Beyerman — the sources write the name also as Beijerman — was a person of standing in the plantation region of the East Coast of Sumatra who figures in the Deli-Atjeh railway connection controversy as the parliamentary opponent and correspondent of Schadee: the open letter of the latter to him, quoted by J. Roest in De spoorwegverbinding tusschen Deli, Atjeh en de Aroebaai (1916), preserved both parties’ cases.
The amendment of 26 September 1912
At the Cultuurraad meeting of 26 September 1912, Beyerman proposed to delete from the motion Schadee the words “with the harbour of Telok Taboehan in the Aru Bay and” and “at least in so far as it concerns the part east of the Besitang river.” The motion as amended by him was carried by 19 votes to 3, while the unamended motion was rejected by 18 votes to 4: the Cultuurraad thus confined its regret to the fixing of the connection plan in general, without adopting Schadee’s harbour question in his own words.
Roest judged his picture of the traffic in the Aru Bay — given in the correspondence and in the December 1912 discussion of that journal — to be far too favourable, because in it Beyerman had included the traffic of Pangkalan Brandan as traffic of the Aru Bay. What Schadee answered in his open letter to him preserves. The same correction — that from a nautical point of view the entrance of Pangkalan Brandan by the Babalan channel might be counted as of the Aru Bay, but from an economic point of view the port of Pangkalan Brandan in the Babalan river itself could not — lies at the base of their whole disagreement.
See Also
- Schadee
- Deli-Atjeh railway connection controversy (1912-1916)
- Cultuurraad
- De spoorwegverbinding tusschen Deli, Atjeh en de Aroebaai
Source
De spoorwegverbinding tusschen Deli, Atjeh en de Aroebaai, door J. Roest, in Tijdschrift voor het Binnenlandsch Bestuur, Deel XLIX, Afl. 6 (Batavia, December 1916), pp. 464–478.