Jacques Obelaer was a Dutch factor in the service of the VOC who served as the Company’s factor at Batoesawer, the capital of Djohor, from February 1609 to the Achehnese attack of May 1613, in which the city was taken, the Dutch garrison overpowered, and twenty-two of the Dutchmen — including Obelaer — carried off to Atjeh as prisoners. Obelaer’s factorship at Batoesawer frames the Dutch-Djohor commercial relationship in the period between the Matelieff campaign of 1606 and the Achehnese attack of 1613.
The factorship at Batoesawer
Obelaer succeeded Van den Broeck as factor at Batoesawer in February 1609, when the Verhoeff fleet departed from Djohor for Bantam after failing to obtain the sultan’s assistance in an attack on Malaka. Verhoeff left two ships at the river mouth to maintain the Dutch presence; the ships stayed until November 1609, when the sultan’s peace with the Portuguese was formally proclaimed under trumpet-sound on 16 October 1610. Obelaer’s position was thus increasingly precarious: the sultan’s separate peace with the Portuguese had ended the Dutch-Djohor military alliance of 1606, and the Dutch factory at Batoesawer survived only on the sultan’s sufferance.
The Achehnese attack (May 1613)
When the sultan of Atjeh’s successor sent a fleet against Djohor in May 1613, the Achehnese appeared at the mouth of the river on 7 May 1613 while the bulk of the Djohor fleet was away at Pahang. The Dutch ship Hope, which had arrived three days earlier to relieve Obelaer and replenish the factory’s capital, lay at anchor in the river. The Achehnese demanded that the Dutch stand aside; Obelaer and the Dutch refused, in fidelity to the Matelieff-sultan accord of 23 September 1606, and landed thirty-one men under the factory’s six-man staff to assist the Djohor defence. The Achehnese took the city on 6 June 1613; two Dutchmen were killed, twenty-two — including Obelaer — were taken prisoner and carried off to Atjeh “onder borchtocht van des compagnies goederen”; three wounded men returned to the ship; the rest were missing.
The aftermath
Obelaer’s captivity at Atjeh was brief. Within months the two Malay courts had reached an accommodation: 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. Obelaer’s letter from Batoesawer of 25 November 1610 — preserved in De Jonge’s De opkomst van het Nederlandsch gezag in Oost-Indië, Dl. III — is the principal Dutch source for the sultan of Djohor’s separate peace with the Portuguese in 1610 and the proximate cause of the Achehnese attack of 1613.
Significance
Jacques Obelaer is, in Van der Woude’s narrative, the principal Dutch factor at Batoesawer in the period between the Matelieff campaign of 1606 and the Achehnese attack of 1613, and the principal Dutch witness of the collapse of the Dutch-Djohor military alliance. His factorship frames the Dutch-Djohor commercial relationship in the period of the Twelve Years’ Truce, when the sultan’s separate peace with the Portuguese and the Dutch inability to maintain a fleet in the Strait of Malaka in force undermined the strategic basis of the alliance. The Achehnese attack of May 1613 — and Obelaer’s captivity at Atjeh — marked the effective end of the Dutch-Djohor military alliance that Matelieff had constructed in 1606 and the strategic turn southward to Jacatra and the eventual founding of Batavia in 1619.
See Also
- Atjeh’s attack on Djohor (May 1613)
- Pieter Willemsz. Verhoeff
- Verhoeff’s Malaka expedition (1608)
- Cornelis Matelieff
- Matelieff’s Malaka campaign (1606)
- Djohor
- Batoesawer
- Malaka
- Pahang
- Acheh
- 1609
- 1610
- 1613
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.” (pp. 131-133).