G. B. Hooyer was a Dutch military historian and author of Krijgsgeschiedenis van Nederl.-Indië, 1811-1894 (“War History of Netherlands-India, 1811-1894”), published in three volumes in Batavia in 1895, with an atlas in quarto format. The work was offered in 1902 by the bookseller Martinus Nijhoff at 15.35 florins in commemoration of the third centenary of the Dutch East India Company.
Work
Hooyer’s comprehensive three-volume war history of the Netherlands Indies covered the entire period from the British interregnum of 1811 to the campaigns of the 1890s, including the Atjeh War. The accompanying atlas provided cartographic documentation of the various military campaigns discussed in the text. The work was part of a tradition of Dutch colonial military historiography that included the more specialised studies of the Atjeh War by E. B. Kielstra.
Authorship of the Atjeh-Album (1896)
Hooyer was also the principal military correspondent of the illustrated weekly Eigen Haard and the author of the historical narrative of the Atjeh-Album of 1896 — the bound compilation of illustrated articles that the periodical devoted to the events of Atjeh between April and June of that year. The album’s preface (Een Woord Vooraf) credits him — identified as an oud-luitenant-kolonel van het N.-I. leger — with zijn rijke ervaring van Indische zaken en zijn talent als schrijver (“his rich experience of Indian affairs and his talent as a writer”). As author of the album, Hooyer is the principal Dutch popular historian of the 1896 crisis — the defection of Toekoe Oemar and the relief of the besieged Dutch temporary posts at Anagaloeng, Senelop, Biloel and Lamkoenjit.
His narrative voice is that of a military intellectual of the late-nineteenth-century colonial army: critical of the concentratie-stelsel, sceptical of the civil administration of Pruys van der Hoeven, and openly admiring of the kloek, doortastend (bold, decisive) generalship of Karel van der Heyden. The album’s biographical portrait of Toekoe Oemar acknowledges his beschaafde manieren (civilised manners) and gaven … als aanvoerder (gifts as a commander), even as it condemns his trouweloosheid (faithlessness). The album’s biographical essays on Habib Abdoe’r Rachman and Teungkoe di Tiro — though derivative of Snouck Hurgronje — treat both figures as serious political actors.
Account in Hooijer’s De verlaten posten in Groot-Atjeh (1897)
G. B. Hooijer was a Dutch officer of the Netherlands East Indies Army, retired with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel (Gep. Luit.-Kolonel O. I. Leger), and the author of De verlaten posten in Groot-Atjeh, an illustrated account of the Dutch outposts established in Groot-Atjeh during the alliance with Toekoe Oemar between 1893 and 1896. His book was published with twenty-four plates by De Erven F. Bohn at Haarlem and G. Kolff & Co. at Batavia.
Literary and polemical position
Hooijer prefaced his work with a Voorwoord that was less a preface than a complaint against Dutch national reticence. He wrote that the Netherlands, symbolised by the Nederlandsche maagd (“Netherlands maiden”), a modest young woman of good family standing in her little garden with her lion, boasted of translated literature, of paintings known in every quarter of the world and of music honoured abroad — yet her voice was not heard in the Europeesch Concert, though she was called the second colonial power; her naval flag was rarely shown, though her merchantmen ploughed every sea.
He observed that the man- and money-devouring war waged for a quarter of a century in North Sumatra was treated by the nation als een huishoudelijke onaangenaamheid — “as a domestic unpleasantness” — about which it preferred to speak as little as possible in public. He noted that the soundest work possessed on the Atjeh-krijg covered only the first nine years of the war; that beside it stood only one ethnographic study of the Achehnese; that no literary work of art and no powerful poem had appeared to sing the great struggle; that the only painting relating to the war had been painted by a Frenchman; and that in music the Dutch remained limited to eenige soldatendeuntjes (“a few soldiers’ ditties”).
