition (August 1879)
- Selimoen
- Habib Machmoed
- Majoor Lubeck
- Majoor Gerlach
- Controleur Kamp
- Toekoe Tjoet Hadjet
- Massa-an
- Reng-Reng
- Ajer-Alang
- March order for the Selimoen expedition (11 August 1879)
- Van Lansberge’s letters on the Selimoen tocht (7 and 21 August 1879)
- 1879
Source
Eene schoone bladzijde uit Atjeh’s geschiedenis, door W. Cool en G. B. Hooijer (‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1889), pp. 52-58. OCR-filename: 20260720_115822_DLP-135-Eene_schoone_bladzijde_uit_Atjeh_s_geschiedenis_Nemotron_OCR_v2_OCR.txt.
De geschiedenis van Nederland in onzen tijd, by J. A. de Bruyne, Directeur der Hoogere Burgerschool te Zierikzee. Deel IV. 1872-1883. Nieuwe uitgave. Schiedam: J. F. Dupont, 1912, Hoofdstuk I, pp. 107-108.