André Furtado de Mendonça — also rendered Andrea Furtado de Mendoça or André Furtado de Mendoza — was a Portuguese naval commander who, in 1601, led an armada from Goa to the East Indies whose appearance off Atjeh sharpened Sultan Aloeddin’s hostility to the Portuguese and indirectly precipitated the release of the Dutch prisoner Frederik de Houtman and the 1602 embassy to Prince Maurits. His subsequent defeat at Bantam by a Dutch squadron confirmed that the Portuguese could no longer project significant naval force into the western archipelago. He is the principal Portuguese naval figure of the Atjeh chapter in the immediate aftermath of the Houtman affair.
The Armada of 1601
The scope of Furtado’s fleet is reported differently by the two principal sources:
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Godee Molsbergen describes an armada of substantial size sent from Goa with multiple objectives: “Van Goa uit zonden ze onder Andrea Furtado de Mendoça een armada tot bestrijding van den zeeroof, vervolgens tot bevestiging van de Portugeesche macht op Ceylon, waarbij ze Jaffanapatnam op Ceylon’s Noordpunt bezetten, en ten slotte, wat het voornaamste moest gerekend worden, tot verdrijving der Nederlanders uit den Archipel” — From Goa they sent, under Andrea Furtado de Mendoça, an armada to combat piracy, then to confirm Portuguese power on Ceylon (in the course of which they occupied Jaffanapatnam on Ceylon’s north point), and finally — what was to be considered the principal purpose — to drive the Netherlanders from the Archipelago.
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Johan van der Woude, by contrast, describes the fleet sent against Bantam more narrowly as “a galleon (galjoen) and a fust” sent from Goa by way of Malaka to Bantam, with instructions to “getucht” — discipline — the natives for their reception of the Dutch. Van der Woude places this mission within the wider Portuguese effort to interrupt the Dutch pepper trade in the archipelago after the Dutch commercial challenge of the late 1590s.
The discrepancy reflects the two sources’ different frames: Godee Molsbergen’s narrative of the wider Indian Ocean strategic picture versus Van der Woude’s focus on the western archipelago and the Bantam mission specifically. Whether the larger Goa armada was subdivided for the Bantam mission, or whether the two accounts describe two distinct Portuguese deployments in the same year, is not resolved by the sources available here. The Ceylon occupation of Jaffanapatnam — recorded only by Godee Molsbergen — was a permanent gain; the anti-piracy and Dutch-expulsion objectives would not be achieved.
The Effect at Atjeh
The appearance of Furtado’s fleet off Atjeh — placed by Van der Woude in June 1601, at the very moment when the sultan was weighing how to receive the Van Caerden visit and the expected Zeeland mission — altered Sultan Aloeddin’s calculations. “De Sultan van Atjeh vreesde dat Portugal met zijn vijand, den Sultan van Djohor, tegen hem samenspande. Ook het verzoek om op een der eilandjes een Spaansch-Portugeesch fort te bouwen, ontstemde hem” — The Sultan of Atjeh feared that Portugal was conspiring with his enemy the Sultan of Djohor against him. The Portuguese request to build a Spanish-Portuguese fort on one of the islands also displeased him.
The arrival was accompanied by the unguarded conduct of a Franciscan monk at the sultan’s court, who had been pressing the sultan to cede his strongest fort to the Portuguese. The Atjehers suspected a connection between the Portuguese fleet’s arrival and the simultaneous presence of a fleet of sixty warships of the sultan of Djohor off Pasei, and “versterkten zich, bevreesd voor een aanval van beiden” — fortified themselves, fearing an attack from both. The sultan, unwilling to make the Portuguese his enemies but angered when they seized an Arab ship in defiance of his hospitality, had his shore batteries fire on the Portuguese ship; one of Furtado’s ships was lost, and the crew was disarmed and imprisoned.
