Abdoel Hamid (also Abdul Hamid) was an Atjeh ambassador who, in 1602, was sent by his Sultan — Sultan Aloeddin — together with Sri Mohammed and Mir Hassan on the Atjeh embassy to Prince Maurits at the siege of Grave. He was already more than seventy years old when he set out, and he died at Middelburg in August 1602, only weeks after arriving in the Republic — the first recorded fatality of an Atjeh envoy on European soil.
The embassy of 1602
The embassy was sent in response to the four Zeeland ships that had come to Atjeh in August 1601 bearing a letter from Prince Maurits pressing for the release of the Dutch prisoners held there since the death of Cornelis de Houtman in 1599 — most notably Frederik de Houtman. The Sultan had agreed to release the prisoners and to compensate Frederik de Houtman “en zijn vrouw” (and his wife — for the prisoner’s fidelity to his wife in Holland had made a strong impression) for the material losses he had suffered. As a token of the new friendship, the Sultan sent three ambassadors on the returning ships: the senior envoy Abdoel Hamid, the admiral of Atjeh Sri Mohammed, and the nobleman Mir Hassan. A Luxemburger, Leonard Werner, served as their interpreter.
Arrival at Middelburg and death
The ships reached the Republic in 1602. The aged Abdoel Hamid — “ruim zeventigjarige” (well over seventy years old) — survived the Atlantic crossing but died at Middelburg in August 1602, before the embassy could complete its journey to Prince Maurits’s siege camp at Grave. He was, in Godee Molsbergen’s framing, the first of the three Atjeh envoys whose embassy would be — for him — posthumous.
The embassy continues
After Abdoel Hamid’s death, the remaining ambassadors Sri Mohammed and Mir Hassan proceeded to Prince Maurits’s camp at Grave, where they were received with state: a state-coach attended by a company of cavalry brought the Oriental gentlemen to a house near the Prince’s tent, and after a meal Maurits received them surrounded by a brilliant company of nobles and military commanders. They delivered two letters from Sultan Aloeddin to the Prince, returned the Prince’s earlier letter (now marked with the King’s seal, “om te bewyzen, dat die brieven wel ontfangen, hem weert ende aenghenaem waren gheweest” — to prove that the letters had indeed been received, welcome and agreeable to him), and presented the Prince with a costly kris, a golden dish and cup, “about two pounds of Camphora of Borneo” (each pound valued at a hundred ducats in those lands), and a lance — the lance being on one of the still-sailing ships.
Significance
Abdoel Hamid is significant in the Dutch-Atjeh encounter as the senior figure of the first Atjeh embassy to the Republic, and as the first Atjeh ambassador known to have died on European soil. His death at Middelburg in August 1602 — well over seventy years old, having crossed two oceans to reach a country he would never leave — marks the human cost of the early modern diplomatic exchange between the sultanate of Atjeh and the young Dutch Republic.
See Also
- Sri Mohammed
- Mir Hassan
- Leonard Werner
- Sultan Aloeddin of Atjeh
- Prince Maurits
- Atjeh embassy to Prince Maurits at Grave (1602)
- Frederik de Houtman
- Cornelis de Houtman
- 1602
- Acheh
- Middelburg
Source
Tijdens de O.I. Compagnie, by Dr. E. C. Godee Molsbergen, Oud-Hoogleeraar, Landsarchivaris te Batavia (Amsterdam: N.V. Swets & Zeitlinger Boekhandel en Uitgevers Mij., 1932), chapter XXXIII (“Atjehers in het kamp van Maurits. De zeeslag bij Bantam”), pp. 118–121 of the numbered-letter sequence.