The letter of the three Sagis of Acheh to Governor Phillips of Penang, dated 4 December 1822, was a sharply worded refusal by the chiefs of the Achehnese capital to recognise Sultan Jauhar Alum as their sovereign, and a reiterated demand for the return of Saif ul-Alum (Syf) to the throne. The letter, which is printed in extenso in Van der Kemp’s appendix, is one of the most important Achehnese primary documents preserved in the British records of the period.
The immediate occasion was a circular that Phillips had sent to the Mukims urging them to submit to Jauhar Alum’s authority. The circular met with “even weinig succes” as had previous attempts to bolster the sultan’s party. Jauhar Alum himself, replying to Phillips on 15 April 1822, had lamented that the ancestral capital was a ruin, that the guns had been carried off or were unmovable, that the houses had been destroyed by Syf, and that restoring the city would require 100,000 dollars — funds he did not possess, with only some 250 sepoys at his command. Against this background, the Sagis’ answer of 4 December was uncompromising.
The chiefs recalled in their letter that they had twice already declared Syf ul-Alum Shah to be their sovereign: first to Captain Coombs alone when he came from Bengal in 1817–1818, and again to Coombs and Raffles together during the commission of 1819. Their declarations had been given “with a true and faithful tongue” and confirmed under their signatures, and they could not now “exchange and forget those expressions”. They therefore requested that Phillips order “our sovereign Syf ul-Alum” back to Acheh so that the country might be happy and British ships “go to and from Acheh with safety, whether on commerce or for amusement”. As for Jauhar Alum, “we will never have him for our Rajah more, for we have deposed him, and sworn to it on the tomb of Tunhar Anjung of Kampong Java, and we never can alter”. The chiefs apologised for any want of form in their address, observing that they were peasants “and not well acquainted with Malay languages”.
Phillips, of course, refused. Bound by the Treaty of Pedir to Jauhar Alum, he replied that the British Government, “being on terms of amity and bound by treaty to the sultan Johar al Allum Shah, cannot concert measures or hold correspondence with the enemies of that Prince”, and urged the chiefs anew to submit. The exchange was, however, a striking demonstration of the hollowness of the British position. The 1819 treaty had recognised Jauhar Alum as sultan; the chiefs of the capital, who alone could give effect to that recognition, denied his title and invoked the treaty’s own underlying premise — that they had been consulted — against its conclusion.
The letter is central to Van der Kemp’s argument that the Treaty of Pedir (1819) was from the first a “dead letter”. It was repeatedly cited in later correspondence — including Ibbetson’s dispatch of 25 February 1824 and Fullerton’s minute of 21 March 1825 — as evidence that Jauhar Alum had never recovered his authority, that the chiefs had not been won over, and that any further British interference in Achehnese affairs could only produce “great and fresh expense”.
See Also
- W. E. Phillips
- Three Sagis
- XXII Mukims
- XXV Mukims
- XXVI Mukims
- Sultan Jauhar Alum
- Sultan Saif ul-Alum
- Captain Coombs
- Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles
- Captain Coombs’ first Acheh mission (1817-1818)
- Raffles-Coombs Acheh Commission (1819)
- Treaty of Pedir (1819)
- Ibbetson’s intervention proposal (February 1824)
- Fullerton’s minute on Acheh (21 March 1825)
- Kampong Java
- 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.