Thomas Best's visit to Atjeh (1613)

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tagsachehnese, colonial, diplomatic, english, event, maritime, precolonial
aliasesBest's 1613 Atjeh embassy, English embassy to Sultan Iskandar Muda 1613, Thomas Best at the court of Atjeh 1613, Thomas Best's visit to Atjeh

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Thomas Best’s visit to Atjeh in 1613 was the embassy of the English sea-captain and East India Company envoy Thomas Best to the court of Sultan Iskandar Muda at Koetaradja during the Atjeh bloeitijdperk ([[1607-1636)|bloeitijdperk]] (golden age) of the Atjeh sultanate, in the course of which a great festival was staged in Best’s honour — the central moments of which were a tournament of elephants and a Court buffalo-fight at Sultan Iskandar Muda’s court ([[1613)|buffalo-fight]] that Best’s journal records in one of the earliest European eyewitness descriptions of court spectacle at Koetaradja. The visit is documented in Best’s journal, edited and published by William Foster as The Voyage of Thomas Best to the East Indies, 1612-14 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1934, p. 168), and is cited in Kreemer’s *De Karbouw* ([[1956)]] (p. 84) — drawing on Kreemer’s *Atjeh* (vol. I, p. 192) — as the principal first-hand account of buffalo-fights as a courtly entertainment in Atjeh.

Kreemer’s summary in De Karbau

Kreemer introduces the visit in the chapter on buffalo-fights and buffalo-races of De Karbouw (p. 84), in a passage that fixes the visit within the Atjeh bloeitijdperk ([[1607-1636)|Atjeh bloeitijdperk]] of Iskandar Muda and quotes Best’s description of the buffalo-fight verbatim:

“Thomas Best, Engels gezant in die dagen, geeft in zijn journaal een entousiast verslag van zijn bezoek in 1613 aan het hof van Soeltan Iskandar Moeda, de ‘Roi soleil’ der Atjehse vorsten, toen er te zijner ere een groot feest plaats had. Eén der hoofdmomenten daarvan was een toernooi van olifanten. ‘After them came buffelos, a beast verie fierce and stronge, which maid a worthie feight and gave greatt content to the spectators.’” The quotation — preserved in Best’s original early-seventeenth-century English spelling — is the documentary nucleus of the entry on the Court buffalo-fight at Sultan Iskandar Muda’s court ([[1613)|court buffalo-fight]]: it fixes the buffalo-fight as an institution of Iskandar Muda’s court, paired with elephant-baiting, and staged before a foreign envoy as part of a state festival. The fact that the buffaloes appeared in the spectacle after the elephants (“after them came buffelos”) suggests a choreographed sequence in which the elephant-tournament was followed by the buffalo-fight — a sequence that points to the cosmopolitan reach of Atjeh’s courtly culture in this period, when the sultanate’s military, commercial and diplomatic horizons extended across the Indian Ocean.

Best’s journal and William Foster’s edition

Best’s journal of his 1612-14 voyage to the East Indies was edited by William Foster and published by the Hakluyt Society (London, 1934) as The Voyage of Thomas Best to the East Indies, 1612-14. The specific page (168) cited by Kreemer contains the description of the festival at the court of Iskandar Muda in 1613. The journal is one of the principal English-language eyewitness records of the Atjeh bloeitijdperk ([[1607-1636)|Atjeh bloeitijdperk]] and supplies the documentary basis for Kreemer’s account of the court buffalo-fight.

The wider Anglo-Atjehnese context

Best’s visit of 1613 falls within the early-seventeenth-century phase of Anglo-Atjehnese diplomatic and commercial relations — a phase that would later be retraced and contextualised by Van der Kemp in his studies of the Raffles’ Acheh treaty of [[1819|1819 Raffles agreement]] and of the eighteenth-century correspondence between the Atjeh sultans and the British in Bengal (notably the [[1786 letter of the Atjeh sultan to Warren Hastings]]). The visit is thus part of a long diplomatic continuum that runs from the early-seventeenth-century Anglo-Atjehnese contact, through the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London ([[1824)|Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London of 1824]] and its fateful Acheh clause, to the Dutch conquest of the late nineteenth century and the Sumatra Treaty of [[1871|Anglo-Dutch Sumatra Treaty of 1871]] that preceded it.

Significance

Best’s visit to Atjeh in 1613 is significant for the encyclopedia of Acheh history on three counts. First, it is the principal European eyewitness account of court spectacle at Koetaradja during the Atjeh bloeitijdperk ([[1607-1636)|Atjeh bloeitijdperk]] under Iskandar Muda. Second, it documents the Court buffalo-fight at Sultan Iskandar Muda’s court ([[1613)|court buffalo-fight]] as an institution of Atjehnese kingship — a fact that anchors the village buffalo-fights of later centuries as a “zwakke weerklank” (faint echo) of the courtly original. Third, it is a document of the early-seventeenth-century Anglo-Atjehnese diplomatic relationship, which would later be retraced and contextualised by Van der Kemp and others.

Sources

The Voyage of Thomas Best to the East Indies, 1612-14, edited by William Foster (London: Hakluyt Society, 1934), p. 168.

De Karbouw — Zijn betekenis voor de volken van de Indonesische Archipel, by J. Kreemer (‘s-Gravenhage / Bandung: N.V. Uitgeverij W. van Hoeve, 1956), p. 84. Atjèh, by J. Kreemer, vol. I (1922), p. 192.

See Also

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