Hooijer then sketched, in musical terms, the symphony he thought the war deserved: the mysterious beginning full of fear of the European great powers; the martial music with which the first expedition departed, passing into violent battle-noise and suddenly dying away; the stately advance of the second expedition rolling broadly along Acheh’s shores; the dissonances after Van Swieten’s departure with the shrill sounds of the Allah il Allah, first drowned out by the war- and victory-song under Van der Heijden and afterwards regaining the upper hand; the dull, muffled music representing concealment behind the geconcentreerde linie; and finally the peculiar song in which the Wien Neêrlands bloed sought to harmonise with the war-music of Toekoe Oemar, ending in a suddenly breaking, confused and violent noise from which the Dutch war-song developed ever clearer and higher, to pass at last into a prophetic vredelied (“peace-song”). The motif of that peace-song, he wrote, could in truth be the guiding thread through the whole, for the restoration of rest and peace had always been the Dutch aim.
Method as a historian
Hooijer’s narrative was written expressly as a commentary on photographic plates, and he repeatedly reminded the reader of that limitation, declining for example to describe the heavy fighting of April 1896 because it lay buiten het kader van dit tot toelichting der platen geschreven verhaal. Within that frame, however, he recorded technical, topographical and anecdotal detail with care: garrison strengths, armament, the construction of parapets and wire entanglements, the daily timetable of meals and the oorlam ration, the jocular signboards painted above gateways, the identity of officers in group photographs, and the presence of Chinese sutlers, Japanese women at Oleh-leh, convict lantern-lighters and tame sheep accompanying patrols.
He was also willing to preserve uncertainty. On the central question of the book — why Teukoe Oemar broke his oath — he wrote that the matter is nog altijd niet uitgemaakt (“has still not been settled”), offered a hypothesis about the threatened loss of Oemar’s indispensability, and closed it with wie zal het zeggen? On the death of Teungkoe di Tiro he reported the allegation that the oelama had been poisoned by his son Mat Amin only as hearsay, naar men zeide (“as it was said”).
Attitudes
Hooijer wrote from an explicitly imperial standpoint. He praised the Indies soldier at length — his courage, contempt of death, indifference to danger and misery, and cheerfulness in spite of geestdoodende afzondering op buitenposten (outer posts) (“mind-killing isolation on outposts”) — observing that some thirty to forty thousand such men preserved order among the millions of subjects the young Queen Wilhelmina counted in her Indies empire, and ending the passage Eere aan hen! (“Honour to them!”). He described the Achehnese population as bowed under anarchie en priesterdwang (“anarchy and priestly compulsion”), and closed the book with an appeal to the glory of the Indies army and the prestige of the Kingdom of the Netherlands as a great colonial power. His portrait of the Chinese sutler at Toengkoeb and of the Japanese women at Oleh-leh employs the racial caricature conventional in Dutch colonial writing of the period.
See Also
- Atjeh-Album (Eigen Haard, 1896)
- Toekoe Oemar’s defection (1896)
- K. van der Heyden
- Pruys van der Hoeven
- Concentratie-stelsel (1884-1896)
- Habib Abdurrahman Zahir
- Teungku di Tiro
- C. Snouck Hurgronje
- 1896
- De verlaten posten in Groot-Atjeh (Hooijer, 1897)
- Voorwoord of De verlaten posten in Groot-Atjeh
- Teukoe Oemar
- General van der Heijden
- Geconcentreerde linie
- Aceh War
- De Erven F. Bohn
- G. Kolff & Co.
Sources
Atjeh-Album van Eigen Haard, uitgave van de N.V. Het Tijdschrift “Eigen Haard”, Amsterdam, 1896, Een Woord Vooraf and passim.
A List of the Best Books Relating to Dutch East India, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague (1902).
De verlaten posten in Groot-Atjeh, door G. B. Hooijer, Gep. Luit.-Kolonel O. I. Leger, met 24 platen (Haarlem: De Erven F. Bohn; Batavia: G. Kolff & Co., 1897). Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, Centrale Boekerij, Amsterdam. OCR-filename: 20260719_140140_DLP-134-De_verlaten_posten_in_Groot_Atjeh_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt, title page and Voorwoord, pp. 1-8; narrative pp. 9-54.
Acknowledgement of sources. This article is a single consolidated account combining the material previously held in this entry with the account given in De verlaten posten in Groot-Atjeh (1897) by G. B. Hooijer. Dutch terminology has been rendered in English, the original Dutch being retained only in direct quotations and in bibliographic citations.