Adriaan van der Dussen was a Dutch opperkoopman in the service of the VOC who arrived at Djohor in August 1614 to conduct negotiations with the sultan about the construction of a Dutch fort — the fort authorised by the second Matelieff accord of 23 September 1606 but never built, and the principal Dutch strategic objective in the Strait of Malaka in the aftermath of the Achehnese attack of 1613. Van der Dussen’s mission is the closing Dutch-Djohor episode of the early Atjeh chapter of Van der Woude’s Van der Woude (1948).
The 1614 mission
The Achehnese attack on Djohor of 7 May 1613 — in which the city of Batoesawer was taken, the Dutch factor Jacques Obelaer and twenty-one other Dutchmen were carried off to Atjeh as prisoners, and the sultan of Djohor was deposed — was followed within months by an Achehnese-Djohor reconciliation: the sultan of Atjeh gave his sister in marriage to the deposed sultan of Djohor — now styled Sultan Sabrang — and sent him back to Djohor with an Achehnese escort of two thousand men to rebuild the destroyed city. The Dutch prisoners were released as part of the rapprochement.
In this context, the Heeren Zeventien dispatched Van der Dussen to Djohor in August 1614 to negotiate the construction of the fort that Matelieff had sought in 1606. The strategic aim was the same: a fortified Dutch post on Djohor territory, supported by a permanent fleet in the Strait of Malaka, would make the Portuguese position at Malaka untenable and complete the work that Matelieff’s campaign of 1606 had begun. Van der Woude does not pursue the outcome of Van der Dussen’s mission in detail, but the strategic context — the Achehnese-Djohor reconciliation, the sultan of Djohor’s dependence on the Achehnese, the Dutch inability to maintain a fleet in the Strait in force — suggests that the mission, like Verhoeff’s earlier attempt, was unsuccessful.
Significance
Adriaan van der Dussen is, in Van der Woude’s narrative, the principal Dutch negotiator at Djohor in the aftermath of the Achehnese attack of 1613 and the principal Dutch figure of the closing Dutch-Djohor episode of the early Atjeh chapter. His mission of 1614 was the principal Dutch attempt to revive the Dutch-Djohor military alliance after the Achehnese attack and the Achehnese-Djohor reconciliation — an attempt that, like the earlier attempts of Verhoeff and Matelieff, failed to secure the strategic Dutch objective of a fortified post on Djohor territory. Van der Dussen’s mission also marks the moment at which the strategic centre of Dutch-Indies policy shifted definitively southward to Jacatra and the eventual founding of Batavia in 1619, and the moment at which Coen took up the director-generalship of the Bantam-Jacatra factories — the post in which he would execute the monopoly-by-force policy that the Heeren Zeventien had authorised in 1608-1609.
See Also
- Atjeh’s attack on Djohor (May 1613)
- Jacques Obelaer
- Cornelis Matelieff
- Matelieff’s Malaka campaign (1606)
- Pieter Willemsz. Verhoeff
- Verhoeff’s Malaka expedition (1608)
- Jan Pieterszoon Coen
- Djohor
- Batoesawer
- Malaka
- Acheh
- 1613
- 1614
Source
Coen, Koopman van Heeren Zeventien. Geschiedenis van den Hollandshen Handel in Indië (1598-1614), by Johan van der Woude (Amsterdam: C.V. Uitgeverij v/h C. De Boer Jr., 1948), Hoofdstuk V “Voorgangers, Hollanders en mededingers tot 1614. Atjeh. Djohor. Malaka.” (p. 132).