Sultan of Deli's letter to Penang

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tagsevent, correspondence, diplomacy, malay, colonial
aliasesDeli letter 27 August 1824, Sultan of Deli to Fullerton 27 August 1824, Appendix 6

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The Sultan of Deli’s letter to Penang of 27 August 1824 — printed by P. H. Van der Kemp as Appendix 6 to his 1900 study — is the despatch by which the Sultan of Deli introduced himself to the newly appointed Governor of Penang, Robert Fullerton, informed him of his adoption of Said Akil (son of the Penang trader Said Hussein) as a son, and begged British help against the in-pressing Padries (Rinchis). The letter is an important document both for the early history of the Padri movement on Sumatra’s East Coast and for the origin of the Deli affair, and is reproduced by Van der Kemp from the Binkhorst collection of correspondence.

Context

The Sultan of Deli had been on terms of friendship with the previous Governor of Penang, W. E. Phillips, and was distressed to learn that Phillips was about to return to Europe. He therefore addressed himself to the new Governor, Fullerton, “in order that the friendly intercourse between Delli and Pulo Penang may not be interrupted.” The letter is dated 27 August 1824 — some five months after the signing of the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 17 March 1824 by which Britain had withdrawn from all political connection with Sumatra and recognised Dutch supremacy over the island.

The Padri threat

The Sultan reported that “many of the districts of Pulo Puchee” (i.e. Sumatra) were in a very disturbed state, “for the Rinchis (Padries) have determined to attack all the different states and render them tributary, to become obedient to all their peculiar laws and orders”. He listed the states already reduced — Tanah Putih, Balah and Panei — and warned that the Padries had now expressed their determination to attack Batu Bara and Deli. “When they do attempt to carry their threats into execution”, he declared, “we shall endeavour to oppose them with all our might, and I shall proceed to Batu Bara myself if hostilities commence.”

The Sultan begged the British Governor to instruct him how he might obtain assistance: “If my friend has any compassion or friendship for all us Rajahs in these districts of Sumatra, we beg you will instruct us how we may obtain assistance from him.” He warned that if the East-Coast states were ruined, “they will prove a source of loss to my friend’s country also.”

Adoption of Said Akil

In a brief but consequential passage, the Sultan announced: “As to my friend’s subject, the son of Syed Hussein, I formerly acquainted Mr. Phillips that I had adopted him as a son, and I beg now also to inform my friend of this circumstance.” The “son of Syed Hussein” was Said Akil, younger brother of the Achehnese pretender Syf, who had married, or was about to marry, a daughter of the Sultan. This adoption — recognised by the Penang government as early as Phillips’s tenure — was the foundation on which Akil would, after his father-in-law’s death, build his usurpation of Deli in 1826–1828.

The letter concluded with a token gift: “I have nothing to offer my friend as a token of my respect but two cakes of bees wax, which I beg his acceptance of.”

Significance

Van der Kemp drew attention to the letter as evidence of two things. First, it shows the extent of the Padri advance by mid-1824, confirming that the Rinchis had already reduced Tanah Putih, Balah and Panei and were menacing Batu Bara and Deli — a situation that would within a few years draw the Dutch into the wars on Sumatra’s East Coast. Second, it establishes that the adoption of Said Akil by the Sultan of Deli was already a matter of record at Penang before Fullerton’s accession, and that the British government cannot subsequently have pleaded ignorance of Akil’s status at Deli when its remonstrances of 1826 and 1828 were issued. The letter is also one of the earliest pieces of correspondence between the new Governor Fullerton and a Malay ruler, foreshadowing the close attention to Sumatran affairs that would mark his minute on Acheh of March 1825 and his later Pinang Nota.

Note on a further reference in van der Woude’s Coen biography

Johan van der Woude’s 1948 biography of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, in a footnote (p. 66, n. 1) also referencing Van der Kemp’s work, cites a letter of the Sultan of Deli to Penang — there tentatively dated 1786 and treated as a document that the British East India Company used to assert influence over the pepper-producing Deli region in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and that was invoked in the 1824 negotiations to counter Dutch claims on Sumatra’s East Coast. Van der Woude’s citation notes that Van der Kemp himself regarded the evidence for British suzerainty over Deli drawn from such a letter as “not indisputable” — a caution that applies more precisely to the present letter of 27 August 1824, since no Deli–Penang letter as early as 1786 is otherwise attested in Van der Kemp’s own study. The 1786 date given by Van der Woude’s footnote is best read as an imprecise secondary reference to the same historiographical dispute over Deli’s status vis-à-vis Penang and the British Crown, rather than as evidence of a separate, earlier letter.

See Also

Sources

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.

Coen: Koopman van Heeren Zeventien, by Johan van der Woude (Amsterdam: C.V. Uitgeverij v/h C. de Boer Jr., 1948), p. 66, footnote 1.

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