Syf’s flight to Calcutta in the early months of 1820 was a remarkable episode in which Saif ul-Alum (Syf), the Achehnese pretender then living at Telok Semawé, fled the Achehnese coast on board the British warship Dauntless and sailed to Calcutta, plundering a junk and twelve praus on the way. The flight marks the transition from Syf’s career as a contestant for the Achehnese throne to his long semi-retirement as a pensioner of the Bengal government at Penang.
The immediate background was the submission of Syf at Telok Semawé. The pretender had promised the British to submit and to repair to the capital Acheh in order to enter into relations with Panglima Polim against Sultan Jauhar Alum. Instead, when the Penang government sent the Dauntless to Acheh in early 1820 to enforce its policy, Syf “pakte zijne biezen” — packed up — and made off by a route no one had expected. He first seized a junk and plundered twelve praus, and then had the effrontery to sail his pirate vessel into the Hooghly.
The complaints of his victims soon reached the British authorities, but the judges at Calcutta “vonden evenwel geene termen hem te veroordeelen”: they found no grounds to convict him, since Syf “had gehandeld als een souverein” — had acted as a sovereign. He therefore left Bengal on 21 July 1820 unpunished, and indeed the government conferred upon him a pension of 500 dollars per month (see Syf’s pension at Penang). He returned to Penang with what Van der Kemp dryly calls “dat niet onaardig succes” — that not inconsiderable success — and there lived quietly on the pension until his death.
The flight had several consequences. It removed at a stroke the most troublesome of the Achehnese pretenders from the immediate scene, and it relieved the Penang government of the embarrassment of having to deal with him as a hostile chief on the Sumatran coast. But it also illustrated the inability of the British to control even those Achehnese notables who were nominally under their protection, and it confirmed the impression, already strong after the Raffles–Coombs commission, that no European government could establish order in Acheh without a large military force. The episode also embroiled Syf in a long-running dispute with the Netherlands government, which held him responsible for the plunder of the Wilhelmina’s mutineers — a dispute that gave rise to the Lucas mission of February 1821 and to the broader Anglo-Dutch “paper war” over Sumatra.
See Also
- Sultan Saif ul-Alum
- Sultan Jauhar Alum
- Panglima Polim
- Syf’s pension at Penang
- Submission of Saif ul-Alum at Telok Semawé
- Wilhelmina mutiny and murder of Bouwens
- Lucas mission to Telok Semawé (February 1821)
- Raffles-Coombs Acheh Commission (1819)
- Telok Semawé
- Acheh
- Calcutta
- 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.