Van der Woude notes the strategic consequence: “de volgende Hollandsche vloot zou van deze gebeurtenissen profiteeren” — the next Dutch fleet would profit from these events. The Zeeland fleet of Hans Huybrecht Tonneman that arrived off Atjeh on 23 August 1601 bearing a letter from Prince Maurits found the sultan already alienated from the Portuguese; the sultan released Frederik de Houtman “en zijn vrouw” without ransom, granted the Zeelanders a factory and a commercial treaty, and sent the three-ambassador embassy to Europe on the returning Zeeland ships. Furtado’s failed mission thus paradoxically produced the diplomatic rapprochement that the Houtman ambush of 1599 had foreclosed — and, in Godee Molsbergen’s framing, accelerated the very Dutch-Atjeh alliance the armada had been (in part) sent to prevent.
The Bantam Battle
When the Portuguese armada had left Atjeh, “voer De Mendoça naar Bantam” — De Mendoça sailed to Bantam. The Dutch-Portuguese naval contest then shifted to the Sunda Strait.
According to Godee Molsbergen, the last great Dutch expedition before the founding of the VOC — thirteen ships under the Admirals Jacob van Heemskerck and Wolphert Harmensz — encountered a strong enemy armada in Bantam bay on Christmas Day 1601: eight large galleons and twenty-two galleys. The Breede Raad (Broad Council) decided “dat men de Portugesche armade met courage zou bezoeken, vertrouwende op de hulpe des Allerhoogsten” — that the Portuguese armada should be visited with courage, trusting in the help of the Most High. Three Dutch ships and two yachts attacked thirty enemy vessels. The battle, begun on Christmas Day, ended in a complete Dutch victory; on New Year’s Day 1602 the heavily-reduced armada was in flight, Bantam was relieved, and the respect of the natives for the Dutch was greatly increased.
Van der Woude likewise reports Furtado’s defeat at Bantam by a Dutch squadron under Wolfert Harmensz in a sea battle off the roadstead — a defeat that, in his narrative, completed the strategic defeat of the Portuguese attempt to interrupt the Dutch pepper trade in the archipelago. (Van der Woude’s tag-list dates this to 1603, but his text does not give a specific date; the date accepted in the older Dutch historiography, as recorded by Godee Molsbergen, is 25 December 1601–1 January 1602.) The defeat confirmed that the Portuguese could no longer project significant naval force into the western archipelago after the destruction of their Malaka fleet by Matelieff in 1606 — though Furtado’s defeat preceded Matelieff’s victory by several years.
Significance
For Atjeh’s history, Furtado de Mendonça is significant as the Portuguese admiral whose armada — by alarming Sultan Aloeddin and displeasing him with the fort request — produced the diplomatic opening between Atjeh and the Dutch Republic that became the 1602 embassy to Prince Maurits. He is the principal instance of the Portuguese attempt to interrupt the Dutch pepper trade at its Atjeh source, and his subsequent defeat at Bantam confirmed that the Portuguese could no longer project significant naval force into the western archipelago — a strategic fact that the VOC would exploit in the Matelieff campaign of 1606 and after. The episode is a measure of how Portuguese strategic overreach in the Indian Ocean in 1601 opened the door to the Dutch-Atjeh relationship that would dominate the next four decades.
See Also
- Sultan Aloeddin of Atjeh
- Sultan of Atjeh (1589-1604)
- Frederik de Houtman
- Houtman brothers’ visit to Atjeh (1599)
- Paulus van Caerden’s Atjeh visit (1600-1601)
- Zeeland Company’s Atjeh mission (1601)
- Atjeh embassy to Prince Maurits at Grave (1602)
- Jacob van Heemskerck
- Wolphert Harmensz
- Wolfert Harmensz.
- Hans Huybrecht Tonneman
- Cornelis Matelieff
- Matelieff’s Malaka campaign (1606)
- Prince Maurits
- Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie
- Johor
- Pasei
- Ceylon
- Jaffanapatnam
- Bantam
- Goa
- Malaka
- Sunda Strait
- Franciscan
- Acheh
- 1601
- 1602
- 1606
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.
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.” (pp. 114-115).