Leonard Werner was a Luxemburger who served as interpreter (tolk) for the Atjeh embassy to Prince Maurits in 1602–1603. His presence in the embassy suite — a German-speaking subject of the Spanish Netherlands translating between Malay and Dutch for the three Atjeh envoys Abdoel Hamid, Sri Mohammed and Mir Hassan — illustrates the cosmopolitan linguistic pool on which the early Dutch-Asian trade relied.
Role in the Atjeh embassy of 1602
When the three Atjeh ambassadors — the senior envoy Abdoel Hamid, the Admiral of Atjeh Sri Mohammed, and the nobleman Mir Hassan — sailed for Europe on the returning Zeeland ships, Leonard Werner accompanied them as interpreter. Godee Molsbergen’s wording — “Een Luxemburger, Leonard Werner, diende als tolk” — gives his origin as Luxembourg and his function as tolk (interpreter/translator). The Luxemburger’s role would have been to render the Sultan’s Malay correspondence and the ambassadors’ Malay speech intelligible to the Dutch court, and vice-versa.
The audience at Grave
The three Atjeh envoys were received by Prince Maurits at his siege camp before Grave. After a meal, the Prince received them surrounded by a brilliant company of nobles and military commanders. The ambassador — probably Sri Mohammed as the senior surviving envoy, after the death of Abdoel Hamid at Middelburg in August 1602 — greeted the Prince in the Mohammedan manner, returned the Prince’s earlier letter marked with the King’s seal, and presented the Sultan’s two letters and the costly gifts. Werner would have been the linguistic bridge for all of this.
Tours and cannon-shots at the siege
After the audience, the Atjeh envoys were escorted by the Counts Ernst and Lodewijk of Nassau to view the siegeworks before Grave — “de belegeringsserrkuige, dat dinghen waren, weert om se te sien” (the siege engines, things worth seeing) — whereupon the principal ambassador discharged two cartouwen (cannon-shots) at the city in memory of the occasion. Werner would have translated the technical explanations of the siege-works for the envoys.
Significance
For Atjeh’s history, Werner is a small but telling figure — a Luxemburger serving as the linguistic hinge between the Atjeh sultanate and the House of Orange at the dawn of the seventeenth century. His presence in the embassy of 1602 is a reminder that the Dutch-Atjeh encounter was already mediated by a polyglot European world in which a German-speaking subject of the Spanish Netherlands could find employment interpreting Malay for the United Provinces.
See Also
- Abdoel Hamid
- Sri Mohammed
- Mir Hassan
- Sultan Aloeddin of Atjeh
- Prince Maurits
- Atjeh embassy to Prince Maurits at Grave (1602)
- 1602
- Acheh
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.