Van Rijn’s visit to Aroe-baai in 1888 was the official colonial tour of the bay of Aroe made by Controleur S.B. Van Rijn van Alkemade from Bengkalis, in connection, De Roo de la Faille notes, with Tiele’s essay on the history of those days. The visit produced the principal Dutch colonial description of the bay and its islets in the late nineteenth century — the report on which De Roo de la Faille draws for the 1888 visit that confirmed the bedekte taal identifications of Kampi and Pangkalan Soesoe, and that recorded the folk tradition of the Queen of Aroe’s flight.
The visit
Entering the bay of Aroe between the islands of Sembilan and Koempej, Van Rijn recorded the half-moon-shaped islet of Kampi close under the shore, set with 50-to-150-metre hills, whose clear white strand slowly gave way to higher ground with light-green grass, behind which the fortified houses of the Datoe Bintara and the Inlandsch Opziener came into view. “The whole makes the impression as if one has a fortress with breastwork before one” — a remark that, in De Roo de la Faille’s reading, was the djoeragan of Van Rijn’s barkas pointing out the same image that the Tanjore inscription of 1030 had recorded as “the ancient Malayur situated on a high hill”, and that in 1862 was still marked by the benteng of an Atjehschen avonturier who flew the Atjehsche flag.
Pangkalan Soesoe and the folk tradition
Crossing the bay, Van Rijn came to Pangkalan Soesoe — “the name ‘milk’ recalls the milky-white colour of the earth-oil here” — where ten dwellings of Malays who had fled from Besitang stood on the high bank, on the site of “a former large kampong, destroyed by sea-rovers”. A little inland he found the two old bentengs of the soengej Si Kondoer and Sérang djaja, said to have been the fortifications of the earlier rajas of Aroe. The soengej Si Djanda, which empties into the Besitang, still recalled, the locals told him, “the widow Djanda Gidau named, of the last raja of Aroe, who fled to that river at the destruction of the realm by Atjeh” — a folk echo of the Queen of Aroe’s flight of 1539.
Significance
For AcehWiki, Van Rijn’s 1888 visit is the principal Dutch colonial confirmation of the bedekte taal identifications of Kampi and Pangkalan Soesoe, and the principal recorded instance of the survival of the Queen of Aroe’s memory in east-coast folk tradition three centuries after the Atjehnese conquest of Aroe.
See Also
- Van Rijn van Alkemade
- Aroe-baai
- Poelo Kampi
- Pangkalan Soesoe
- Pulo Sembilan
- Atjehsche avonturier at Aroe-baai (1862)
- Queen of Aroe
- Atjeh-Aroe War (1539)
- Tiele
- P. de Roo de la Faille
- Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java
Source
Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java, by P. de Roo de la Faille (Den Haag: Maart 1954), chapter “Mendez Pinto op Sumatra”, pp. 10-12.